Remembering Adorno

John Abromeit
Arpil 2004
Radical Philosophy

In his sociology of religion, but also in his analyses of bureaucracy in modern societies, Max Weber analysed the process by which ideas that aim for qualitative change, for a transvaluation of values, are worn down in the historical process, codified and routinized by interpreters, gradually brought back into line with the status quo. Building upon Georg Lukács’s early analyses of reification, which reinterpreted Weber’s theory of rationalization in terms of Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism, Theodor Adorno would prove himself to be one of the most astute analysts of such processes of ‘adjustment’, which would expand and intensify in the twentieth century. Adorno’s own theory was driven in large part by the increasingly difficult task of escaping the levelling tendencies of a society dominated by the logic of the commodity, but he also clearly recognized that his own efforts would be only partially successful: ‘No theory’, not even his own, ‘escapes the market any longer.’1 The adjustment of the dialectically transcendent ideas of Adorno and his colleagues has been described as the transformation of Critical Theory into the Frankfurt School.2 While the concept of Critical Theory has become practically meaningless – particularly in the Anglo-American world – the concept of the Frankfurt School has become a convenient label to designate one of the many theoretical tendencies competing on the market today. It is not entirely clear who belongs to the ‘school’ or what exactly it stands for. In the past decades many have taken a trip to the city of Frankfurt itself in hopes of clarifying this question. But upon arriving in the mini-metropolis on the Main, asking a taxi driver to be taken to the ‘Frankfurt School’, as some bewildered visitors have done recently, will lead only to a wild goose chase. Theodor Adorno Platz, on the other hand, really does exist. But prior to this year, one would have discovered there only a large war memorial from 1925, a concrete ping-pong table, and several benches – often littered with empty cans of beer – all surrounded by some overgrown hedges. Just a few days before what would have been his hundredth birthday in 2003, the city of Frankfurt finally decided to improve the miserable state of Adorno’s official site. Beer cans were picked up, hedges trimmed, ping-pong table removed and the war monument was replaced by an artistic memorial by the Russian artist Vadim Zakharov in the form of a large desk with several of Adorno’s principal works on top of it.

The city of Frankfurt and the federal state of Hesse have been reluctant to support nonconformist cultural causes in the past. The budget of the Frankfurt Film Museum was slashed several years ago, which prompted Adorno’s friend and well-known representative of the New German Cinema, Alexander Kluge, to write several letters in protest. More recently, the city government has threatened to cut the funding for what is without doubt the most innovative cultural under­taking in Frankfurt today, namely William Forsythe’s avant-garde ballet.3 Such continuing conspicuous neglect of Adorno would not, however, have been possible during his centenary year, for the city has realized that the ‘Frankfurt School’ has become an internationally recognized label, one that they literally cannot afford to ignore. In fact, the city has in the meantime charged full-steam ahead. The face-lift of Theodor Adorno Platz has been just one part of a much larger ‘Jubiläum’ the city has dedicated to its exiled son this past year. For example, the Institute for Social Research, which has since come to represent the ideas of the so-called second and third generations of the Frankfurt School, organized a three-day international conference on Adorno’s work. Considering what the ‘second and third generation’ members of the ‘Frankfurt School’ have written about Adorno in the past two decades, it is difficult to imagine that this conference was motivated by anything more than Pflichtbewusstsein (consciousness of duty).4 The conference thematized Adorno’s not so surprising disappearance from academic discussions in Germany in the past decades. But far from merely confirming that Adorno’s thought belongs to the past, this academic neglect of Adorno and the other Critical Theorists also confirms their own deeply ambivalent attitude towards academic specialization, with its affirmative tendency towards insularity and insufficient self-reflexivity. But not all of the centenary events were driven by a concern with the city’s image and/or performed reluctantly out of a mere sense of duty. Several other conferences and talks were organized that called into question the numbing effects of ritualized memory and made an attempt not merely to think about Adorno, but to think with him about contemporary issues. Furthermore, several new studies of Adorno’s life and work were published last year, including two new intellectual biographies that take seriously the task of working through Adorno’s impressive and manifold legacies.* These two bio­graphies will be the subject of the following remarks.