Theodor adorno: critical theory
Contact Us Privacy Policy Sitemap. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Theodor Adorno. Theodor Adorno Biography. He was also the Music Director of the Radio Project. Already as a young music critic and unordained sociologist, Theodor W. Adorno was primarily a philosophical thinker. As a composer he was unable to step out from under the shadow of his teacher Alban Berg.
The label 'social philosopher' emphasizes the socially critical aspect of his philosophical thinking, which from onwards took an intellectually prominent position in the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. It is the second half of this name that he later adopted as his surname Wiesengrund was abbreviated to W. His musically talented aunt Agatha also lived with the family.
Young Theodor passionately engaged in four-handed piano playing. His childhood joy was increased by the family's annual summer sojourn in Amorbach. He attended the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gymnasium where he proved to be a highly gifted student: at the exceptionally low age of 17 he graduated from the Gymnasium at the top of his class. In his free time he took private lessons in composition with Bernard Sekles and read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason together with his friend Siegfried Cracauer - 14 years his elder - on Saturday afternoons.
Later he would proclaim that he owed more to these readings than to any of his academic teachers. He completed his studies swiftly: by the end of he graduated with a dissertation on Edmund Husserl. In the meantime he had already met with his most important intellectual collaborators, Max Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin. Vienna Intermezzo During his student years in Frankfurt he had written a number of music critiques.
He believed this would be his future profession. With this goal envisioned, he used his relationship to Alban Berg with whose opera Wozzeck he had made a name for himself, to pursue studies in Vienna, beginning in January, The disappointment over this caused him to cut back on his music critiques to enable his career as academic teacher and social researcher to flourish.
He did however remain editor-in-chief of the avant-garde magazine Anbruch. His musicological writing already displayed his philosophical ambitions. In correspondence, the two men discussed the difference in their conceptions of the relationship between critique and artworks that had become manifest through Benjamin's " The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility ".
At around the same time, Adorno and Horkheimer began planning for a joint work on "dialectical logic", which would later become Dialectic of Enlightenment.
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Alarmed by reports from Europe, where Adorno's parents suffered increasing discrimination and Benjamin was interned in Colombes , they entertained few delusions about their work's practical effects. After learning that his Spanish visa was invalid and fearing deportation back to France, Benjamin took an overdose of morphine tablets.
In light of recent events, the Institute set about formulating a theory of antisemitism and fascism. On one side were those who supported Franz Leopold Neumann 's thesis according to which National Socialism was a form of " monopoly capitalism "; on the other were those who supported Friedrich Pollock 's " state capitalist theory.
Adorno arrived with a draft of his Philosophy of New Music , a dialectical critique of twelve-tone music that Adorno felt, while writing it, was a departure from the theory of art he had spent the previous decades elaborating.
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Horkheimer's reaction to the manuscript was wholly positive: "If I have ever in the whole of my life felt enthusiasm about anything, then I did on this occasion", he wrote after reading the manuscript. First published in a small mimeographed edition in May as Philosophical Fragments , the text waited another three years before achieving book form when it was published with its definitive title, Dialectic of Enlightenment , by the Amsterdam publisher Querido Verlag.
This "reflection on the destructive aspect of progress" proceeded through the chapters that treated rationality as both the liberation from and further domination of nature, interpretations of both Homer 's Odyssey and the Marquis de Sade , as well as analyses of the culture industry and antisemitism. With their joint work completed, the two turned their attention to studies on antisemitism and authoritarianism in collaboration with the Nevitt Sanford -led Public Opinion Study Group and the American Jewish Committee.
In line with these studies, Adorno produced an analysis of the Californian radio preacher Martin Luther Thomas. Fascist propaganda of this sort, Adorno wrote, "simply takes people for what they are: genuine children of today's standardized mass culture who have been robbed to a great extent of their autonomy and spontaneity". In addition to the aphorisms that conclude Dialectic of Enlightenment , Adorno put together a collection of aphorisms in honor of Horkheimer's 50th birthday that was later published as Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life.
These fragmentary writings, inspired by a renewed reading of Nietzsche, treated issues like emigration , totalitarianism , and individuality , as well as everyday matters such as giving presents, dwelling, and the impossibility of love. In California Adorno made the acquaintance of Charlie Chaplin and became friends with Fritz Lang and Hanns Eisler , with whom he completed a study of film music in In this study the authors pushed for the greater usage of avant-garde music in film, urging that music be used to supplement, not simply accompany, films' visual aspects.
Adorno also assisted Thomas Mann with his novel Doktor Faustus after the latter asked for his help. Upon his return, Adorno helped shape the political culture of West Germany. Until his death in , twenty years after his return, Adorno contributed to the intellectual foundations of the Federal Republic, as a professor at Frankfurt University , critic of the vogue enjoyed by Heideggerian philosophy, partisan of critical sociology, and teacher of music at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music.
Adorno resumed his teaching duties at the university soon after his arrival, [ when? Adorno's surprise at his students' passionate interest in intellectual matters did not, however, blind him to continuing problems within Germany: The literary climate was dominated by writers who had remained in Germany during Hitler's rule, the government re-employed people who had been active in the Nazi apparatus and people were generally loath to own up to their own collaboration or the guilt they thus incurred.
Instead, the ruined city of Frankfurt continued as if nothing had happened, [ citation needed ] holding on to ideas of the true, the beautiful, and the good despite the atrocities, hanging on to a culture that had itself been lost in rubble or killed off in the concentration camps. All the enthusiasm Adorno's students showed for intellectual matters could not erase the suspicion that, in the words of Max Frisch , culture had become an "alibi" for the absence of political consciousness.
Starting with his essay Wagner, Nietzsche and Hitler , [ 36 ] Adorno produced a series of influential works to describe psychological fascist traits. One of these works was The Authoritarian Personality , [ 37 ] published as a contribution to the Studies in Prejudice performed by multiple research institutes in the US, and consisting of ' qualitative interpretations ' that uncovered the authoritarian character of test persons through indirect questions.
In he continued on the topic with his essay Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda , in which he said that "Psychological dispositions do not actually cause fascism; rather, fascism defines a psychological area which can be successfully exploited by the forces which promote it for entirely non-psychological reasons of self-interest.
In Adorno participated in a group experiment, revealing residual National Socialist attitudes among the recently democratized Germans. He then published two influential essays, The Meaning of Working Through the Past and Education after Auschwitz , in which he argued on the survival of the uneradicated National Socialism in the mindsets and institutions of the post Germany, and that there is still a real risk that it could rise again.
Here he emphasized the importance of data collection and statistical evaluation while asserting that such empirical methods have only an auxiliary function and must lead to the formation of theories which would "raise the harsh facts to the level of consciousness. With Horkheimer as dean of the Arts Faculty, then rector of the university, responsibilities for the institute's work fell upon Adorno.
At the same time, however, Adorno renewed his musical work: with talks at the Kranichsteiner Musikgesellschaft, another in connection with a production of Ernst Krenek 's opera Leben des Orest , and a seminar on "Criteria of New Music" at the Fifth International Summer Course for New Music at Kranichstein. Adorno also became increasingly involved with the publishing house of Peter Suhrkamp , inducing the latter to publish Benjamin's Berlin Childhood Around , Kracauer's writings and a two-volume edition of Benjamin's writings.
Adorno's own recently published Minima Moralia was not only well received in the press, but also met with great admiration from Thomas Mann, who wrote to Adorno from America in I have spent days attached to your book as if by a magnet. Every day brings new fascination It is said that the companion star to Sirius, white in colour, is made of such dense material that a cubic inch of it would weigh a tonne here.
This is why it has such an extremely powerful gravitational field; in this respect it is similar to your book. Yet Adorno was no less moved by other public events: protesting the publication of Heinrich Mann 's novel Professor Unrat with its film title, The Blue Angel ; declaring his sympathy with those who protested the scandal of big-game hunting; and, penning a defense of prostitutes.
Because Adorno's American citizenship would have been forfeited by the middle of had he continued to stay outside the country, he returned once again to Santa Monica to survey his prospects at the Hacker Foundation. While there he wrote a content analysis of newspaper horoscopes now collected in The Stars Down to Earth , and the essays "Television as Ideology" and "Prologue to Television"; even so, he was pleased when, at the end of ten months, he was enjoined to return as co-director of the Institute.
In response to the publication of Thomas Mann 's The Black Swan , Adorno penned a long letter to the author, who then approved its publication in the literary journal Akzente. A second collection of essays, Notes to Literature , appeared in Although the Zeitschrift was never revived, the Institute nevertheless published a series of important sociological books, including Sociologica , a collection of essays, Gruppenexperiment , Betriebsklima , a study of work satisfaction among workers in Mannesmann, and Soziologische Exkurse , a textbook-like anthology intended as an introductory work about the discipline.
Throughout the fifties and sixties, Adorno became a public figure , not simply through his books and essays, but also through his appearances in radio and newspapers. Yet conflicts between the so-called Darmstadt school , which included composers like Pierre Boulez , Karlheinz Stockhausen , Luigi Nono , Bruno Maderna , Karel Goeyvaerts , Luciano Berio , and Gottfried Michael Koenig , soon arose, receiving explicit expression in Adorno's lecture, "The Aging of the New Music", where he argued that atonality's freedom was being restricted to serialism in much the same way as it was once restricted by twelve-tone technique.
With his friend Eduard Steuermann , Adorno feared that music was being sacrificed to stubborn rationalization. During this time Adorno not only produced a significant series of notes on Beethoven which was never completed and only published posthumously , but also published Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy in In his return to Kranichstein, Adorno called for what he termed a "musique informelle", which would possess the ability "really and truly to be what it is, without the ideological pretense of being something else.
Or rather, to admit frankly the fact of non-identity and to follow through its logic to the end. At the same time Adorno struck up relationships with contemporary German-language poets such as Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. Adorno's dictum—"To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric"—posed the question of what German culture could mean after Auschwitz; his own continual revision of this dictum—in Negative Dialectics , for example, he wrote that "Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream"; while in "Commitment", he wrote in that the dictum "expresses in negative form the impulse which inspires committed literature"—was part of post-war Germany's struggle with history and culture.
Adorno additionally befriended the writer and poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger as well as the film-maker Alexander Kluge. In , Adorno was elected to the post of chairman of the German Sociological Society, where he presided over two important conferences: in , on "Max Weber and Sociology" and, in , on "Late Capitalism or Industrial Society".
Adorno's critique of the dominant climate of post-war Germany was also directed against the pathos that had grown up around Heideggerianism, as practiced by writers like Karl Jaspers and Otto Friedrich Bollnow , and which had subsequently seeped into public discourse. His publication of The Jargon of Authenticity took aim at the halo such writers had attached to words like "angst", "decision", and "leap".
After seven years of work, Adorno completed Negative Dialectics in , after which, during the summer semester of and the winter semester of —68, he offered regular philosophy seminars to discuss the book chapter by chapter. One objection, which would soon take on ever greater importance, was that critical thought must adopt the standpoint of the oppressed, to which Adorno replied that negative dialectics was concerned "with the dissolution of standpoint thinking itself.
At the time of Negative Dialectics ' publication, student protests fragilized West German democracy. Trends in the media, an educational crisis in the universities, the Shah of Iran's state visit, German support for the war in Vietnam, and the emergency laws combined to create a highly unstable situation.
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Like many of his students, Adorno too opposed the emergency laws , as well as the war in Vietnam, which, he said, proved the continued existence of the "world of torture that had begun in Auschwitz". This death, as well as the subsequent acquittal of the responsible officer, were both commented upon in Adorno's lectures. As politicization increased, rifts developed within both the Institute's relationship with its students as well as within the Institute itself.
Soon Adorno himself would become an object of the students' ire. After a group of students marched to the lectern, unfurling a banner that read "Berlin's left-wing fascists greet Teddy the Classicist", a number of those present left the lecture in protest after Adorno refused to abandon his talk in favor of discussing his attitude on the current political situation.
But as progressed, Adorno became increasingly critical of the students' disruptions to university life. His isolation was only compounded by articles published in the magazine alternative , which, following the lead of Hannah Arendt 's articles in Merkur , claimed Adorno had subjected Benjamin to pressure during his years of exile in Berlin and compiled Benjamin's Writings and Letters with a great deal of bias.
In response, Benjamin's longtime friend Gershom Scholem , wrote to the editor of Merkur to express his disapproval of the "in part, shameful, not to say disgraceful" remarks by Arendt. Relations between students and the West German state continued deteriorating. In spring , a prominent SDS spokesman, Rudi Dutschke , was gunned down in the streets; in response, massive demonstrations took place, directed in particular against the Springer Press , which had led a campaign to vilify the students.
An open appeal published in Die Zeit , signed by Adorno, called for an inquiry into the social reasons that gave rise to this assassination attempt as well as an investigation into the Springer Press' manipulation of public opinion. At the same time, however, Adorno protested against disruptions of his own lectures and refused to express his solidarity with their political goals, maintaining instead his autonomy as a theoretician.
Adorno rejected the so-called unity of theory and praxis advocated by the students and argued that the students' actions were premised upon a mistaken analysis of the situation. The building of barricades, he wrote to Marcuse, is "ridiculous against those who administer the bomb. Upon his return to Frankfurt, events prevented his concentrating upon the book on aesthetics he wished to write: "Valid student claims and dubious actions", he wrote to Marcuse, "are all so mixed up together that all productive work and even sensible thought are scarcely possible any more.
Beginning in October , Adorno took up work on Aesthetic Theory. In June he completed Catchwords: Critical Models. During the winter semester of —69 Adorno was on sabbatical leave from the university and thus able to dedicate himself to the completion of his book of aesthetics. For the summer semester Adorno planned a lecture course entitled "An Introduction to Dialectical Thinking", as well as a seminar on the dialectics of subject and object.
But at the first lecture, Adorno's attempt to open up the lecture and invite questions whenever they arose degenerated into a disruption from which he quickly fled. After a student wrote on the blackboard "If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease", three women students approached the lectern, bared their breasts and scattered flower petals over his head.
After further disruptions to his lectures, Adorno cancelled the lectures for the rest of the seminar, continuing only with his philosophy seminar. In the summer of , weary from these activities, Adorno returned once again to Zermatt , Switzerland, at the foot of Matterhorn to restore his strength. On 6 August he died of a heart attack.
Their major theories fascinated many left-wing intellectuals in the first half of the 20th century. Adorno's adoption of Hegelian philosophy can be traced back to his inaugural lecture in , in which he postulated, "only dialectically does philosophical interpretation seem possible to me" Gesammelte Schriften 1: Hegel rejected the idea of separating methods and content, because thinking is always thinking of something; dialectics for him is "the comprehended movement of the object itself.
Adorno understood his Three Studies of Hegel as "preparation of a changed definition of dialectics" and that they stop "where the start should be" Gesammelte Schriften 5: f. Adorno dedicated himself to this task in one of his later major works, the Negative Dialectics The title expresses "tradition and rebellion in equal measure.
Marx's Critique of Political Economy clearly shaped Adorno's thinking. From this text, Adorno took the Marxist categories of commodity fetishism and reification. These are closely related to Adorno's concept of trade , which stands in the center of his philosophy, not exclusively restricted to economic theory.
Adorno's "exchange society" Tauschgesellschaft , with its "insatiable and destructive appetite for expansion", is easily decoded as a description of capitalism. Class theory , which appears less frequently in Adorno's work, also has its origins in Marxist thinking. Adorno made explicit reference to class in two of his texts: the first, the subchapter "Classes and Strata" Klassen und Schichten , from his Introduction to the Sociology of Music ; the second, an unpublished essay, "Reflections on Class Theory", published postmortem in his Collected Works.
Psychoanalysis is a constitutive element of critical theory. In it Adorno argued that "the healing of all neuroses is synonymous with the complete understanding of the meaning of their symptoms by the patient". In his essay "On the Relationship between Sociology and Psychology" , he justified the need to "supplement the theory of society with psychology, especially analytically oriented social psychology" in the face of fascism.
Adorno emphasized the necessity of researching prevailing psychological drives in order to explain the cohesion of a repressive society acting against fundamental human interests.
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Adorno always remained a supporter and defender of Freudian orthodox doctrine, "psychoanalysis in its strict form". He expressed reservations about sociologized psychoanalysis [ 65 ] as well as about its reduction to a therapeutic procedure. Adorno's work sets out from a central insight he shares with all early 20th century avant-garde art: the recognition of what is primitive in ourselves and the world itself.
Neither Picasso 's fascination with African sculpture nor Mondrian 's reduction of painting to its most elementary component—the line—is comprehensible outside this concern with primitivism , which Adorno shared with the century's most radical art. At that time, the Western world, beset by world-wars, colonialist consolidation, and accelerating commodification , sank into the very barbarism civilization had prided itself in overcoming.
Theodur w adorno biography of williams death: Theodor W. Adorno was one of the most important philosophers and social critics in Germany after World War II. Although less well known among anglophone philosophers than his contemporary Hans-Georg Gadamer, Adorno had even greater influence on scholars and intellectuals in postwar Germany.
According to Adorno, society's self-preservation had become indistinguishable from socially sanctioned self-sacrifice: of "primitive" peoples, primitive aspects of the ego and those primitive, mimetic desires found in imitation and sympathy. Adorno's theory proceeds from an understanding of this primitive quality of reality that seeks to counteract whatever aims either to repress this primitive aspect or to further those systems of domination set in place by this return to barbarism.
From this perspective, Adorno's writings on politics, philosophy, music, and literature are a lifelong critique of the ways in which each tries to justify self-mutilation as the necessary price of self-preservation. According to Adorno's translator Robert Hullot-Kentor, the central motive of Adorno's work thus consists in determining "how life could be more than the struggle for self-preservation".
Adorno, along with the other major Frankfurt School theorists, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse , argued that advanced capitalism had managed to contain or liquidate the forces that would bring about its collapse and that the revolutionary moment, when it would have been possible to transform it into socialism, had passed. As he put it at the beginning of his Negative Dialectics , philosophy is still necessary because the time to realize it was missed.
Adorno argued that capitalism had become more entrenched through its attack on the objective basis of revolutionary consciousness and through liquidation of the individualism that had been the basis of critical consciousness. Though Adorno was not appointed professor at Oxford, he undertook an indepth study of Husserl's philosophy as a postgraduate at Merton College.
It should be noted that " jazz " was frequently used to refer to all popular music at the time of Adorno's writing. This article was less an engagement with this style of music than a first polemic against the blooming entertainment and culture industry. Adorno believed the culture industry was a system by which society was controlled though a top-down creation of standardized culture that intensified the commodification of artistic expression.
Extensive correspondence with Horkheimer, who was then living in exile in the United States , led to an offer of employment in America. After visiting New York for the first time in , he decided to resettle there. In Brussels , he bade his parents, who followed in , farewell, and said goodbye to Benjamin in San Remo. Benjamin opted to remain in Europe, thus limiting their very rigorous future communication to letters.
Very soon, however, his attention shifted to direct collaboration with Horkheimer. They moved to Los Angeles together, where he taught for the following seven years and served as the co-director of a research unit at the University of California. Faced with the unfolding events of the Holocaust , the work begins with the words:.
Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity translation, 1. In this influential book, Adorno and Horkheimer outline civilization's tendency towards self-destruction.
They argue that the concept of reason was transformed into an irrational force by the Enlightenment. As a consequence, reason came to dominate not only nature, but also humanity itself. It is this rationalization of humanity that was identified as the primary cause of fascism and other totalitarian regimes. Consequently, Adorno did not consider rationalism a path towards human emancipation.
For that, he looked toward the arts. After , he ceased to work as a composer.
By taking this step he conformed to his own famous maxim: "Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" Nach Auschwitz noch ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch. Adorno was, however, to retract this statement later, saying that "Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream… hence, it may have been wrong to say that no poem could be written after Auschwitz.
Apart from that, he worked on his "philosophy of the new music" Philosophie der neuen Musik in the s, and on Hanns Eisler's Composing for the Films. He also contributed "qualitative interpretations" to the studies of anti-semitic prejudice performed by multiple research institutes in the U. This culminated in a position as double Ordinarius of philosophy and of sociology.
His collection of aphorisms, Minima Moralia, led to greater prominence in post-war Germany when it was released by the newly founded publishing house of Peter Suhrkamp. It purported a "sad science" under the impression of Fascism , Stalinism , and Culture Industry, which seemingly offered no alternative: "Wrong life cannot be lived rightly" Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen.
The work raised Adorno to the level of a foundational intellectual figure in the West German republic, after a last attempt to get him involved in research in the U. Adorno was an outspoken critic of these policies, which he displayed by his participation in an event organized by the action committee, Demokratie im Notstand "Democracy in a State of Emergency".
When the student Benno Ohnesorg was shot by a police officer at a demonstration against a visit by the Shah of Iran , the left-wing APO became increasingly radicalized, and the universities became a place of unrest. To a considerable extent, it was students of Adorno who represented the spirit of revolt thus executing an interpreted "praxis" from "Critical Theory.
Moreover, it is said that Adorno asked for the help of police to remove the students that had occupied the Frankfurt Institute in fear of vandalism. Therefore, Adorno in particular became a target of student action. On the other side of the spectrum, the right-wing accused him of providing the intellectual basis for leftist violence. In , the disturbances in his lecture hall, most famously as female students occupied his speaker's podium bare-breasted, increased to an extent that Adorno discontinued his lecture series.
In a letter to Samuel Beckett , he wrote: "The feeling of suddenly being attacked as a reactionary at least has a surprising note. Adorno became increasingly exhausted and fed up with the situation on campus. He left with his wife on a vacation to Switzerland. Despite warnings by his doctor, he attempted to ascend a 3, meter high mountain , resulting in heart palpitations.
The same day, he and his wife drove to the nearby town Visp, where he suffered heart palpitations once again. He was brought to the town's clinic. In the morning of the following day, August 6, he died of a heart attack. Adorno and other Frankfurt School theorists developed the theory of alienation in the philosophy of Karl Marx and applied it to social cultural contexts.
Adorno argued that advanced capitalism is different from early capitalism and so Marxist theory applicable to early capitalism does not apply to advanced capitalism. Adorno was to a great extent influenced by Walter Benjamin's application of Karl Marx 's thought. Adorno, along with other major Frankfurt School theorists such as Horkheimer and Marcuse, argued that advanced capitalism was able to contain or liquidate the forces that would bring about its collapse and that the revolutionary moment, when it would have been possible to transform it into socialism, had passed.
Adorno argued that capitalism had become more entrenched through its attack on the objective basis of revolutionary consciousness and through liquidation of the individualism that had been the basis of critical consciousness. His "The Authoritarian Personality" significantly contributed to the theory of "qualitative interpretations" in psychology.
Adorno returned to Germany in and, with Horkheimer's support, became a professor in Frankfurt. He balanced his academic work with administrative responsibilities, playing a significant role in shaping the university. In the late s, student activism and political unrest spread through German universities. Adorno became embroiled in the conflict, prompting him to take a temporary leave of absence and travel to Switzerland with his wife.
Ignoring medical advice, Adorno attempted to climb a 3,meter mountain, which severely compromised his heart health. On August 6, , Theodor Adorno passed away from a heart attack. Theodor Adorno German philosopher, sociologist and musicologist.