In perspective: Theodor Adorno

	- '[TA]..offically lost his venia legendi (permission to teach) on September 11 [1933], the date of his thirtieth birthday, not because of his dialectical materialist theory, but because of his Jewish name' (Buck-Morss 1977:136)
	' "[Vossiche Zeitung]...I had hopes of getting the position of [music] critic, but the death of the paper took this hope away with /// it, and I think it was fortunate, although I clung desperately to the possibility, as i was trying to stay in Germany at all costs...(incidentally, I would have been able to hold out perfectly well financially in Germany, and also would have had no political objection; except that every possibility for effectiveness would have been cut off from me, including that of [my music] being performed, and that was why I left..."' (TA to Krenek, 7.10.1934, quoted in Buck-Morss 1977:136-7)
	- 'On April 21, 1934, [TA] wrote Benjamin ...that the situation "for non-Aryan authors (including myself)" in regard to publishing required simply "the confirmation of the regular declaration" of national loyalty and that this could be "received without difficulty, although final confirmation could be postponed indefinitely" (Buck-Morss 1977:138)
	- '...one seraches his writings in vain for even a mention of the Spanish Civil war' (Buck-Morss 1977:139)

What a theory regards and disregards determines its quality. (Theodor Adorno)[1]

Adorno's work is not well known outside academia, but the ideas he argues for are widespread and seem to be enjoying a come-back after the end of Stalinism in Russia in 1989. Indeed, his ideas often feel surprisingly modern. To some he is a marxist innovator, heroic in his rejection of both Hitler and Stalin. He appears to offer a radical critique of the effects of capitalism on culture and on the psychology of the working class, to explain why Stalinism and German Fascism had taken root in workers' heads and so why efforts to develop socialist societies had failed. Some find his pessimism about the working class particularly convincing - 'Ideology is socially necessary illusion'[2] - especially when it is linked to a Freudian fatalism about the powers of the capitalist mass media - what Adorno called the 'culture and consciousness industry'.[3] Equally attractive, to some, is that Adorno wrote in a poetic style of German and chose to make his thoughts obscure. He is often seen as a marxist, and turned to by students of culture and especially of music. The musicologist, Richard Middleton, thinks Adorno was a 'giant' who can help those of us on the left to 'understand the enemy',[4] and the literary critic, Terry Eagleton, places Adorno (along with Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin) as one of the three 'most creative, original cultural theorists Marxism has yet produced'.[5] However, like many a once-fashionable 'postmodernist' (or even a Noam Chomsky [6]) Adorno distrusted overarching theories and he vehemently insisted that he was no marxist.[7] I hope to demonstrate that he was correct and that his ideas on politics and culture ought not to be a basis for classical marxist cultural theory, let alone for revolutionary political practice.[8]

Adorno's background and early politics [9]

Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund-Adorno was born in Frankfurt in 1903 into a wealthy, highly-cultivated, liberal-bourgeois family. His father was an assimilated Jewish wine merchant who had converted to Protestantism, and his mother was the Catholic daughter of a Corsican-French army officer and a German-born singer. Teddie enjoyed a privileged formal education: he had his own music teacher, discussed Kant with Siegfried Krakauer when he was 15, attended the local Gymnasium and went on, at the age of 17 - having already published two articles [10] - to the new local University, where he read philosophy, music, sociology and psychology. He completed his doctorate on Husserl in 1924, at the age of 21. World War 1, the Russian Revolution and the failed German Revolution of 1919-1923 [11] do not seem to have made a political activist out of him, and up to the late 1920s he seems to have been unaffected by Marx, Engels, Lenin, or any writer from the classical marxist tradition, though he had discovered Lukacs' Theory of the Novel in 1921, and probably read Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness not long after it appeared in 1923.[12] Adorno seems never to have been connected to (let alone a member of) any working-class organisation. In fact, his first job was as Frankfurt correspondent for an arch-conservative music journal in 1923,[13] at a period when he was reportedly close to conversion to Catholicism.[14]

However, in 1925 Adorno met the socialist composer Alban Berg,[15] who influenced him musically and politically. Decades afterwards, however, he admitted how politically naive he had been during the late 1920s: 'I remember my fright when an aristocratic girl of vague origins, scarcely able to speak German without an affectedly foreign accent, confessed to me her sympathy for Hitler, with whose image hers seemed incompatible...But she was far shrewder than I'.[16] From 1925 until 1928 Adorno lived mainly in Vienna as Berg's pupil, sharing the same digs as Arthur Koestler, and meeting Hanns Eisler and Georg Lukacs in the elite Schoenberg circle. During visits to Berlin Adorno associated with Walter Benjamin, Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Later, he returned to Frankfurt where he co-edited an avant-garde Viennese musicological journal, but resigned when it moved too close to the Communist Party.[17] Though Adorno evidently never had to make his own living, in 1928 he decided on an academic career and began lecturing in philosophy at Frankfurt University.

Then, in 1929, Adorno had a series of unforgettable conversations with Walter Benjamin, and he adopted some of Benjamin's ideas in a quite surprising marxist turn in his second doctoral thesis of 1931. Characteristically, however, Adorno failed to acknowledge his debt either to Benjamin or to Marx.[18] In his inaugural lecture at the University of Frankfurt in 1931, published only after his death, Adorno acknowledged the pertinence of Marx's reproach to philosophers about the need to change the world and that this 'compels praxis', because 'mere thought cannot accomplish this'.[19] But at the same time he wrote (in a characteristically gnomic prose) that 'after the failure of efforts for a grand and total philosophy'[20] the task of philosophy was not to search for 'concealed and manifest intentions of reality, but to interpret unintentional reality',[21] since the 'text which philosophy has to read is incomplete, contradictory and fragmentary, and much in it may be delivered up to blind demons'.[22] There was also a cultural salvage operation to be carried out: the 'big house' of the philosophers 'has long since decayed in its foundations and threatens not only to destroy all those inside it, but to cause all the things to vanish which are stored within it, much of which is irreplaceable'.[23] However, when the Nazis won state power, Adorno was quickly convinced that philosophy 'must learn to renounce the question of totality' [24] - crudely, Marx's anti-Hegelian idea (mediated by Lukacs) that society needs to be seen as a whole, as the 'unity of the diverse', however contradictory, dynamic and historical that wholeness may be[25] - since the world had split asunder.

Adorno admitted that what he called the 'outbreak' of the Third Reich surprised his political judgment, though not his 'unconscious fear',[26] but even then there was no question of political commitment, only pity and contempt for those who, like himself, stood by and watched:

No-one who observed the first months of National Socialism in Berlin in 1933 could fail to perceive the moment of mortal sadness, of half-knowing self-surrender to perdition, that accompanied the manipulated intoxication, the torchlight processions and the drum-beating. How disconsolate sounded the favourite German song of those months, 'Nation to Arms', along the Unter den Linden.[27]

Nobody seemed to be able to explain to Adorno what was going on, including the German Communist Party, the KPD:

Anyone who pointed, for example, to the lack of any spontaneous resistance by the German workers was told in reply that things were so much in a state of flux that such judgments were impossible; anyone who was not on the spot, right among the poor German victims of aerial warfare - victims, however, who had few objections to air-raids as long as they were directed at the other side - had no right to open his mouth, and in any case agrarian reforms were imminent in Rumania and Yugoslavia.[28]

Adorno saw the political impotence of the Weimar Republic in the face of Hitler: 'Germany's position in the competition between imperialist powers was, in terms of the available raw materials and of her industrial potential, hopeless in peace and war'.[29] Yet his own political stand was fatalistic and introverted - 'I ought to be able to deduce Fascism from the memories of my childhood'.[30] Adorno's critique of other philosophers was, however, confident and clear:

how completely the German mind failed against an opponent to whom all the substantial power of the German philosophy of history seemed to have passed. Pedantic punctiliousness in the concrete, wordy conformist optimism in the idea, and, often enough, an involuntary concession of weakness in the assurance that after all things are not yet so bad with our culture.. .is all that German philosophy and science could bring to bear against a man who rebuked them as a sergeant-major would dress down a rookie. Behind their consequential helplessness one could almost suspect the presence of a secret impulse to obey the sergeant-major in the end.[31]

Apparently, Adorno did nothing of a practical nature to oppose the Nazis, and he seems to have ignored Italian Fascism altogether.

Adorno later insisted that he did not 'play the game' - presumably, either adaptation to the Nazis or adherence to the official KPD line in politics, that fascism was the inevitable and culminating stage of capitalism - and that he had already been amongst those 'forced into inner emigration before the Third Reich broke out'.[32] However, in the early 1930s he was sufficiently politically flexible to hope for a job on a Berlin paper and to write uncritically about Herbert Muntzel's 'consciously National Socialist' music and Josef Goebbel's 'Romantic Realism'. True, the Nazis banned Adorno from teaching in September 1933, but so late as April 1934 he told Benjamin that he was prepared to accept the situation for 'non-Aryan authors' such as himself, though that meant taking a loyalty oath to the Nazi state.[33] In spite of that remarkable flexibility, Adorno was formally expelled in the spring of 1934, but he was allowed to travel to London and then on to Oxford and to maintain a house in Nazi Germany. He got married in Berlin in 1937. Adorno 'seems to have naively hoped that the Nazis were a passing phenomena and he might still salvage his career',[34] and since 1928 he had put a lot of effort into cultivating an old acquaintance, Max Horkheimer, Director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research.

The Cafe Marx

The Frankfurt Institute was proposed in 1923, the same year as the defeat of the German Revolution. The impetus came from Felix Weill, a millionaire and self-styled 'salon Bolshevik' who had been briefly arrested for socialist activities in 1919, who was acquainted with leading KPD members such as Clara Zetkin and Paul Frolich, but was never a party member. Weill wanted his father to fund an Institute for Marxism, but in the interests of academic recognition it was actually opened in 1924 as the Institute of Social Research. Moreover, its first Director, Carl Grunberg, was no Bolshevik: he was more interested in the history of the German labour movement than in contemporary politics, though he forged a link with David Ryanazov's Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow.[35] Crucially, Herman Weill's grant gave the Frankfurt Institute economic and political independence both from Frankfurt University and from the KPD.

The original staff and associates of the Institute were 'committed socialists, irreconcilably to the left of Social Democracy'.[36] However, following the failure of KPD and Comintern policy (both on the Nazis and the prospects for revolution) and Hitler's subsequent takeover of power in 1933, the majority of them looked for a new approach, critiquing both bourgeois ideology and Stalinised marxism. In practice this led to a retreat from trying to combine theory and empirical research - Marx's classical method - into theory (and sometimes into philosophy) alone.[37] Rather than locate the problem in the political mistakes of Stalinist or reformist leaders and parties, Adorno and Horkheimer in particular sought to locate it in a mediated Lukacsian conception of 'totality', and in a historically-decisive change inside workers' heads. As we shall see, early Freudian psychology was introduced into their work-methods 'primarily to explain why the western proletariat had failed to fulfill its historical role', and in turn, this shift of emphasis began to undermine the marxist-humanism that had been hegemonic in many parts of the Institute.[38] However, in 1931, as a precaution, publication of the Institute's journal was moved to Paris. In January 1933, Horkheimer and Pollock were raided by Nazi Stormtroopers, though they managed to escape and, eventually, to shift the Institute to Geneva, making its subsequent closure for tendencies hostile to the state somewhat academic. In 1934, Horkheimer and many Institute staff left for the USA.

From the later 1930s, and especially after the start of Stalin's Moscow Trials of Old Bolsheviks, Adorno and most of the Institute staff began to see Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia as two 'totalitarian states' - with a single party in power, committed to the same political ideology, and using agencies such as a secret police, the armed forces, economic institutions and state-controlled mass media to maintain their power. This changed political perspective had decisive consequences for their academic work. In 1936, Adorno believed he had found 'common ground' with Benjamin - 'You know that the subject of the "liquidation of art" has for many years underlain my aesthetic studies and that my emphatic espousal of the primacy of technology, especially in music, must be understood strictly in this sense' [39] - and he was keen to discover a 'true accounting of the relationship of the intellectuals to the working-class':

It is not bourgeois idealism if, in full knowledge and without mental prohibitions, we maintain our solidarity with the proletariat instead of making our own necessity a virtue of the proletariat, as we are always tempted to do - the proletariat which itself experiences the same necessity and needs us for knowledge as much as we need the proletariat to make the revolution. [40]

Already for Adorno there was already a clear division of political labour between intellectuals and the proletariat. It was the former's duty to ensure the 'further development of the aesthetic debate' which Benjamin had 'so magnificently inaugurated',[41] and which contained some of the 'profoundest and most powerful statements of political theory' that he had encountered since he read Lenin's State and Revolution.[42] Politically, this meant that 'in the current situation, which is truly desperate, we should really maintain discipline at any cost' and 'not publish anything which might damage Russia'.[43] However, the inability to explain the defeat of the Left Opposition, the horrors inflicted by Stalin on Russia's peasantry and intellectuals, the gulags, the Moscow trials and the disastrous Comintern popular front policy in Spain all took their toll on loyalty to Russia. In May 1938 Adorno commented on Eisler's 'miserable defense' of the show trials,[44] though he retained some illusions until the Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939, and Benjamin's suicide at the Spanish border in 1940 shocked him more than anything else.

By 1937, Horkheimer had announced a systematic shift of emphasis away from a marxist belief in the existence of 'class domination' towards an effectively liberal-bourgeois perspective of 'social justice', and away from marxist methods of analysis to what he liked to call 'critical theory'. He stressed the need to 'speak extremely scientistically' in the USA and to write 'not one word that can be interpreted politically, and that meant avoiding 'expressions like "materialist"...at all costs'. Instead, a kind of code was developed: 'fascism' became 'totalitarian doctrines', 'communism' was altered to 'constructive forces within humanity' and the 'proletariat' became the 'masses'.[45] Horkheimer and Adorno began to accept that they were living under a new and distinctive form of social relations - 'late capitalism' [46] - in which cultural commodities like the radio, movies and the record-player had politically detrimental effects on workers' psychology. However, there was one slight hope: a fragment of the 'forces of production' had been rescued by a remnant of the intelligentsia, just as the 'relations of production' froze. Horkheimer wrote: 'under the conditions of later capitalism and the impotence of the workers' movement before the totalitarian state's apparatus of oppression, truth has sought refuge amongst small groups of admirable men',[47] who 'may at the decisive moment become the leaders because of their deeper insight'.[48]

In 1938 Adorno followed the Institute to the USA. He insisted that the 'totality' of culture had fractured - following economics and politics - into separable 'spheres'. 'Men' in 'our epoch' had 'become objects', but where did the subject go? Instead of seeking to understand his position historically, Adorno simply denied Marx's axiom that 'the proletariat represented, even potentially, a truly universal class in whose name abstract, bourgeois humanism might be transcended', and then began to doubt the idea of universality itself.[49] Adorno's enthusiasm for what we can now see was Stalinised marxism cooled considerably: he sometimes invoked marxist phrases and concepts, but he never used Marx's methods of analysis consistently. For example, also in 1938, he wrote that 'exchange-value' had somehow taken the place of 'use-value' when the concert ticket became more important than the concert, but, against Marx, he held that the proletariat no longer had the power to make history. Characteristically, he did not explain how this new situation came about, or what had happened to the subjective factor in history - what people could do to change the world, even though they did this in circumstances not of their choosing - while the supposedly objective forces - technology, the economy, and so on - did their deadly work. Instead, there is a mechanical and unacknowledged jump from commodity-production in general to how workers thought, felt and failed to act. How, precisely, had 'relations of production' suddenly frozen while 'forces of production' lurched on independently? How, in other words, had history stopped? What is at work here is an attempt to invert Marx's metaphorical Base and Superstructure idea from a materialist to an idealist[50] mode, whilst retaining bits and pieces of Marx's terminology. Quite how Adorno himself had escaped these forces to get outside the 'total social process' is unclear.

By the early 1940s, for Adorno (and against Marx) the masses could be thought of as being powerless in the face of outward threats, mainly because they are defined as powerless inside their own heads.[51] Relying on early Freudian theory - he 'always defended a strong, orthodox interpretation of Freud, against the late Freud himself as well as against the neo-Freuduan revisionists'[52] - Adorno pronounced that the masses had 'regressed, arrested at an infantile stage'.[53] While not 'childlike' they had become 'childish', their 'primitivism' being 'not that of the undeveloped, but that of the forcibly retarded'.[54] They had become perverse, accepting 'displeasure as pleasure',[55] thereby leading to the 'liquidation of the individual'. [56] On the other hand, quite in line with classical marxism, Adorno attacked vulgar materialism, considering it

methodologically unfortunate to give conspicuous individual characteristics from the realm of the superstructure a "materialistic" twist by relating them to corresponding characteristics of the substructure in an unmediated and even causal manner. The materialistic determination of cultural characteristics is possible only when mediated by the total process.[57]

In other words, culture did not 'reflect' economics in any direct or mechanical fashion: it was more complex and contradictory than that. But in a fundamentally idealist manner he leaves out of his strange 'totality' both human agency and history. It is particularly ironic, then, that on their arrival in the USA, Adorno and many other Institute staff were suspected of being dangerous marxists.[58]

Things fall apart: the music of the spheres

The sea-changes in Adorno's political and philosophical ideas worked their way through into his ideas about art in general and music in particular. In 1920, he had believed that 'the art of our time is faced with the question of its continued existence',[59] but when art survived he adjusted his position slightly: 'music, unlike pictures and books, cannot be physically owned', and so 'for all its popularity with the bourgeoisie' art 'has always remained esoteric'.[60] This is a confusing formulation, mainly for what it leaves out. For example, what happened to musical copyright in sheet music or public performance, and, if 'music' is humanly-produced sound, under what non-commoditised circumstances could it be learned or played in the twentieth century, or even in the nineteenth? Did Mozart not write for the market?[61]

In 1932, just before the Nazis achieved state power, Adorno published an essay which is often used to justify his characterisation as a marxist, though he was later 'relentlessly critical' of it and repeatedly refused to see it republished.[62] He continued to disagree with Lukacs' concept of 'totality' in culture, using 'light music' and 'vulgar music' interchangeably and taking it for granted that the content of 'vulgar music is the obsolete or depraved material of art music'.[63] Just as music had split, so had its audience, not wholly along clear class lines, but irretrievably all the same:

The islands of pre-capitalist "music making" - such as the 19th century could still tolerate - have been washed away: the techniques of radio and sound film in the hands of powerful monopolies and in unlimited control over the capitalistic propaganda machine, have taken possession of even the innermost cell of musical practices, i.e. domestic music making.[64]

Adorno seems to be writing of valuable music only as something played in private on a musical instrument, just as he did himself, (and not from a recording), so this music appears to have had a special connection with the members of a leisured class, whilst the workers who built, tuned and dusted the pianos are simply ignored. In addition, the bourgeoisie had split: the 'expropriation of the upper middle class through inflation and other crises has expelled this stratum of society from operas and concerts, exiling its members before the radio'.[65] There was a clear class perspective at work: writing about the HMV logo so recently as 1928, Adorno had maintained that 'the dog listening to his master's voice was the authentic trademark for the gramophone's effect'.[66]

Adorno's essay rets on a series of unargued assumptions. Music had long been a commodity, but why was it a new form of commodity when Al Jolson broke into song on The Jazz Singer in 1927, or after radio became commercially significant after World War 1? What was it about those electronic industries which had such qualitatively or quantitatively new effects? In public, Adorno pronounced that 'under no conditions is music to be understood as a "spiritual" phenomenon, abstract and far removed from social conditions', [67] yet in private he remained idealist and elitist:

The social question can only meaningfully be posed on the basis of the aesthetic quality question. In other words, sociology should not question how music functions, but how it stands towards fundamental social antinomies, whether it sets about to master them or let them remain or even hide them, and this question leads only to what is immanent in the form of the work in itself.[68]

But who decides what 'quality' is and is not? Where exactly in the 'form' of the music does its power and meaning lie? What precise relationship does 'music' have to 'fundamental social antinomies' - what Marx thought of as class relations? [69] Adorno believed that 'aesthetic forces of production' belong to the 'ideological superstructure', while relations of production belong to the 'culture industry' at the 'base', [70] but while classical marxists never deny that culture, ideas and so on can be powerful, they also stress (against idealists) that such powers are not decisive.[71]

What is crucial, here, is Adorno's privileging of culture over practical politics. According to him, the only faint possibility of political as well as cultural hope lay in the musical remnant which had some 'value' and which (again, mysteriously) escaped the monolithic processes of the market and the commodity form. This music 'sketches in the clearest possible lines the contradictions and flaws which cut through present-day society' and was able to 'portray within its own structure the social antinomies which are also responsible for its own isolation',[72] and thus 'call for change through the coded language of suffering'.[73] Consequently, this music is under the 'same obligation as theory to reach out beyond the current consciousness of the masses', though unless the masses could hear the music of people like Weill - which 'is today the only music of genuine social-polemical impact' because of a key characteristic, its 'negativity'[74] - there was little to be expected from them. Contrary to what Marx and the classical marxists expected, changes and contradictions in the base of society would not any longer provide opportunities for self-emancipatory political action by the proletariat. Hope, if it was to come from anywhere, had to come from 'above', in the 'coded' form of 'progressive' cultural products and practices.

After Hitler's successful bid for power in 1933, Adorno's thinly-disguised elitism and idealism became more obvious and fed back into his selective and methodologically-arbitrary use of fragments of Marx along with a good deal of Stalinist mechanical materialism. The concentration of capital in commercial culture businesses - a real phenomenon after the crisis of 1929-1932 [75] - had, in some unexplained way, merged into a 'total capitalistic propaganda machine'. Music, along with the rest of culture, had been a victim of this mysterious and one-sided determinism - a creeping, undialectical, fatalistic and almost Weberian rationalisation of the system.[76] As for 'vulgar' music, its 'light' character merely added to its psychological dangerousness.[77] In the later 1930s, Adorno's vision darkened:

The leverage of music - what they call its liberating aspect - is the opportunity to feel something, anything at all. But the content of the feeling is always that of privation. Music has come to resemble the mother who says, "Come and have a good cry, my child." In a sense it is psychoanalysis for the masses, but one which makes them, if anything, even more dependent than before.[78]

It was in part their own fault: he noted sourly of the largely working-class US dancers known as 'jitterbugs' that 'For people to be transformed into insects they require as much energy as might well suffice to transform them into human beings'.[79]

In 1938, Adorno still formally acknowledged that the 'diverse spheres of music must be thought of together',[80] but at the same time the 'unity of the two spheres of music' was to him 'an unresolved contradiction'.[81] However, he agreed with the most conservative 'caretakers of music'[82] that the music consumed by the masses was rotten: 'there is nothing more to decompose in the lower music. The forms of hit songs are so strictly standardised, down to the number of beats and the exact duration, that no specific form appears in any particular piece.'[83] The good stuff had had its 'field of force' reversed, so that the masses were not merely turned away from it and so are 'confirmed in their neurotic stupidity',[84] and this was reinforced by the 'feeling of impotence that creeps over them in the face of monopolistic production', and they continue 'identifying themselves with the inescapable product'[85] of the 'culture industry'. This is why the masses fell prey to the 'jitterbug', a dance 'stylised like the ecstasies savages go into beating the war drum' with 'convulsive aspects reminiscent of St Vitus' dance or the reflexes of mutilated animals'.[86]

By 1941 Adorno was completely clear that 'the masses' had become dough, 'kneaded by the same mode of production as the articraft material foisted upon them'. The 'customers of musical entertainment are themselves objects or, indeed, products of the same mechanisms which determine the production of popular music', and therefore - in a Marxist-sounding flourish - their spare time 'serves only to reproduce their working capacity'.[87] How did this work? According to Adorno, there was something inside the music which has these apparently inescapable effects:

Structural standardisation aims at standard reactions. Listening to popular music is manipulated not only by its promoters, but as it were, by the inherent nature of this music itself, into a system of response-mechanisms wholly antagonistic to the ideal of individuality in a free, liberal society.[88]

Moreover, the composition 'hears for the listener', 'divests the listener of his spontaneity and promotes conditioned reflexes'.[89] These effects were reinforced by 'pseudo-individualisation',

endowing cultural mass production with the halo of free choice or open market on the basis of standardisation itself. Standardisation of song hits keep the customers in line by doing their listening for them, as it were. Pseudo-individualisation, for its part, keeps them in line by making them forget that what they listen to is already listened to for them, or 'pre-digested'.[90]

Consequently, those who ask for a 'song of social significance ask for it through a medium which deprives it of social significance'.[91]

How did Adorno escape? He doesn't say, but he knew where the problem was most acute:

Individuals of the rhythmically obedient type are mainly found among the youth - the so-called radio generation. They are most susceptible to a process of masochistic adjustment to authoritarian collectivism. The type is not restricted to any one political attitude. The adjustment to anthropophagus collectivism [cannibal-mindedness] is found as often among left-wing political groups as among right-wing groups. Indeed, both overlap: repression and crowd-mindedness overtake the followers of both trends. The psychologies tend to meet despite the surface distinctions in political attitudes.[92]

Commoditised music (including 'bad serious music'[93] which had also split off under the general pressure) had become 'largely a social cement',[94] and the people 'clamour for what they are going to get anyhow'.[95] Yet Adorno provides no detailed analysis of this music, and fails even to give examples of what he means. Instead, he relies on a shared sense of superiority between himself and his readers.That such a line of reasoning was inductive and unfalsifiable - not to mention ahistorical and essentialist - seems not to have troubled him.

By 1945, Adorno insisted that what happened in workers' heads was 'commodity listening', whose ideal is to 'dispense as far as possible with any effort on the part of the recipient'. [96] So there was no hope, especially amongst the proles:

The sentimentality of the common people is by no means primitive, unreflecting emotion. On the contrary, it is pretense, a fictitious, shabby imitation of real feeling, often self-conscious and slightly contemptuous of itself. This fictitiousness is the life element of the fascist propagandist performances. [97]

The pleasure they received was that it encouraged them 'not to think about anything'. It was flight; not, as is asserted, flight from a wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance',[98] since - in another Marxist-sounding flourish - 'mass culture discloses the fictitious character of the "individual" in the bourgeois era', while 'Self-preservation in the shape of class has kept everyone at the stage of species-being'.[99] That commercially-made songs, successful at the record-shop counter, should have an automatic connection with and reinforcingly reactionary effect on workers' thoughts, feelings and actions is never doubted, but neither is it demonstrated. Faith in a pessimistic, mechanical and vulgar Freudian essentialism was enough and, fortunately, there was still a remnant of the intelligentsia which had managed to escape bourgeois hegemony and to practise critical theory - 'only individuals are still capable of representing consciously and negatively the concerns of the collectivity'.[100] How they managed to do this in a period when reason itself was identified with the urge to dominate is, however, highly problematical.[101]

Where is the proletariat? 'Post-Marxism' in the 1940s.

After Auschwitz, Adorno's cultural pessimism was reinforced by his acceptance of Friedrich Pollock's theory about 'state capitalism', which seemed to make Marx's Capital outdated.[102] In 1941, Adorno wrote that there was a 'tendency of present economy to eliminate the market and the dynamics of competition',[103] prefiguring a world of 'post-competitive capitalism'.[104] He was rather reticent about the history of this process, but a key factor appears to have been the development of capitalism into its full-blown monopoly stage at some point in the later 1920s, above all in the 'culture industry'. 'The dependence of the most powerful broadcasting company on the electrical industry, or of the motion picture industry on the banks, is characteristic of the whole sphere, whose individual branches are themselves economically interwoven'.[105] In reality, such concentrations were largely unknown outside North America and Western Europe, but 'Europe sufficed for him entirely', even when Adorno lived in the USA.[106] What Marx had analysed as tendencies towards capital-concentration and monopoly within industrial capitalism, Adorno took to be facts, and then he turned Marx on his head by claiming that the relevance of finance capital was 'incomparably greater in early industrialism than in later industrialism'.[107] Adorno's readers were now asked to believe that the forces of production are (somehow) 'displaced into high, quasi-privileged spheres, isolated, and therefore, even when they incorporate true consciousness, are also partly false' whilst the 'lower spheres obey the dominant relations of production.' [108] Somehow, the masses had lost their intellect and creativity, and were now more or less boxed-in by frozen relations of production.

Marx was both right and wrong. Adorno claimed that 'as a matter of economic social fact' the 'crucial role in the struggle against increasing concentration of economic power will have to be played by the working-people',[109] but he made an explicit renunciation of any connection with working class parties, at a time when the German KPD was being banned. [110] He believed, against Marx, that the working class may be still for-itself but was no longer in-itself, and while he sometimes dissociated himself from those who 'showed contempt of the masses as such', he did not challenge Le Bon's 'well-known characterisation of masses as being largely de-individualised, irrational, easily influenced, prone to violent action and altogether of a regressive character'.[111] In fact, he damned the 'artificially integrated fascist masses'[112] in his own 'satanic society'.[113] This political and cultural pessimism developed, until by 1950, Adorno and Horkheimer postulated the existence of an 'anthropological species we call the authoritarian type',[114] a 'more or less enduring organisation of forces within the individual',[115] a 'social disease'[116] which was the seed-bed for 'potential fascism'[117] even in the USA. Ironically, most of the research programme's subjects - like Freud's, earlier in the century - were middle class,[118] though the underlying assumption of all his work was that the masses were the heart of the problem. There was, however, no scientific method for testing such hypotheses, not even the empirical ones which Adorno despised.[119]

How could he know all this, anyway? According to Adorno, the left-leaning intelligentsia were (somehow) free of these pressures but (because the working class had let them down) they remained stranded in a hopelessly compromised and contradictory position, retaining 'some degree of independence' which enabled their 'last representatives', to exist 'however dismally'.[120] So the progressive critical individual was inevitably split off from the working class, since the present period was one of the 'dissolution of the subject, without yet giving rise to a new one'.[121] Put simply, the working class had failed - 'simple folk are forced to brawl amongst themselves for their portion of the social product'[122] - and all that Adorno could do was mourn the 'old subject' and await the Second Coming, taking care meanwhile to have 'nothing to do with gaolors, nor to fall foul of thieves'.[123] He knew the world was unfair - 'While the policeman beats up strikers with a rubber truncheon, the factory-owner's son can drink an occasional whisky with a progressive writer'[124] - but he continued to believe that forces of production can be ideas alone and to 'ponder the grimly comic riddle: where is the proletariat?'[125]

The Cafe Max

By 1951, Adorno's philosophy had become near-mystical: 'the only philosophy which can responsibly be practised in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate things from the standpoint of redemption', so 'perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light'.[126] He acknowledged that such a philosophy was impossible to put into practice, politically, since it 'presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair's breadth, from the scope of existence'.[127] So 'inviolable isolation' was, paradoxically, 'the only way of showing some measure of solidarity'[128] under the 'overwhelming power of high capitalism',[129] contrary to those who maintained a 'Romanticised concept of the proletariat'.[130] Adorno had now adapted bits of Nietzsche and 'developed a sociologically diffuse concept of power which seemed to have absolved him of any further explanation of the political process, with the result that he spent the rest of his life mourning 'the "subject" which had lost its "substance"'[131] and thinking in ways which remained 'haunted by this ghostly missing agency'. [132] It is, however, difficult to agree with Bradley that Adorno's method was 'a particular Hegelian relapse' of Marxism, though it is true that this is to be found no less in Stalinist mechanical materialism than in the 'apparent richness of the Frankfurt School'.[133] And it seems to be rather more than a series of misunderstandings at the heart of Adorno's supposed Marxism, which now looks to be little more than an idealist mediation of Stalinist distortions of Marx.

Confusingly, gobbets of Marx's writings still appeared from time to time in Adorno's writings, in terms of theory and practice Marx was relegated to a 'secular pantheon', a 'wax museum of great men'.[134] Adorno, meanwhile, sought refuge in texts.[135] Having 'long since abandoned Lukacs' faith in the proletariat, having nothing but scorn for Mannheim's intellectual class with its implied role of advising the politically powerful', he 'offered no real alternative which transcended idealism.'[136] Krakauer upbraided his former pupil: 'You...reject Communism, frown down on Social Democracy, etc.: what do you suggest should be done in terms of social change, other institutions?' But Adorno's ' (pitiable) answer was: I know and say what is bad; is this not enough?' [137] Occasionally, Adorno acknowledged the contradiction at the heart of his political quietism - 'Practice is what is put off and cannot wait; this is what ails even theory',[138] and 'Whatever an individual or a group may undertake against the totality they are part of is infected by that totality; and no less infected is he who does nothing at all'.[139] But his intellectualism and idealism justified his concentration on theory, since 'Auschwitz demonstrated irrefutably that culture has failed':[140] 'a new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen'.[141] In a world fractured as Adorno conceived it to be, a unified theory and practice was impossible, so Marxism was 'no longer a counter-position one could take',[142] and probably had not been since the early 1930s.

During the rest of the 1950s, Adorno castigated Freud for 'blaming the "socialists" for what their German archenemies did' before the war,[143] but criticised his colleagues' efforts to integrate Marxism and Freudianism. Politically, he was less even-handed: he contributed two articles to an anti-communist, CIA-funded magazine in 1953 and in 1954 he accepted research funding from the Mannesmann corporation, a founder-member of the Anti-Bolshevik League and a financer of the Nazi Party. On the other hand, he continued to lambaste the communists who failed to denounce the Moscow Trials[144] and claimed that Marx and Engels' writings contained 'the seed from which eventually came what Karl Kraus called Moscauderwelsh [Moscow double-talk]'.[145] He appears not to have seen this as ideologically contradictory, perhaps because in 'the open-air prison which the world is becoming' there were 'no more ideologies in the authentic sense'.[146] He dropped hints that 'an explicit theory of society' was necessary,[147] but expressed no confidence in this being achieved,[148] By 1955 what had once been known to students as the 'Cafe Marx' had become known (after its Director, Horkheimer) as the 'Cafe Max'.[149]

In 1958, Adorno took over as Director of the Institute, and after the revelations about Kruschev's 'secret speech' and the workers' uprisings in Poland and Hungary - which Adorno seems to have ignored - he sought to make a distinction between what he understood as Marxism and its 'confiscation'[150] in the 'dictatorships of the East'.[151] However, he failed to explain how a huge body of work could be 'confiscated', or how he could use the traditionally Stalinist term 'dialectical materialism' at the same time as castigating Lukacs, inveighing against 'the imbecility of boy-meets-tractor literature' and denounced 'Socialist Realism'.[152] Lukacs bit back:

A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the "Grand Hotel Abyss"...a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainment, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered.[153]

Brecht was less subtle: he wrote that Adorno and the institute 'had defused Marxism, and thus contributed to the evils of society which it sought merely to diagnose'.[154] By the later 1950s, Adorno admitted that Marx's writings were to him a place where 'one need only rummage around for a passage that has made a special impression to be reminded of the proverbial needle in the haystack',[155] and his research student, Habermas, recalled him giving seminars on Hegel with only 'a certain Marxist background - and that was it'.[156] As for the working class, What Adorno saw their 'disillusioned consciousness' was their own responsibility, since they 'envisaged no real power to alter everything fundamentally - as expected in socialist theory'.[157] The question of political leadership never arose.

During the 1960s, the gradual chiming-in of Adorno's philosophical position with Western bourgeois ideology became ever more clear: 'Sociology's abandonment of a critical theory of society is resignatory: one no longer dares to conceive of the whole since one must despair of changing it'. Philosophically, he admitted he had been forced back into a kind of left-wing Hegelianism.[158] Politically, he continued to deplore the 'unfreedom' in the West, but he evidently believed the Soviet (and now the Chinese) 'empires' were, so to speak, unfreer. Certainly he reserved most of his considerable venom for the USSR and its allies:

On the threadbare pretext of a dictatorship (now half a century old) of the proletariat (long bureaucratically administered), governmental terror machines entrench themselves as permanent institutions, mocking the theory that they carry on their lips. They chain their vassals to their most direct concerns and keep them stupid.[159]

This is not quite the 1930s-1950s Stalinist (or fashionable late 1980s-early 1990s postmodernist) idea that Lenin led to Stalin, but it is remarkably close. Rather than analyse the degeneration of Stalinist Russia, Adorno preferred to attack the theory on which its official rhetoric (but not its practice) was based. In the West, too, the masses were secondary - 'the customer is not king, as the culture industry would like us to believe, not its subject but its object'[160] - though it remained possible to sentimentalise their plight:

If the masses have been unjustly reviled from above as masses, the culture industry is not among the least responsible for making them into masses and then despising them, while obstructing the emancipation for which human beings are as ripe as the productive forces of the epoch admit[161]

Universal history must be 'construed and denied',[162] since

After the catastrophes that have happened, and in view of the catastrophes to come, it would be cynical to say that a plan for a better world is manifested in history and unites it...No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.[163]

This was 'the horror that verifies Hegel and stands him on his head'.[164] If history does have any unity, it is that given by suffering: 'society is as transparent, and its apologia as threadbare, as those who see through it are certain to die out'.[165] Marx's nineteenth century optimism did not fit twentieth century realities.

The screeching retinue of Elvis Presley

During the 1950s and 1960s, Adorno's adaptation to idealism worked its way through into his ideas about the embattled situation of art under 'high capitalism'. With the 'complete hegemony of exchange-value and with the contradictions arising out of that hegemony, autonomous art becomes both problematic and programmatic at the same time'.[166] But how, in Gramsci's perspective, can a term such as 'complete hegemony' make sense? How can any art, or any human practice, be 'autonomous'?[167] And if it were 'complete', how could it still have 'contradictions'? In cultural - and specifically musical - terms, there is in Adorno an implicit notion of a Golden Age of cultural 'totality', not in any area of labouring or working class cultural practice, but from the high-point of the bourgeois era, somewhere between Monteverdi and Beethoven.[168] Only the 'promise contained in the age-old music is the promise of life without fear'.[169] How is that to be discovered? In its theological character: 'What it has to say is simultaneously revealed and concealed. Its Idea is the divine Name which has been given shape. It is demythologised prayer, rid of efficacious magic. It is the human attempt, doomed as ever, to name the Name, not to communicate meaning'.[170] And how can that Idea become manifest? Only by playing: 'To interpret music means to make music'.[171] It was an individual act of devotion which could not be falsified.

For everyone else there was only the 'culture industry', which 'buttresses the state of mind of people so as to be better able to exploit it'.[172] In 1962 - seven years after Presley's rise to fame and in the year of the Beatles' first successful UK recording - Adorno produced his Introduction to the Sociology of Music. He begins with a formal nod to totality - 'the sociology of music' needs to offer 'knowledge of the relation between music and socially organised individuals who listen to it'[173] - but rapidly shifts focus towards listening-skills, since works have been analysed 'with different degrees of accuracy'[174] according to his standards. Since society is 'irresistibly turning bourgeois' and 'exchange and performance principles' have become 'victorious',[175] the overwhelming majority of listeners were of the 'emotional' type - especially in the USSR, where music is 'tailor-made', and its 'musical ego ideal is patterned after the cliche of the violently oscillating, now ebullient, now melancholy Slav'.[176] Then there was the Western 'extreme entertainment listener', characterised by a 'misrelation to the subject matter' and by an 'inner realm' which 'stays altogether empty, abstract and indefinite'.[177] Sometimes, 'where this attitude is radicalised', 'artificial paradises take shape as they do for the hashish smoker' and 'powerful taboos are violated'[178] - 'he' is, in short, 'a self-conscious lowbrow who makes a virtue of his own mediocrity'[179] and his 'psychological peculiarity is a weak ego'.[180] None of this applies, however, to the 'good listener', who 'may be presumed to be growing rare and threatening to disappear'.[181] Adorno gives no empirical evidence to support such generalisations. Instead, he proceeds to offer a pathology of how the masses listened to commercially-successful music.

Assuming the masses (somehow) have the same basic ideas and ways of thinking and feeling, Adorno suggests that song-hits have an effect, even a social role, involving 'patterns of identification'. He then dove-tails these assertions with David Reisman's sociology: 'The hits not only appeal to the "lonely crowd" of the atomised; they reckon with the immature, with those who cannot express their emotions and experiences, who either never had the power of expression or were crippled by cultural taboos'.[182]

To people harnessed between their jobs and the reproduction of their working energies, the hits are purveyors of an ersatz for feelings which their contemporaneously revised ego ideals tell them they should have. Socially the hits either channel emotions - thus recognising them - or vicariously fulfill the longings for emotions.[183]

Ignoring the possibility that any songwriter's ideas might be quite different from any consumer's, and that he had conducted no empirical research to support his own (unpublished) detailed analyses of songs or his generalisations about the effects of consumption, Adorno grandly proclaimed that 'pop music is an ideology'.[184] It is 'objectively untrue and helps to maim the consciousness of those exposed to it, however hard the individual crippling effects may be to measure'.[185] It is 'planned idiocy',[186] which 'virtually tests what mankind will put up with, what threadbare, noncommital intellectual contents can be imposed on it',[187] though it is 'not ideology pure and simple, it is ideological only insofar as it is false consciousness'.[188] Which is why the masses cannot bear the music Adorno liked: 'Any musical reminder of themselves, of the doubtfulness and possible uplifting of their own existence, will embarrass them. That they are really cut off - alienated, even - from their potential is the very reason why it infuriates them to be reminded by art'.[189] Evidently, then, such an 'ersatz' music (as well as 'art' music) had a history.

According to Adorno, there was a time, apparently, 'far into the nineteenth century', when it was still possible to write good popular music, but when 'popular' and 'art' music split, the former's 'esthetic decay' was 'as one with the irrevocable dissociation of the two realms'.[190]

In the nineteenth century and as late as the twentieth - in other words, at the high tide of liberalism - free institutions were more progressive than the ones steered by public officials; but today, under the conditions of monopolistic mass consumption, the allegedly free market serves to strangulate what may be stirring.[191]

Bluntly, wealth and patronage were preferable to the state as a basis for the production of art (and, of course, for the funding of an elite Institute of Social Research). Even nations and nationalism had their merits, since 'music has national elements to the same extent as bourgeois society as a whole', and its history and forms of organisation, 'essentially occurred within national boundaries'[192] - a thought which would have surprised Mozart and Beethoven, but which was a commonplace of bourgeois nationalism. However, when liberal capitalism collapsed before totalitarianism in Germany and Russia, Adorno believed that was a retrogressive step for culture in general, though this was partly offset, since 1945, by the 'modern movement', which 'has liquidated national differences',[193] amongst the self-appointed intelligentsia at least. The move from ordinary bourgeois nationalism to elitist bourgeois internationalism was complete.

There remained the problem of market choice. Adorno knew it was 'far more difficult to see why one popular song is a hit and another a flop than why Bach finds more of an echo than Telemann',[194] but he expected his readership to know who Telemann was and to fall into line behind his denunciation of the 'banality' and 'vulgarity' of the 'crudely simple'[195] music of the 'screeching retinue of Elvis Presley'.[196] What he hoped to argue was that it was not simply a case of industry manipulation of audiences and markets, but that there was something in the music - its 'immanent character'[197] - which had psychological effects. It (somehow) 'sets up a system of conditioned reflexes in its victims, and the crux is not even the antithesis of primitivity and differentiation'.[198] Admittedly, there were contradictions: the 'subtly habit-forming effect contrasts oddly with the crudeness of the stimuli themselves',[199] and song-makers had to 'write something impressive enough to be remembered and at the same time well-known enough to be banal'.[200] Reluctantly, Adorno had to admit that not all the talent went into making 'serious music', and that 'there is still some good bad music left today, along with all the bad good music',[201] though 'popular music is bad, bound to be bad, without exception'.[202] But instead of 'searching for the musical expression of class standpoints one will do better so to conceive the relation of music to the classes that any music will present the picture of antagonistic society as a whole',[203] and he moves towards an unargued elevation of 'Authentic music' as the best place to start looking.

According to Adorno, this 'authentic music',

like probably any authentic art, is as much a cryptogram of the unreconciled antithesis between individual fate and human destiny as it is a presentation of the bonds, however questionable, that tie the antagonistic individual interests into a whole, and as it is finally a presentation of the hope for real reconcilement. The elements of stratification touching the several musics are secondary in comparison.[204]

In other words, this 'authentic music' could be relatively autonomous of class struggle:

Music has something to do with classes insofar as it reflects [sic] the class relationship in toto. The standpoints which the musical idiom occupies in the process remain epiphenomena as opposed to that phenomenon of the essence. The purer and more unalloyed its grasp of that antagonism and the more profound its representation, the less ideological the music and the more correct its posture as objective consciousness.[205]

In fact, it is 'by the anti-ideological resolution of conflicts, by a cognitive behaviour without an inkling of the object of its cognition, that great music takes a stand in social struggles...by enlightenment, not by aligning itself, as one likes to call that, with an ideology'.[206] Yet since the 'end of music as an ideology will have to await the end of antagonistic society',[207] the alignment of non-alignment and the ideology of the non-ideological have prevented 'great music' (let alone Adorno) from any active involvement in securing the end of class society. As usual, by appearing to say everything, Adorno says nothing. Even his music criticism is effectively Hegelian in its insistence on music having suprasocial and autonomous powers.[208]

Optimism of the intellect, pessimism of the will

In the later 1960s, Adorno claimed to believe both that class existed - 'Men are still dominated by means of the economic process'.[209] - and that it was 'far too optimistic on Marx's part to expect that the primacy of the forces of production would inevitably arrive and necessarily explode the relations of production'.[210] Yet nobody outside Second International or Stalinist politics - let alone Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg or Gramsci - saw anything inevitable in these general tendencies of capitalist development. Adorno knew Marxism only as the 'state religion' of the USSR,[211] yet he hung onto a utopian belief that 'However unbreakable the spell' of that 'present form of socially necessary sham', bourgeois and Stalinist ideology, 'it is only a spell'.[212]

It is highly ironic, then, that when his own students sought to break that 'spell', and accused him of 'betraying the activist imperative of his work',[213] Adorno was horrified - 'when I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails'.[214] They criticised his sophisticated despair, and he accused them of a relapse into idealism: 'There has recently been a recrudescence of enthusiasm for the beauty of street battles among militant students - all of this from the vantage point of studied ignorance. This is a reprise of futurist and Dadaist actions'.[215] Instead, he commended the ivory tower as the most realistic alternative to direct action on the streets,[216] since 'theory was itself a form of praxis in an era when no historical subject could be located'.[217] In short, everyone's 'mental imprisonment' was 'exceedingly real', except his own.[218] As for his students, some of them made sure that history caught up with their professor. In March 1969, Der Spiegel reported that

After the distribution of a leaflet "ADORNO ALS INSTITUTION IST TOT"[as an institution, Adorno is dead], three young revolutionary females from the 'Basisgruppe Soziologie' circled around Professor Adorno, at first waving their boquets of flowers, then kissing him, exposing their breasts, and confronting him with an erotic pantomime. Professor Adorno...tried to protect himself with his briefcase, and then left the lecture hall. He has since announced that his lectures and seminars on "Dialectics" would be indefinitely postponed.[219]

Humiliated, Adorno went on holiday to Switzerland, and died of a heart attack in May 1969.

Conclusion: the Giant Despair

Adorno's perspective on people and on history is a bit like the idea of the Biblical Fall, after which society had entered into an apparently infinite vortex on the way to another, unknown and unnameable dimension. There is, indeed, a certain Star Wars quality to his writing,[220] when 'inner and outer life are torn apart',[221] 'after the attempt to change the world miscarried'. [222] Instead of a philosophical development, then, Adorno's odyssey after his near-marxist writings of 1932 looks more like an infinite regress to Hegelian idealism - in which a formal but abstract dialectic has got its time-mechanism reversed - on the way back from Auschwitz to 1933, then to the failed German Revolution of 1923, via the murders of Luxemburg and Liebnecht in 1919 and the short-lived successes of the October 1917 revolution in Russia, and through late Marx to the early Marx, from early Marx to his original teacher Hegel and the Golden Age of bourgeois music. From his privileged position Adorno continued to insist that the only hope lay with 'the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves. These, however, would be a precondition for a democratic society which needs adults who have come of age in order to sustain itself and develop'.[223] But where such paragons were to come from in a naughty world - where unionised musicians were a 'hindrance to artistic progress'[224] - remains wholly unclear.

Adorno's political perspective was consistently elitist, abstract, quietist and ineffective - even 'narcissistic'[225] - and there is in his position something of 'the imprint of that "Authoritarian personality"' he repeatedly criticised.[226] Krakauer was even more biting, denouncing Adorno's method as 'a fraud'[227] and castigating him for 'excessive formalism, indifference to the concrete, and an arrogant disregard for the contradictions of his own position'.[228] Moreover, there are numerous links between his work and that of Althusser and Foucault, plus other apparent connections to Derrida, Lyotard and Baudrillard.[229] Berman has noted how Adorno's 'monolithic cultural despair' had a deleterious effect on the US New Left, especially those who 'embraced a mystique of post-modernism',[230] but this is less of a paradox than it might seem. What Adorno shared with many Left Bank PCF 'anti-Stalinists' and semi-anarchist flaneurs of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s US New Left reformists and Althusserian clones of the 1960s and 1970s was an incomplete break with the agenda, methods and assumptions of a stalinoid mediation of Marx, plus an unwillingness to get his hands dirty in the class struggle. In general, Adorno marries a static, pessimistic, vulgar materialist and eclectic conception of politics and economics to an equally static, pessimistic and vulgar materialist mediation of early Freud, so that the one appears to reinforce the other. Lukacs hit the nail on the head: Adorno beame the 'exponent of a kind of "non-conformist conformity"'.[231] From a younger activist's perspective, as Konrad Boehmer (one of the German New Left in the late 1960s) pointed out, Adorno was 'outspokenly pre-Marxist and totally bourgeois'.[232]

It is not surprising, then, that today's homeless left-reformists, having despaired of a western working class which appeared in the 1980s to have let the intellectuals down very badly once again, and having passed through the internationally influential defeatism associated with post-modernism, should have chosen optimism of the intellect and pessimism of the will and sought refuge in their intellectual grandfather's writings. Where else was there for them to go to choose their ancestors? Of course, that is no reason why those of us working in the tradition of classical Marxism should follow them down that particular vortex, or why we should continue thinking of Adorno as a marxist of any kind.[233] Given the recent trajectory of many of those on the left who were once heavily influenced by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies - and in particular by the effective the disavowal of any political hope in the white, western working class - revolutionary intellectuals urgently need to analyse the history of that political tradition from the unmistakeable realities of 1989, through the various dead-end streets of New Left Review, Marxism Today, Screen and Screen Education and virtually all the publications emanating from CCCS to the Euro-Gramscianism and Euro-Benjaminism of the 1970s - and then, via the political and theoretical crises of 1968,1956,1936,1932,1928 and 1924 to 1917, noting how Adorno got most of it wrong on the way. Surely Benjamin was correct: 'the revolutionary struggle is not fought between capitalism and mind. It is fought between capitalism and the proletariat'.[234] In the 1990s as much as in the 1930s, the proletariat needs a revolutionary socialist party, in the building of which even academics interested in cultural theory can, if they choose, have a modest part to play.

Notes

I would like to thank Colin Barker, Paul Brook, Laurence Coupe, Richard Holland, Matt Kelly, Mary Littlefield, Morten Michelsen, Alistair Mutch, Lina Nicolli, Philip Tagg, Peter Wicke and, particularly, Elaine Scanlan for trying to help me make this article intelligible.

ANMERKUNGEN

¹ T Adorno, 'The Sociology of Knowledge and its Consequences', A Arato and E Gebhart (eds), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (Oxford, 1978), pp 460. I have tried to use Adorno's own words in order to mediate his perspective as little as possible, even though this has involved grouping together statements, phrases and words which are kept apart in his writings. However, I have focussed on those matters of history, politics, philosophy and theory in which he never (or only rarely) contradicts himself. By doing this, of course, I am refusing to play the fashionable German academic game of demonstrating how Adorno was usually on both sides of every argument. Only half of Adorno's collected works has been translated into English, but Peter Wicke assures me that my general analysis holds true for the untranslated material.

² T Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London, 1986[1970]), p33.

³ T Adorno, 'Is Marx Obsolete?', Diogenes, Volume 64, 1968, p10.

⁴ R Middleton, Studying Popular Music (Milton Keynes, 1990), pp35,68. Several younger scholars of popular music have recently begun to pay serious attention to some of Adorno's work, though Adorno's ideas seem never to have gone away in many areas of cultural studies.

⁵ T Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1990), pp363-364.

⁶ See A Arnove, 'In perspective: Noam Chomsky', International Socialism 74, pp117-140.

⁷ For 'Western Marxism', and its exclusion of marxists like V.N.Volosinov and F Jakubowski, and of most marxist intellectuals who were politically engaged and active, see A Callinicos, The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx (London, 1983), p9.

⁸ For classical marxism, see J Molyneux, What is the Real Marxist Tradition? (London, 1985). A Callinicos, The Revenge of History. Marxism and the East European Revolutions (Cambridge, 1991) is the best introduction to twentieth century history from this perspective.

⁹ Unless otherwise credited, all biographical information about Adorno and his colleagues (including unsourced quotations) derives from R Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School. Its History, Theories and Political Significance (Cambridge, 1994), supplemented by M Jay, The Dialectical Imagination. A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research (London, 1973) and M Jay, Adorno (Cambridge MA, 1984).

¹⁰ 'Expressionism and Artistic Truthfulness: Toward a Critique of Recent Literature' [1920] and 'Platz: On the Drama by Fritz von Unruh' [1920], T Adorno, Notes to Literature, Volume 2 (New York, 1992[1974]), pp257-266.

¹¹ See C Harman, The Lost Revolution. Germany 1918 to 1923 (London, 1997).

¹² E Lunn, Marxism and Modernism. An Historical Study of Lukacs, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno (Berkeley CA, 1982), p201; S Buck-Morss, Negative Dialectics, op cit, pp21,44,197n82,210-211n228,211n230. Lukacs later repudiated his own early work.

¹³ T Adorno, Alban Berg. Master of the smallest link (Cambridge,1991 [1968]), pxi.

¹⁴ S Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics. Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (Hassocks, 1978), pp2,192n11.

¹⁵ T Adorno, Alban Berg, op cit, ppx,xi,13.

¹⁶ T Adorno, Minima Moralia. Reflections on a Damaged Life (London, 1974 [1951]), p188.

¹⁷ S Buck-Morss, Negative Dialectics, op cit, p33.

¹⁸ M Paddison, Adorno's aesthetics of music (Cambridge, 1993), p34; G Scholem, Walter Benjamin. The Story of a Friendship (Philadelphia, 1981), pp179,191; Wiggershaus, Frankfurt School, op cit, p82; Buck-Morss, Negative Dialectics, op cit, pp 18-19,268n22. Professor Cornelius refused to accept the Adorno's first thesis, largely because it plagiarised his own work. Since Cornelius was targetted by Lenin in 1908 in Materialism and Empirico-Criticism for his 'explicitly arch-reactionary views' and for being a 'police sergeant in a professorial chair' - V Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow, 1977) Volume 14, pp219,344 - Adorno's conservatism or his opportunism (or both) seem to have been in place very early in his adult life.

¹⁹ T Adorno, 'The Actuality of Philosophy' [1931], Telos, Number 31, Spring 1977, p129.

²⁰ Ibid, p124.

²¹ Ibid, p127.

²² Ibid, p126.

²³ Ibid, p130.

²⁴ Ibid, p127.

²⁵ A Callinicos, Revolutionary Ideas, op cit, pp74-75. See also M Jay, 'The Concept of Totality in Lukacs and Adorno', Telos, Number 32, Summer 1977, pp117-138.

²⁶ T Adorno, Minima Moralia, op cit, p192.

²⁷ Ibid, p104.

²⁸ Ibid, p113-114.

²⁹ Ibid, p104.

³⁰ Ibid, p192.

³¹ T Adorno, 'Spengler Today', Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, Volume 9, 1941, p306.

³² T Adorno, Minima Moralia, op cit, p57.

³³ Buck-Morss, Negative Dialectics, op cit, p138.

³⁴ M Jay, Adorno (Cambridge MA, 1984), p31.

³⁵ Ryazanov disappeared around the period of the Moscow trials, c1936-1937 - G Lukacs, Record of a Life. An Autobiographical Sketch (London, 1983), p88.

³⁶ Horkheimer became disillusioned after the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebnecht in 1919, though he seems to have remained intellectually optimistic about the Soviet experiment until at least 1927. Marcuse had had some practical political experience in the SPD in 1917-1918, left on account of what he saw as its 'betrayal of the proletariat', but was in touch with Left Oppositionists so late as 1927. Langerhaus, Mandelbaum and Biehahn have been characterised as Korschists or Trotskyists, and yet Langerhaus, along with Massing and Gomperz have also been described as either members of (or friendly towards) the KPD up until some point in the 1930s. Grossman and Pollock were KPD members, Wittfogel was a KPD candidate in Reichstag elections and Sorge became a master spy for the Soviet Union and was executed in Japan. Gumperz and Borkenau probably kept their KPD cards until the later 1920s, though it was Pollock who most frequently appeared in police files because of his dealings with the KPD Central Committee, yet he managed to meet members of the Left Opposition in Moscow in 1927, where Wittfogel got into some kind of hot water in 1929. From 1929 to 1939 the Institute continued its political quietism and went officially silent about events in Stalin's Russia. Wittfogel seems to have given up the struggle inside the KPD by 1934, while Massing was lucky to be allowed to leave Moscow and the Party in 1938. Only Grossmann, a former member of the Polish CP, retained an unreflective enthusiasm for the Soviet Union into the 1940s, though he was already marginalised at the Institute by the time of the first Moscow Trials.

³⁷ M Jay, Permanent Exiles. Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America, (New York, 1985), p108; P Slater, Origin and Significance of the Frankfurt School, (London, 1977), p57.

³⁸ M Jay, Permanent Exiles, op cit, p109.

³⁹ T Adorno, 'Correspondence with Benjamin', New Left Review, Volume 91, 1973, p64.

⁴⁰ Ibid, p67.

⁴¹ Ibid.

⁴² Ibid, p68.

⁴³ R Wiggershaus, Frankfurt School, op cit, p162. Trotsky's analyses of the defeat of the German and Chinese Revolutions and of the Stalin counter-revolution in Russia, for example, appear to have been unknown to Adorno during the 1930s, though Benjamin urged the Adornos to read Trotsky's 'history of the February Revolution' and autobiography in Spring 1932 - G Scholem and T Adorno, (eds), The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910-1940 (Chicago, 1994), p393. The only reference to Trotsky I have found by Adorno is to Literature and Revolution, in a posthumously-published work - T Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op cit, p241.

⁴⁴ S Buck-Morss, Negative Dialectics, op cit, p289n317.

⁴⁵ R Wiggershaus, Frankfurt School, op cit, p210.

⁴⁶ Z Tar, The Frankfurt School. The Critical Theories of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (New York, 1977), p76.

^47M Jay, Permanent Exiles, op cit, p110.

⁴⁸ M Jay, Ibid; Z Tar, Frankfurt School, op cit, p37. They had to be men, apparently, because of Adorno's sustained contempt for women, including his own wife - S Buck-Morss, Negative Dialectics op cit, p206n188; T Adorno, Minima Moralia, op cit, pp92-93,96,111,173; M Jay, Adorno, op cit, p93. And there was never any question that they had to be white - see T Adorno, Prisms, (London, 1967), pp122,127, on 'jazz', 'dirty notes' and 'barbarity'. Somewhere, Matt Kelly tells me, Adorno even compared black jazz singers to the victims of one of Stalin's show trials. Peter Wicke points out that, after World War II, Adorno had to apologise publicly because his earlier statements on music made by black artists were too similar to those made by Nazis.

⁴⁹ M Jay, 'The Frankfurt School's Critique of Marxist Humanism', in Social Research, Volume 39, Number 2, 1972, pp292-293.

⁵⁰ Adorno was aware of problems with idealism, particularly the danger of equating subject and object - see T Adorno, 'Husserl and the problem of idealism', Journal of Philosophy and Social Science, Volume 9, 1940, p5.

⁵¹ 'Commodity Music Analysed' [1934-40], T Adorno, Quasi una fantasia. Essays on Modern Music (London, 1994 [1963]), p50.

⁵² G Rose, The Melancholy Science. An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (London, 1978), p91. Adorno seems not to have been aware of V Volosinov's classical marxist Freudianism. A Marxist Critique (New York, 1976[1927]).

^53T Adorno, 'On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening'[1938], in A Arato and E Gebhart, (eds), Frankfurt School Reader, op cit, p286.

⁵⁴ Ibid.

⁵⁵ Ibid, p274.

⁵⁶ Ibid, p276.

⁵⁷ G Scholem and T Adorno, (eds), Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, op cit, pp581-582. Compare T Adorno, 'Correspondence with Benjamin', op cit, p71.

⁵⁸ Lowenthal was prevailed upon to leave his radical books in Germany in case the US Customs opened the crates, and the police did pay a call on the Institute in July 1940. Marx's name dropped out of correspondence and was censored from the journal, and known communists like Wittfogel and Grossman were not allowed to have offices along with the rest of the staff in New York. Horkheimer and his staff worked hard to counter this left-wing reputation and after the USA entered the war in 1941, they not only took money for research from CBS and the Rockefeller Foundation but also went to work for the US State directly. Neumann went to the Washington-based Board of Economic Warfare, and later the Intelligence Division of the Office of the US Chief of Staff. Kirchheimer worked alongside Gurland as a staff member of the OSS (the precursor of the CIA) at the State Department. Marcuse went to the Office of War Information in the State Department, and then worked with Neumann at the OSS, up to the time of the Korean War. Lowenthal also worked at the Office of War Information before he was appointed Director of the Research Department at the 'Voice of America' in 1949.

⁵⁹ T Adorno, 'Expressionism', op cit, p259.

⁶⁰ T Adorno, 'Motifs', Quasi una fantasia, op cit, p13.

⁶¹ H Robbins Landon, 1791. Mozart's Last Year (London, 1988).

⁶² T Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music (New York, 1976[1962]), p233; W Blomster, 'Sociology of Music: Adorno and Beyond', Telos, Number 28, Summer 1976, pp85n10,85n11; S Buck-Morss, Negative Dialectics, op cit, pp218-219n89.

⁶³ T Adorno, 'On the Social Situation of Music'[1932], Telos, Number 35, Spring 1978, pp158,160.

⁶⁴ Ibid, pp128-129.

⁶⁵ Ibid, p151.

⁶⁶ S Buck-Morss, Negative Dialectics, op cit, p287n107.

⁶⁷ T Adorno, 'Social Situation', op cit, p130.

⁶⁸ M Jay, Adorno, op cit, p135.

⁶⁹ Paul Brook points out that this theme was taken up by Eurocommunist mediators of Gramsci in the 1970s and 1980s. Compare C Boggs, Gramsci's Marxism (London, 1976).

⁷⁰ M Paddison, Adorno's aesthetics, op cit, p127.

⁷¹ See F Jakubowski, Ideology and Superstructure in Historical Materialism (London, 1990). Compare Lunacharsky - W Blomster, 'Sociology of Music', op cit, p99n54 - and Engels - T Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (London, 1976), p9.

⁷² T Adorno, 'Social Situation', op cit, p130.

⁷³ Ibid, p131.

⁷⁴ Ibid, p144.

⁷⁵ D Harker, One for the Money: politics and popular song (London, 1980), pp38-41.

⁷⁶ I owe this point to Paul Brook.

⁷⁷ T Adorno, 'Social Situation', op cit, p162.

⁷⁸ T Adorno 'Commodity Music Analysed', op cit, p50

⁷⁹ Ibid, p52.

⁸⁰ T Adorno, 'Fetish-Character', op cit, p274.

⁸¹ Ibid, p275.

⁸² Ibid, p274.

⁸³ Ibid, p289.

⁸⁴ Ibid, p286.

⁸⁵ Ibid, p288.

⁸⁶ Ibid, p292.

⁸⁷ T Adorno, 'On Popular Music', Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, Volume 9, 1941, p38.

⁸⁸ Ibid, pp21-22.

⁸⁹ Ibid, p22.

⁹⁰ Ibid, p25.

⁹¹ Ibid, p40.

⁹² Ibid.

⁹³ Ibid, p21.

⁹⁴ Ibid, p39.

⁹⁵ Ibid, p38.

⁹⁶ T Adorno, 'A Social Critique of Radio Music', Kenyon Review, Volume 8, Number 2, Spring 1945, p211.

⁹⁷ T Adorno et al, 'Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda', in E Simmel, ed., Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease (New York, 1946), p132.

⁹⁸ T Adorno and M Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London 1986[1947]), pp144. In 1938 Adorno already referred to the band conductor as 'totalitarian Fuhrer' - T Adorno, 'Fetish-Character', op cit, p284 - and by 1947 he published his thoughts about 'Fascist character even in Wagner's time' - T Adorno, 'Wagner, Nietzsche and Hitler', Kenyon Review, Volume 9, Number 1, 1947, p161.

⁹⁹ T Adorno and M Horkheimer, Dialectic, op cit, p155.

¹⁰⁰ T Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music (London, 1973 [1948]), p190.

¹⁰¹ A Callinicos, Against Postmodernism. A Marxist Critique (Cambridge, 1989), p96.

¹⁰² See F Pollock, 'State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations'[1941], in A Arato and E Gebhart, op cit, pp71-94, and compare the very different analysis by T Cliff, State Capitalism in Russia (London, 1988 [originally distributed in duplicated form as The Nature of Stalinist Russia in 1948]). Neumann had critiqued Pollock's departure from a classical marxist perspective so early as 1941.

¹⁰³ T Adorno, 'Spengler Today', op cit, p310.

¹⁰⁴ T Adorno, 'On Popular Music', op cit, p29.

¹⁰⁵ T Adorno and M Horkheimer, Dialectic, op cit, p123. Elaine Scanlan points out the apparent links to notions of 'synergy' in our own day.

¹⁰⁶ M Jay, Dialectical Imagination, op cit, p187.

¹⁰⁷ T Adorno, 'Reading Balzac' [ND], Notes to Literature, Volume 1, (New York, 1991), p133.

¹⁰⁸ G Rose, The Melancholy Science. An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (London, 1978), p120.

¹⁰⁹ T Adorno et al, The Authoritarian Personality (New York, 1964 [1950]), p267.

¹¹⁰ P Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London, 1976), p43. Adorno wrote a book in collaboration with Hanns Eisler, an unashamed Communist, but it appeared without Adorno's name on the title-page in 1946, at the latter's insistence - H Eisler, Composing for the Films, (London, 1951[republished in Germany in 1969 with Adorno's name also on the title page]).

^111T Adorno, 'Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda'[1951], in A Arato and E Gebhart, Frankfurt School Reader, op cit, p121. Adorno even sought to recruit Marx to their position, claiming wrongly that he had 'no psychology at all, and for good theoretical reasons. The world Marx scrutinised is ruled by the law of value, not by men's souls. Today men are still the objects or functionaries of the societal process' - T Adorno, 'Veblen's Attack on Culture. Remarks Occasioned by the Theory of the Leisure Class', Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, Volume 9, Number 3, 1941, p409. N Geras, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend (London, 1983), argues persuasively that this is not the case.

¹¹² T Adorno, 'Freudian Theory', op cit, p123.

¹¹³ M Jay, 'Concept of Totality', op cit, p131.

¹¹⁴ T Adorno et al, Authoritarian Personality, op cit, pix.

¹¹⁵ Ibid, p5.

¹¹⁶ Ibid, pv.

¹¹⁷ Ibid, p18.

¹¹⁸ Ibid, pp22,23,229,269.

¹¹⁹ D Morrison, 'Kultur and culture: The Case of Theodor W. Adorno and Paul F. Lazarfeld', Social Research, Volume 45, 1978, pp338,348.

¹²⁰ T Adorno and M Horkheimer, Dialectic, op cit, p132.

¹²¹ T Adorno, Minima Moralia, op cit, p16.

¹²² Ibid, p28.

¹²³ Ibid, p52.

¹²⁴ Ibid, p186.

¹²⁵ Ibid, p194.

¹²⁶ Ibid, p247.

¹²⁷ Ibid.

¹²⁸ Ibid, p26.

¹²⁹ T Adorno, In Search of Wagner, (London, 1991[1952]), pp123.

¹³⁰ T Adorno, Wagner, p131.

¹³¹ G Rose, Melancholy Science, op cit, p55.

¹³² Ibid, p142.

¹³³ D Bradley, 'The Cultural Study of Music, CCCS Stencilled Paper No 61, University of Birmingham, 1980, pp48-49. Bradley, too, seems boxed-in by the Stalinist mediation of Marx, as when he comments on the alleged wisdom of Christopher Caudwell - Ibid, pp9-10,24.

¹³⁴ T Adorno, 'Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa Solemnis', Telos, Number 28, Summer 1976, p113.

¹³⁵ T Adorno, 'Parataxis. On Holderlin's Late Poetry' [1963], Notes to Literature, Volume 1, op cit, p111.

¹³⁶ M Jay, Permanent Exiles, op cit, pp72-73.

¹³⁷ Ibid, p230. Elaine Scanlan points out the links to Chomsky's apologism here.

¹³⁸ T Adorno, Negative Dialectics, op cit, p245.

¹³⁹ Ibid, p243.

¹⁴⁰ Ibid, p366.

¹⁴¹ Ibid, p365.

¹⁴² Ibid, p197.

¹⁴³ T Adorno, 'Freudian Theory', op cit, p129.

¹⁴⁴ T Adorno, 'The Stars Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column. A Study in Secondary Superstition', Jahrbuch fur Amerikastudien [Munich], Volume 2, 1957, p88.

¹⁴⁵ T Adorno, 'Punctuation Marks', Notes to Literature, Volume 1, op cit, p94. Then, in that poisonous Cold War environment, Adorno was accused of having edited the classical Marxism out of an edition of Benjamin's letters - M Jay, 'The Permanent Exile of Theodor W. Adorno, Midstream [Australia], Volume 15, Part 10, December 1969, p66.

¹⁴⁶ T Adorno, Prisms, op cit, p34.

¹⁴⁷ T Adorno, 'Freudian Theory', op cit, p134.

¹⁴⁸ D Held, Introduction to Critical Theory. Horkheimer to Habermas (Cambridge, 1980), p72.

¹⁴⁹ M Jay, Dialectical Imagination, op cit, p286.

¹⁵⁰ T Adorno, 'Contemporary German Sociology', Transactions of the Fourth World Congress of Sociology, Volume 1, 1959, p38.

¹⁵¹ Ibid, p34.

¹⁵² T Adorno, 'Reconciliation under Duress' [1961], T Adorno et al, Aesthetics and Politics, (London, 1992), p173.

¹⁵³ G Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel (London, 1971), p22.

¹⁵⁴ G Rose, Melancholy Science, op cit, p127.

¹⁵⁵ T Adorno, 'Biographical Musings' [1959/1963], Notes to Literature, Volume 2, op cit, p25.

¹⁵⁶ R Wiggershaus, Frankfurt School, op cit, p2.

¹⁵⁷ T Adorno, 'Contemporary German Sociology', op cit p38; S Buck-Morss, Negative Dialectics, op cit, p184.

¹⁵⁸ Wiggershaus, Frankfurt School, op cit, p570.

¹⁵⁹ T Adorno, Negative Dialectics, op cit, 204.

¹⁶⁰ T Adorno, 'Culture Industry Reconsidered' [1967], New German Critique, Volume 6, p12.

¹⁶¹ Ibid, p19.

¹⁶² T Adorno, Negative Dialectics, op cit, p172.

¹⁶³ Ibid.

¹⁶⁴ Ibid.

¹⁶⁵ Ibid, p268.

¹⁶⁶ T Adorno, In Search of Wagner, op cit, pp83 See also p103 where a passing reference to 'over-determination' gives us a clue to the later development of Adorno's elitist idealism by Foucault, Althusser and others. See also D Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, op cit, p135; T Adorno and M Horkheimer, Dialectic, op cit, pp120,122,155; T Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Musicop cit, pp5,6,8,9,10,112.

¹⁶⁷ As for the supposedly Marxist conception, 'relative autonomy', that now looks to be a fudge in the Adornian tradition.

¹⁶⁸ T Adorno, Prisms, op cit, p137. See also R Subotnik, 'Adorno's Diagnosis of Beethoven's Late Style: early Symptom of a Fatal Condition', Journal of the American Musicological Society, Volume 29, Number 2, pp242-275; R Subotnik, 'Why is Adorno's Music Criticism the Way It Is? Some Reflections on Twentieth-Century Criticism of Nineteenth-Century Music', Musical Newsletter, Volume 7, Number 4, 1977, pp3-12; M Paddison, Adorno's aesthetics, op cit, pp225-232.

¹⁶⁹ T Adorno, In Search of Wagner, op cit, p156.

¹⁷⁰ T Adorno, 'Music and Language' [1956], Quasi una fantasia, op cit, p2.

¹⁷¹ Ibid, p3.

¹⁷² T Adorno, Sociology of Music, op cit, p18.

¹⁷³ Ibid, p1.

¹⁷⁴ Ibid, p3.

¹⁷⁵ Ibid, p6.

¹⁷⁶ Ibid, p18.

¹⁷⁷ Ibid, p15.

¹⁷⁸ Ibid.

¹⁷⁹ Ibid, p16.

¹⁸⁰ Ibid, p17.

¹⁸¹ Ibid, p6.

¹⁸² Ibid, pp26-27.

¹⁸³ Ibid, p27.

¹⁸⁴ Ibid, p30.

¹⁸⁵ Ibid, pp37-38.

¹⁸⁶ Ibid, p53.

¹⁸⁷ Ibid, p33.

¹⁸⁸ Ibid, p63.

¹⁸⁹ Ibid, p28.

¹⁹⁰ Ibid, p22.

¹⁹¹ Ibid, p131.

¹⁹² Ibid, p155.

¹⁹³ Ibid, p174.

¹⁹⁴ Ibid, p3.

¹⁹⁵ Ibid, pp28,29.

¹⁹⁶ Ibid, p13.

¹⁹⁷ Ibid, p29.

¹⁹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹⁹ Ibid, p30.

²⁰⁰ Ibid, p31.

²⁰¹ Ibid, p32.

²⁰² Ibid, p225.

²⁰³ Ibid, pp55-56.

²⁰⁴ Ibid, pp68-69.

²⁰⁵ Ibid, p69.

²⁰⁶ Ibid.

²⁰⁷ Ibid, p70.

²⁰⁸ I owe this point to Philip Tagg.

²⁰⁹ T Adorno, 'Is Marx Obsolete?', op cit, p6.

²¹⁰ Ibid, p9.

²¹¹ Ibid, p3.

²¹² Ibid, p15.

²¹³ M Jay, 'The Frankfurt School in Exile', Perspectives in American History, 1972, p348.

²¹⁴ M Jay, Dialectical Imagination, op cit, p279.

²¹⁵ T Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op cit, p441.

²¹⁶ Ibid, p153.

²¹⁷ M Jay, 'The Concept of Totality', op cit, p134.

²¹⁸ T Adorno, 'Subject and Object'[1969], A Arato and E Gebhart, Frankfurt School Reader, op cit, p504.

²¹⁹ M Paddison, Adorno's aesthetic, op cit, p289n52.

²²⁰ I owe this interesting comparison to Richard Holland.

²²¹ T Adorno, 'Sociology and Psychology', Part 1,