7—
Theodor W. Adorno:
An Intellectual Memoir

By Leo Lowenthal

Adorno was a genius, and his work, which is now published in more than twenty volumes, encompasses the intellectual universe of Western civilization, concentrating on but not limited to philosophy, the social sciences, musicology, and significant events of public life. It would be absurd for me to try to convey a systematic summary of Adorno's unique enterprise. Rather, I shall discuss it in a fragmentary style. In doing so, I find myself in tune with Adorno's own approach: to disavow consistently any legitimacy for a system. The famous Dialectic of Enlightenment, written with his friend Max Horkheimer, has the German subtitle Philosophische Fragmente [Philosophical Fragments], which was unfortunately omitted in the English version. His first writings on Richard Wagner were entitled "Fragments on Richard Wagner," and many of his books were called "notes" or "essays" or something similar. Adorno looked to Nietzsche, Karl Kraus, and Walter Benjamin as models of

this literary form. The style has a characteristic open-ended, probing quality, and its format is essayistic, aphoristic, or fragmentary. In Adorno's case it was justified by his famous philosophical bon mot on Hegel's system: "The whole is the false."

We met in late 1922, brought together by the eminent writer, philosopher, and sociologist Siegfried Kracauer. Ten years later we found ourselves working together in the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, and we continued a close association for about twenty years. Our relationship was stormy at times, as is almost unavoidable in a community of high-strung intellectuals. It fills me with emotion to find, for instance, that Martin Jay, who is by now the preeminent historian of our Institute, in an article called "Adorno and Kracauer: Notes on a Troubled Friendship" (a subtitle that ironically might serve as a proper characterization for the mutual relationships of all of us) noted that in 1927 Adorno "brooded over his chances for successful habilitation and complained about his rivalry with a mutual friend, Leo Lowenthal, in the ranks of the Frankfurt Institute"; or that four years later, in 1931, "possibilities of Kracauer contributing to the new Institute journal were discussed, with Adorno lamenting that his hands were tied by Leo Lowenthal, whom he described as 'king of the desert' [Wüstenkönig ] at the Institute."^[1] Well, I never had a crown, and Adorno gained his professorial appointment.

Maintaining a fragmentary format, I would first like to discuss the areas and problems on which Adorno and I either engaged in brotherly collaboration or shared scholarly interests, and then I would like to make some observations on the frequently rebellious criticism raised by some of his students and disciples.

[1] Martin Jay, "Adorno and Kracauer: Notes on a Troubled Friendship," in Jay, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York, 1985), p. 222.

As some of you know, the Institute continued the publication of its journal—which originated in 1932 in Germany, where it lasted only one year—first in Geneva and then in New York as an essentially German-language outlet for our work. It was, in the true sense of the word, a joint enterprise, because all the major articles were subject to critical scrutiny by the entire group. To give a personal example, in 1937 I published an essay on Knut Hamsun with the subtitle "A Prehistory of the Authoritarian Ideology," at a time when Hamsun's membership in the Norwegian Nazi-Quisling Party was still unknown. Adorno wrote a lengthy footnote for my essay, in which he drew close parallels between Hamsun and Sibelius, whose music expressed similar elements of contempt for men oppressed in the glorification of a rigid, pantheistically colored concept of nature. Collaborative closeness is also documented by the first three theses on anti-Semitism that are incorporated in the Dialectic of Enlightenment and, above all, by our studies in the seductive and potentially dangerous devices of the American fascist agitator. This work culminated in my book Prophets of Deceit, to which Adorno anonymously contributed a draft of an introduction in addition to copious substantive comments and suggestions. Conversely, I had the privilege of participating in the original draft of the research plan for the famous Authoritarian Personality, on which Adorno was a senior author, and of contributing my own comments and suggestions on his chapters of this monumental work. In a similar spirit of collegial and intellectual solidarity, Adorno wrote the major text of a section in an essay of mine on popular culture, which we properly called "Some Theses on Critical Theory and Empirical Research."

It is indeed in this area of popular or mass culture—or, as Adorno called it, "the culture industry"—that our interests frequently converged. It is, by the way, not without irony that many topics for this symposium mention Adorno's work on mass culture, a term that

he, with his discriminatory perception for linguistic nuances, intensely disliked. In 1967 he expressly stated this in a postscript to the essay published in the Dialectic of Enlightenment twenty years earlier:

The term "culture industry" was perhaps used for the first time in the book Dialectic of Enlightenment, which Horkheimer and I published in Amsterdam in 1947. In our drafts we spoke of "mass culture." We replaced that expression with "culture industry" in order to exclude from the outset the interpretation agreeable to its advocates: that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art. From the latter the culture industry must be distinguished in the extreme.^[2]

I am proud that Adorno approved and used my shorthand definition of fascist agitation as well as culture industry as "psychoanalysis in reverse," that is, as more or less constantly manipulated devices to keep people in permanent psychic bondage, to increase and reinforce neurotic and even psychotic behavior culminating in perpetual dependency on a "leader" or on institutions or products. We both saw modern anti-Semitism and culture industry as ultimately belonging in the same social context even though at times they go different political ways. What is at stake here, as Adorno never grew tired of repeating, is the ever-increasing difficulty of genuine experience mediated primarily through art, whose independence and integrity has been increasingly sabotaged by the sophisticated apparatus of social manipulation and domination. Significant is the inexorable paralysis of productive imagination and artistic experience leading to a conversion of cognitive effects into sales psychology. Culture industry provides the inescapable commodity charac-

[2] Theodor W. Adorno, "Culture Industry Reconsidered," New German Critique 6 (Fall 1975): 12.

ter of all its products and imperceptibly extinguishes the differences among these products themselves and the general or specific advertising purposes for which they are created. We agreed that the culture establishment refused to take any responsibility by ignoring completely the meaning of mass culture and conveniently indicting its technology alone for its miserable productions; we agreed that the dividing line between art and commodity culture must not be obfuscated and that the unholy alliance of social domination with the naked profit motive hardly promotes a state of consciousness in which, in Adorno's words, Freizeit would turn into Freiheit —leisure into freedom.

I would like to let Adorno speak with his own words, first in regard to the dividing line between art and culture industry: "The entire practice of the culture industry transfers the profit motive naked onto cultural forms. . . . The autonomy of works of art, which of course rarely ever predominated in an entirely pure form, and was always permeated by a constellation of effects, is tendentially eliminated by the culture industry, with or without the conscious will of those in control."^[3] I might add as a melancholic personal comment that I find it ever more difficult to persuade my students, despite their predominantly radical persuasion, to accept these irreconcilable differences—another illustration of how the infamous positivist value-neutrality is affecting and infecting the best of us.

Adorno stressed the inescapable fate of people to succumb to the culture industry whether they want it or not:

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

[3] Ibid., p. 13.

which is nonetheless transparent to them. . . . 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.^[4]

It was once a theoretical dream of our inner circle that, in addition to the social theme of authority, we would engage in a joint study of all aspects of the decay of the essence and concept of the individual in bourgeois society and its conversion to mere illusion and ideology. However, whereas the theme of authority received profuse elaboration in what are now almost classic books, that of the individual remained merely a guiding perspective. Adorno, for instance, continually emphasized the hollow cult of the so-called personality and the exultation of the allegedly autonomous individual in the era of monopoly capitalism. I pursued the same theme in my own studies on the literary genre of biography—in this country as well as in Europe—and its role as a sham device that pretended human specificity when in fact the true meaning of the particular has been perverted. When I wrote on the cultural changes in the selection and treatment of biographies in popular magazines, from what I called "heroes of production" to "heroes of consumption," Adorno admonished me in a letter of November 1942 to emphasize the theoretical function of biographies in present society and particularly within the context of mass culture. He said, and I could not agree more, that "ultimately, the very concept of life as a self-developing and meaningful unity has as little reality today as the concept of the individual, and it is the ideological function of the biographies to conjure up the fiction on arbitrarily selected models that there is still such a thing as life. . . . Life itself in its completely abstract appearance has become mere ideology."

While my own emphasis in the analysis of this trivial genre was on the shallow solace it offered the politically impotent and histor-

[4] Ibid., p. 16. (Translation emended.)

ically disoriented middle classes in Europe before the advent of fascism, Adorno's profound reflections stressed the awesome paradox that the same apparatus of culture industry that extinguishes private idiosyncratic consciousness falls all over itself in an endless praise of personality and individuality. In his words, culture industry's "ideology above all makes use of the star system, borrowed from individualistic art and its commercial exploitation. The more dehumanized its methods of operation . . . the more diligently and successfully the culture industry propagates supposedly great personalities and operates with heartthrobs."^[5] Narcissistic as it may sound to some of you, this report of brotherly collaboration and intellectual exchanges should be understood solely as a foil: I wish to bring into relief Adorno's great contribution to a critical understanding of modern society's inescapable network of domination and of its seemingly inescapable reinforcement of the psyche of man, without which this very mechanism of domination would cease to be effective. This theme inspired his continual admonition: "Don't participate"—arguably the leitmotif of his life's work, against which all the weakness of personality or idiosyncracies of life-style weigh very little.

Thinking about Adorno's merciless, but always theoretically founded, indictment of the social phenomena themselves, as well as their faulty, distorted, and manipulated pseudo-interpretations in bourgeois philosophy, social research, and literary criticism—just to name a few of the dubious intellectual enterprises—I cannot help but be reminded of the original theological meaning of the Greek term skandalon . Every thought he ever had and every word he ever said created a new Ärgernis [irritant] for his foes and friends alike.

At this point I would like to break off my brotherly tribute to this genius, whose much too early demise might not be unconnected to the skandalon he adhered to without compromise until the end at his post as Germany's most prominent academic teacher and outstand-

[5] Ibid., p. 14.

ing citizen of the Western European avant-garde. He would have been the first to understand that the implacability implied in each of the intellectual positions he held needed constant refinement and defense against facile acceptance by followers and angry misinterpretations by adversaries. Nothing is more ironic than the term "Frankfurt School," which presupposes a body of learnable statements and doctrines that one could live with, comfortably or uneasily—whatever the case might be—henceforth. I truly believe that no one who, either directly or indirectly, belonged to our circle at its beginnings over a half century ago would ever have felt comfortable with this term. As a matter of fact, the by now indeterminably large corpus of books, articles, doctoral theses, symposia, and seminars has almost "industrialized" the Frankfurt School; many of these works seem to be little short of talmudic disputations about the meaning of this or that theorem at different periods or about the relation of this or that writer or scholar in this or another phase. When Adorno chose as the subtitle of his first major collection of fragments and aphorisms the words "Reflections from Damaged Life," he did not offer to repair such damage. But many, if not most, of his disciples—indeed, students of all shades of the school—could not and cannot accept the absence of political and cultural remedies. I cannot help but think that their call for action is not so far removed from the all-pervasive advocacy of fashionable pseudo-psychological cures that are about to poison many of our contemporaries. If I appear irate, you are not misreading me, but it is an ire grounded in compassion for the restless youth and the now equally restless middle-aged who have looked in vain to Adorno for salvation; he was not, and did not want to be, a messiah.

In stressing some of their collective misreadings, I may perhaps be able to add to an understanding of Adorno's intellectual heritage. I start with the ad hominem argument: Adorno as a human being. One of the most popular objections to radical thinkers has been the vulgar argument that they should practice what they preach—although they are not really preaching anything—by staying away

from all the amenities of the good life. Brecht's comments on the financial resources of the Institute and the upper-class backgrounds of some of its principal members (which I believe to be in poor taste) are well known. I take more seriously the elegant observation of Lukács, who, in the preface to a new edition of his Theory of the Novel in 1962, commented as follows:

A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the "Grand Hotel Abyss," which I described in connection with my critique of Schopenhauer as "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 entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered."^[6]

I have never heard that miserable living conditions and substandard nutrition are necessary prerequisites for innovative thought. If Marx and Nietzsche at times suffered insults of material deprivation, their theoretical creativity survived, not because of but despite such painful conditions. I might also add that Georg Lukács found his own ways of comfortable survival in a political environment where many other heretic Marxists, who were not privy to Lukács's strategy of adaptive behavior, had their heads chopped off. This is an example of an older contemporary, though, not of a "rebellious son." The sons' favorite outcry, to which all of us have been exposed at times, is against the cardinal sin of what they call "elitism." In a lengthy essay by W. V. Blomster entitled "Sociology of Music: Adorno and Beyond" there is a section called "Adorno: ad personam":

In an age when psychological interpretations of almost all phenomena are irresistible, it is astonishing that so few ques-

[6] Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), p. 22.

tions have been asked about the man Adorno and the degree to which his own psychological constitution might have conditioned—indeed, limited—his work in music. Although this may seem at best a peripheral concern within this study, several observations demand inclusion here. . . . There are moments of uneasiness in working with Adorno when one finds in his position the imprint of that "authoritarian personality" which he himself fought so vehemently. . . . Little remains to be said upon Adorno's elitism and snobbishness; precisely in his work in music, however, it is felt that a greater humility might have vastly increased his effectiveness.^[7]

Blomster is in error. The litany about elitism has been sung for a long time in many quarters, young and old, particularly when it comes to the considerable demands made upon the reader to engage in great efforts to follow the thought but not the thinker. I will return to this issue toward the end of this essay. May it suffice for the moment that it is exactly this kind of biographical and psychological reductionism that Adorno always opposed in his extensive studies of the literary arts (I might say, I learned a good deal from him whenever I succumbed to an ad hominem shortcut in my own critical work in literature).

I take more seriously a second paradigm, according to which Adorno cut the connection between theory and practice so sacred to Marxist doctrine. Hans-Jürgen Krahl, for a short while a prominent spokesman of the German New Left before he died in a tragic accident, took Adorno to task for allegedly cutting this umbilical cord. Although, according to Krahl, Adorno understood the ideological contradictions of bourgeois individualism and his "intellectual biography is marked by the experience of fascism," he nevertheless remained entrapped in the very contradictions he overtly diagnosed.

[7] W. V. Blomster, "Sociology of Music: Adorno and Beyond," Telos, no. 28 (Summer 1976): 109.

Adorno's cutting critique on the ideological existence of the bourgeois individual irresistibly trapped him in its ruin. But this would mean that Adorno had never really left the isolation that emigration imposed on him. . . . Production of abstract labor is mirrored in his intellectual subjectivism. This is why Adorno was not able to translate his private compassion for the wretched of the earth into an integral partisanship of his theory toward the liberation of the oppressed.^[8]

It seems to me that Adorno gave the correct answer with his often-quoted sarcastic observation that he did not know that Critical Theory had given license to throwing Molotov cocktails. True, had Adorno and his friends manned the barricades, they might very well have been immortalized in a revolutionary song by Hanns Eisler. But imagine for a moment Marx dying on the barricades in 1849 or 1871: there would be no Marxism, no advanced psychological models, and certainly no Critical Theory. The call to arms the ultraradical disciples directed at their teachers—legitimate as their intentions may have been—has merely produced excesses, the consequences of which have become only too obvious in the troubled state the New Left finds itself in today.

This leads to another, more serious, aspect of this perverted rebellion. In an introduction to a short piece by Adorno called "Culture Industry Reconsidered," Andreas Huyssen, an editor of New German Critique, in fall 1975 endorsed Hans Mayer's misguided formulation about Adorno's "secret hostility toward history."^[9] I do not want to be disrespectful of Hyssen, whose good intentions are shown in his praise of Adorno as "one of the first to use critical Marxist thought to illuminate Western mass culture,

[8] Hans-Jürgen Krahl, "The Political Contradictions in Adorno's Critical Theory," Telos, no. 21 (Fall 1974): 164.

[9] Andreas Huyssen, "Introduction to Adorno," New German Critique 6 (Fall 1975): 3; Mayer's charge is made in Der Repräsentant une die Märtyrer (Frankfurt am Main, 1971), p. 165.

which for years had been dismissed by conservative culture critics with elitist moralizing"; however, his reproach of Adorno, that he "consistently avoided historic specificity in his work," is plainly absurd. There seems to be an attempt on the part of these youthful followers (or nonfollowers) to demand an activist pseudo-historic participation, almost on a day-to-day basis and in a spirit of team-dictated partisanship. At least, that is how I interpret Huyssen's condescending remark that, although Adorno's "thought unmistakably developed in reaction to critical events," his hostility to history was nonetheless severe: "This hostility in turn reflects his rejection of the determinate negation as a key concept of the philosophy of history and indicates his insistence on negativity and refusal as crucial elements of a modern aesthetic."^[10] This perplexes me! Every member of the Institute's inner circle not only was immersed in Hegelian philosophy and the classical aspects of Marxian dialectics but also continuously emphasized "determinate negation" as the key concept of any critical theory. Huyssen himself, a few pages later, after the first outburst seemed forgotten, correctly quoted the following words from Adorno's essay "Culture and Administration":

The authentic cultural object must retain and preserve whatever goes by the wayside in that process of increasing domination over nature which is reflected in expanding rationality and ever more rational forms of domination. Culture is the perennial protestation of the particular against the general, as long as the latter remains irreconcilable with the particular.^[11]

I do not really know how to explain this vogue of vague accusations except as what I suspect to be an understandable "morning-after" malaise in the wake, and at the wake, of the student

[10] Huyssen, "Introduction to Adorno," pp. 4–5.

[11] Theodor W. Adorno, "Culture and Administration," Telos, no. 37 (Fall 1978): 97. (Translation emended.)

movement. When hope for radical political change in our day or tomorrow collapsed, Critical Theory offered itself to many of the young as a convenient scapegoat. To the great pain and sorrow of its creators and practitioners, above all Adorno, it was forgotten that critical thought itself is adequate practice. It clashes with and is resisted by the cultural and, in part, political establishment, which always wants to convert the skandalon of nonconformist theory into a mere scandalous aberration and to recommend—and, if possible, contribute to—the liquidation of leaders and followers of Critical Theory. In that respect, Adorno's work and life in post-Hitler Germany serve as eloquent testimony to his historical sensitivity and his knowledge that only by a determined no, which he so admirably practiced, could historical progress and regression be kept alive in critical consciousness.

The attempts to catch Adorno in his alleged contradictions caused by lapses in historical consciousness are a continuation of my theme of filial rebellion. The same Mr. Huyssen perceived an irreconcilable contradiction between an Adorno who spoke, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, of the autonomous individual as "a phenomenon of the bourgeois past" and one who, in his later essay "Culture Industry Reconsidered," allegedly revived this "autonomous individual" as a "precondition for democratic society." But if one reads the text carefully, it becomes apparent that, first of all, Adorno never intended to "reconsider" his theory of cultural industry but rather, as the German text clearly states, to write a "résumé," that is, a summing up of what he explicated, with Horkheimer, in the original essay. Furthermore, Adorno expressly says at the end of the new essay that culture industry's anti-enlightenment and mass deception has "turned into a means for fettering consciousness." He then dialectically states that autonomous individuals would only develop if there were no culture industry "obstructing the emancipation for which human beings could be "—not, as a translator incorrectly renders it, are —"as ripe as the productive forces of the epoch permit." The point here is unmistakable:

capitalism will not provide the emancipation that, according to every good Marxist, including Adorno, would technically be possible every day, since "the productive forces" would allow the termination of misery and domination. In contrast to his critic, Adorno remained rather melancholic, if not desperate, about the seemingly unresolvable—for the time being at least—intertwining of the establishment and its nonautonomous subjects (in the true sense of the term subjection ). This is the opposite of a "retraction" of the original thesis of "enlightenment as an instrument of rationalized domination and oppression."

More painful even than the eagerness to trip Adorno in contradictions is the eagerness to take him to task for overlooking some very obvious historical phenomena. In a recent book by Otto Karl Werckmeister, Ende der Ästhetik, which, to my knowledge, has not been translated, we read:

When Adorno until the very end defended modern art [meaning avant-garde art] against an imagined front of cultural conservatism, as if modern art still needed social certification, he missed the consequences of its complete assimilation in the late-capitalist culture. Culture and police both watch over the borderline of reality and art. On this side of the border, Adorno's negative-utopian glorification of art and the affirmative ideological function of art in bourgeois culture are much closer to each other than Adorno's concept of their absolute contradiction.^[12]

To this schoolmasterly reprimand for having failed to do his homework, I can only say that the whole theory of avant-garde modern art, in which Adorno was really the leader of our group, consists precisely in defending the thesis that avant-garde art is the only reservoir of genuine human experience, and therefore of opposi-

[12] Otto Karl Werckmeister, Ende der Ästhetik (Frankfurt am Main, 1971), p. 31.

tional consciousness, which itself is in constant danger of being suffocated through the loving profit-tentacles of the culture industry. Indeed, nobody was more aware than Adorno of the enormous dangers to the survival of "auratic" art (to use Benjamin's term).

Let me give you one last example of this chorus of critics (some of whom, I am sorry to say, I cannot differentiate from Beckmesser in the Meistersinger ). It is fairly well known that Adorno's work in musicology and the philosophy and sociology of music developed the theory of the indispensable unity of performance and the intent of the composition. In particular, he spent a good deal of his efforts demonstrating the distortion of serious music by the technology of electronic reproduction, including, but not limited to, broadcasting and recording. I am not a musicologist, but I know something about the necessary relationship of a work of art and the social frame within which it is presented or performed, and I must assume by analogy that the horrors of televised Shakespeare are comparable to the distortion of musical listening of which Adorno speaks. (It is, by the way, at this juncture that I would like to say that I believe in the superiority of Adorno's aesthetic theories over those of Walter Benjamin. But this is a topic for others to ponder.) In a slick German literary journal I found a review of volume fourteen of Adorno's writings in German—which, incidentally, came out not too long ago in English under the title Introduction to the Sociology of Music . The reviewer, Helmut Heissenbüttel, did not like Adorno's typology of the music listener, and he quickly expressed regret that poor Adorno did not live to the day when the recording industry permitted variations of musical interpretation through the plethora of available records. This, he believed, is now possible thanks to the enormous accessibility to recorded performances composers have provided of their works, which are codified in record catalogs. Heissenbüttel cited with approval the so-called Bielefelder Catalog, "which appears every year with semi-annual supplements," and he reminded readers that in America the Schwann Record and Tape Guide appears every month. Missing heretofore, then, were reliable

guides that listed not only what was available but also what to select and why to select it. This gap has now been filled. I quote from Ulrich Schreiber's Schallplatten Jahrbuch I [Record Yearbook I]:

What is decisive for the listing of a record in this guide is not its market value but the contribution it makes to the formation of knowledge about the composer, about an epoch in the history of music, about musical interpreters and strategies of interpretation. Thus a record [Schallplatte ] is here being taken seriously as an aesthetic, not an economic, phenomenon. For the first time, a comprehensive attempt is being made in German to assign to the record its significance in musical life and to use the medium "record" for a demonstration of changes in the history of musical tasks and consciousness. The records that we recommend for the reader of this guide do not add up to an eternal inventory of classical music, nor are they merely commodities for consumption. It is the essential task of this book to mediate meaningfully between false extremes.

I can only marvel at Heissenbüttel and his uncritical endorsement of Schreiber's thinly veiled industrial enterprise, this epitome of what Adorno called manipulated listening, gegängelte Musik . This naïveté is topped by an insult: Heissenbüttel spoke of Adorno as a caricature of the expert who has now been replaced by a true "leader," the Schallplattenführer —in short, Leader Schreiber. Some of us have always been critical of guidelines as predigested experience of works of art, enterprises that, of course, only serve the purpose of rendering the oppositional character of the artwork into a harmless, so-called aesthetic experience.

Let me juxtapose Schreiber's words on the merits of a Schall-plattenführer with a Time-Life Corporation advertisement, which guarantees that

though your time may be limited, you will be reading widely and profitably . . . books that are truly timeless in style

and significance. This plan draws its strength from the fact that the editors spent thousands of hours finding the answers to questions that you, too, must have asked yourself many times. . . . It is part of their job to single out the few books that tower over all others. In each case, the editors will write special introductions to underline what is unique in the book, what impact it has had or will have, what place it has earned in literature and contemporary thought. . . . The books will be bound in durable, flexible covers similar to those used for binding fine Bibles and Missals.

I invite the audience to make a comparative content analysis between the shrewd public relations agents of the Time-Life Corporation and the Heissenbüttel-Schreiber alliance.

On this note I shall terminate my sampling of manifestations of oedipal rebellion against Adorno. I would like to say one final word about comments that persist from all quarters about the difficulty of reading Adorno.^[13] It is true, Adorno's texts are very difficult. He never intended to make it easy for his professional and intellectual colleagues or for all his readers and listeners. He would not tolerate—another variation of the Adorno skandalon —that what he had to say should ever fit into a mode of easy consumption. On the contrary, the demands he made of himself and his audience are only another variation of his theme of striving for genuine experience in production as well as in received productive imagination. His sense of responsibility for language, his hostility to the all-embracing emergence of a one-dimensional, nonconnotative, unambiguous language of efficiency and predigested derivative thought that leaves no room for the unique and idiosyncratic, for productive imagination and the dissenting voice, reminds me of a letter Coleridge wrote to his friend Southey almost a hundred and seventy

[13] I am well aware that this criticism is often raised against Western Marxism as a whole.

years ago, defending his style of "obscurity" and contrasting it "with the cementless periods of the modern Anglo-Gallican style, which not only are understood beforehand, but, being free from . . . all the books and eyes of intellectual memory, never oppress the mind by any after recollections, but, like civil visitors, stay a few moments, and leave the room quite free and open for the next comers."^[14] I do not know whether Adorno knew of this letter, but I am sure he would have smiled with approval if I had told him about Coleridge's praise of "obscurity" as a witty rejection of linguistic consumerism. And so we come to another thinker who was, like Adorno, the embodiment of the skandalon, Friedrich Nietzsche. In his preface to The Dawn, he wrote:

I have not been a philologist in vain; perhaps I am one yet: a teacher of slow reading. I have even come to write slowly. At present it is not only my habit, but even my taste, a perverted taste maybe, to write nothing but what will drive to despair everyone who is in a hurry. . . . Philology is now more desirable than ever before . . . it is the highest attraction and incitement in an age of "work," that is to say, of haste, of unseemly and immoderate hurry-scurry, which is intent upon "getting things done" at once, even every book, whether old or new. Philology itself, perhaps, will not "get things done" so hurriedly; it teaches how to read well, that is, slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar, with delicate fingers and eyes.^[15]

Those of us who knew Adorno will always carry this image of him with us: his "mental doors ajar," and touching everything he did "with delicate fingers and eyes."

[14] Coleridge to Southey, October 20, 1809; in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford, 1959), vol. 3, p. 790.

[15] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day, trans. Johanna Volz (London, 1910), pp. xxviii–xxix. (Translation emended.)