The melancholy science : an introduction to the thought of Theodor W. Adorno

struable. Yet, as I try to show, Adorno's reuvre forms a unity even though it is composed of fragments. In the last five years all the major works and many of the minor works of Adorno, Lukacs and Benjamin have been translated or are in the process of being translated into English. In spite of this increasing recognition of their importance there exists as yet little systematic study of their work. I have not attempted to be exhaustive in my treatment of Adorno's work. In particular, his writings on music, which constitute over half of his published work, do not receive detailed attention. Although Adorno acknowledged the importance of his collaboration with Horkheimer, his debates with Lukacs and with Benjamin reveal more of the inspiration which structures his thought, and I have therefore concentrated on those aspects. While I argue that Adorno's texts must be read from a methodological point of view with close attention to stylistic features, I have, nevertheless, reconstructed his ideas in standard expository format. ## The Melancholy Science German. These conditions led to Adorno's worst work on jazz and popular culture. ## The Frankfurt School, 1950~69 The history of the Institute in Germany after 1950 is the most important and complex but the least documented. Horkheimer, Adorno and Pollock returned to West Germany and re-established the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Horkheimer became the rector of the University of Frankfurt, and in 1953 Adorno too accepted a chair at the university. Thus the activity of the Institute was no longer to be explicitly divorced from teaching. This turned out to be both an advantage and a disadvantage. It increased the intellectual and political influence of the Institute in the fifties but also contributed to its decline in the sixties. During these two decades the tension between the Institute's role as part of established academia, which it now increasingly became, and as critic of German society was at its most acute. By the mid-sixties the Institute was uncomfortable in many ways, unable to satisfy the state or its students. This has caused its achievement to be underestimated. The story of the School after r 950 is the story of Horkheimer and Adorno and the ideas which they brought back with them from America. While many early members of the Institute had drifted away from it and remained in America after the war, Horkheimer and Adorno had in many ways drawn closer together. 33 They decided to 1\eturn to West Germany, unlike Ernst Bloch and Bertolt Brecht who returned to East Germany, 34 because they were committed to redefining 'critical theory' in a way that would take account of the experience of the previous twen~y years. This meant for them combating the official communism of Eastern Europe as much as fascism and the 'culture industry', which were the social phenomena associated more in their minds with Western Europe and America. The two men took up and propagated a position which defied the terms of the Cold War. They were equally critical of East and West and did not succumb to the ideological excesses characteristic of the period of German reconstruction. This isolated them and the faculties of sociology and philosophy of the University of Frankfurt. Not only did they preserve and continue a Marxist discourse, but they resisted the intellectual tide in Germany which disowned Nietzsche and even, for a period, Max Weber along with most of the tradition of theoretical sociology. By contrast, Lukacs, now in Hungary, discredited both Nietzsche• and Weber and German social thought in general in his book Die ,(erstijrung der Vernurift (The Destruction of Reason). 35 In most West German universities the theoretical tradition in sociology was rejected or ignored, and empirical research methods, copied from American ones, were enthusiastically embraced in order to assess, for example, the effects The Melancholy Science for him. 5 6 At the same time, Adorno was one of the sternest critics of this music from both a musical and a sociological standpoint. 57 Where philosophy and sociology are concerned it is not so easy to distinguish the 'composer' from the 'critic' but it is equally important to do so, for Adorno's criticism of philosophy and sociology is deeply allied to his search for a new style for these enterprises as it is more obviously in the case of his work in music. Adorno's collected works will comprise twenty-two volumes. He wrote in many forms and produced essays, reviews, radio broadcasts, slim volumes of short articles, monographs and long books. Half of his published work is on music. Only two volumes in the collected works are called by their editors 'sociological writings' . 58 The first of these volumes contains Adorno's criticism of sociology, the second, his empirical work. Yet, as the editors warn, the work in these two volumes is not 'merely' sociological, nor do they contain the whole of Adorno's 'sociology'. 59 The philosophical arid sociological principles which structure his criticism of philosophy, sociology, music and literature are always the same. Adorno tried to develop a critique of society by producing a critique of its intellectual and artistic products. Chapter 2 The Search for Style ## Morality and Style It is impossible to understand Adorno's ideas without understanding the ways in which he presents them, that is, his style, and without understanding the reasons for his preoccupation with style. It is, however, Adorno's theory of society which determines his style, and that theory can only be understood if one knows how to read his texts. This chapter is concerned with the relationship between Adorno's ideas and their heterogeneous presentation; the subsequent chapters are concerned with the grounding of the ideas. The glossary included at the end ofthe book may be consulted at this stage for a protreptic account of terms mentioned in this chapter. Adorno explicates his style most fully in the essay Der Essay als F~rm (The Essay as Form), 1 and in the book Minima Moralia. 2 It is in these that his engagement with Nietzsche is most evident. Much of Adorno's critique of philosophy and of sociology is drawn from his reception of Nietzsche's philosophy. Adorno opposed the separation of philosophy from sociology since it amounted, in his opinion, to the separation of substantial issues from the development of methodology and empirical techniques. His own concern with 'method' and 'style' was of a different order. Adorno's 'methods' present seminal ideas; they are not devices imposed on material in order to organise and explain it. 'Method' (and even more 'style') means for him the relation between ideas and the composition of texts. It does not mean devising procedures for applying theories. Adorno's works are exemplars of negative dialectic, that is, they are informed by the idea that concepts, as ordinarily used, are distorting and mask social reality. Adorno thus had to find an alternative way of using Front Matter....Pages i-x The Crisis in Culture....Pages 1-10 The Search for Style....Pages 11-26 The Lament over Reification....Pages 27-51 A Changed Concept of Dialectic....Pages 52-76 The Dispute over Positivism....Pages 77-108 The Dispute over Modernism....Pages 109-137 The Melancholy Science....Pages 138-148 Back Matter....Pages 149-212 Gillian Rose. Includes Indexes. Bibliography: P. [193]-205.