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This
year marks the centenary of the birth of Theodor W.
Adorno, one of the most important thinkers and cultural
critics of the twentieth century and a leading figure
of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Born in
Germany on 11 September 1903, Adorno attended the
University of Frankfurt where he studied philosophy,
sociology, psychology, and music. With a passion for
music, Adorno went to Vienna to study composition
under Alban Berg. To escape from Nazism, Adorno moved
to England in 1934 before formally joining the Institute
for Social Research (better known as the Frankfurt
School), then in exile in New York, in 1938. In 1953,
at the age of 50, Adorno returned to Frankfurt to
take up a position with the Institute, and in 1959
he became its director. He died in 1969. Adorno can
be placed at the outer edge of the Marxist tradition.
He differed from the classical Marxist tradition of
Marx, Lenin, Trotsky or Gramsci in not being organically
linked to either the labour movement and its organisations
or the political left and its parties. His excuse
was that “the call for unity of theory and practice
has irresistibly degraded theory to a servant’s
role”, but he was wrong to think that any praxis
would turn into blind activism. Adorno was never politically
active, and like the rest of the Frankfurt School,
remained secluded within the academic world. Towards
the end of his life, he became quite conservative.
He was famously hostile to the 1960s student movement,
and even called the police to deal with the 76 students
who occupied his institute on 31 January 1969! Also,
his interests were principally cultural, aesthetic
and philosophical in nature – he did not give
central importance to questions of politics, strategy
or political economy.
Central
to the thought of Adorno, was his experience of the
rise of Nazism, Stalinism and the defeat of the workers
movement. Those events were according to him, the
outcome of a “Dialectic of Enlightenment”
(title of a famous book he wrote with Max Horkheimer
in 1944). Enlightenment is not understood as the 18th
century philosophy of that name, but as the process
of scientific and technological domination of nature.
"In the most general sense of progressive thought,
the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men
from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet
the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant."
Science, technology, rationalism rather are blamed
for this disaster. "Enlightenment is more totalitarian
than any system" – whether Stalinist, Fascist
or Capitalist. The domination of nature ultimately
extends to the domination of men. "Enlightenment
behaves towards things as a dictator towards men:
it knows them in so far as he can manipulate them."
This "dialectic" of Enlightenment consists
in that liberation from the domination of nature resulted
in new forms of domination. The liquidation of the
individual is the outcome of the subordination of
nature to humanity. Enlightened thought and reason
attack myth and superstition, but only to create its
own mythology. “No universal history leads from
savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading
from the slingshot to the megaton bomb” sums
up Adorno’s pessimistic view of history. Adorno
aimed to rescue the individual, the particular, the
“non-identical” from both the totalising
impulse of philosophical systems (such as Hegel’s)
and the totalitarian regimes. “The whole is the
untrue” he famously wrote. Adorno differed from
classical Marxism in so far as he blamed “instrumental
reason” (the logic of science, technology and
industry) rather than specifically capitalism for
those disasters, however his analysis relied heavily
on Marxian categories like commodity fetishism, exchange
value, reification. The value of Adorno’s writings
lies on how he used those categories to analyse new
forms of capitalist domination and social phenomena.
Of
particular interest is how Adorno extended Marx’s
analysis of commodity fetishism and the domination
of exchange value to cultural forms. He argues that
all contemporary cultural life is dominated by the
commodity form. Adorno was not hostile to “mass
culture” or “popular culture” as such,
but to the specific repressive form assumed by it
under the impact of monopoly capital, namely the “culture
industry”. The culture industry is dominated
by two processes: standardisation and pseudo-individualisation.
Cultural production is a process of “standardisation”
whereby the products acquire the form common to all
commodities – like “the romantic comedy
familiar to every movie-goer” or the “girls
band” in Top of the Pops. Films and popular songs
sound more and more like each other, they are interchangeable.
“Pseudo-individualisation” is the ideological
process which hides the process of “standardisation”,
it provides the apparent novelty or uniqueness of
the product for the consumer. The culture industry
shapes the preferences and tastes of the masses. Standardised
production goes hand in hand with “standardised
reactions” from the consumers (think of pre recorded
laughter). The culture industry is central to the
ideological manipulation of the people. The effect
of the culture industry is “mass deception”,
it impedes the development of critical thinking. “The
power of the culture industry’s ideology is such
that conformity has replaced consciousness.”
Popular music and film act as a form of “social
cement”, it encourages people to reconcile themselves
to their fate. “It is catharsis for the masses,
but catharsis which keeps them all the more firmly
in line.”
The
major part of Adorno’s work consists in the development
of a critical musicology, and his technical musicological
knowledge allowed him to make fascinating analysis
of how “fetishism in music” goes hand in
hand with “regressive listening”. In popular
music, Jazz, for example, the commodity form dominates
the musical form, providing listeners with a few “patterned”
and “pre-digested” recipes. Against the
culture industry, Adorno champions modernist avant-garde
composers, Schoenberg in particular, in whose work
the status of music as a commodity is resisted internally
by the music itself. In “Philosophy of the New
Music” (1949), Adorno shows that during Schoenberg’s
free atonality phase for example, musical dissonances
expressed the composer’s refusal to accept the
rigid forms of the structures of traditional music,
and to capitulate to the prevailing tastes and attitudes
promoted by the culture industry. Atonal composition
deliberately maintains unresolved tensions and refuses
to make easy listening that would favour standardised
responses. Adorno’s critique of the culture industry
is fascinating, but is not sufficiently differentiated
and dialectical. In particular, his essay on Jazz
has been widely criticised for its purely negative
assessment of that musical form. Also, unlike his
friend Walter Benjamin, he neither grasped the contradictions
within the culture industry nor its democratic potential.
Adorno failed to discuss the weaknesses of the culture
industry and relate them to a process of “functional
transformation”.
Adorno’s
thought cannot be really comprehended if its content
is considered without paying attention to its form.
His distinctive form of writing is very elaborated.
To oppose closed systems of thought that claim completeness
and to preserve the particular, he writes in aphorisms
or in the form of essays. His writing is deliberately
difficult (but not obscure) to evade standardised
reactions and recuperation by the culture industry.
His philosophical style actually owes something to
the atonal composition techniques of Schoenberg. Adorno’s
theoretical practice explicitly binds itself to the
practices of artistic modernism. For Adorno, style
is an important weapon in the struggle against the
commodity form. Any reader of his book of aphorisms
“Minima Moralia” (1951) or collection of
essays “Prisms” (1955) will be struck the
rare literary quality of Adorno’s writing. To
scrutinise social and cultural phenomena, Adorno employs
a method of “immanent critique”. In assessing
the object of criticism, Adorno employs the standards
the object has of itself in its concept. These standards
suggest what the object sought and maybe seeks to
be. They also suggest unfulfilled potentialities.
Immanent criticism thus preserves the non-identical,
the tension between concept and object.
Adorno’s
critique of “damaged life” under capitalism
would have had a sharper edge had it been related
to collective forms of political struggles. Instead,
Adorno is convinced that the only opposition possible
is that of the isolated individual who intellectually
refuses the “totally administered society”:
“In face of totalitarian unity, which cries out
for the elimination of differences directly as meaning,
something of the liberating social forces may even
have converged in the sphere of the individual. Critical
theory lingers there without a bad conscience.”
Remote from any political practice, his thought ultimately
remained contemplative. "Philosophy, which once
seemed outmoded, remains alive because the moment
of its realisation was missed. The summary judgement
that it had merely interpreted the world is itself
crippled by resignation before reality, and becomes
a defeatism of reason after the transformation of
the world failed." Adorno’s failure to connect
to any political practice is related to his refusal
to posit any definite alternative. He thought that
to do so was potentially totalitarian. He sought to
free philosophy from its affirmative tendencies, by
rendering dialectics purely negative. That remained
an abstract negation of capitalism. The writings of
Adorno retain their value today for their incisive
critique of commodification, however we cannot limit
ourselves to the “weapon of criticism”,
we must also turn to the “criticism of weapons”...
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