Robert W. Witkin
Many of Adorno’s best-known writings on culture were produced during his sojourn in England (1934–38) and the United States (1938–47). Dark times and exile – the shadow of the Holocaust – are constant companions in these texts: their presence, unmistakable, imparts to his writing the urgent tone of a “wake-up” call.
Culture is ubiquitous: it mediates all consciousness, all mental life. We are never out of culture; for the most part we take it for granted, much as a fish takes water. Intellectual culture – philosophy, art, science and literature – is only one aspect of culture. More immediate are the everyday cultures of the workplace, of organizations, of public service, education, democratic politics and formal administration; the culture of intimacy, of family life and interpersonal relations; newspapers, magazines, and all the varieties of leisure culture – mass entertainment, radio, television, film, records, music and theatre.
Most people do not think of everyday culture – the culture of business life or of pop music – as toxic, even less as belonging to the same mind-set that led to the worst horrors of the twentieth century. The apocalyptic tone of Adorno’s philosophy of culture is directed to persuading his readers of the pathology of modern culture and of the fate he believes awaits those who do not resist the cultural hegemony of a late capitalist society, who allow themselves to be assimilated, to become “apologists” for a barbarous world. His critique of culture is oriented, not simply to understanding culture, nor restoring its remnants to past glories but, uniquely, to renewing Culture1 as a living process, one that refuses closure, remaining ever conscious of its difference from the world. While philosophy, art, morality, ideas, can never be reconciled to the world as it is, the aspiration to achieve reconciliation grounds moral praxis.
Adorno’s ideas evolve, in essay form, through a complex and allusive interplay among many discourses. A labyrinth of originating texts is seamlessly woven into the fabric of his writing. His knowledge of philosophy, music, art and literature, both modern and classical, was vast and detailed. He was not just an erudite scholar, but an accomplished musician – a pianist and a composer, a pupil of Alban Berg and a member of the Schönberg circle. His critique of modern popular culture and mass entertainment took in astrology, variety theatre, film noir, jazz, radio and television. He associated personally with many important contributors to twentieth-century culture, both serious and popular.
In Adorno’s philosophy, all culture is formed in the crucible of material economic relations (P: 23ff). This was as true of the Culture of the enlightenment, which was integral to the formation of the capitalist society that emerged from feudalism, as it was of the mass culture produced by the culture industries in the twentieth century. Both can be understood only in relation to society. Culture, in Adorno’s utopian sense of enlightenment Culture, is formed in the effort to serve the spiritual element in life, to bring the subject, through expression, to self-understanding. But the achievement of integrity, of harmony and reconciliation in ideas or works of art, also comprises the sense of Culture’s utopian difference from, and incompatibility with, an antagonistic world. The modern world is antagonistic to the extent that it is constituted as objective life from which the spiritual element is expunged. A living Culture that expresses the subjective spirit must, necessarily, apprehend its difference from an object world that lacks it. Conversely, a culture that identifies completely with that world lacks subjective spirit and cannot sustain the spiritual element in life.
Culture, on Adorno’s view, must resist or suspend its own objecthood if it is to serve the spiritual needs of the subject. It must avoid closing with its objects. A living Culture is historical. To remain so, it must critically interrogate its continually changing relationship to its objects. To benefit the living subject, Culture must constitute itself as a coded set of possibilities for forming experience anew under changed and changing social conditions. That is, it must avoid the temptation to provide tablets of truth received from on high. It must, instead, provide forms that give its recipients something to work with; forms that engage them in the process of striking meaning anew from them. Works of art and Culture undergo change; they experience an outer history as they are engaged by new recipients under new historical conditions. Adorno refused to allow thought to rest upon its objects; he made the non-identity of concept and thing – of individual and society, part and whole, Culture and world – an object of critical attention (AT: 176).
Intellectual culture – art, science, morality, etc. – can be seen from two distinct perspectives. In one, cultural forms express the life-process of the subject; works of art and science are oriented to the self-understanding of the subject (individual and collective), its spiritual development; they are intrinsically meaningful, valued as ends in themselves. In the second perspective, culture is instrumental; it is practically oriented, as means, to the attainment of worldly ends (both subjective and objective). The relationship between these two perspectives, one inward and the other outward, figures in different ways in the founding discourses of sociology.
A figure of key importance in the development of the philosophy of culture was Georg Simmel;2 he had an unmistakable influence on scholars of Adorno’s generation such as Georg Lukács and Adorno’s close friend and early tutor, Siegfried Kracauer.3 Jürgen Habermas has argued that social theories which originated in Max Weber and are constituted as diagnoses of the time (including Adorno and Horkheimer’s) all draw from Simmel’s philosophy of culture.4 For Simmel, Culture is formed in the subject’s self-objectification through expression (the soul objectified in its forms). Bringing together elements of its life-process as whole and expressing that process outwardly (the objectification of spirit), the subject, reflected in the myriad aspects of the world, returns to itself, enriched in self-understanding.
The “tragedy of culture”, for Simmel, lies in the fact that the modern subject no longer directs this process. Once formed, objective culture (objectified spirit) yields to the demands of material life and breaks away from the subjects who created it. It no longer serves an individual’s spiritual needs once it is identified with a material world that has ceased to recognize the spiritual. Science, technology, morality and so on come to form more or less closed material contexts that are opaque to subjective spirit. The growth of the money economy and of the division of labour has accelerated the growth of objective cultures, despiritualizing them at the same time: “Because of modern differentiation . .. the objective mind lacks this spirituality. This may be the ultimate reason for the present-day animosity of highly individualistic and sensitive people to the ‘progress of culture’.”5
In The Philosophy of Money, Simmel developed this point concerning the rapid increase in objective (material) culture. The (subjective) culture of the individual lags far behind the development of objective culture: our understanding of the most familiar things in daily use such as radios, the internal combustion engine, electricity and so forth lags behind the scientific and technical culture that produced them. Simmel argued, as Adorno would do, that an individual’s spiritual needs are best served by observing a certain ascetic restraint in respect of objective culture. “Every day and from all sides, the wealth of objective culture increases, but the individual mind can enrich the forms and content of its own development only by distancing itself still further from that culture and developing its own at a much slower pace.”6
Simmel draws conclusions about this process in respect of the development of modern societies. In a few lines he encapsulates the very essence of the thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment developed by Adorno and Horkheimer some four decades later.
The preponderance of means over ends finds its apotheosis in the fact that the peripheral in life, the things that lie outside its basic essence, have become masters of its centre and even of ourselves. Although it is true to say that we control nature to the extent that we serve it, this is correct in the traditional sense only for the outer forms of life. If we consider the totality of life then the control of nature by technology is possible only at the price of being enslaved in it and by dispensing with spirituality as the central point of life. The illusions in this sphere are reflected quite clearly in the terminology that is used in it and in which a mode of thinking, proud of its objectivity and freedom from myth, discloses the direct opposite of these features.7
Adorno develops an argument similar to Simmel’s, counterposing Culture to what he terms “pseudo-culture” (TPC). He uses the former term to refer to the great systems of thought and ideas associated with the European enlightenment, together with the art and music that developed with them. Enlightenment Culture was imbued with a consciousness of itself as serving the subject’s spiritual needs, as being – in the Kantian sense – “purposefully purposeless”. The role of Culture in the reproduction and development of material life was obscured by the idea, immanent in Culture, of Culture’s own “autarchy”. Adorno sets that autarchy, dialectically, against its opposite: modernity’s adaptive, means-oriented culture which is directed solely to the mastery of the material world. Such a culture identifies itself with its objects, expunging everything within itself (subjective spirit) that is not instrumental and outwardly effective until individuals become objects to themselves, their lives as subjects virtually extinguished.
Adorno directed his critique at both aspects of culture. All culture is formed in response to material social life. But the division of mental and physical labour conceals this origin and allows those privileged by the division to think of Culture as autarchic. Adorno rejected claims that made Culture a self-contained and self-sufficient entity, existing for its own sake. The ideology of the autarchy of Culture was in any case dangerous, he argued. During the Nazi period, individuals who possessed the most refined tastes in art and music participated, willingly, in the torture of their fellow citizens, thus demonstrating the lie in all the claims of so-called high Culture to enrich the humanity of the subject. Moreover, when Culture claims to be self-contained and existing for itself, it becomes “cultural goods” and untrue.
On the other hand, pseudo-culture, oriented to adaptation, to fitting in, to assimilation by the collective machinery of the administered world, heralds the extinction of the individual and the very possibility of freedom; it capitulates to barbarism. Its growth erodes both the spirit and the Culture that sustains it. Industries centred on the production of culture for the masses have grown to such a degree that millions are inundated with cultural goods – disseminated via the mass media – that were inaccessible in times past. Adorno does not see this as a benefit but as a toxin. Mass culture is not a means of self-expression, of the self-development of the subject, but its antithesis; it appeals to the passive, regressive and self-indulgent in people. To participate, without resistance, in pseudo-culture is to extinguish one’s life as a subject.
More than a collection of cultural goods, pseudo-culture is a dynamic process that grinds all culture in its mill. Even works of so-called high Culture are first stripped of everything that equips them to serve the development of spirit, and then assimilated to the rigid form of pseudo-culture. They become indistinguishable from cultural goods produced by the culture industry. As the older entrepreneurial capitalism in which individualism flourished gave way to the totally administered world of monopoly capitalism, so genuine Culture retreated before the advance of pseudo-culture. The vast proliferation of adaptive culture, information, advertising, mass entertainment and so on does not just displace genuine Culture; it degrades Culture, fuelling its own development, as pseudo-culture, by feeding upon it. The culture industry makes old art into its material. Even a Beethoven symphony, in the mill of the mass media, gets ground down into pseudo-culture, into a stream of neat tunes linked together by nothing very important (EM: 251–70). The works of great philosophers such as Spinoza are reduced to digests of their ideas, a few handy formulas. The individual cannot use these, actively, to engage with Spinoza’s ideas, because they are torn from the entire edifice of philosophical discourse which alone makes them intelligible for those who actively develop their understanding through thinking (TPC: 31).
A dynamic process of understanding demands something like a composed reading in which one “forms” one’s idea of the whole structure of Spinoza’s system from a detailed grasp of its elements and their relations. These elements constitute a force-field of energies that is open to development both in respect of its internal relations and, externally, in relations with other systems of ideas. The state of part–whole relations that Adorno viewed as healthy, as indicating moral integrity, is one in which the whole structure develops out of interactions among its elements. Open and responsive to each other, these elements change and are changed by each other; in turn, the totality or whole that emerges from them remains open and responsive to them. Thus, while Adorno’s model of moral responsibility and freedom rests upon the free and spontaneous initiative of the elements or parts of a system – whether elements in a philosophical system, musical motifs in a sonata, or individuals in a social system – it rests equally upon the responsiveness of these parts or elements to each other, their mutual mediation, and their reflexive relationship with the emergent whole that they are in the process of forming.
This treatment of part–part and part–whole relations derived as much from Adorno’s musical background – his familiarity with Heinrich Schenker’s musicology8 – as from his reading of Emile Durkheim’s sociology. In his analysis of the formation of both aesthetic and social systems, Adorno is even more explicit than Durkheim about structuration as moral work and as an index of truth-value.9 A basic formulation of part–part and part–whole relations, a set of fundamental conditions, recurs in all his discussions of form and structure, from social formation to the musical formation of the sonata or rondo. The totality, as living Culture, exists only in its emergent formation from the details – from the elements and relations that constitute it. In a dynamic process of understanding, the subject engages with the material, discovering new possibilities in the system of ideas. Thus Spinoza’s philosophy is not closed, hermetically sealed against change and development; it participates, through reception, in an outer history and is changed. No such dynamic understanding is possible when the whole is torn from the details and assumes the rigid form of a summary list.
What ceases to develop in time has become pseudo-culture. Contributing nothing to it, its elements merely decorate it. Culture thus degrades with the growth of cultural goods. Only Culture that resists closure and remains critically open can escape the fate of becoming “cultural goods”. For the individual whose knowledge of the world comes in the form of digests, of pseudo-culture, there is no real understanding, only an authoritarian submission to assertions that are not truly understood. Education cannot provide the solution to the degrading of Culture; education is itself degrading along with Culture, of which it is a part. Adorno insists, nevertheless, that those who resist assimilation by the administered world hold on to Culture (as dynamic understanding) after society has deprived it of its foundation: “For the only way spirit can possibly survive is through critical reflection on pseudo-culture, for which Culture is essential” (TPC: 33, tr. mod.).
Modern societies have seen the development of social organizations that approximate to rational–technical machineries for the exploitation of material and natural resources. Weber’s analysis of means–end rationality, disenchantment and depersonalization, informs Adorno’s critique of culture generally, and Dialectic of Enlightenment in particular. The image of a total system for the mastery of material nature, and the mutilation of the human spirit involved in this process, can be projected from Weber’s model of formal administration, of bureaucracy.
Fundamental to bureaucracy as a system of offices is the individual’s separation from the office; organizational relations in Weber’s ideal-type of bureaucracy are formal, depersonalized and instrumental. Recruitment by public examinations, the hierarchical principle in assigning a compass of responsibility to each office, the proliferation of records and of systems for managing them, together tend to objectify the office-holder who becomes a functionary – not a subject but an object of the collective machinery of administration. The relentless pursuit of mastery of material resources, through rational technical means–end efficiency, progressively extinguishes all elements of sensuous and non-rational life, all spiritual life that does not attach itself like a limpet to the world to be mastered.
While Marx argued that the labourer is expropriated from the means of production, Weber argued that economic expropriation in modern society is only one type. The soldier is expropriated from the means of making war and the bureaucrat is expropriated from the means of administration. The expropriation of the subject is a feature of the ubiquitous march of rationality.10 What was taken from the subject as agent was given to the organization as a collective machinery. Law, morality and religion – indeed all cultural spheres – were no less subject to the progressive march of rationality and, with it, to the “disenchantment” of the world.
From this point of view, an economic revolution that abolished private ownership would enslave the world further rather than liberating it because the technical demands of economic management under collective ownership would require an intensification of rational–technical authority, of bureaucracy. (Recent history would appear to vindicate Weber on this point.) In Weber’s march of rationality, expropriation threatens to become total, to expropriate spirit from the world on every level. On a literary plane, Franz Kafka conveyed, with chilling effect, in The Castle and The Trial, the nightmare of a legal–rational existence bereft of spiritual life, of a subjectivity that filled out empty forms as its historical core.
In the first chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer fixed upon the Culture of enlightenment associated with the development of bourgeois societies. Their critique is directed against the claim of enlightenment Culture to have dispelled the ignorance and darkness of myth by enthroning science and reason in its place. The authors deny the implicit theory of progress: that culture, and with it society, moves from barbarity and ignorance towards the individual’s freedom and enlightenment. Science indeed succeeds in displacing myth but science and reason themselves bring about a society from which subjective spirit is driven to the margins. A rational–technical society proves its command over nature and the object world by extinguishing everything within itself that is not identified with the object world and its mastery. Society as the would-be master of nature does not liberate but enslave itself; men and women become objects to themselves in a spiritually degraded world.
Although Adorno and Horkheimer’s treatment of the Culture of enlightenment clearly accords with Weber’s thesis concerning the role of rationality in the disenchantment of the modern world, they treat the prehistory of the modern world differently. Weber contrasted the characteristics of “legal–rational” society with those of “traditional” societies. He did not subscribe to a theory of progress any more than did Adorno but, unlike Adorno, he did not subscribe to a theory of development either. Adorno and Horkheimer make the principle of the technical mastery of nature into a unilinear developmental principle that takes society from its beginnings to the twentieth century. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno put this most clearly:
Universal history must be construed and denied. After the catastrophes that have happened, and in view of the catastrophes to come, it would be cynical to say that a plan for a better world is manifested in history and unites it. Not to be defined for that reason, however, is the unity that cements the discontinuous chaotically splintered moments and phases of history – the unity of the control of nature, progressing to rule over men, and finally to that over men’s inner nature. No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb . .. Under the all-subjugating identity principle, whatever does not enter into identity, whatever eludes rational planning in the realm of means, turns into frightening retribution for the calamity which identity brought on the nonidentical.
(ND: 320, emphasis added)
From the beginning, Adorno and Horkheimer argue, culture is oriented to the mastery of nature through the social organism’s disciplining of itself. An adaptively formed culture is rigidly bound to its material context. The myths of earlier times had this rigid and unchanging character. Science, which claimed to enlighten the world through overcoming myth (which it treated as false idea) is, in reality, the successor myth. It is a more complete or perfect instrument for the mastery of nature and with it the mastery of society. Myth and enlightenment are shown not to be radically opposed. Both have the same purpose and the same structure as objective spirit. Both subscribe to the tyranny of means which consists in control over the labour of others, whether in the culture of rational administration in the modern world, or in the culture of class domination on board Ulysses’ vessel in his encounter with the Sirens.11
Perhaps the best-known and most accessible chapter in Dialectic of Enlightenment is “The Culture Industry”, where Adorno and Horkheimer mount a sustained critique of popular culture in all its varieties. Marx’s contribution is clearest here. For Marx, capitalism is a system of commodity production. In simple or traditional societies, production is oriented to fulfilling the known local needs of people pursuing a traditional way of life. It is possible to imagine that the life-process of the individual and the community (political, religious and aesthetic, as well as economic) is reflected in the society’s material culture, is integral to the life-process of the community (political, religious and aesthetic, as well as economic), filling it out as its spiritual core. Commodities, however, are goods made purely for sale in a mass market. They are (economic) goods devoid of a spiritual core.
Marx claimed that those who labour to produce commodities are alienated from the products of their labour; commodities are not their products and do not express their life-process as individuals or members of communities. Workers are alienated too from the process of production: they work under conditions determined by the capitalist system that employs them. Finally, they are alienated from each other in a production process that desociates them as it deskills them.12 In Taylorism–Fordism, for example, as the extreme form of the microdivision of labour, this desociation is taken to the limit and workers engage in mindless repetitive activity; coordination of action no longer requires social interaction and cooperation; all is synchronized by the machinery of the production line.13
The commodity itself becomes a fetish-object. Because the commodity is not the outcome of expression, of subjective spirit, it appears to consciousness in a form that elides the process of its production, so that it seems not to be the outcome of real relations among human beings but to belong to an autochthonous world of things. Anything detached from living history, from becoming, presents itself to the mind as sui generis, as self-contained and complete; it is a fetish-object. The disparity in power between the alienated subject and the commodified world engenders dependence and ego-weakness; the latter manifests, in the commodity, as the power of its appeal, of its promise to gratify. The realm of the commodity is a “phantasmagoria”.14
Adorno treats the commodity as the form of all objective spirit that has detached itself from subjective spirit. Emptied of history, the commodity does not participate in living relationships. With the expansion of a monolithic global economy, the commodity form becomes insatiable, colonizing every domain of social life, extinguishing the remnants of subjective spirit wherever it finds them. The individual’s relationship to the commodity becomes one of authoritarian submission as it does for all relations that are no longer historical.
Adorno is a master of conceptual modulation. He opens up possibilities in concepts such as that of the commodity, developing them to the point where they shade into other concepts drawn from different theoretical contexts. Thus the alienated forms of life represented by the commodity and bureaucracy also characterize the world of compulsive neuroses and paranoid delusion, of authoritarianism, the irrational and totalitarian terror. In the modern world, with its vast depersonalized administrative structures and its endless production of commodities, the disparity in power between the individual and society is immense.
In “The Stars Down to Earth”, Adorno performed an impressive deconstruction of the daily horoscope “Astrological Forecasts” by Carroll Righter in the Los Angeles Times (November 1952–February 1953). He aimed to expose the social pathology that sustains indulgence in this particular form of the irrational. The astrology column purports to represent authority, the authority of the stars. But this authority simply projects the dependence and powerlessness experienced by individuals in the face of the real collective forces in society that control their daily lives. The stars are assumed to influence and shape events in daily life, and to provide individuals with opportunities they can take advantage of provided only that they act appropriately and in a timely fashion. The column’s endorsement of the relentless pressure to succeed in life equates success with activity that is narrowly focused on the personal and particularistic interests of the individual. Rather than associating individuality with a self-possessed potency or the possession of intrinsic powers, the column promotes a sense of individuality as consisting in personal qualities such as “magnetism” and “charm”. It stresses the capacity to fit in, to hold one’s own in a group setting, to conform.
The stars appear to be in complete agreement with established ways of life and the habits and the institutions of the age. The effect of the column is to reproduce in its readers precisely that state of mind which the status quo induces in them daily: it shares this with all pseudo-culture. The culture industry’s products are not harmless: all serve to secure the individual’s adaptation to life in a spiritually degraded world. In Adorno’s analyses, the reader can experience the link between the most ordinary aspects of everyday consciousness and the darkest compulsions of the irrational in social life:
In astrology, as in compulsive neurosis, one has to keep very strictly to some rule, command or advice, without ever being able to say why. It is just this blindness of obedience which appears to be fused with the overwhelming and frightening power of the command. Inasmuch as the stars are viewed in astrology as an intricate system of do’s and don’ts, this system seems to be a projection of a compulsive system itself.15
Popular music in general, and jazz in particular, are instances of what Adorno calls cultural commodities, not simply because they are made by the culture industries – major recording companies, film studios, broadcasting media – but because they are manufactured, like all commodities, solely to realize their exchange value on the market. Songs are written to make money, to capture the attention of a mass audience and to sell many records. Song writers are not creative individuals who do what they do out of a genuine desire to express themselves. Nor is the culture industry simply the technical means for connecting them with an appreciative public. Successful artists, including the most talented, belong to the culture industry long before it ever agrees to display their wares (DE, C: 122; J: 96). Economic relations of commodity production are not incidental but enter into every aspect of the creative process, stamping its products with the characteristics of all commodities. Manufacture for the mass market demands nothing less.
Music is part of an effect culture. Knowing in advance what will “appeal” to an audience, what will “turn it on”, enables the cultural entrepreneur to achieve a degree of market prediction that is essential for the kind of investment that has to be made. Commodities must be reliable stimuli, sufficiently similar to those that have, in the past, triggered the appropriate response in the record-buying or film-going public. The task is made relatively easy because the repetitive demands of meaningless work in modern society have numbed the masses, causing them to seek an escape both from boredom and effort. They respond to whatever is most familiar; and in the endlessly repetitious forms of commodified music, they experience an after-image of the production process itself (DE, C: 137; J: 109).
The principal characteristic of all pseudo-culture, all products of the culture industry, is “standardization”. Each new song must be like all the others (Adorno discusses such things as the 32-bar song form, the limitation of all musical intervals to one octave and one note, the positioning of elements in relation to the bridge, and so forth) to elicit the recognition necessary to connect with an audience. The standardized commodity is a closed form. Its power to elicit a response (an effect) depends upon this closure. It cannot be a vehicle for expression because, to serve in this way, culture must be open; it must reflect the subject’s life-process, embodying its (historical) development in its internal relations and, through reception, in its external relations.
Expressive culture is historical; pseudo-culture is not. Commodities come under the law of repetition. They offer more of the same. The proliferation of cultural goods and their apparent variety only masks the fact that what you get is essentially the same song, the same TV soap. Variations and apparent novelty and variety are superficial; Adorno describes them as instances of pseudo-individualization. Standardization, in popular music, means that the culture industry does the listener’s listening for her, in advance. If the songs were identical, however, she would soon tire of them. Pseudo-individualization makes each song look as if it was new by marrying its standardized form to a distinctive feature, a catchy rhythm, melodic phrase, etc. (EM: 437–69).
Music was central to Adorno’s life and work. In his many publications devoted to music, structural considerations are paramount. At the very centre of European art music, in Adorno’s writings, was Beethoven. The sonata as a musical form was perfected in Beethoven’s middle period, when his major symphonies were composed. These can be thought of as large-scale sonatas. A symphony, such as Beethoven’s Fifth, consists in a few fundamental elements or motifs which are repeated and varied in different ways: for example rhythmically, harmonically, through juxtaposition, inversion, modulation, melodic decoration, timbral changes and so forth. The composition as a whole is thus thematically developed through the repetition and variation of these motifs (AT: 100–101). In Adorno’s analysis, this developmental process appears to proceed spontaneously and freely as though determined immanently from below (rather than transcendentally from above); that is, the composition appears to be the outcome of the free movement of the elements themselves.
Because the “thematic particles” – the motifs – of a Beethoven symphony are identical with their development, they become historical figures. In both the sonata form and the novel, the “subject” is marked by its historicity. We might say that, at any moment of existence, the “subject” of the sonata or the narrative is what it is by virtue of its “historicity”; by virtue, that is, of possessing a development, an unfolding biography or history in and through which its identity is conserved. Moreover, this development appears to proceed organically out of the subject’s relations and encounters in the “text” and yet to lead, with a certain inevitability, to the fulfilment of its development as its project. Beethoven’s development of the sonata allegro in his middle-period compositions reaches the pinnacle of the bourgeois effort to reconcile individual freedom and collective constraint in the medium of art.
The most obvious embodiment of this principle of developing variation occurs in the development and recapitulation of the sonata allegro, the structure Adorno considers essentially synonymous with Beethoven’s second-period style. Development is the process through which the musical subject demonstrates its self-generated powers as it “goes out”, in dialectical terms, from itself into the generalizing world of Other or object, through which it demonstrates, in other words, its freedom in objective reality. The emphatic reassertion of self in Beethoven’s recapitulation is equally important. Through the recapitulation, the subject seems not only to bring together within itself, but actually to derive from within itself, the principles of dynamic development (historical change) and fixed eternal order (unchangeable identity) and to synthesize the two into a higher level of reality.16
Adorno’s writings on the music of Beethoven, Wagner, Schönberg, Berg, Webern, Mahler and other composers far outweigh the few papers he wrote on jazz and popular music, both in number and in the depth of their musical analysis and discussion of specific works. From his early paper on “The Social Situation of Music” (EM) to later essays,17 Adorno’s analyses centre on composers’ responses to the alienated condition of music in the modern world. He sets himself against composers who, recognizing that alienation originated in the lack of fulfilment of the individual in the world, sought to abolish alienation, through extinguishing the expressive individual altogether and retreating to a hypostatized domain of pure music. Identifying this approach to modern music with neo-classical composers, chiefly Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith, he also linked it to the varieties of phenomenology and existentialism that sought to respond to the crisis of modern culture through retreating to a domain of pure subjectivity.18 In both music and phenomenology, what was hypostatized as pure subjectivity or as pure music was, Adorno argued, empty. Its structural correlates were to be found in authoritarian submission and fascism as well as in all forms of pseudo-culture. Such music became effect music, purged of history and expression; a variant of the type produced by the culture industry.
Adorno was committed to the continuing relationship between subject and world – albeit a relationship of negative identity – and to the longing for reconciliation between them (ND: 149). For that to happen music must be expressive and dynamic; it must overcome alienation, not by seeking to abolish it through detaching subject from object, but through perfecting the expression of music’s alienation on its outside. Schönberg, Berg and the composers of the second Viennese school of composition served as his models here. Even in the case of these composers, however, Adorno’s approval was not total. He remained committed to Schönberg’s revolution in atonal music around 1910 because it exemplified a music of suffering that was fully engaged with history, but he was ambivalent about Schönberg’s later development of twelve-tone music, even though he himself used it in compositions. The apparently closed nature of the invariant ordering of twelve tones (the row) that was the basic building block of each composition appeared to hand to mathematics what belonged to history. In many of Schönberg’s followers, music turned its back on history, something it shared with both Stravinsky’s music and jazz.
There were other writers, contemporaries of Adorno, who were fiercely critical of modern culture and whose ideas, at the time, were better known than his. These included the authors of literary dystopias such as Brave New World and 1984. When Adorno and Horkheimer had completed Dialectic of Enlightenment, they consulted their friend, Leo Löwenthal, as to whom they might approach to help them publish the book. His witty reply, “Huxley, as far as I know, does not read German, and Joyce is dead”,19 acknowledged the discernible echoes in their work, both of Brave New World and of the problematic language of Finnegan’s Wake. Prisms includes an essay on Kafka, whose books The Castle and The Trial can also be seen as dystopias, and an essay on Huxley with a very full critical discussion of Brave New World.
Other critics deplored the brash commercialized mass culture of the modern world. Peter Hohendahl has drawn attention to the American liberals of the 1940s and 1950s who, following the New Deal, switched focus from the political-economic front to the critique of modern culture, for example, Daniel Boorstin, Mary McCarthy, David Riesman and others.20 The apocalyptic dread of mass culture took root in the academy, too. In England, the literary critic, F. R. Leavis, taking his lead from Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, where culture is described as “the best that has been known and thought in the world”,21 wrote of the “dark prospects” for culture which had now become incompatible with any concept of civilization in the modern world.22
A third source for the critique of mass culture was the writing of Clement Greenberg, arguably the most important American art critic of the twentieth century. Greenberg had published his famous paper, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” in the Partisan Review in 1938,23 some nine years before the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment. In it, he anticipated many arguments about popular culture that appeared later in Adorno and Horkheimer’s chapter on the culture industry. Like Adorno, Greenberg perceived that mass culture, which used as its material the remnants of traditional art, posed a threat to the autonomy and independence of the serious artist and thus the possibility of establishing a critical relation to modern society. Like Adorno, he believed that critical culture was in danger of being sublated in mass cultural kitsch. Of the three sources of criticism mentioned, Greenberg’s analysis in his major papers on art resonates in important respects with Adorno’s own critique.
It is misleading to identify Adorno’s critique of culture with cultural criticism that adopts apparently similar conclusions. Adorno himself was especially critical of those who treat culture as a value, who deplore the decline of serious Culture and its displacement by the vulgarities of mass culture; this was a type of criticism that issued in nostalgia for things past. For Adorno, criticism that tacitly accepts the world as it is, that complains of it but embodies no real resistance to it, is actually complicit in reproducing the existing state of affairs (P: 22–3).
The “cultural critic” imagines himself to be superior to the world he criticizes whereas in reality he is mediated to the very core by the object of his criticism, by the culture he criticizes. Because he does not really resist the reproduction of the status quo, even at the level of ideas, he helps to reinforce it: “As long as even the least part of the mind remains engaged in the reproduction of life, it is its sworn bondsman” (P: 26). Many so-called cultural critics, Adorno argued, are simply apologists for what they purport to criticize; their criticism reflects only the privilege granted by the separation of mental from manual labour. The superiority displayed in their writings is that of a ruling class which imagines itself to be in possession of higher spiritual values, to own the Culture that culture lacks. What is important in Adorno’s philosophy of culture are not his specific conclusions but the continuous intense theoretical dynamic in and through which those conclusions, in response to continuously changing conditions, take on (new) meaning, and are themselves changed.
1. The word “culture” is capitalized where it refers to enlightenment Culture in Adorno’s utopian sense of a culture that serves the spiritual needs of the subject. In every other sense of the word, as in “culture industry”, “pseudo-culture”, etc., the word “culture” appears in lower case.
2. See Georg Simmel, Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings (1997).
3. See Siegfried Kracauer, “Georg Simmel”, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (1995).
4. Jürgen Habermas, “Georg Simmel on Philosophy and Culture: Postscript to a Collection of Essays”, Critical Inquiry 22(3) (Spring 1996), 403–14.
5. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (1990), 466–7.
6. Ibid., 449.
7. Ibid., 482, emphasis added.
8. See Robert Snarrenberg, Schenker’s Interpretive Practice (1997).
9. See Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology (1976).
10. For Weber’s views on bureaucracy and the expropriation of the subject, see From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (1948), 196–240.
11. For further discussion of the relationship between myth and enlightenment, see Alison Stone’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 3).
12. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1964), 106–16.
13. See Frederick Taylor, Scientific Management (1947).
14. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (1976), 165–8.
15. Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture (1994), 64.
16. Rose Subotnik, “Adorno’s Diagnosis of Beethoven’s Late Style: Early Symptoms of a Fatal Condition”, Journal of the American Musicological Society 29(2) (1976), 249.
17. See, for example, Adorno’s Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music (1992).
18. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music (2006), 107f.
19. Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften 17 (1996), 571. Cited in James Schmidt, “Language, Mythology, and Enlightenment: Historical Notes on Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment”, Social Research 65(4) (Winter 1998), 808.
20. Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno (1995), 28f.
21. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, and Other Writings (1993), 79f.
22. See F. R. Leavis, Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (1930).
23. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”, Art in Theory: 1900–1990 (1992).