Theodor W. Adorno: Theoretician through negations (original) (raw)
Related papers
1999
The cover notes erroneously suggest that this is the first English assessment of Adorno's life and work. Even leaving aside the more specialised works on Adorno, this claim neglects several excellent introductions, most notably those of Rose (1978), Jay (1984) and Jarvis (1998). Since the first two of these are listed in the author's bibliography, I think we can point the finger at overzealous marketing by the publisher. Compared with these authors Brunkhorst is pitched at a level of accessibility between Jay and the more complicated Rose and Jarvis. Brunkhorst focuses on a few selected themes, and his book is perhaps not as well rounded as some of the other introductions. But he makes up for this by providing more than Rose or Jay on Adorno's relation to his philosophical contemporaries (especially Heidegger) and to recent continental critical theory, without becoming as dense as Jarvis's sustained philosophical study. Published as part of a series on Political Philosophy Now, Brunkhorst's book actually places more emphasis on philosophical aesthetics than on politics, perhaps inevitably, given Adorno's scanty contribution to political theory per se. But Brunkhorst cleverly turns this round by emphasising that, for Adorno, in their very alienation from practical politics, experimental forms of art and philosophy make an important political intervention by preserving forms of freedom which have vanished from actual political life. Brunkhorst focuses on Adorno's central dialectic of identity and nonidentity. The closed-in identity of the modern subject is reactively constructed through its fascinated horror at anything non-identical to it, at otherness and difference. So are the totalising systems of thought and closed societies with which that subject is entwined. What is feared and envied is projectively terrorised and forced to conform to the dominant order, by either conceptual or actual violence. Genocide is the ultimate expression of this twisted logic of exclusion: the other is not merely rejected, but exterminated. Brunkhorst examines the connection between Adorno's theory of freedom and his experience of exile from and return to Germany, steering a course between biography and intellectual history. Adorno's privileged upbringing and hothouse education as a musician and philosopher with the Scho¨nberg school in Vienna and the Horkheimer circle in Frankfurt is covered, as are
Adorno and the Task of Criticism
Today, the words 'cultural criticism' hold a convoluted signification, containing layers of suspicious inquiry, each holding the next to an invariably groundless standard. It appears that there are two main tensions for this condition: one, the immanent status of the word -as in, it, as 'cultural' necessarily refers back to relations of the social and political. And two, 'criticism,' as distinctly referential to a negation which reveals hidden tensions through, specifically, a written text. It is the provocation of the 20 th century Frankfurt scholar Theodor Adorno that both of these details have been forgotten, or lost, due to the continual affects of the enlightenment lead culture industry. Similarly, the term 'cultural criticism' has prolonged inhibitions within modernity; primarily, within the Marxist theory of reification -which objectifies abstract relations as concrete in their commodity form. As an installment of enlightenment logic, reified social relations are universalized as easily as they are reproduced. Reified society appears similar to the role of cultural criticism: both intend to display, in material form, relations to which would be previously abstract. But, the logic of criticism is resoundingly one of inhibitory coercion; cultural criticism attempts to imitate the cultural conditions of social relations to subjects through methods of mediation. But mediation is never a neutral tool, necessarily insinuating the cultural attachments of a medium of cultural criticism. Importantly, it is undeniably an authoritarian gesture, which forces a conceptualization of the relations to which its reader exists. But exclusively in this motion, Adorno locates radical potential. Through a negative strategy, Adorno approaches cultural criticism with its very critique; this paper will trace the radical foundations and modern inhibitions of Adorno's theory of cultural criticism.
Theory, Practice and History: The Political Concerns of Adorno's Philosophy
Adorno is often portrayed as a philosopher unengaged with political problems, who at best was sympathetic but failed to engage with the vital political struggles of his time. Though immediately concerned with the horrors of World War II and totalitarianism, Adorno's political philosophy demonstrates a deeper concern with the metaphysical underpinning of such atrocities than standard liberal critiques of fascism. In order to begin to understand his philosophical perspective, we must first understand Adorno's critical engagement with Hegel. In doing so, we can understand his critique of Hegel, epitomised within Negative Dialectics but developed much earlier within his career, as part of a wholesale reformulation of the standard theory-action dynamic which the Left has established for itself. Adorno's critique allows us to better understand philosophy's historical role and the prism within which contemporary actors are situated, particularly with the radical political developments of the 2010s.
Introduction to the Inaugural Issue of Adorno Studies
2017
WE founded the Association for Adorno Studies in December of 2011 with the aim of providing a forum for scholarly research treating Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno as a thinker of deep contemporary relevance, indeed, importance. Our contention was, and continues to be, that the theoretical rigor and interdisciplinary scope that characterizes Adorno's output makes his work an essential resource for formulating a critical understanding of and plausible response to late capitalism and the broadly neo-liberal framework that currently dominates the globe.
The Guilt of Reification: Adorno’s Critique of Sociological Categories
Peter Osborne (ed.), Futurethoughts: Critical Histories of Philosophy, 2024
This essay advances a reading of Theodor W. Adorno's mature interventions into sociology as a 'critique of sociological categories'. It maintains that his unorthodox commitment to sociology was simultaneously a dialectical commitment to the critical value of its fundamental untenability – at least, in its dominant bourgeois variant. From this sketch, the essay attempts to examine one instance of this critique, centred on the category of reification and one of its most proximate sociological cognates, Émile Durkheim’s concept of the social fact. The first section reconstructs Adorno’s concept of reification as outlined in Negative Dialectics and elsewhere. With recourse to Marx’s extended mature project and pace the interpretation offered by Gillian Rose, it argues that reification in Adorno underscores not the discrepancy between use-value and exchange-value as well as the exchange of false equivalents but holds to issues pertaining to the social and relational form of value that objectively arise from the exchange process. The second section then recounts Durkheim’s concept and theory of the social fact as advanced in his early plea for the sociological discipline, The Rules of Sociological Method. Drawing on Adorno’s essays, interventions, lectures, and, albeit cautiously, seminar protocols, the concept of reification is taken as a leitmotif with which to reconstruct his mature encounter with Durkheim. Doing so demonstrates that Adorno finds in the concept of the social fact a correct but deficient notion of reification, a recognition, to paraphrase Marx, that social relations between individuals assume the phantasmagoric form of relations between things, though with the intonation inversed. The final section shows how this framework is redeployed as part of Adorno’s confrontation with Karl Popper and others as part of the now-infamous Positivism Dispute. It argues that some of the stakes involved in this dispute might be better understood if Adorno’s criticisms are viewed as offering a particular reading of internal developments within sociological positivism itself. For, whilst Adorno characterises both Durkheim and Popper as positivists, much to the chagrin of their defenders, the charges levelled against them are not equivalent. Comparing the critiques levelled against them brings to the forefront how sociological positivism over the course of the twentieth century was to undergo a theoretical impoverishment. In this, Durkheim is mobilised because his sociological theory sketched a ‘more serious’ alternative approach to those sociologists who lacked even the faintest hint of, to use Adorno’s phraseology, the ‘guilt of reification’.
Social Philosophy after Adorno
2007
Lambert Zuidervaart examines what is living and what is dead in the social philosophy of Theodor W. Adorno, the most important philosopher and social critic in Germany after World War II. When he died in 1969, Adorno's successors abandoned his critical-utopian passions. Habermas in particular, rejected or ignored Adorno's central insights on the negative effects of capitalism and new technologies upon nature and human life. Zuidervaart reclaims Adorno's insights from Habermasian neglect while taking up legitimate Habermasian criticisms. He also addresses the prospects for radical and democratic transformations of an increasingly globalized world. The book proposes a provocative social philosophy 'after Adorno'.
Robert W. Witkin, Adorno on Music
Music Analysis, 2000
It will not have escaped readers of this journal that Theodor Adorno has, for the last decade or so, been enjoying something of a renaissance. Even if his fortunes on the mainland European continent may have dimmed a little, his reputation in Britain and America, the two countries which provided him with sanctuary during the Nazi years, seems never to have been better. Adornoites everywhere can shudder at the thought that he might finally be becoming fashionable. Not so long ago he even surfaced in the British Sunday press in an article entitled`Why I Adore Adorno', its author musing that Tony Blair might have been better off reading Adorno's Negative Dialectics at university than sitting around strumming his guitar and chatting about social reform. True, the image of the most popular British Prime Minister since World War II poring over a decidedly unpopular (and Germanic) treatise on critical philosophy for inspiration is as ludicrous as it is poignant. Ludicrous, since today, no political party concerned with re-election would dream of being seen to take its eye off the economy to speculate about (say) domination or the meaning of freedom; poignant, since one cannot help wishing it would. But who knows? If the Prime Minister chooses eventually to hand on the Millennium Dome with the words`All culture is garbage', I, for one, will gladly have been proved wrong. Adorno scholars have recently had to contend with a considerable influx of published material, not all of which, however, can be considered first rate. High points include Robert Hullot-Kentor's extraordinary new translation of Aesthetic Theory, Peter Hohendahl's Prismatic Thought and Simon Jarvis's Adorno: A Critical Introduction. 1 Low points we can pass over. But suffice it to say here that this new found curiosity and enthusiasm for Adorno's work has, more often than not, failed to be converted into new or relevant perspectives, or even to present Adorno's own ideas with an appropriate degree of fidelity. Accounting for this renewal of interest generates plenty of speculation in its own right and is an unavoidable corollary of the theory itself. Critical theory depends on a correct analysis of society, an understanding of the current situation of culture, for its critique of that culture to proceed. And whether or not the Frankfurt School offers the best description of the structure of our society as it stands today is a moot point. That said, the post-1989`New World Order' and the decline of any number of modernist paradigms has done Adorno surprisingly little harm, his name being allowed to keep close, if uneasy