Adorno,T heodor Wiesengrund b. September II, 1903; Frankfurt am Main, Prussia d.August 6, 1969;Visp,Wallis
An eminent member of the Frankfurt School who lived from 1938 to 1953 in the United States, Adorno deeply influenced the intellectual discourse in both Germany and the United States.
He coined the phrase that after Auschwitz there can be no poetry.Adorno grew up in Frankfurt, where he studied music and philosophy at university. He studied neo-Kantianism under Hans Cornelius, and while attending his seminars, he met Max Horkheimer. Both men were interested in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. Adorno received his doctorate in philosophy in 1924. In 1930 he traveled to Berlin, where he met Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Bertolt Brecht, all of whom were trying to create an aesthetic based on Karl Marx’s critique of capitalist society and the bourgeoise. Adorno became enamored with George Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness (1923). At the beginning of his studies, Adorno gained an interest in expressionism and wrote Ernst Bloch, whom he considered the philosopher of expressionism. He found in this philosophy the very real possibility of cultural disintegration. Around this same time, he met Alban Berg, a student of Arnold Schonberg, the creator of atonal music. He soon agreed to go with Berg to Vienna as his student. Adorno’s two years in Vienna had considerable influence on his aesthetic and philosophical pursuits.
When he returned from Vienna, Paul Tillich had become chair of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. Tillich was a good friend of Horkheimer and Friedrich Pollock, the early founders of the Institute for Social Research, which Adorno would later join. Before that, he had already published some of his first essays on music in the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung (Journal of Social Research), the institute’s journal. Tillich helped Adorno become a lecturer (Privatdozent) while he finished his Habili- tationsschrift, a postdoctoral study of Soren Kierkegaard’s aesthetics.
When in 1933 Jews were excluded from academic professions, Adorno hoped to find refuge in Vienna but was unable to receive a position at the university. In 1934, he moved to England, where he remained for three and a half years. While there, he continued to publish articles on the aesthetics of music in the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, and he also began a thorough study of Husserl. Through his studies over the years, he did not dwell solely on music but turned again to Marx in order to understand the influence of capitalist society on the rational subject. In 1938 he moved to the United States and became an “official” member of the Institute of Social Research in New York. Alienated from American life, he began to investigate the culture industry and mass culture in a capitalist society. While in New York, he encountered the true nature of the technological and managerial control created by a growing monopolistic capitalism. As he watched the order of capitalist society move more and more toward rationalization and mechanization, Adorno paradoxically claimed it to be even more irrational than bourgeois society. The commodification and homogenization of capitalist society destroyed in his eyes the foundations of bourgeois society and led to the disintegration of the individual. He believed this loss of subjectivity was a major threat to the future of society. During this time he published some of his best known works, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), a collaboration with Horkheimer; The Authoritarian Personality (1950), a collaborative project; and Minima Moralia (1951).
While in New York, his doubts about capitalism increased, and his ideas made him even more of a cultural elitist. He began his first research project in the United States with Paul Lazarsfeld at the Princeton University Radio Research project. He at once disliked the empirical and quantitative nature of the study and felt the study of audience response to radio programming displayed a form of commercialism in which consumers would eventually dictate radio programming.
As a result, real art itself would become a commodity. He saw music within mass culture as a commodity judged more by exchange value than use value. Returning to his belief in the destruction of the individual, he felt the music of mass culture destroyed subjectivity. The mass media was creating a reified culture that destroyed mediation and reconciliation and created instead a passivity that completely eliminated the possibility of a negation. He believed the culture industry merely imitated existing social patterns, whereas true art went beyond such social arrangements. For Adorno, the power of mass culture was greater than any economic theory in strengthening the success of capitalism. He claimed it did not allow people to question social conditions and instead created for them false needs.After living in California, Adorno returned to Frankfurt in 1953 and became director of the Institute for Social Research in 1959. During this time he wrote as pro- lifically as before. He engaged in debates with the social positivists and with Martin Heidegger, and he completed his Negative Dialectics (1966). His Aesthetic Theory was published posthumously in 1970. His books and essays greatly influenced postmodernism and poststructuralism.
Jim Varn
See also Brecht, Bertolt; Frankfurt School; Horkheimer, Max; Intellectual Exile; Kracauer, Siegfried; Schonberg, Arnold
References and Further Reading
Dallymar, Fred. Between Freiburg and Frankfurt: Toward a Critical Ontology. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991.
Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923—1950. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.
Lunn, Eugene. Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukacs, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.