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Adorno
Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) was a leading figure in the Frankfurt School and one of this century's most demanding intellectuals. His works, always informed by his variant of Critical Theory that he called Negative Dialectics, is notoriously difficult to understand bu has had an enormous impact on philosophy, sociology, musicology, literary criticism, psychology, and the study of culture. In an introductory section, Martin Jay gives a brief, lucid account of Adorno's notion of force-field, and of Adorno's extension of Walter Benjamin's concept of constellation. He distinguishes five impulses in Adorno's his Marxism, his aesthetic modernism, his mandarin cultural conservatism, his anticipation of deconstructionism, and the self-conscious Jewishness that led him to look for redemption and at the same time to refuse any definition of paradise. Professor Jay devotes the central sections of his book to the major aspects of Adorno's thought--his philosophy, his social theory, and his view of modern culture and aesthetic theory. He has succeeded brilliantly in the task of presenting Adorno's theories in understandable form while remaining true to their unresolved tensions.
200 pages, Hardcover
First published September 27, 1984
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April 13, 2026
As Martin Jay lays it out in this book, which was the first ever foray into the study of the oeuvre of this leading light of the Frankfurt School, throughout his career Adorno was conscious of the postmodern dilemma, specifically in terms of the question, "Can the contents of philosophical ideas be extracted from the form of their presentation?"
Yes, Theodor W. Adorno was acutely conscious of the dilemma concerning form and content in philosophical thought, often framing it as a central issue in his critique of traditional, positivist, and "identity" thinking. He explicitly rejected the notion that the content (truth) of philosophical ideas can be separated from their form of presentation, arguing that such a separation is a form of fetishism that blinds thought to its own ideological entanglements
Adorno typified the Western Marxists who aligned themselves with the belief in the utopian potential of modern society, but did not have blinders on to the extent that they took any existing socialist regime as the realization of the socialist dream. As Adorno and the other members of the Frankfurt School saw it, it was only through the chicaneries of the socialist politicians and the establishment of a dominance of a false political system that impeded true Socialism from making further progress on the road to equality; this was done by preventing the power of the proletariat from reaching down to the uneducated, poorer members of society through a specific class war. Thus, at a level of hyper-aggressive class divisions, and through a countervailing screen of racial privilege, Adorno points out with authority that the class tensions between these two groups has prevented our society from taking on the meritocratic features of a world where we are able to live better than we currently do, and where we can live out the truly fulfilled lives that at present we can only imagine.
Adorno was not impressed with the position of Martin Heidegger, who vouched that he had located a realm of being prior to the split between subject and object.
This study of Adono's work has led to the realization that it is irrational to assume that we should exhibit a cold mien in terms of our relation with the world, as if it were a basic principle of our bourgeois subjectivity. We should take pleasure in life and n the joys it can offer us, indeed, especially now when, now, after the tragedy of Auschwitz, we realize we have been spared the guilt connoted by living through that apocalyptic time, but resist all calls for a depressed outlook on life, but rather to take a positive attitude and, expressly so, in order that we may envision a utopia on earth.
Adorno was insistent on the power of rejecting all philosophies of identity.
Unlike many Marxists who, following Lukacs' lead, condemned Nietzsche as a dangerous irrational precursor to fascism, Adorno honored him for his trenchant critique of mass culture and politics and his ruthless exposure of the bankruptcy of traditional metaphysics and, what's more, his penetrating insight into the ambiguity of the dialectic of enlightenment. The lines of communication extend even to the figures in French philosophers of the period of the 1960s where, according to Michel Foucault, Adorno was similar to in that there correlations between Foucault's analysis of the disciplinary and carceral society of modernity and Adonro's administered worlds.
Adorno chastised KIerkegaard for designating the aesthetic stage of development as inferior to the ethical or religious.
In his Metacritique of Epistemology, as in is KIerkegaard study, Adorno sought to discover the social underpinnings of seemingly inexplicable fissures and antinomies in his subject's work, an invention that surpassed a merely epistemological reflection. Adorno's revealed a basically psychohistorical approach to philosophy in that he took Husserl's insistence on bracketing historical considerations in the search for a universal, transcendent truth as function of the specific historical crisis of the European middle class.
Personally, I do not believe that we are force to choose between two forms of capitalism, either democratic capitalism or authoritarian capitalism, because I believe that American capitalism has resolved these contradictions through the economic interventions through the power of the Federal Reserve Board as a self-sufficient entity has allowed any such contradictions to be contained and displaced indefinitely. The choice between them is not a choice between Syclla and Charibdis or, if you will or between Socialism and Capitalism, because Democratic Socialism does not imply a choice for one in favor of the other.
In his book The Jargon of Authenticity, Adorno claimed that the prevailing fascination with the response to authentic human relations had contributed to the mystification of social conditions that prevented such authenticity from being achieved, Heidgger's insistence on the ontological meaning of death betrayed a covert sympathy for a totalizing identity theory that denied difference even as it purported to defend it. Like the cult of lyric poetry, or the culture of rock and popular music, it offered a pseudo-immediacy that ultimately served to perpetuate the social domination of the subject. Rather than negating the alienation of modern life, the jargon of authenticity subtly manifested the existent state of reality such that Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lived on because the moment to realize it had passed. However, as I see it, there is a possibility that in the future John Lennon's world of the imagination can potentially be resized and finally come into existence now that the long-term mystification engendered by the prevailing fascination with the rock discourse and the allure of pop-folk mass culture has passed into history and into an even subtler manifestation of the future of philosophy.
Postmodern art: an art that self-consciously debunked its illusory claim to wholeness and self-sufficiency and hence was more capable of negating reality than once that kept up the pretences of art-as-artifice. The purpose of art was to be found in its very refusal to subordinate nature to thought, matter to spirit, such that de-aestheticized art might provide a flickering utopian model of what mankind, despite everything, might become.
Adorno leaves the modern artist with the question: "Why carry on?" It seems to me that the answer is to enact a social liberation, but it remains resolved how to do so without becoming part of the chains of the culture industry, a weakness that several Adornio critics at the back of the book attempt to resolve, with but middling success. We might ask wish to ask the author Martin Jay, how did Adorno accomplish this, and was he successful?
Adorno's friend Walter Benjamin argues that language was not originally a medium of communication between minds that existed prior to their immersion in language. Words that merely communicate thought are due to the fall of language from its perfect state of memetic unity between word and thing, If there is anyone with whom communication takes place in the prelapsarian state it is God, said the note Kabbalist Benjamin. We also take note that Durkheim argued that Adorno's case presuposed the very non-constructivist objectivity his own theory denied. Does this explain how critical theory, since Wittgenstein, "begs the question"?
The argument that critical theory "begs the question" (assumes what it aims to prove) following Wittgenstein—and specifically within the context of the Benjamin-Adorno-Durkheim triangle—centers on the tension between immanent critique and transcendent objectivity.
Here is an analysis of how these ideas interact, based on your query:
1. The Benjaminian Foundation (Language, Prelapsarianism, and God)
Walter Benjamin's early philosophy argues that language is not originally a tool for communication between human minds. It is instead an expression of the "spiritual essence" of things, a "name" language that communicates itself to God in a prelapsarian (pre-Fall) state.
Post-Fall language becomes instrumental—a "bourgeois" medium used for social communication.
Adorno heavily adopts this, seeing art as a "language without intention," reminding us of the original language of things, and a critique of the "overnaming" in modern society.
2. Durkheim’s Challenge: Adorno's Non-Constructivist Objectivity
Durkheim argued that social facts must be treated as things ("non-constructivist objectivity").
Adorno's critical theory, according to interpretations of his engagement with Durkheim and Popper, challenges this by arguing that such "objectivity" is actually a reified, alienated "second nature" produced by capitalist exchange, not a natural phenomenon.
The Critique: Durkheim, and later thinkers like Popper, argued that Adorno's critique assumes its own objectivity—a "transcendent" position—while simultaneously attacking the idea of an objective world that can be known outside of the damaged social totality. This is a "non-constructivist objectivity" his own dialectic seeks to deny (i.e., treating his critique as a "true" description of the "false" world).
3. Critical Theory Since Wittgenstein: "Begging the Question"
Wittgenstein’s Impact: Wittgenstein’s later philosophy argues that language games are practices where "meaning is use". His work is often used to attack the idea of a "metaphysical" vantage point outside of language and practice.
The "Begging the Question" Mechanism: If critical theory aims to critique society (immanent critique) but uses a standard of "true" consciousness to diagnose "false" consciousness, it must, as Nietzsche (and later Adorno) suggested, adopt a form of "objective" thinking.
The Dilemma: If, since Wittgenstein, we accept that we cannot stand outside our language games (or "forms of life") to judge them, then critical theory "begs the question" by relying on a latent, unproven assumption that their critique is not just another language game, but a privileged, "true" understanding of the social whole.
Adorno’s Paradox: Adorno was aware of this and described his method as a tour de force—a balancing act that must be "objective" to break the spell of ideology.
In conclusion, the argument that critical theory begs the question suggests that, in trying to expose the "false objectivity" of capitalist society, Adorno uses a "true objectivity" that is itself untethered to the very Wittgensteinian language practices he critiques. However, for Adorno, this is not a fallacy, but a "negativism" that refuses to let the "true" world be "pre-decided by world view".
Yes, Theodor W. Adorno was acutely conscious of the dilemma concerning form and content in philosophical thought, often framing it as a central issue in his critique of traditional, positivist, and "identity" thinking. He explicitly rejected the notion that the content (truth) of philosophical ideas can be separated from their form of presentation, arguing that such a separation is a form of fetishism that blinds thought to its own ideological entanglements
Adorno typified the Western Marxists who aligned themselves with the belief in the utopian potential of modern society, but did not have blinders on to the extent that they took any existing socialist regime as the realization of the socialist dream. As Adorno and the other members of the Frankfurt School saw it, it was only through the chicaneries of the socialist politicians and the establishment of a dominance of a false political system that impeded true Socialism from making further progress on the road to equality; this was done by preventing the power of the proletariat from reaching down to the uneducated, poorer members of society through a specific class war. Thus, at a level of hyper-aggressive class divisions, and through a countervailing screen of racial privilege, Adorno points out with authority that the class tensions between these two groups has prevented our society from taking on the meritocratic features of a world where we are able to live better than we currently do, and where we can live out the truly fulfilled lives that at present we can only imagine.
Adorno was not impressed with the position of Martin Heidegger, who vouched that he had located a realm of being prior to the split between subject and object.
This study of Adono's work has led to the realization that it is irrational to assume that we should exhibit a cold mien in terms of our relation with the world, as if it were a basic principle of our bourgeois subjectivity. We should take pleasure in life and n the joys it can offer us, indeed, especially now when, now, after the tragedy of Auschwitz, we realize we have been spared the guilt connoted by living through that apocalyptic time, but resist all calls for a depressed outlook on life, but rather to take a positive attitude and, expressly so, in order that we may envision a utopia on earth.
Adorno was insistent on the power of rejecting all philosophies of identity.
Unlike many Marxists who, following Lukacs' lead, condemned Nietzsche as a dangerous irrational precursor to fascism, Adorno honored him for his trenchant critique of mass culture and politics and his ruthless exposure of the bankruptcy of traditional metaphysics and, what's more, his penetrating insight into the ambiguity of the dialectic of enlightenment. The lines of communication extend even to the figures in French philosophers of the period of the 1960s where, according to Michel Foucault, Adorno was similar to in that there correlations between Foucault's analysis of the disciplinary and carceral society of modernity and Adonro's administered worlds.
Adorno chastised KIerkegaard for designating the aesthetic stage of development as inferior to the ethical or religious.
In his Metacritique of Epistemology, as in is KIerkegaard study, Adorno sought to discover the social underpinnings of seemingly inexplicable fissures and antinomies in his subject's work, an invention that surpassed a merely epistemological reflection. Adorno's revealed a basically psychohistorical approach to philosophy in that he took Husserl's insistence on bracketing historical considerations in the search for a universal, transcendent truth as function of the specific historical crisis of the European middle class.
Personally, I do not believe that we are force to choose between two forms of capitalism, either democratic capitalism or authoritarian capitalism, because I believe that American capitalism has resolved these contradictions through the economic interventions through the power of the Federal Reserve Board as a self-sufficient entity has allowed any such contradictions to be contained and displaced indefinitely. The choice between them is not a choice between Syclla and Charibdis or, if you will or between Socialism and Capitalism, because Democratic Socialism does not imply a choice for one in favor of the other.
In his book The Jargon of Authenticity, Adorno claimed that the prevailing fascination with the response to authentic human relations had contributed to the mystification of social conditions that prevented such authenticity from being achieved, Heidgger's insistence on the ontological meaning of death betrayed a covert sympathy for a totalizing identity theory that denied difference even as it purported to defend it. Like the cult of lyric poetry, or the culture of rock and popular music, it offered a pseudo-immediacy that ultimately served to perpetuate the social domination of the subject. Rather than negating the alienation of modern life, the jargon of authenticity subtly manifested the existent state of reality such that Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lived on because the moment to realize it had passed. However, as I see it, there is a possibility that in the future John Lennon's world of the imagination can potentially be resized and finally come into existence now that the long-term mystification engendered by the prevailing fascination with the rock discourse and the allure of pop-folk mass culture has passed into history and into an even subtler manifestation of the future of philosophy.
Postmodern art: an art that self-consciously debunked its illusory claim to wholeness and self-sufficiency and hence was more capable of negating reality than once that kept up the pretences of art-as-artifice. The purpose of art was to be found in its very refusal to subordinate nature to thought, matter to spirit, such that de-aestheticized art might provide a flickering utopian model of what mankind, despite everything, might become.
Adorno leaves the modern artist with the question: "Why carry on?" It seems to me that the answer is to enact a social liberation, but it remains resolved how to do so without becoming part of the chains of the culture industry, a weakness that several Adornio critics at the back of the book attempt to resolve, with but middling success. We might ask wish to ask the author Martin Jay, how did Adorno accomplish this, and was he successful?
Adorno's friend Walter Benjamin argues that language was not originally a medium of communication between minds that existed prior to their immersion in language. Words that merely communicate thought are due to the fall of language from its perfect state of memetic unity between word and thing, If there is anyone with whom communication takes place in the prelapsarian state it is God, said the note Kabbalist Benjamin. We also take note that Durkheim argued that Adorno's case presuposed the very non-constructivist objectivity his own theory denied. Does this explain how critical theory, since Wittgenstein, "begs the question"?
The argument that critical theory "begs the question" (assumes what it aims to prove) following Wittgenstein—and specifically within the context of the Benjamin-Adorno-Durkheim triangle—centers on the tension between immanent critique and transcendent objectivity.
Here is an analysis of how these ideas interact, based on your query:
1. The Benjaminian Foundation (Language, Prelapsarianism, and God)
Walter Benjamin's early philosophy argues that language is not originally a tool for communication between human minds. It is instead an expression of the "spiritual essence" of things, a "name" language that communicates itself to God in a prelapsarian (pre-Fall) state.
Post-Fall language becomes instrumental—a "bourgeois" medium used for social communication.
Adorno heavily adopts this, seeing art as a "language without intention," reminding us of the original language of things, and a critique of the "overnaming" in modern society.
2. Durkheim’s Challenge: Adorno's Non-Constructivist Objectivity
Durkheim argued that social facts must be treated as things ("non-constructivist objectivity").
Adorno's critical theory, according to interpretations of his engagement with Durkheim and Popper, challenges this by arguing that such "objectivity" is actually a reified, alienated "second nature" produced by capitalist exchange, not a natural phenomenon.
The Critique: Durkheim, and later thinkers like Popper, argued that Adorno's critique assumes its own objectivity—a "transcendent" position—while simultaneously attacking the idea of an objective world that can be known outside of the damaged social totality. This is a "non-constructivist objectivity" his own dialectic seeks to deny (i.e., treating his critique as a "true" description of the "false" world).
3. Critical Theory Since Wittgenstein: "Begging the Question"
Wittgenstein’s Impact: Wittgenstein’s later philosophy argues that language games are practices where "meaning is use". His work is often used to attack the idea of a "metaphysical" vantage point outside of language and practice.
The "Begging the Question" Mechanism: If critical theory aims to critique society (immanent critique) but uses a standard of "true" consciousness to diagnose "false" consciousness, it must, as Nietzsche (and later Adorno) suggested, adopt a form of "objective" thinking.
The Dilemma: If, since Wittgenstein, we accept that we cannot stand outside our language games (or "forms of life") to judge them, then critical theory "begs the question" by relying on a latent, unproven assumption that their critique is not just another language game, but a privileged, "true" understanding of the social whole.
Adorno’s Paradox: Adorno was aware of this and described his method as a tour de force—a balancing act that must be "objective" to break the spell of ideology.
In conclusion, the argument that critical theory begs the question suggests that, in trying to expose the "false objectivity" of capitalist society, Adorno uses a "true objectivity" that is itself untethered to the very Wittgensteinian language practices he critiques. However, for Adorno, this is not a fallacy, but a "negativism" that refuses to let the "true" world be "pre-decided by world view".
April 16, 2009
Probably the best general introduction I've read, but nobody is worse done by general introduction than Adorno. Particularly flummoxing is Jay's desire to eliminate Hegel from Adorno's work, and to separate him from Lukacs. He's good on Adorno's debts to Weber and Durkheim, pretty good on the musicology, but bad on the philosophical side of things, and makes some completely misleading claims (e.g., that the non-identical is an end in itself, when Adorno explicitly warns against believing that; that the 'exchange principle' is money, while for Adorno it is a/the Concept; that the Dialectic of Enlightenment is making trans-historical claims, when it is explicitly a theory of truth in time.) But it's well written at least.
February 25, 2019
Furiously logging my thesis books so I can meet my reading challenge 2k19
...Martin Jay is a legend!!
...Martin Jay is a legend!!
September 25, 2023
Nonsense
March 13, 2026
Martin Jay's book on Adorno is a very unpretentious introduction. I've given it three stars because it does its job as well as can be done with a thinker who was deliberately obtuse and unsystematic (the harder the text is to digest, the more thought the reader must put into it - "The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass"). It's Adorno for beginners, but Adorno for beginners is still very tricky - at least for me! For the purposes of a seminar, I read the Jay, Adorno's essay 'Subject-Object' in his book Critical Models, and his lecture 'Sociology and Empirical Research', from the anthology The Positivism Dispute in German Sociology. Those texts form the basis of the following reflections on Adorno, which because of my ignorance are necessarily very incomplete, and potentially downright wrong.
I don't have a communist political orientation, but certain of Adorno's quotes have reached me through osmosis. He's an excellent aphorist, and his statements always seemed wise and brutal. "There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more"; as well as "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric," are the ones that have stuck with me the most. Whether one is a liberal or a Marxist-Leninist, there is no disagreeing with either thought. The latter statement on Auschwitz cuts to the heart of a tension within Adorno: aesthetic activity within this damaged world is almost monstrous, even (or especially) today, in our moment of genocide and unapologetic amorality. Nonetheless, Adorno devoted himself to the analysis and defence of aestheticism against politics in his later life.
Adorno's thought indeed presents itself to us as a bundle of unresolved tensions. The Auschwitz-culture problem mentioned above is only one such contradiction. We also have the tension between theory and praxis (of course Adorno always leant towards the former), the tension between a seemingly unbounded pessimism about our damaged society and a certain belief about the infinite perfectibility of humanity in the communist future, the tension between the autonomy of the transcendental intellect and the constraining material conditions of society, and the tension between an egalitarian wish to dissolve all hierarchies with a strict aesthetic theory that privileges only the highest artistic accomplishments. There is nothing to be done about resolving any of these contradictions in our understanding of Adorno. He understood phenomena as 'force-fields' - a multiplicity of points which exist in "dialectical" tension with one another. To grasp one without reference to the others is impossible, to grasp the whole is false. Jay explains that Adorno's thought can be understood (although surely not comprehended) in a similar way.
I'll hone in on the pessimism-utopia juxtaposition mentioned above, because I feel a great affinity towards this pessimism tempered by belief in human utopia. What does utopia look like to Adorno? He allows himself a moment to speculate in Subject-Object. It is the world where subjects and objects live in peace. The distinction between subject and object cannot be dissolved (this would be a reactionary and illusionary return to a state of nature), but the subject can be removed from its throne - the hierarchy can be abolished; both between individual subjects as well as subjects and objects. Difference is recognised, and subjects and objects participate in each others' difference. The subject comes to acknowledge its objective qualities and the subjective qualities of the object. This is a proto-ecosocialist endeavour: humanity (subject) ceases trying to dominate itself and nature (object), especially through categorising forms of thought that force all into analytic identities. Thank god for synthetic reason.
My problem with this is typically crude, British empiricist stuff. What does this mean in terms of practical politics? What does a fleshed-out programmatic sketch of the pluralist utopia look like? What does a technology which doesn't dominate nature look like? For Adorno, such questions miss the point. Like Marx, he's not trying to write the recipes of the cook-shops of the future. In fact, to try to speculate upon the future from the vantage point of our damaged society would reproduce that society's flaws. We have to criticise and wait. I'm a rather theoretically-oriented and lazy person, so it would be great for me if I found this answer satisfying. Unfortunately I don't. Of course, it wasn't a satisfying answer for Adorno either!
Another issue that I have with Adorno is that whilst he ostensibly defends the subjectivity of the intellect in the face of material conditions, his rather schematic understanding of history can in fact exaggerate the effect of economic/social circumstances on the artist. Adorno's basic theoretical point is that whilst the artist is conditioned by their upbringing and the historical sediments they have to work with, their subjectivity still gives them freedom to do new things with what history has bequeathed, to radically alter the pattern. This much, I agree with. However, he explains the rationalisation and expansive power visible in classical music as directly causally linked to the rationalisation of production in the bourgeois economy and the shift away from craft production. This is a crude historical explanation, and not equal to the subtlety Adorno displays elsewhere. Given the economic underdevelopment of the Germanic nations where classical music came into its own, it also seems unlikely.
I plan to read more Adorno in later life, and thus thoroughly overthrow the meagre understanding I have gained of him in the past week. I think he was a very beautiful soul, and had an incredible mind. It's a cause of sorrow to me to me that such a man's life was so greatly damaged by this horrible world.
I don't have a communist political orientation, but certain of Adorno's quotes have reached me through osmosis. He's an excellent aphorist, and his statements always seemed wise and brutal. "There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more"; as well as "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric," are the ones that have stuck with me the most. Whether one is a liberal or a Marxist-Leninist, there is no disagreeing with either thought. The latter statement on Auschwitz cuts to the heart of a tension within Adorno: aesthetic activity within this damaged world is almost monstrous, even (or especially) today, in our moment of genocide and unapologetic amorality. Nonetheless, Adorno devoted himself to the analysis and defence of aestheticism against politics in his later life.
Adorno's thought indeed presents itself to us as a bundle of unresolved tensions. The Auschwitz-culture problem mentioned above is only one such contradiction. We also have the tension between theory and praxis (of course Adorno always leant towards the former), the tension between a seemingly unbounded pessimism about our damaged society and a certain belief about the infinite perfectibility of humanity in the communist future, the tension between the autonomy of the transcendental intellect and the constraining material conditions of society, and the tension between an egalitarian wish to dissolve all hierarchies with a strict aesthetic theory that privileges only the highest artistic accomplishments. There is nothing to be done about resolving any of these contradictions in our understanding of Adorno. He understood phenomena as 'force-fields' - a multiplicity of points which exist in "dialectical" tension with one another. To grasp one without reference to the others is impossible, to grasp the whole is false. Jay explains that Adorno's thought can be understood (although surely not comprehended) in a similar way.
I'll hone in on the pessimism-utopia juxtaposition mentioned above, because I feel a great affinity towards this pessimism tempered by belief in human utopia. What does utopia look like to Adorno? He allows himself a moment to speculate in Subject-Object. It is the world where subjects and objects live in peace. The distinction between subject and object cannot be dissolved (this would be a reactionary and illusionary return to a state of nature), but the subject can be removed from its throne - the hierarchy can be abolished; both between individual subjects as well as subjects and objects. Difference is recognised, and subjects and objects participate in each others' difference. The subject comes to acknowledge its objective qualities and the subjective qualities of the object. This is a proto-ecosocialist endeavour: humanity (subject) ceases trying to dominate itself and nature (object), especially through categorising forms of thought that force all into analytic identities. Thank god for synthetic reason.
My problem with this is typically crude, British empiricist stuff. What does this mean in terms of practical politics? What does a fleshed-out programmatic sketch of the pluralist utopia look like? What does a technology which doesn't dominate nature look like? For Adorno, such questions miss the point. Like Marx, he's not trying to write the recipes of the cook-shops of the future. In fact, to try to speculate upon the future from the vantage point of our damaged society would reproduce that society's flaws. We have to criticise and wait. I'm a rather theoretically-oriented and lazy person, so it would be great for me if I found this answer satisfying. Unfortunately I don't. Of course, it wasn't a satisfying answer for Adorno either!
Another issue that I have with Adorno is that whilst he ostensibly defends the subjectivity of the intellect in the face of material conditions, his rather schematic understanding of history can in fact exaggerate the effect of economic/social circumstances on the artist. Adorno's basic theoretical point is that whilst the artist is conditioned by their upbringing and the historical sediments they have to work with, their subjectivity still gives them freedom to do new things with what history has bequeathed, to radically alter the pattern. This much, I agree with. However, he explains the rationalisation and expansive power visible in classical music as directly causally linked to the rationalisation of production in the bourgeois economy and the shift away from craft production. This is a crude historical explanation, and not equal to the subtlety Adorno displays elsewhere. Given the economic underdevelopment of the Germanic nations where classical music came into its own, it also seems unlikely.
I plan to read more Adorno in later life, and thus thoroughly overthrow the meagre understanding I have gained of him in the past week. I think he was a very beautiful soul, and had an incredible mind. It's a cause of sorrow to me to me that such a man's life was so greatly damaged by this horrible world.
Read
May 13, 2022Era gracioso ir en el bus con un libro titulado "Adorno", sin más contexto.
Es una buena introducción a su filosofía, aunque últimamente que estoy leyendo bastantes introducción me he dado cuenta de que es mejor leerlas cuando ya sabes algo del filósofo en cuestión a menos que la introducción sea realmente buena. Y ni conozco tanto a Adorno ni sé si este libro llega a ese nivel de excelencia divulgativa. Sea como sea, está bien y si hubiese leído más cosas de Adorno probablemente la habría disfrutado más.
Es una buena introducción a su filosofía, aunque últimamente que estoy leyendo bastantes introducción me he dado cuenta de que es mejor leerlas cuando ya sabes algo del filósofo en cuestión a menos que la introducción sea realmente buena. Y ni conozco tanto a Adorno ni sé si este libro llega a ese nivel de excelencia divulgativa. Sea como sea, está bien y si hubiese leído más cosas de Adorno probablemente la habría disfrutado más.
December 30, 2019
Read this quickly (for the thesis) but it is written quite succinctly and I appreciate that it's quite easy to read, even considering the at times complicated subject matter. Definitely only a surface introduction, but as I haven't really come into heavy contact with Adorno yet, that is enough for me.
December 22, 2023
Phenomenal covering of Adorno! Possibly one of the easiest-to-read introductions to his thought I've read thus far. Situates him in the context of Western Marxism and even as a precursor to post-structuralism, mapping out his relations to other thinkers while never reducing his thought to a product of external factors nor simplifying it to mere cultural criticism. A very clear writer (in spite of Adorno); encouraged me to read more from Martin Jay.
April 9, 2011
Martin Jay is one of the great intellectual historians working today. His work on Adorno is insightful and useful for anyone interested in this incredibly complex and challenging philosopher.
Read
July 31, 2011A well written primer to Adorno's though.
May 14, 2015
Good introduction to the work and life of Adorno aswell as the context that made Critical theory a relevant entreprise.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews