Theodor Adorno

When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.

The phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended. People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them.

Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-09-11 – 1969-08-06) was a German sociologist, philosopher, musicologist and composer.

Quotes

• Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up.
  • On high culture and popular culture, in a letter to with Walter Benjamin (18 March 1936)]

• Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.
  • The Authoritarian Personality (1950), p. 976, co-written with Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford

• Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
  • Kulturkritik findet sich der letzten Stufe der Dialektik von Kultur und Barbarei gegenüber: nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, und das frißt auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmöglich ward, heute Gedichte zu schreiben.
  • Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft [Cultural Criticism and Society] (1951); this quote is more famously known in the forms "No poetry after Auschwitz" or "There can be no poetry after Auschwitz." Sometimes a more specific proscription is made, such as "No lyric poetry after Auschwitz." The influence of the underlying idea can be seen in such derivative statements as "No history after Auschwitz."

• When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.
  • As quoted in The Dialectical Imagination : A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research (1973) by M Jay, p279.

• In general they are intoxicated by the fame of mass culture, a fame which the latter knows how to manipulate; they could just as well get together in clubs for worshipping film stars or for collecting autographs. What is important to them is the sense of belonging as such, identification, without paying particular attention to its content. As girls, they have trained themselves to faint upon hearing the voice of a 'crooner'. Their applause, cued in by a light-signal, is transmitted directly on the popular radio programmes they are permitted to attend. They call themselves 'jitter-bugs', bugs which carry out reflex movements, performers of their own ecstasy. Merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impoverished and barren existence. The gesture of adolescence, which raves for this or that on one day with the ever-present possibility of damning it as idiocy on the next, is now socialized.
  • Perennial fashion — Jazz, as quoted in The Sociology of Rock (1978) by Simon Frith, ISBN 0094602204

• Jazz is the false liquidation of art — instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.
  • Perennial fashion — Jazz, as quoted in The Sociology of Rock (1978) by Simon Frith by Simon Frith

• The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.
  • "Perennial Fashion — Jazz" (1978), Prisms, p. 129, as translated by Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (1981)

• If one is to take Lulu's twelve-tone chord as the integral totality of complementary harmony, then Berg's allegorical genius proves itself within a historical perspective which makes the brain reel: just as Lulu in the world of total illusion longs for nothing but her murderer and finally finds him in that sound, so does all harmony of unrequited happiness long for its fatal chord as the cipher of fulfillment — twelve-tone music is not to be separated from dissonance. Fatal: because all dynamics come to a standstill within it wihout finding release. The law of complementary harmony already implies the end of the musical experience of time, as this was heralded in the dissociation of time according to Expressionistic extremes.
  • Philosophy of Modern Music (1973) as translated by Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster

Culture Industry Reconsidered (1963)

Résumé über Kulturindustrie" - "Culture Industry Reconsidered" as translated by Anson G. Rabinbach in New German Critique 6, (Fall 1975), p. 12-19

• The importance of the culture industry in the spiritual constitution of the masses is no dispensation for reflection on its objective legitimation, its essential being, least of all by a science which thinks itself pragmatic.

• The phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended. People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. They force their eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured. Without admitting it they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all.

• The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness. The order that springs from it is never confronted with what it claims to be or with the real interests of human beings. Order, however, is not good in itself. It would be so only as a good order. The fact that the culture industry is oblivious to this and extols order in abstracto, bears witness to the impotence and untruth of the messages it conveys. While it claims to lead the perplexed, it deludes them with false conflicts which they are to exchange for their own. It solves conflicts for them only in appearance, in a way that they can hardly be solved in their real lives.

External links

• Illuminations - The Critical Theory Project
• Theodor Adorno profile at popcultures.com
• "Odysseus and the Siren Call of Reason : The Frankfurt School Critique of Enlightenment" in Other Voices, n.1 v.1, (1997)
• "Adorno during the 1950s" by Juergen Habermas
• "Context, Theme, and Tone in Adorno’s Writings about Mahler and His Music," in Naturlaut, by Melissa Ursula Dawn Goldsmith
• The Adorno Reference Archive at Marxists.org
• Negative Dialectics at efn.org
• Gravesite