Adorno.pdf

Review Essay

One Hundred Years of Adorno: Re-Examining Critical

Theory’s Concept of Philosophy of Experience

E RIC O BERLE

( Department of History, Stanford University)

Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics , by J.M. Bernstein. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2001. 478 pp. $70.00 (cloth). ISBN: 0-521-62230-1. $26.00

(paper). ISBN: 0-521-00309-1.

Theodor W. Adorno. Ein letztes Genie , by Detlev Claussen. Frankfurt am Main:

S. Fischer Verlag, 2003. 485 pp. $30.00 (cloth). ISBN: 3-100-10813-2.

“Philosophy,” the Frankfurt intellectual and social critic Theodor Adorno

liked to tell his introductory students, “is at once a discipline and a non-

discipline.” 1 Standing between world-view and science, philosophy must

recognize itself, on the one hand, as nothing more than the extension

of public discourse and culture, drawing on ideas as they exist among

real people living socially and historically; while, on the other hand,

it must strive for a rigor and precision beyond that of mere everyday

language, proving itself to be more self-reﬂective, thus more critical than

the unexamined thought. Behind this seemingly modest deﬁnition of

philosophy stands Adorno’s critique of both modern culture and modern

philosophy, his argument that modern intellectual life, in its tendency

and need to divide thought into disciplines, constantly runs the risk of

self-betrayal: that modern philosophy, in striving to become a science

like mathematics, risks depriving itself of the content it needs in order

to grapple with the actual problems in the world; and, conversely, that

1 Adorno, 1973b:33-44. All translations are my own, though I have supplied page

references when an English edition is available.

Critical Sociology, Volume 30, issue 3

also available online

2004 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden

www.brill.nl

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modern culture, insofar as it becomes purely the realm of specialists selling

their specialty or serving the academic system, loses contact with the very

critical impulses that keep culture alive.

This year, which marks the centenary of Adorno’s birth, might prove

to be the year that the dynamism contained in this idea returns to

the discussion of ‘Adorno’ the cultural ﬁgure and philosopher. That

he should be remembered, thirty years after his death, primarily as a

recondite and forbidding academic specialist, can certainly be attributed

to the very breadth of his oeuvre , which, spanning philosophy, sociology,

musicology, literary criticism, and Marxian political theory, has suffered

from a divided reception among a number of academic ﬁelds. But it

is not only this dialectic of culture and specialization that has obscured

Adorno’s thought. The fact that Adorno collided not simply with the

student protestors of the 1960s, but with many of those who hated the

students and all that they stood for, has made the cultural image of

Adorno – Adorno as a cultural personality 2 –intoasortofcipheronto

which all of the contradictions of the age have been inscribed. Behind

this paradoxical image, the thought has often been obscured. Whether

paradoxically cast as the ‘revolutionary pessimist,’ ‘prudish provocateur,’

the anti-subjective philosopher of subjectivity, or the émigré retourné who

2 Adorno was highly critical of the categories of social perception implied by the idea

of “personality,” and he would have been uncomfortable with his status as an intellectual

“personality,” a person whose thought was often all but eclipsed by their larger-than-life

image. However, he also believed it was difﬁcult to engage with modern intellectual life

without analyzing how the relation between personhood and thought was itself a historically

conditioned. In a short essay entitled “Gloss on Personality,” he interpreted this mass-

media-inﬂected notion of heroic selfhood as something woven into the structures of social

perception. Originally, according to Adorno, the term referred to the Goethean self, whose

individuality (and fame) were the product of a well-rounded education ( Bildung ); but by the

ﬁn-de-siècle , the term’s meaning had drifted toward the invocation of “personality” as a form

of charismatic power. By the late 1950s, when the essay was written, it implied a media-,

sex-, money- or power-“appeal” in which commingled the glamour of the army general,

the robber baron and the ﬁlm star. “Personality” meant, in other words, the perception

of subjectivity through the schema of the culture industry, and in this sense Adorno was

clearly sharply critical of the idea. And yet, argued Adorno, one must acknowledge that the

public worshiped its “personalities” because their very existence seemed to promise a sense

of freedom not available to most members of society. Behind the appeal of “personality,”

Adorno saw a longing for individual freedom, which he thought could still (though only

with considerable effort on the part of individuals) be reconnected with the idea of Bildung.

In this sense, “personality” was for Adorno a historical category for understanding the

role of public ﬁgures, including that of the modern intellectual, and it could be used

in a broad sense to analyze the problem of intellectual freedom and experience. See

Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften (hereafter cited as AGS), 1970, Vol. 10.2:639-644. In English,

see Adorno (1998:161-165).

Review Essay •

783

failed to understand America, Jazz, politics, or the summer of love, the

clichéd image of Adorno has too frequently dominated even the most

sophisticated readings of his individual works and the most promising

discussions of his ideas.

The two works under review transform both the specialized and the

cultural understanding of Adorno – the one by bringing the reader closer to

the lived relation between Adorno’s thought and the historical context with

which it engaged, the other by forcefully reintroducing Adorno’s thought to

a philosophical world that has changed considerably since his death. Detlev

Claussen’s Theodor W. Adorno: Ein Letztes Genie ( Theodor W. Adorno: Last Genius )

presents a biographical portrait of Adorno as cultural ﬁgure that adeptly

traces and analyzes Adorno’s activities across many specialized endeavors

by framing his work in terms of historical, political and philosophical

concepts. J.M. Bernstein’s book, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics , attempts

to systematize Adorno’s philosophy by interpreting the Frankfurt thinker’s

major works in terms of a genre that would have struck Adorno as

quite foreign, that sub-specialty of modern analytical philosophy which

describes itself as ‘ethics’ or ‘moral philosophy.’ Whereas Claussen’s work

distinguishes itself by placing Adorno within a rich historical-conceptual

context, Bernstein’s work, by revealing the tensions inherent in trying to

bring Adorno in line with the current academic discussion, casts light on

the limits of modern ethical theory, and thus on the difﬁculties and promise

of sustaining Adorno’s original intellectual framework today.

Though Claussen’s Letztes Genie takes the biography as its dominant

form, it is a thoroughly philosophical work in the best Adornian sense.

Less a day-to-day account of Adorno’s life than a series of tightly-woven

biographical essays exploring Adorno’s thought in relation to society and

experience, Letztes Genie recasts the image of Adorno the specialist – the

philosopher, sociologist, musician, and literary critic – by demystifying

the person. Presenting Adorno’s early experience in terms of a series of

intellectual friendships, Claussen examines the ideas that tied Adorno the

thinker to the world by presenting those ideas as lived experience – as

dialog with others, as engagement with historical events, as a desire for

artistic and individual self-expression, as an attempt to come to terms with

anger, limitation, violence, and discrimination.

Deﬁning an intellectual biography as a series of engagements with

individuals and events that unfold in the medium of ideas, Claussen

argues that a historical and philosophical analysis of Adorno can illuminate

the experiential content of what historian Eric Hobsbawm has termed

the “short twentieth century,” that period encompassing world wars

and revolutions, Holocaust and GULag, the ﬁnal destruction of the

old European social structures and the establishment of modern social

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democracy (Hobsbawm 1994). Adorno, whose thought developed out of

the ‘high culture’ of the nineteenth century, sought to transform it by

bringing it to bear on the barbarity of the twentieth. He did so, argues

Claussen, for two reasons: out of hope of coming to terms with the

past as that which structures and limits the exercise of freedom, and

out of a personal need to understand his own sense of guilt as one of

those who escaped the Holocaust. Adorno’s lasting accomplishment as a

thinker was to serve as a mediator of traditions which, though broken,

contained much worthy of being preserved. In this sense, Claussen sees

the historical and philosophical interpretation of Adorno’s life as a way

to understand the still-viable dimensions of German-speaking intellectual

life in the twentieth century, as it survived and was transformed through

a true ‘inner emigration,’ that of those German- and German-Jewish

intellectuals who were forced into exile as a consequence of Hitler’s rise to

power.

Letztes Genie ’s mode of historical argumentation cultivates the middle

ground between sociological and literary conceptuality, intermingling the

two to reconstruct the historical relation between individual expectation

and social self-awareness. In a beautiful opening chapter on Adorno’s

early years, Claussen places the individual life in the context of broader,

transindividual developments. Adorno’s early life is presented as an éducation

sentimentale , in which society and its tensions are illuminated by the

ambitions and illusions of one of its most brilliant but wayward sons. This

narrative tells the story of ‘Teddie,’ the young hot-house ﬂower, whose

strong identiﬁcation with German high culture is read both globally – in

terms of broad demographic and historical patterns within the German

cultural lands on the one hand and European Jewry on the other –

and locally, in terms of the speciﬁc historical position of Frankfurt’s

Jewish community and its internal divisions. Exploring the historical

dialectic of modernization, secularization and assimilation in terms of

the cultural geography of Frankfurt, Claussen discovers the history of

Jewish emancipation and self-delusion in the histories of public and private

places, of homes in cities and vacation spots, of places of business and

public schools. A story of Frankfurt as both a sheltered province and a

place very much undergoing historical transformation, Claussen’s narrative

offers what one might call an alternative, German-Jewish version of the

narrative of bourgeois transformation and illusion depicted in Thomas

Mann’s Buddenbrooks . Mann’s epic of fathers and sons in the nineteenth

century, itself animated by the tension between artist and bourgeois, is

in fact discernable in the lifeworld of ﬁn-de-siècle Frankfurt. And yet, as

Claussen shows, Mann’s epic would look quite different if extended to the

twentieth century, or if it were made to account for the quite different

Review Essay •

785

tensions at play between German and Jewish dimensions of self-perception

and culture.

Adorno, who was fourteen years old when World War I ended and

the modernist cultural revolution began to unfold, was one of the last

intellectuals of the nineteenth century and, in turn, one of the ﬁrst of the

twentieth. Born too late to serve in the war, but early enough to belong to

the intellectual generation that did, he was often regarded as a Wunderkind

who lacked either the sobriety or the radicalism of those who, after being

called to defend Kaiser und Heimat , were condemned to suffer patriotic

disillusionment alongside the rise of political anti-Semitism. For Claussen,

however, it was precisely Adorno’s quality as a late-bloomer that allowed

him to play the role he did. Because Adorno matured in exile – in the

years he spent in England and America between 1933 and 1950 – he had

the opportunity to think through both his own experience and that of the

twentieth century more generally, raising questions of exile and alienation,

social class and nationalism, Jewish self-perception and aesthetic alterity

up to the level of theory. His relative youth, in turn, allowed Adorno to

serve as one of the most important conduits for the return of culture – and

cultural criticism – after its failure in 1933 and its nadir in the barbarity of

Auschwitz.

As Letztes Genie offers a challenge to the big narratives of intellectual

life of German-speaking countries in the nineteenth and twentieth century,

it works to overturn the clichés concerning Adorno in particular. The

individual chapters in Letztes Genie are devoted to interpreting Adorno’s

theoretical and personal engagements with a number of key ﬁgures – most

prominently, Thomas Mann and Fritz Lang, Bertolt Brecht and Hans

Eisler, Sigfried Kracauer and Max Horkheimer, Ernst Bloch and Georg

Lukàcs – in a historical, cultural and philosophical context. Intellectually,

these ﬁgures, themselves some of the brightest stars in the ﬁrmament of

Weimar culture, serve as Adorno’s interlocutors as he works his way toward

overcoming the Weimar mistake of equating politics and culture and seeks

out a philosophy that grasps the relations between these spheres of modern

life through historical reﬂection and conceptual mediation. Using, for

example, a discussion of Adorno’s friendship with Fritz Lang to discuss the

machinations of Hollywood ﬁlm-making in the 1940s, the German émigré

experience, and the argument the infamous “Culture Industry” chapter of

Dialectic of Enlightenment , Claussen presents many of the most difﬁcult ideas

in Adorno’s philosophy in terms of the shared experiences that prompted

them. This approach makes Letztes Genie particularly adept at shedding

light on some of the less understood periods of Adorno’s history and of

the Frankfurt School. Besides the excellent chapters on Adorno’s youth in

Frankfurt and on the exile community in Hollywood, Letztes Genie does an

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