Status Updates From Lectures 1949-1968, Volume ...

“We cannot simply focus on the individual, as such, from society, for the individual is determined, right down to its innermost composition through society, and further, that it is actually much harder to determine what is truly individuated, that which differs from the merely social, than it is to determine the opposite.”

“what matters is not the human being as such, but the concrete relations of actual living human beings and the relationship of human beings to the prevailing institutions and arrangements, to existing property relations and to objective social reality”.

Sounds like what he said in the previous chapter about the point of sociology.

“ however important it is to know the direction in which the political sentiment of the people is moving, one could only offer a reliable prognosis if one knows the specific interests and political perspectives of the key groups which occupied the economically most important positions and to a large extent are in a position to affect all direct to behaviour of human being themselves.”

On sociology: “the objective, sustaining foundation of our society… the forms of organisation through which society produces and reproduces itself today.”

Sociology “is principally concerned, not only with human being and their behaviour, but [also]… with the objective forces on which their behaviour depends… objective mechanisms which affects the social life of human beings behind their backs”

Adorno mentioning it being necessary to take what we now call an inter-disciplinary approach to understanding and diagnosing social problems.

Mentions to not just focus on administrative and managerial questions when doing empirical sociology as such an approach “ encourages us to prioritise the inessential in essential, and to conceive of human beings, as objects to be administered rather than as subjects.”

What I got from this chapter was that the built urban environment needs to reflect the existing social order and be fit for purpose for humans to live as human beans, rather than as Adorno stated on page 14, “simply as appendages of the machinery of civilisation.”

“If we attempted to orient urban architecture and development to fundamental social conditions that for underlying economic reasons no longer really obtain, we would slavishly fall victim to a historicising romanticism that would simply end up in proximity to certain nineteenth century intentions that we really have to leave behind.”

Quotable quote: “Inability of human beings today acknowledge the past, and the tendency of contemporary humanity… to repudiate everything that is no longer immediately present to it and to throw everything historical onto the rubbish heap, has led to the appalling examples of humanity we have all witnessed under fascism”