Theodor Adorno

Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno (September 11, 1903 – August 6, 1969) was a German sociologist, philosopher, musicologist and composer. He was a member of the Frankfurt School along with Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas and others. He was also the Music Director of the Radio Project.

Adorno and his theoretical framework

Adorno's theoretical method is closely related to his understanding of music and his friend Alban Berg use of twelve-tone techniques, which were aimed at dethroning the primacy of traditional tonality in composition. For even if "the whole is untrue", for Adorno we retain the ability to form partial conceptions and submit them to a test as we progress towards a "higher" awareness. This role of progressive artistic improvement was one which was prevalent in the Second Viennese School prior to the Second World War, and was an essential component of the doctrine that art should be, at first, shocking or difficult to understand, because it is only through the "corrosive unacceptability" to the middle class of new art that the dominant cultural assumptions may be challenged.

Related Topics:
Twelve-tone technique - Tonality - Second Viennese School

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Adorno's followers argue that he seems to have managed the very idea that one can abandon totality while still being able to rank artistic and ethical phenomena on a tentative scale, not because he was a sentimentalist about this ability but because he saw the drive towards totality (whether the Stalinist or Fascist totality of his time, or globalization of the market today) as derivative of the ability to make ethical and artistic judgement, which, following Kant, Adorno thought part of being human. Thus his method was to use language and its "big" concepts tentatively and musically, partly to see if they "sound right" and fit the data. For example, his question in The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno, T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. & Sanford, R.N., 1950, ISBN 0393311120). This and other works written during his sojourn in California was whether American Fundamentalist authoritarianism could be spoken of as having a relationship to Continental Fascism without sounding a false note in terms of the partial totality of a "theory" that American authoritarians MIGHT bring about a different but equally or more pernicious form of Fascism in the US.

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Some people respond to Adorno's style by saying that it was that of a disconnected German pedant (relating to an alleged inclination of German philosophers to write at great lenghts in a very formal style about simple subjects, approaching them through the ages of their austere philosophical tradition and in regard to humans' struggle with ego). However, Adorno's constant engagement with jazz (which was, it must be admitted, limited to American popular songs made for white audiences and was for this reason flawed), his study of Los Angeles astrology and in general his interest in phenomena of contemporary culture and politics (e.g. denazification in Germany, television, sex education) paint the picture of an involved and concerned intellectual.

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Adorno was concerned that a genuine sociology retain a commitment to truth including the willingness to self-apply. Today, his life can be read as a protest against what he would call the "reification" of political polls and spin as well as a culture that in being aggressively "anti" high culture, seems every year to make more and more cultural artifacts of less and less quality that are consumed with some disgust by their "fans", viewed as objects themselves.

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:See also: Critical Theory, New musicology.

Related Topics:
Critical Theory - New musicology

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