Reading Adorno

Adorno should be read, rather than read about. When friends asked what they should read, it seemed that, opened at random, Adorno can seem daunting, while some of his shorter, more personal pieces are not translated into English. Even in Germany some of his essays are on sale only as part of the complete works.

It is said that Adorno did not intend access to his books to be easy. But neither surely would he have preferred to remain unread. This page is a pointer towards pieces which are available in English and to his books which can either be bought or read in libraries. The passages, all of which are copyright by the publishers and are placed here only as publicity for the books, will be changed from time to time. Suggestions for future inclusion are welcome by email.

Adorno on Music

Adorno's first professional writing was as a gifted music critic. His writing about music remains outstanding. This piece about Richard Strauss was written in 1929 when Adorno was 26 years old. It is translated by Rodney Livingstone in Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, London/NY: Verso; 1992. pp. 34-35.

From my childhood I retain very clear impressions of the associations aroused in my mind by the name of Richard Strauss. I recall the moment when, shrill and very new, it first entered my consciousness where Schubert's Rondo and the Kreutzer Sonata had long since enjoyed a secure place. . . . To me the name of Richard Strauss suggested music that was loud, dangerous and generally bright, rather like industry, or rather what I then imagined factories to look like. It was the child's image of modernity that was set alight by his name. What attracted me were the stories about the rumbustuous plays he had composed which my parents and my aunt had heard. I was attracted even more strongly by their painful refusal to tell me the content of those operas which anyway I was still too young to understand - I had been persuaded that the head in Salome belonged to a calf, and similarly, they had tried to convince me tht all the excitement in Otello was about a handkerchief that had been mislaid.
But more than all this my imagination was kindled by the word Elektra. This word was explosive and full of artificial, seductively evil smells, like a large chemical works close to the town where we lived, whose name sounded very similar. The word glittered cold and white, like electricity, after which it appeared to have been named; a piece of gleaming electrical machinery that poured out chlorine and which only adults could enter, something luminous, mechanical and unhealthy. When at the age of fifteen I got to know some of Strauss's music, it had hardly any connection with that old sense of excitement I had felt and which was comparable to the prospect of an excursion to the Eastern docks. By then I knew about Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner, and was studying the theories of instrumentation. The description of a bass clarinet, an English horn or even the obsolete serpent gave me the same thrill as the self-contained machinery of the mysterious Elektra had done in the past. And in Don Juan and Ein Heldenleben, which I knew directly, I sought only to identify those instruments. Only much later did I notice that the images generated by my imagination in advance of any knowledge actually fitted the music far better than the verification procedures I subsequently conducted. Thus the latent content of a work of art may well be transmitted uniquely in the aura you enter when you touch it, without any real knowledge, whereas it is too encapsulated in the solid kernel of its form to reveal itself to us until that form is shattered.

Theodor Adorno, Motifs, translated by Rodney Livingstone and published in Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, London/NY: Verso; 1992. pages 34-35

The Culture Industry

Adorno is famed for his discovery of what he termed the Culture Industry. His scathing reaction to the claim that businesses merely respond to customer demand has a wider and more topical ring in the era of the supermarket. It comes from Minima Moralia translated by E.F.N. Jephcott.

Section 129. Service to the Customer

The culture industry piously claims to be guided by its customers and to supply them with what they ask for. But while assiduously dismissing any thought of its own autonomy and proclaiming its victims its judges, it outdoes in its veiled autocracy, all the excesses of autonomous art. The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them. It drills them in their attitudes as if it were itself a customer.

Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Jephcott, E. F. N., trans. New York and London: Verso; 1974.
pp.200-201.

Poetry after Auschwitz

People who ask about Adorno want to know the source of his dictum about writing poetry after Auschwitz. Providing them with the date (written in 1949 for a festschrift) and source (published in an Essay on Cultural Criticism and Society in Prisms , p.34) of the quotation may only increase their mystification. The sentence is part of the conclusion to an essay, and reading it on its own may be as fruitless as attempting to understand the last act of Hamlet without having first seen the rest of the play.

This is the opening of the essay, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, the whole of which may be read in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, Camb. Mass.: MIT Press; 1967, p.19.

To anyone in the habit of thinking with his ears, the words ‘cultural criticism (Kulturkritik) must have an offensive ring, not merely because, like automobile’, they are pieced together from Latin and Greek. The words recall a flagrant contradiction. The cultural critic is not happy with civilization, to which alone he owes his discontent. He speaks as if he represents unadulterated nature or a higher historical stage. Yet he is necessarily of the same essence as that to which he fancies himself superior.

Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, Camb. Mass.: MIT Press; 1967, p.19.

Adorno on Philosophy

‘Meditations on Metaphysics: After Auschwitz’, from Negative Dialectics published in Frankfurt in 1966 three years before Adorno died.

In philosophy we experience a shock: the deeper, the more vigorous its penetration, the greater our suspicion that philosophy removes us from things as they are – that an unveiling of the essence might enable the most superficial and trivial views to prevail over the views that aim at the essence. This throws a glaring light on truth itself. In speculation we feel a certain duty to grant the position of a corrective to common sense, the opponent of speculation. Life feeds the horror of a premonition: what must come to be known may resemble the down-to-earth more than it resembles the sublime; it might be that this premonition will be confirmed even beyond the pedestrian realm, although the happiness of thought, the promise of its truth, lies in sublimity alone.

Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans E. B. Ashton. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. p.364

Adorno on Punctuation

Typing Adorno for a Web page, something made possible only by a modern computer, involved disabling its punctuation checker. German rules for writing correctly were and still are rigorously applied; Adorno tackled a problem which in Microsoft Word has become universal.

From ‘Punctuation Marks’ in Notes to Literature, Volume 1. ed. Rolf Tiedemann and trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson. Columbia University Press. 1958. pp. 96-7.

The writer is in a permanent predicament when it comes to punctuation marks; if one were fully aware while writing, one would sense the impossibility of ever using a mark of punctuation correctly and would give up writing altogether. For the requirements of the rules of punctuation and those of the subjective need for logic and expression are not compatible: in punctuation marks the check the writer draws on language is refused payment. The writer cannot trust in the rules which are often rigid and crude; nor can he ignore them without indulging in a kind of eccentricity and doing harm to their nature by calling attention to what is inconspicuous – and inconspicuousness is what punctuation lives by. But if, on the other hand, he is serious, he may not sacrifice any part of his aim to a universal, for no writer today can completely identify with anything universal; he does so only at the price of affecting the archaic. The conflict must be endured each time, and one needs either a lot of strength or a lot of stupidity not to lose heart. At best one can advise that punctuation marks be handled the way musicians handle forbidden chord progressions and incorrect voice leading. With every act of punctuation, like every musical cadence, one can tell whether there is an intention or whether it is pure sloppiness.

Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, Volume 1.ed. Rolf Tiedemann and trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson. Columbia University Press. 1958. pp. 96-7

Friendship and Reminiscence

One of Adorno’s earliest essays was on friendship and throughout his life, as his friends died, Adorno would speak on their acquaintanceship or provide an obituary. Particularly touching are Adorno’s recollections of his teacher, the composer, Alban Berg, after Berg’s untimely death in 1935. This extract from Adorno’s book Alban Berg, 1968, (trans 1991) p. 25, provides a vivid vignette both of Berg and of his entirely impractical pupil.

In the private sphere, too, he liked to challenge life at its most refractory, as symbolized by technical gadgets such as an electric cigarette lighter, typewriter or automobile, with which he was infatuated; technical clumsiness provoked his good-natured derision. He liked giving me advice on how to adjust my typewriter, nor was he above discussing the question of shaving. I, who considered the tedious procedure annoying, would have liked nothing better than a means to remove a beard once and for all, thus saving me the daily aggravation. In the true Altenbergian spirit Berg objected to such rationalism: what women liked about a smoothly shaven face was inseparable from the fact that they could feel the sprouting beard underneath. It was with such nuances that he discovered dialectics for himself. His patient attention to daily routine and his passionate attention to trivial activities because to no small degree a part of his music, the manic perfection of detail. It was precisely because his natural bent, the death instinct, drew him into diffuse, vast dimensions, that he was obsessed with craftsman-like integrity.

Theodor W. Adorno, Alban Berg. Trans. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey, Cambridge : Cambridge U.P., 1991.

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