SOURCE: “Adorno in America,” in Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America, Columbia University Press, 1985, pp. 120-37.

The exemplary anecdotes are known to us all. Adorno arrives in America in 1938 to work on Paul Lazarsfeld's Princeton Radio Research Project. Lazarsfeld writes of his new acquaintance: “He looks as you would image a very absent-minded German professor, and he behaves so foreign that I feel like a member of the Mayflower society.”¹ Adorno travels to the Project's offices in an abandoned brewery in Newark, New Jersey, through a tunnel under the Hudson River and admits “I felt a little as if I were in Kafka's Nature Theater of Oklahoma.”² The attempt to adapt his ideas to the needs of the Project soon proves, not surprisingly, a failure, as Adorno's concept of fetishization resists all efforts to operationalize it. Lazarsfeld's hope to achieve what he later called “a convergence of European theory and American empiricism”³ is quickly abandoned with no small amount of embarrassment and bitter feelings on both sides.

A decade later, the Institute für Sozialforschung is invited back to Frankfurt, and Adorno, with no hesitation, joins Max Horkheimer and Friedrich Pollock in its reconstruction. Having noted in Minima Moralia that “every intellectual in emigration is, without exception, mutilated,” in particular because “his language has been expropriated, and the historical dimension that nourished his knowledge, sapped,”⁴ he leaves his exile home for good in 1953 and never looks back. Twelve years later, he tells his German audience in a radio talk entitled “Auf die Frage: Was ist Deutsch?”⁵ that both subjective and objective reasons determined his return. The former include the slight to his self-esteem dealt him by an American publisher who criticized Philosophie der neuen Musik for being “badly organized.”⁶ The latter, which he claims are more substantial, center around his desire to write in his native tongue, whose “elective affinity” for philosophy, in particular its speculative and dialectical moment, he claims is superior to that of English.

When Adorno dies in 1969, The New York Times carries a short obituary, which soon gains modest notoriety for its remarkable garbling of Adorno's life and work.⁷ Focusing for mysterious reasons on an obscure piece he once wrote on jitterbugging, it fails to record any of the important theoretical dimensions of his thought. At the time of his death, Adorno is known in America almost entirely as the first name on the title page of The Authoritarian Personality, a study whose uneasy mixture of empirical methods and Critical Theory was very atypical of his work as a whole. The only translation of his writings on cultural themes then available is Prisms, which a small British publisher had brought out in 1967 and failed to distribute in America. Not a single philosophical work is accessible to readers unable to take on the challenge of Adorno's formidable German.

The image of Adorno's relation to America conveyed by these anecdotes is not difficult to discern. The sensitive European mandarin is shocked and bewildered by the commercialism, vulgarity, and theoretical backwardness of his temporary home. Belittling the assimilationist tendencies of other emigrés as a form of craven accommodation to economic necessity, he hustles back to Germany as soon as the opportunity avails itself. America in return finds him arrogant, snobbish, and incomprehensible. His departure is little noted and even less mourned.

That this image is more than just impressionistically anecdotal is confirmed by a sample of the critical literature on Adorno's relation to America. The linguistic barrier, for example, is widely remarked even after translations are attempted. The musicologist and Stravinsky confidante Robert Craft speaks for many when he complains that “a more convoluted, abstruse, and floridly unintelligible style is scarcely conceivable. It can have been designed for one purpose only, that of maintaining the highest standards of obfuscation throughout.”⁸ No less disconcerting to many is Adorno's merciless critique of mass culture, which offends the populist pieties of progressive American thought. Edward Shils, Leon Bramson, and Herbert Gans lead a phalanx of critics who point to the apparent paradox of a self-proclaimed leftist so contemptuous of democratic tastes and values.⁹ Adorno is called a covert Puritan and ascetic for his hostility to the simple pleasures of the common man.¹⁰ Behind the facade of a modernist, one critic spies “a yearning for European liberal-bourgeois society and the life-style of its cultured upper-middle-class members.”¹¹ According to another, Adorno's debts to figures like Spengler and Nietzsche make it “far more useful and evocative to regard” him and his colleagues in the Frankfurt School “as men of the Right than of the Left.”¹² To still a third, Adorno can “be described, not altogether unfairly, as a materialist dandy … a stranded spiritual aristocrat doomed to extinction by the ‘rising tide of democracy.’”¹³

These examples are all taken from American responses to Adorno, but the image they convey has not been confined to our shores. In 1976, a very hostile essay entitled “‘Beute der Pragmatisierung’: Adorno und Amerika” was published in a collection on Die USA und Deutschland edited by Wolfgang Paulsen.¹⁴ Its author, Dagmar Barnouw, compared Adorno with the French aristocrats who emigrated during the French Revolution. Criticizing his “autocratic snobbism” and paranoiac ressentiment, she concluded that works like Dialectic of Enlightenment were little more than “poetic performances in total reaction against a social reality”¹⁵ that Adorno neither understood nor appreciated.

The grain of truth in these contentions, however exaggerated and one-sided they may be, must be acknowledged. The Adorno who could complain that “it is made unmistakably clear to the intellectual from abroad that he will have to eradicate himself as an autonomous being if he hopes to achieve anything”¹⁶ was clearly not an eager convert to the “American way of life.” There can be no question that the linguistic uprootedness that Adorno felt with a keenness more typical of literary than scholarly emigrés¹⁷ was a genuine trauma, as his frequent quarrels with Siegfried Kracauer over the use of English abundantly demonstrate.¹⁸ Nor is it disputable, as Adorno's notoriously unsympathetic treatment of jazz illustrates, that he tended to flatten out the dynamic contradictions of the popular culture he knew only from afar. It is equally clear that many of the analyses he made of his emigré home were colored by the aftereffects of his forced departure from Europe. As one commentator has recently noted, the major works he completed in exile all “contained many passages which assimilated American society to that of Nazi Germany”¹⁹ with an insensitivity obvious in hindsight. And it would be no less difficult to detail the ways in which the American reception of Adorno mirrors this image of hostility and incomprehension.

But it would nonetheless be a travesty of the truth to remain content with so one-dimensional an account of the impact of America on Adorno and the impact of Adorno on us. To make better sense of this dual relationship, it would be useful to borrow the celebrated image of a constellation which Adorno himself borrowed from Benjamin. It is, in fact, helpful to conceptualize Adorno's general place in the intellectual life of the twentieth century by understanding the multiple impulses contained in his work as forming a figure of juxtaposed elements irreducible to any one dominant star. For rather than turning Adorno into essentially an elitist mandarin merely pretending to be a Marxist or an aesthetic modernist with only residual nostalgia for the world he left behind, it is better to acknowledge the countervailing energies of each of these forces in his field. If we add to them several others, most notably his ambiguous identification with the Jews, which appears in his dark ruminations on the meaning of the Holocaust, and what might be called his proto-deconstructionist impulse, to which I will return later, a more fully nuanced understanding of the irreconcilable tensions in Adorno's formation can be grasped. Rather than reduce Adorno to any one star in his constellation, be it Western Marxist, elitist mandarin, aesthetic modernist, or whatever, we must credit all of them with the often contradictory power they had in shaping his idiosyncratic variant of Critical Theory. For what made Adorno so remarkable a figure was the fact that the negative dialectics he so steadfastly defended, with its valorization of nonidentity and heterogeneity, was concretely exemplified in his own intellectual composition, which never produced any harmoniously totalized world view.

The same approach, I want to argue, will allow us to make sense as well of his uneasy relationship to America, which was far more complicated than the conventional image expressed in the anecdotes and scholarship mentioned a few moments ago. For although there can be little doubt that the European star in Adorno's constellation shone brighter than the American, the gravitational pull of the latter was by no means negligible. If the aphorisms of Minima Moralia were reflections on an emigré's damaged life, it is, after all, important to recognize that the original source of the damage was not the culture industry in America, but rather the crisis of European culture and society that forced him into exile in the first place. Although it would be foolish to claim that the damage was somehow healed during his stay, it is also not entirely correct to see his experience as merely deepening his pessimism about the universality and irreversibility of the crisis. For when Adorno returned to Frankfurt, he was a changed man. “It is scarcely an exaggeration to say,” Adorno would ultimately acknowledge, “that any contemporary consciousness that has not appropriated the American experience, even if in opposition, has something reactionary about it.”²⁰ Although Adorno's appropriation was largely in opposition, it nonetheless did include two positive elements.

First, the doubts he had already entertained about the redemptive power of high culture, doubts instilled in him in part by his Marxist and aesthetic modernist inclinations, were immeasurably strengthened by his contact with a society in which no such faith could be found. “In America,” he later wrote, “I was liberated from a certain naive belief in culture and attained the capacity to see culture from the outside. To clarify the point: in spite of all social criticism and all consciousness of the primacy of economic factors, the fundamental importance of the mind—‘Geist’—was quasi a dogma self-evident to me from the very beginning. The fact that this was not a foregone conclusion, I learned in America.”²¹ Adorno put this knowledge to good use in the essay he wrote in 1949 entitled “Cultural Criticism and Society,” which was first published two years later in a Festschrift for Leopold von Wiese and then served as the opening essay of Prisms.²² His American-induced critique of the fetishism of high culture, which expanded on the earlier analysis of “affirmative culture”²³ made by Horkheimer and Marcuse in the years shortly after their own arrivals in New York, might, in fact, be seen as evidence of the radicalizing effect of Adorno's emigration. One commentator has gone so far as to claim that this change shows that “in certain ways Adorno now moved closer toward a Marxian analytical framework.”²⁴

In more directly political terms, however, the emigration seems to have had the opposite effect. For the second lesson Adorno appropriated from his years in the United States was derived from what he called his “more fundamental, and more gratifying … experience of the substance of democratic forms: that in America they have penetrated the whole of life, whereas in Germany at least they were never more than formal rules of the game.”²⁵ Here Adorno seems to exemplify the deradicalization familiar in the histories of many leftist intellectuals who came to America, much to the chagrin of some later observers like Joachim Radkau.²⁶ But interpreted more generously, these remarks can be seen as indicating a cautiously realistic optimism about the value of trying to contribute “something toward political enlightenment”²⁷ in his native land, as he was to put it many years hence. For by his actions after his return, it is clear that Adorno, like the other members of the repatriated Institut staff, had hopes that the substance of democratic forms might also be introduced to a Germany which had never known them in the past. Rather than bemoaning the penetration of American commercialism and vulgarity, which to be sure he did in other contexts, Adorno came back to Europe with the belief that something of genuine political value might be brought with him across the Atlantic.

It was in this spirit that Adorno, obviously fighting his earlier inclinations, cautiously defended the usefulness of public opinion research in Germany in the 1951 conference on empirical social research in Frankfurt.²⁸ Pointing to the disparagement of such techniques during the era that had just ended, he noted that the Nazis had understood all too well the democratic potential of a method that treats every voice as having equal weight. With belated recognition of the original aim of Lazarsfeld's Radio Research Project, he contended that the unmediated opposition posited by some between “administrative” and “critical” social research was a fallacious oversimplification. His positive experience working on The Authoritarian Personality project clearly left its mark on Adorno, as it did other members of the Institut.²⁹ Although in later years he would reconsider some of his enthusiasm for empirical techniques, because of their threat to replace Critical Theory entirely, he never lost his respect for their potential as tools of enlightenment.

In a country where most of the basic “facts” of social and political life had been systematically distorted for a dozen years, it is not difficult to see why Adorno would have modified his earlier hostility to empiricism or even have begun talking positively about the possibility of enlightenment. It was, of course, with the hope of reeducating his countrymen about those facts that Adorno would later contribute to the debate about Germany's “unmastered past” in such essays as “Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit” in 1959 and “Erziehung nach Auschwitz” in 1966.³⁰ That Adorno could speak positively about pedagogy rather than revolution shows how deeply impressed by his American experience he was. So too does his emphasis on the importance of psychoanalysis in the process of reeducation, for it was one of the cardinal lessons of The Authoritarian Personality that the traditional progressive faith in reason alone was inadequate. As the concluding sentences of the study assert, “we need not suppose that appeal to emotion belongs to those who strive in the direction of fascism, while democratic propaganda must limit itself to reason and restraint. If fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.”³¹ It was in the hope of harnessing the insights of psychoanalysis for emancipatory purposes that Adorno and his Institut colleagues organized the influential conference on “Freud in die Gegenwart” in Frankfurt in 1956³² and were supportive of the work of Alexander Mitscherlich and the Sigmund Freud Institute.

In his essay on “Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit,” Adorno explicitly tied the absence of a lively psychoanalytic culture in Germany to the effects of anti-semitism, whose central importance seems only to have become gradually apparent to Adorno and his colleagues during their American exile. When they returned to Germany, the glib Marxist formulas that had characterized their work at least as late as Horkheimer's “Die Juden und Europe” of 1939 were now things of the past.³³ In the “Elements of Anti-Semitism” section of Dialectic of Enlightenment in particular, Adorno had come to understand the intimate relationship between hatred of the Jews and the extirpation of non-identity that was the dominant bugbear of his negative dialectics. It was not merely the supposed guilt of the survivor that made him sensitive to the implications of Auschwitz for Western culture, but also the experience he had in America of a nonreductive reaction to anti-Semitism that avoided the trivializations of the European left.

In summary, although it might be said that while in America Adorno tended to interpret his new surroundings through the lens of his earlier experience, once back home he saw Germany with the eyes of someone who had been deeply affected by his years in exile. Negatively, this meant an increased watchfulness for the signs of an American-style culture industry in Europe.³⁴ Positively, it meant a wariness of elitist defenses of high culture for its own sake, a new respect for the value of democratic politics, a grudging recognition of the emancipatory potential in certain empirical techniques, and a keen appreciation of the need for a psychological dimension in pedagogy. To put it in capsule form, only an Adorno who had spent time in the United States could have written a sentence like the following from his Introduction to the Sociology of Music: “In general, outrage at the alleged mass era has become an article for mass consumption, fit for inciting the masses against politically democratic forms” (p. 132).

If it is misleading, then, to discount the effects of Adorno's American experience as a subtle counterweight to his European origins and thus miss the dynamic tensions in his intellectual force-field, it would be no less so to characterize the American response to his work as entirely uncomprehending and hostile. For here too the relation between Adorno and America is far more complex and ambivalent than the anecdotal impressions mentioned earlier would suggest. As early as 1954 and C. Wright Mills' acknowledgment in The Saturday Review that the return of Horkheimer and Adorno to Germany was “to the great loss of American social studies,”³⁵ a positive awareness of his work has been evident among growing circles of American intellectuals. Benefiting from the popularity of their former colleague Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s, the Frankfurt School as a whole gained widespread attention in the United States only a few years after its explosive rise to prominence in West Germany. Critical Theory seemed the most appropriate form of heterodox Marxism for a society without a large-scale militant working-class movement and with a growing counterculture distrustful of technological rationality. Unlike in Britain, where Althusser's brand of scientistic scholasticism and political orthodoxy attracted extensive admiration, in America, the New Left found Marcuse's version of the Frankfurt School's ideas especially congenial. Some of its members, like Donald Kuspit,³⁶ Samuel and Shierry Weber, Jeremy Shapiro, and Angela Davis, were stimulated enough to go to the source and study in Frankfurt.

Adorno, of course, was initially far less well known back in America and was thus spared the type of controversy over the practical implications of his ideas that swirled around him in Germany shortly before his death. Although I can recall a heated conversation in 1968 with the leader of the Columbia University SDS and later member of the Weatherman underground, Mark Rudd, who dismissed Adorno as a betrayer of the revolution, this attitude rarely surfaced in the American New Left's reception of his work, such as it was. Far more typical was the joint dedication of a book edited by Paul Breines called Critical Interruptions: New Left Perspectives on Herbert Marcuse, published in 1970,³⁷ which, with no apparent irony, was addressed to Adorno and another recently deceased hero of the movement, Ho Chi Minh. Although by the mid-1970s, some of the same complaints against Adorno's politics that had appeared in Germany were repeated in America, it was in the less volatile context of the postpolitical academization of Marxism.³⁸

If the moment when Adorno's work became more than merely an enticing rumor for the American New Left could be dated, it would probably be 1967 with the publication of an essay entitled “Adorno: or, Historical Tropes” by the Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson in the journal Salmagundi.³⁹ Four years later, it served as the opening chapter in his widely influential Marxism and Form, which presented the first substantive survey of Western Marxism to an English-speaking audience. Although concluding that Negative Dialectics was “in the long run a massive failure,” Jameson nonetheless praised Adorno's concrete studies as “incomparable models of the dialectical process, essays at once both systematic and occasional, in which pretext and consciousness meet to form the most luminous, if transitory, of figures or tropes of historical intelligibility.”⁴⁰ In the same year as Jameson's essay first appeared, George Steiner's highly lauded collection Language and Silence introduced Adorno's lament about the impossibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz to American readers.⁴¹ Scattered remarks throughout the rest of the book indicated that Steiner saw Adorno and other continental Marxists like Benjamin and Lukács as major cultural critics, whose absence from the Anglo-American scene was a scandalous indication of its sterility. No less powerful an endorsement came from the other leading guide to recent European theory of those years, George Lichtheim, whose interest lay more in political and philosophical matters than aesthetic or cultural ones. Although many of his best pieces appeared in British journals like the Times Literary Supplement, in 1968 Northwestern University's Triquarterly published his sympathetic overview of Western Marxism entitled “From Marx to Hegel,” which treated Adorno as the “spiritual antipode”⁴² to Lukács in that tradition. Three years later, Lichtheim republished the piece in a collection with the same name that included an admiring essay solely on Adorno, which had first appeared anonymously in the TLS in 1967, as well as several other essays on Critical Theory. Although somewhat journalistic in tone, Lichtheim's sympathetic appreciations of the Frankfurt School, with whose general position he explicitly identified,⁴³ played a constructive role in the early years of Adorno's American reception.

Although Adorno's death in 1969 was, as we have seen, an event of little importance in the popular media, it was followed by a more serious appraisal of his significance in academic circles. In December 1969, the Jewish review Midstream published my essay on “The Permanent Exile of Theodor W. Adorno,”⁴⁴ which tried to provide a broad overview of his career, including its last, unhappy episodes. In the following year, the newly founded radical philosophy journal Telos brought out the first of its many considerations of Adorno's work, Russell Jacoby's ecstatically favorable review of Aufsätze zur Gesellschaftstheorie.⁴⁵ Jacoby, whose admiration for Adorno went so far that he emulated many of his stylistic mannerisms, soon became his major American defender against all attacks from the right or left. Intransigently insisting that negative dialectics was completely compatible with Marxism at its most radical, he quickly became notorious for his sharply worded critiques of all attempts to make sense of the Frankfurt School's work in less glowing terms.⁴⁶

Telos was also the journal where other very positive assessments of Adorno's work by Dick Howard and Susan Buck-Morss first appeared.⁴⁷ Although far from the center of American intellectual life during these years—in its Spring 1970 issue it proudly described itself as “a philosophical journal definitely outside the mainstream of American philosophical thought”⁴⁸—it soon established itself as the major interpreter of Western Marxist ideas for the English-speaking world. Its only rival was the New Left Review in England, which was much more favorably inclined towards Althusserian and other allegedly scientific Marxisms than towards Critical Theory.⁴⁹ Other journals like Social Research, New German Critique, Theory and Society, and Cultural Hermeneutics also opened their pages to articles about Adorno and his colleagues, but none was as tenacious as Telos in promoting his work in America, not only through articles about him, but also by translating many of his more important essays.

The difficult task of rendering Adorno's longer works into English began in earnest in the early 1970s: Dialectic of Enlightenment and Aspects of Sociology in 1972, Philosophy of Modern Music, Negative Dialectics, and Jargon of Authenticity in 1973, Minima Moralia in 1974, Introduction to the Sociology of Music and The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology in 1976, In Search of Wagner in 1981, and Against Epistemology and the republication of Prisms in 1982. Further translations of the Notes on Literature and the Aesthetic Theory have been announced. Although of very mixed quality—Edmund Jephcott's rendition of Minima Moralia is often said to be the most successful, while several others vie for the honor of being the least—the English translations of Adorno's major works in the past decade did make it possible for a much wider audience to confront his work. Against the backdrop of several accounts of the Frankfurt School as a whole, which began with my The Dialectical Imagination in 1973 and continued with the surveys and collections of Slater, Tar, O'Neill, Held, Friedman, Connerton, and Arato and Gebhardt,⁵⁰ they provided the basis for an increasingly sophisticated American reception of his work, which is by no means at its end.

One of the clearest indications of that sophistication is the progressive refinement of the American perception of Adorno's unique place in the Western Marxist tradition, which is now no longer understood in the simplified terms of a return “from Marx to Hegel.” In 1977, Susan Buck-Morss published her penetrating study of The Origin of Negative Dialectics,⁵¹ which used previously untapped primary sources to demonstrate Adorno's indebtedness to Benjamin and subtle differences with Horkheimer. Moving beyond my emphasis on the relative coherence of a unified Frankfurt School in The Dialectical Imagination, she persuasively showed the ways in which Adorno was always an idiosyncratic member of the Institut's inner circle. Other scholars have scrutinized the complexities of Adorno's relationships with his friends Siegfried Kracauer and Leo Lowenthal, as well as exploring the implications of Lichtheim's remark that he was the “spiritual antipode” of Lukács within Western Marxism.⁵² More recently still, the full ramifications of his complicated interaction with Benjamin have been reexamined, most probingly in excellent new books by Richard Wolin and Eugene Lunn.⁵³ Lunn, in fact, has succeeded in modifying still further Buck-Morss's modification of my argument about the collective coherence of the Frankfurt School by demonstrating the differences between Adorno and Benjamin even in the 1920s, before their celebrated dispute over mass culture, technology, and political engagement. Stressing Adorno's roots in an Expressionism that was moving beyond its subjective phase toward the objectification of its anguish, he contrasted Adorno's version of aesthetic modernism with Benjamin's, which was more deeply indebted to Surrealism and Symbolism with their relative indifference to the fate of subjectivity.

Adorno's differences with Habermas, most extensively spelled out in an article by Axel Honneth translated in Telos in 1979,⁵⁴ have also attracted widespread comment in recent years. Those like the ecologically minded anarchist Murray Bookchin use Adorno's analysis of the domination of nature against Habermas, whom they accuse of complicity with the instrumental rationality the older Frankfurt School found so oppressive.⁵⁵ Others like Joel Whitebook invoke the ambiguities of the dialectic of enlightenment against what they see as Habermas' “compulsively modernistic”⁵⁶ project. Still others, like the English sociologist Gillian Rose, the author of a major study of Adorno entitled The Melancholy Science, chastise Habermas for violating Adorno's injunction against identity theory through his positing of an ideal speech situation.⁵⁷ Those, on the other hand, who find Habermas' position more politically promising, often contrast his stress on intersubjectivity with Adorno's retreat into the wreckage of the bourgeois subject.⁵⁸ Admiring Habermas' attempt to break the logjam of classical Critical Theory and develop new ways of conceptualizing the still unresolved contradictions of contemporary society, they also applaud his search for a more viable normative ground than the immanent critique whose power Adorno himself often came to question.

Although these debates cannot be pursued in greater detail now, I hope the general point has been made. The American reception of Adorno's work has been immeasurably improved by the increasing precision of our understanding of his place in the general context of Western Marxism. Not only are we increasingly aware of the differences as well as similarities between Adorno and the other members of the Frankfurt School, we are also far more sensitive than we were to the unexpected convergences between his position and that of other Western Marxists in the anti-Hegelian camp, like Althusser and Colletti.⁵⁹ Although there are still some defenders of the absolute distinction between critical and scientific Marxisms,⁶⁰ the second thoughts many American leftists have had about the virtues of neo-Hegelianism have led them to seek new ways to conceptualize the legacy of Western Marxism and Adorno's place in it.

If we turn now to the ways that specific dimensions of Adorno's work have been treated in America, the implications of this shift will become apparent. As might be expected, certain aspects of Adorno's work have been more readily accepted than others. In large measure because of the absence of translations, his writings on literature and aesthetics have been less widely discussed than his cultural criticism and philosophy. Aside from still unpublished dissertations by Michael Jones on the literary essays and Lambert Zuidervaart on the Aesthetic Theory,⁶¹ there have been no full-length treatments of these themes. Although scholars who teach European literatures, like Jameson, Russell Berman, and Peter Uwe Hohendahl,⁶² have incorporated and debated Adorno's ideas, those who concentrate on English and American literature have not. As Frank Lentricchia concedes in his magisterial survey, After the New Criticism, Adorno and other Western Marxist aestheticians “have a great deal to say to American critics, but … they have not been shaping influences.”⁶³

Adorno's musical writings, which are somewhat more readily available in English, have fared marginally better. But scattered essays by Ronald Weitzmann (who is English), Donald Kuspit, Wesley Blomster, Rose Rosengard Subotnik, and James L. Marsh cannot really compare with the very extensive reception of Adorno's musicological works in Germany.⁶⁴ In Charles Rosen's widely admired book on Schoenberg, for example, there is no mention of Adorno, nor is he widely cited in the American literature on Wagner.⁶⁵ And if Adorno has had little impact on musicological circles, it is even less likely, although I cannot be absolutely certain, that he has influenced actual American composers, as Carl Dalhaus claims was the case in Germany during the 1950s and 1960s.⁶⁶ Perhaps Robert Craft's remark in his critical review of the translation of Philosophy of Modern Music suggests the reason: it “comes twenty-five years too late to exert any active influence. Not that Adorno's interpretation has been proved or disproved. It simply has been passed by, relegated to academe when the music finally escaped the custody of theoretical critiques and entered the live performing repertory.”⁶⁷

Adorno's thoughts on culture in general, however, have been far more influential in the still lively debate over the implications of mass culture. The model of the “culture industry” was, after all, first developed with America in mind and several of Adorno's former colleagues who remained in the United States, especially Lowenthal and Marcuse, were notable contributors to the discussion which followed. In the 1950s, many respected American intellectuals, including Dwight MacDonald and David Riesman, drew on Adorno's work, even if indirectly. By the 1960s and 1970s, many younger commentators, such as Diane Waldman, Andreas Huyssen, Stanley Aronowitz, Douglas Kellner, Philip Rosen, Miriam Hansen, Mattel Calinescu, John Brenkman, and Thomas Andrae, found Adorno a source of even greater inspiration.⁶⁸ Interestingly, one of the keenest areas of interest has been Adorno's scattered remarks on film, which have attracted attention in part because of the increased American awareness of the new German cinema. The impact of Adorno's criticisms of traditional Hollywood films on directors like Alexander Kluge has not gone unnoticed by American critics. The translations of Adorno's essays “Culture Industry Reconsidered” and “Transparencies on Film”⁶⁹ have also led to an appreciation of the ways in which he came to nuance the remittingly bleak prognosis of the original analysis in Dialectic of Enlightenment His reconsiderations in this area have allowed his critique of film to be taken more sympathetically than his less forgiving attack on jazz, which is probably the least successful aspect of his work in America.

Adorno's powerful critique of mass culture has been especially influential because of its roots in his social psychology. Although the dust raised by the controversy over The Authoritarian Personality settled long ago in the 1950s, other aspects of Adorno's appropriation of Freud have continued to attract attention. In works like Bruce Brown's Marx, Freud, and the Critique of Everyday Life and Russell Jacoby's Social Amnesia,⁷⁰ Adorno's defense of the radical potential of Freud's early work and his critique of the premature harmony of sociology and psychology, a critique elaborated by Marcuse in his attack on Fromm in Eros and Civilization, have been endorsed with enthusiasm. In the even more influential studies of Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World and The Culture of Narcissism,⁷¹ many of the Frankfurt School's arguments about the decline of the family and its invasion by the professional bureaucracies of the administered world have been given still greater currency. Joel Kovel's probing dissections of contemporary analytic practice, A Complete Guide to Therapy and The Age of Desire: Reflections of a Radical Psychoanalyst,⁷² are also indebted to Critical Theory's earlier considerations of this issue. Thus, although the general Frankfurt School use of Freud has not been spared criticism from a variety of perspectives,⁷³ it has nonetheless been and continues to be an enormous stimulus to the American attempt to harness Freudianism for emancipatory ends.

If, however, we really want to understand the implications of the shift I mentioned a few moments ago in the perception of Adorno's place in the Western Marxist tradition, it is to the reception of his philosophy that we must turn. For it is here that the most movement has occurred in the past ten years in the American understanding of Adorno's work. In fact, just as Adorno's differences from more mainstream Western Marxists like Lukács were becoming increasingly appreciated, so too were his similarities with non-Marxist continental philosophers. Adorno's complicated relationship with phenomenology, for example, has been the source of considerable interest, in part because of the translations of his critiques of Heidegger and Husserl and in part because of a prior awareness of Marcuse's debt to these same thinkers. In the early 1970s, Telos, in particular its editor Paul Piccone, was hopeful of finding a common ground between Critical Theory and phenomenology. Bemoaning the overt hostility of Adorno toward Husserl and Heidegger, Piccone and the Italians he translated in Telos like Pier Aldo Rovatti,⁷⁴ refused to take their apparent incompatability as the final word on this issue. To reach the opposite conclusion, their strategy was to emphasize the importance of Husserl's late work, in particular The Crisis of European Sciences, which appeared after the Frankfurt School's position against Husserl had hardened. Finding common ground in their critical attitudes towards technology and hoping to integrate the phenomenological investigation of the Lebenswelt with negative dialectics, Piccone and his allies contended that the results would offer a better basis for a more genuinely materialist Marxism than that provided by Lukács' neo-Hegelianism. By the end of the decade, however, Piccone's faith in Marxism of any kind had waned so far that any thoughts of a creative synthesis had vanished, although he continued to rely on the traditional Critical Theory idea of an administered world in his notion of “artificial negativity.”⁷⁵

At about the same time, a parallel effort was being made by Fred Dallmayr to find fruitful links between Adorno and Heidegger. Once again the strategy was to claim that Adorno's hostility was directed more against his target's early than late works. In an essay he published in 1976 and a book entitled Twilight of Subjectivity: Contributions to a Post-Individualist Theory of Politics that appeared five years later,⁷⁶ Dallmayr argued that despite the outward signs of animosity, a close kinship existed between the two thinkers:

Adorno's strictures against individualism and the philosophy of consciousness correspond closely to Heidegger's critique of “subjectivism” and of the tradition of Western “metaphysics” with its accent on subjective reflection. Likewise, Adorno's comments on the ambivalence of Enlightenment thought and modern rationalism find a parallel in the existentialist posture toward logical calculation and the conception of man as “rational animal”; in particular, the argument that the growing sway of “instrumental” rationality reflects ultimately man's “will to power”—the desire to subjugate and control nature—is reminiscent of Heidegger's treatment of modern technology as an anthropocentric stratagem. A further affinity … can be found in the common stress of the two thinkers on historical exegesis and on the importance of “pre-understanding” or tradition in human cognition.⁷⁷

Thus, like Hermann Mörchen,⁷⁸ Dallmayr called into question Adorno's own self-understanding in order to find convergences where previously only antagonism had been recognized. What made Dallmayr's rapprochement plausible was his emphasis on Heidegger's late works with their critique of identity and defense of difference. Insisting as well on the parallels between both of their positions and Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of ambiguity, Dallmayr sought to forge a postsubjectivist and posthumanist philosophy that would avoid the domination of nature and “egological” individualism present in so many traditional Western philosophies.

To establish his point, Dallmayr also drew on the work of a fourth figure, whose surprising resemblance to Adorno has received increasing notice in America, Jacques Derrida. Indeed, as I mentioned earlier, it is arguable that one of the stars in Adorno's intellectual constellation can be identified with the poststructuralism of Heidegger's heterodox French disciples. This is not to say, however, that Adorno should be construed as a deconstructionist avant la lettre or that we can ignore the very important differences between his position, with its still Hegelian and Marxist dimensions, and theirs. Indeed, as one of the poststructuralists, Jean-François Lyotard, has recognized,⁷⁹ a very nondeconstructionist nostalgia for a lost totality still permeates even a negative dialectics. And yet, it makes even less sense to build impermeable walls between two of the most significant theoretical movements of our time.

The most compelling historical reason for the similarity is, of course, the common respect for Nietzsche found in both Adorno and the poststructuralists. Virtually all of the literature on Adorno in English recognizes his remarkable debt to a philosopher for whom most other Marxists, Western or otherwise, had only contempt.⁸⁰ It is partly for this reason that writers like the English critic Terry Eagleton have contended that

the parallels between deconstruction and Adorno are particularly striking. Long before the current fashion, Adorno was insisting on the power of those heterogeneous fragments that slip through the conceptual net, rejecting all philosophy of identity, refusing class consciousness as objectionably “positive,” and denying the intentionality of signification. Indeed there is hardly a theme in contemporary deconstruction that is not richly elaborated in his work—a pointer, perhaps to the mutual insularity of French and German culture, which now, ironically, converge more and more only in the Anglo-Saxon world.⁸¹

An even more extensive attempt to defend the comparison has been made by Michael Ryan in his 1982 Marxism and Deconstruction.⁸² Although acknowledging that Adorno's emphasis is on society and Derrida's on language, he nonetheless argues that both share a hatred of logocentric hierarchies, both attack “the idealist privilege of identity over nonidentity, universality over particularity, subject over object, spontaneous presence over secondary rhetoric, timeless transcendence over empirical history, content over mode of expression, self-reassuring proximity over threatening alterity, ontology over the ontic, and so on.”⁸³ In fact, in his zeal to assimilate Adorno and Derrida, Ryan goes so far as to make them common enemies of the domination of reason, without acknowledging that Adorno's more discriminating wrath was directed against only certain forms of rationality rather than rationality tout court.

If the parallels between Adorno and Derrida have been noted in America, so too have those between Adorno and Foucault.⁸⁴ In particular, the striking similarity between the arguments of Dialectic of Enlightenment and Discipline and Punish about the pervasiveness of disciplinary power in our administered world has been remarked.⁸⁵ Although it would be misleading to ignore their different evaluations of psychoanalysis, both Adorno and Foucault share a common skepticism about the sexual utopianism of certain Freudo-Marxists, including Marcuse. And both are at one in their sensitivity to what in Dialectic of Enlightenment he and Horkheimer called the “underground history”⁸⁶ of the European body, which Foucault's investigations of “bio-power” have helped bring to the surface. One final parallel might be mentioned, which concerns Adorno's regretful insistence in “The Actuality of Philosophy” that it was no longer possible for thought “to grasp the totality of the real” and Foucault's contention in Power/Knowledge that “the role for theory today seems to me to be just this: not to formulate global systematic theory which holds everything in place, but to analyze the specificity of mechanisms of power, to locate the connections and extensions, to build little by little a strategic knowledge.”⁸⁷ In both cases, a micrological analysis takes the place of the grand syntheses that were so much a trademark of Hegelian Marxism at its most ambitious. Or more precisely, for both Adorno and Foucault, totality is retained only as a term of opprobrium to indicate the pervasive domination of power relations that can only be challenged on the local and particular level.

One way, to be sure, in which Adorno and the poststructuralists part company is in their differing attitudes towards aesthetic modernism. Whereas Adorno seems to have had little faith in an art that would follow the classical modernism of Schoenberg and Beckett, many poststructuralists such as Lyotard eagerly defend the postmodernism that apparently has. Interestingly, leftist American students of Critical Theory who have struggled with the elitism inherent in Adorno's position have found this alternative a promising one. Thus, for example, the same Fredric Jameson who did so much to introduce Adorno to American audiences now complains that his later work in particular fails to register the inevitable historicity of modernism.⁸⁸ Rather than eternally contrasting avant-garde modernism and the culture industry, postmodernism, so Jameson suggests, calls into question the very dichotomy. Against Adorno, Jameson now argues for “some sense of the ineradicable drive towards collectivity that can be detected, no matter how faintly and feebly, in the most degraded works of mass culture just as surely as in the classics of modernism.”⁸⁹

Whether or not postmodernism can be harnessed for radical purposes is, of course, not yet clear, as Habermas has frequently warned.⁹⁰ It may therefore be healthy to contrast Adorno in some respects with those recent philosophical currents that support it, rather than assimilate him too quickly to them. Moreover, as Habermas has also recently cautioned,⁹¹ there are important distinctions that ought not to be forgotten in their different appropriations of the Nietzschean critique of the Enlightenment, which prevented Adorno, contrary to the hasty reading of Ryan, from attacking all forms of rationality as oppressive.

And yet, despite the dangers of turning Adorno into a deconstructionist with a German accent, it would be equally misguided to ignore the undeniable parallels that allow us with hindsight to see the implication of Adorno's thought as more complicated than would have been foreseen during his own lifetime. And if Eagleton is correct in claiming that this recognition has happened primarily in the Anglo-Saxon world because of the “mutual insularity of French and German culture,” then we must take seriously the impact of his American reception. For if Adorno had to leave home to learn the lessons about democratic politics and the fetishization of high culture described earlier, the emigration of his thought may also have been necessary to bring out all of its potential implications. It has sometimes been argued that the first detached and analytical overviews of the Frankfurt School's history could only have been written by outsiders with no stake in the polemical wars within Germany that surrounded Critical Theory.⁹² No less perhaps might be said of the reception of Adorno's work, some of whose implications may be more apparent on foreign shores than at home. Although, as I mentioned earlier, Adorno never returned to America after 1953, it is thus perhaps symbolically just that when his heart gave out in Switzerland sixteen years later, he was in fact preparing to do so in order to give the Christian Gauss lectures at Princeton University. The lectures were never delivered, but Adorno's thought did return nonetheless.⁹³

We might therefore in conclusion adopt the trope of chiasmus, so frequently used by Adorno himself, to describe his complicated relationship to America.⁹⁴ As in such sentences as “history is nature; nature is history,” Adorno employed chiasmus to indicate the unreconciled and unsublated relationship between two elements that nonetheless are inextricably intertwined. It is appropriate to call his peculiar status as a thinker tensely suspended between his native land and his emigré home a form of chiasmus. For as an American, he was obviously a displaced European, while as a European, he was deeply affected by his years in America. As a result he was able to remain in permanent exile from both contexts, and still does after his death. Although surely a source of pain, this condition, as Adorno doubtless knew, was also a stimulus to his creativity and originality. It also paradoxically made him into something of an exemplary figure for contemporary man. For as he argued in his essay in Noten zur Literatur entitled “Die Wunde Heine,” “today, the fate Heine suffered has literally become the common fate: homelessness has been inflicted on everyone. All, in language and being, have been damaged as the exile himself was.”⁹⁵

It is perhaps especially fitting that I borrow this citation from the opening remarks made by the American literary critic Harvey Gross at the earlier symposium honoring Adorno that was held in Los Angeles on the tenth anniversary of his death.⁹⁶ For not the least of Adorno's gifts to his emigré asylum, a country known for receiving rather than generating refugees, was the knowledge that in some sense we too are still suffering from Heine's wound, we too are still leading the damaged lives of men unable to find their way home.

Notes

1. Paul Lazarsfeld, “An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir,” The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960, Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge, 1969), p. 301.

2. Theodor W. Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” The Intellectual Migration, p. 342.

3. Lazarsfeld, p. 313. For an account of the failure written from Lazarsfeld's perspective, see David E. Morrison, “Kultur and Culture: The Case of Theodor W. Adorno and Paul F. Lazarsfeld,” Social Research (Summer 1978), 45(2):331-55.

4. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London, 1974), p. 22.

5. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, (Frankfurt, 1977).

6. Ibid., p. 698.

7. The New York Times, August 7, 1969. It is held up to ridicule in Hans Mayer, Der Repräsentant und der Martyrer: Konstellationen der Literatur (Frankfurt, 1971), p. 145; Martin Jay, “The Frankfurt School in Exile,” Perspectives in American History (1972), 6:356; and Zoltan Tar, The Frankfurt School: The Critical Theories of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (New York, 1977), p. 11.

8. Robert Craft, “A Bell for Adorno,” Prejudices in Disguise (New York, 1974), p. 94.

9. Edward Shils, “Daydreams and Nightmares: Reflections on the Criticism of Mass Culture,” Sewanee Review (Autumn 1957), 65(4):587-608; Leon Bramson, The Political Context of Sociology (Princeton, 1961); Herbert J. Gans, “Popular Culture in America: Social Problem in a Mass Society or Social Asset in a Pluralist Society?” in Social Problems, A Modern Approach, ed. Herbert S. Becker (New York, 1966).

10. This in particular was Shils' argument, which paid no attention to the hedonist dimension of Critical Theory.

11. Tar, p. 118.

12. George Friedman, The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School (Ithaca, 1981), p. 32.

13. Irving Wohlfahrt, “Hibernation: On the Tenth Anniversary of Adorno's Death,” Modern Language Notes (December 1979), 94(6):980-81. Wohlfahrt, who studied with Adorno in the 1960s and wrote one of the first introductions to him in English (the short “Presentation of Adorno” in New Left Review [January 1968], no. 46), is a far more sensitive analyst of his work, and that of Benjamin, than either of the two previously cited authors. He ends this compact but very insightful piece by reversing its generally critical direction and warning against “blaming the messenger [Adorno] for the news” (p. 982).

14. Dagmar Barnouw, “‘Beute der Pragmatisierung’: Adorno und Amerika,” in Die USA und Deutschland: Wechselseitige Spieglungen in der Literatur der Gegenwart, ed. Wolfgang Paulsen (Bern, 1976). The author teaches in the German Department of Brown University in America, so perhaps the essay can be taken as another example of the American response to Adorno rather than a German reading of it.

15. Ibid., p. 76.

16. Adorno, Prisms: Culture Criticism and Society, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London, 1967), p. 98.

17. For a good discussion of this issue, see Egbert Krispyn, Anti-Nazi Writers in Exile (Athens, Ga., 1978).

18. The correspondence between them, which can be found in the Kracauer Nachlass in the Schiller National Museum in Marbach am Neckar, contains many examples of their differing views of English.

19. Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno (Berkeley, 1982), p. 209.

20. Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” pp. 369-70. H. Stuart Hughes is one of the few observers who has noted the validity of Adorno's remarks about his debt to America. See his The Sea Change: The Migration of Social Thought, 1930-1965 (New York, 1975), pp. 150f. He points out how frequently American terms enter his vocabulary in the writings done after his return, terms like “healthy sex life,” “some fun,” “go-getters,” “social research,” “team,” “middle range theory,” “trial and error,” “administrative research,” “common sense,” “fact finding,” “statement of fact,” “case studies,” “facts and figures,” “nose counting,” and “likes and dislikes” (p. 166).

21. Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” p. 367.

22. See, for example, his remarks that “the greatest fetish of cultural criticism is the notion of culture as such. … Only when neutralized and reified, does Culture allow itself to be idolized. Fetishism gravitates towards mythology.” Prisms, pp. 23-24.

23. See, in particular, Marcuse, “The Affirmative Character of Culture,” Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston, 1968); the first use of the term came in Horkheimer's “Egoismus und Freiheitsbewegung,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (1936), 5(2):161-231.

24. Lunn, p. 208.

25. Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” p. 367.

26. Joachim Radkau, Die deutsche Emigration in den USA: Ihr Einfluss auf die amerikanische Europapolitik 1933-1934 (Düsseldorf, 1974). Radkau includes the Institut für Sozialforschung in his general indictment because of their psychologization of social problems. But he notes that Adorno's “Scientific Experiences” essay has a “skeptical and pessimistic undertone” that sets it apart from other emigré memoirs (p. 13).

27. Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” p. 370. The desire of the returning Institut members to contribute to political enlightenment is expressed in a letter Horkheimer sent to Lowenthal on April 13, 1951, in which he wrote:

    We stand here for the good things: for individual independence, the idea of the Enlightenment, science freed from blinders. When Fred [Pollock] reports to me that you and other friends see the type of empirical social science we are conducting here as in many ways conventional, I am convinced that you would be of another opinion could you see the thing with your own eyes. … As much as I yearn for pure philosophical work again, as much as I am determined to take it up again under the right conditions and devote myself solely to it, so much do I also know that effectiveness here, either for the education of students or for ourselves, is not lost.

    (Lowenthal archive).

28. Adorno, “Zur gegenwärtigen Stellung der empirischen Sozialforschung in Deutschland,” in Empirische Sozialforschung: Meinungs- und Marktforschung Methoden und Probleme: Schriftenreihe des Instituts zur Förderung öffentlicher Anglegenheiten e.V. (Frankfurt, 1952).

29. See for example, Friedrich Pollock, ed. Gruppenexperiment: Ein Studienbericht: Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie, vol. 2 (Frankfurt, 1955).

30. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, 10.2.

31. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: 1950), 2:976.

32. The proceedings of the conference were collected as Freud in der Gegenwart: Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie, (Frankfurt, 1957), vol. 6. The Institute's purpose in sponsoring this conference were expressed in a letter Horkheimer sent to Lowenthal on January 20, 1956:

    I participate in the affair—on the urgent request of Mitscherlich—because such an event in Germany means a restrengthening of enlightened cultural forces, because young people in general no longer know of these things, but should be led through them, because the jurists in regard to the new formation of the penal code, the ministers and pedagogues in regard to the new teaching code should be reminded of these things, because psychiatry to a great extent is a scandal. I am very aware of the risks brought by such an undertaking, but it belongs to the things that justify my being here.

    (Lowenthal archive).

33. For an overview of the Frankfurt School's changing attitude toward this issue, see chapter 6.

34. See, for example, his remark in Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York, 1976), that “it is different in America, where one meets scientists who must strain even to imagine experiencing music otherwise than by radio. The culture industry has become much more of a second nature than thus far on the old continent” (p. 231).

35. C. Wright Mills, “I.B.M. Plus Reality Plus Humanism-Sociology,” Saturday Review (May 1954), p. 54.

36. Kuspit actually went earlier, from 1957 to 1960. See his “Theodor W. Adorno: A Memoir,” Chateau Review (1983), 6(1):20-24.

37. Paul Breines, ed., Critical Interruptions: New Left Perspectives on Herbert Marcuse (New York, 1970). In 1968, Breines had written an essay on “Marcuse and the New Left in America,” in Jürgen Habermas, ed., Antworten auf Herbert Marcuse (Frankfurt, 1968), in which he noted that “Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin and the perspectives developed in the Institut für Sozialforschung remain all but unknown” in America (p. 137).

38. See, for example, the work of Ben Agger, “On Happiness and Damaged Life,” in John O'Neill, ed., On Critical Theory (New York, 1976); and “Dialectical Sensibility I: Critical Theory, Scientism and Empiricism,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory (Winter 1977) 1(1):1-30; “Dialectical Sensibility II: Towards a New Intellectuality,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory (Spring-Summer 1977) 1(2):47-57.

39. Fredric Jameson, “Adorno: or, Historical Tropes,” Salmagundi (Spring 1967), 5:3-43.

40. Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, 1967), pp. 58-59.

41. George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New York, 1967).

42. George Lichtheim, “From Marx to Hegel,” Triquarterly (Spring 1978) 12:5-42; republished in From Marx to Hegel (New York, 1971), where the citation appears on p. 21.

43. Lichtheim, From Marx to Hegel, p. viii. For an overview of Lichtheim's career, which discusses his links with Critical Theory, see chapter 10.

44. Martin Jay, “The Permanent Exile of Theodor W. Adorno,” Midstream (December 1969), 15(10):62-69.

45. Russell Jacoby, review of Adorno, Aufsätze zur Gesellschaftstheorie, in Telos (Fall 1970), 6:343-48. For a general account of Telos and its debt to Critical Theory, see John Fekete, “Telos at 50,” Telos (Winter 1981-1982), 50:161-71.

46. Russell Jacoby, “Marcuse and the New Academics: A Note on Style,” Telos (Spring, 1970) 5:188-190; “Marxism and the Critical School,” Theory and Society (1974), 1:231-38; “Marxism and Critical Theory: Martin Jay and Russell Jacoby,” Theory and Society (1975), 2:257-63; review of Phil Slater, Origin and Significance of the Frankfurt School in Telos (Spring 1977), 31:198-202; review of Zoltan Tar, The Frankfurt School in Sociology and Social Research (1978), 63:168-71; review of George Friedman, The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School in Telos (Fall 1981), 49:203-15.

47. Dick Howard, review of Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, in Telos (Summer 1971), 8:146-49; Susan Buck-Morss, “The Dialectic of T. W. Adorno,” Telos (Winter 1972), 14:137-44.

48. Telos (Spring 1970), no. 5, table of contents.

49. The New Left Review did publish a two-part translation of Adorno's “Sociology and Psychology” in numbers 46 (November-December 1967) and 47 (January-February 1968), but its first extended analysis of Critical Theory was the Althusserian attack of Göran Therborn, “Frankfurt Marxism: A Critique,” in number 63 (September-October, 1970), pp. 65-89. My essay, “The Frankfurt School's Critique of Marxist Humanism,” Social Research (Summer 1972), 34(2):285-305 was in part a rebuttal to Therborn.

50. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Boston, 1973); Phil Slater, Origin and Significance of the Frankfurt School: A Marxist Perspective (London, 1977); Tar, The Frankfurt School; O'Neill, ed., On Critical Theory; David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (Berkeley, 1980); Friedman, The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School; Paul Connerton, The Tragedy of Enlightenment: An Essay on the Frankfurt School (Cambridge, 1980); Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York, 1977); and The New Left Review, ed., Aesthetics and Politics: Debates Between Bloch, Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno (London, 1977). For an overview of the American reception of Critical Theory, see Douglas Kellner and Rick Roderick, “Recent Literature on Critical Theory,” New German Critique (Spring-Summer 1981), 23:141-70.

51. Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (New York, 1977). See also her “Piaget, Adorno, and the Possibilities of Dialectical Operations,” in Hugh J. Silverman, ed. Piaget, Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1980).

52. David Gross, “Lowenthal, Adorno, Barthes: Three Perspectives on Popular Culture,” Telos (Fall 1980), 50:122-40; Martin Jay, “The Concept of Totality in Lukács and Adorno,” Telos (Summer 1977), 30:117-37; and in Shlomo Avineri, ed., Varieties of Marxism (The Hague, 1977); Martin Jay, “Adorno and Kracauer: Notes on a Troubled Friendship,” Salmagundi (Winter 1978) 40:42-66; reprinted below as chapter XIII.

53. Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (New York, 1982); Lunn, Marxism and Modernism.

54. Axel Honneth, “Adorno and Habermas,” Telos (Spring 1979), 39:45-61. See the response in the same issue by James Schmidt, “Offensive Critical Theory? Reply to Honneth,” pp. 62-70.

55. Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto, Ca., 1982); “Finding the Subject: Notes on Whitebook and ‘Habermas Ltd.,’” Telos (Summer 1982), 52:78-98.

56. Joel Whitebook, “Saving the Subject: Modernity and the Problem of the Autonomous Individual,” Telos (Winter 1981-1982), 50:94.

57. Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (London, 1978), pp. 146f. She continues the attack on Habermas in Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Athlone, 1981), pp. 33f, but now her perspective is closer to Hegel than to Adorno, whom she also accuses of regressing back to a form of neo-Kantianism.

58. See, for example, Jean Cohen, “Why More Political Theory?,” Telos (Summer 1979), 40:70-94, and Seyla Benhabib, “Modernity and the Aporias of Critical Theory,” Telos (Fall 1981), 49:39-59. Although these writers are by no means uncritical supporters of Habermas, they clearly find his version of Critical Theory an advance over Adorno's.

59. See, for example, the review of Colletti's Marxism and Hegel by Ben Agger in Telos (Summer 1975), 24:191. See also the chapter on Della Volpe and Colletti in my Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley, 1984).

60. See, for example, Russell Jacoby, Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism (Cambridge, 1981).

61. Michael T. Jones, “Constellations of Modernity: The Literary Essays of Theodor W. Adorno” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1978); Lambert Zuidervaart, “Refractions: Truth in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory” (Ph.D. diss., University of Amsterdam, 1981 (Zuidervaart is a Canadian); the best essay in English on Adorno's aesthetic theory is Richard Wolin, “The De-Aestheticization of Art: On Adorno's Aesthetische Theorie,” Telos (Fall 1979) 41:105-127. See also Robert Lane Kauffmann, “The Theory of the Essay: Lukács, Adorno, and Benjamin,” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 1981), and J. N. Mohanty, “The Concept of Intuition in Aesthetics Apropos a Critique by Adorno,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (1980), 39:39-45.

62. Russell Berman, “Adorno, Marxism and Art,” Telos (Winter 1977-1978, 34:157-66; Peter Uwe Hohendahl, “Autonomy of Art: Looking Back at Adorno's Aesthetische Theorie,” German Quarterly (1981), 54:133-148, and The Institution of Criticism (Ithaca, 1982).

63. Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago, 1980), p. xii.

64. Ronald Weitzman, “An Introduction to Adorno's Music and Social Criticism,” Music and Letters (July 1971), 102(3):287-98; Donald B. Kuspit, “Critical Notes on Adorno's Sociology of Music and Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (1975), 33:321-77; Wesley Blomster, “Sociology of Music: Adorno and Beyond,” Telos (Summer 1976), 28:81-112; Rose Rosengard Subotnik, “Adorno's Diagnosis of Beethoven's Late Style: Early Symptoms of a Fatal Condition,” Journal of the American Musicological Society (Summer 1976), 29(2):242-75; “Why is Adorno's Music Criticism the Way It Is?,” Musical Newsletter, (Fall 1977) 7(4):3-12,; “The Historical Structure: Adorno's ‘French Model’ for Nineteenth-Century Music,” Nineteenth-Century Music (July 1978), 2(1):36-60; “Kant, Adorno, and the Self-Critique of Reason: Toward a Model for Music Criticism,” Humanities in Society (Fall 1979), 2(4):353-86, and James L. Marsh, “Adorno's Critique of Stravinsky,” New German Critique (Winter 1983), 28:147-69. One might also add two articles by the Hungarian-born sociologist, now living in Australia, Ferenc Fehér, because they were written for American journals: “Negative Philosophy of Music—Positive Results,” New German Critique (Winter 1975), 4:99-111, and “Rationalized Music and its Vicissitudes (Adorno's Philosophy of Music),” Philosophy and Social Criticism (1982), 9(1):42-65. Compare this rather paltry collection of essays with the German reception of Adorno's musicological works, a bibliography of which can be found in Burkhardt Lindner and W. Martin Lüdke, eds. Materielien zur ästhetische Theorie Th. W. Adornos Konstruktion der Moderne (Frankfurt, 1979, pp. 543f. For the reception in several other European countries, see the essays in Adorno und die Musik, ed. Otto Kolleritsch (Graz, 1977). See also Anne G. Mitchell Culver, “Theodor W. Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music, Evaluation and Commentary,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, 1973).

65. Charles Rosen, Arnold Schoenberg (Princeton, 1975), which does not even list anything by Adorno in the bibliography. Rosen gave a hostile paper on “Adorno and Stravinsky” at the Adorno conference at the University of Southern California in 1979, but it was not included in the proceedings published in Humanities in Society (Fall 1979), 2(4). Adorno's influence can, however, be seen in Gary Schmidgall, Literature as Opera (New York, 1977), especially in the chapter on Berg's Wozzeck.

66. Carl Dalhaus, Esthetics of Music, trans. William Austin (Cambridge, 1982), p. 101.

67. Craft, p. 92.

68. Andreas Huyssen, “Introduction to Adorno,” New German Critique (Fall 1975), 6:3-11; Diane Waldman, “Critical Theory and Film: Adorno and ‘The Culture Industry’ Revisited,” New German Critique (Fall 1977), 12:39-60; Stanley Aronowitz, The Crisis in Historical Materialism: Class, Politics and Culture in Marxist Theory (South Hadley, Mass., 1981); Douglas Kellner, “TV, Ideology, and Emancipatory Popular Culture,” Socialist Review (1979), 45:13-53; “Network Television and American Society: Introduction to a Critical Theory of Television,” Theory and Society (January 1981) 10(1):31-62; “Kulturindustrie und Massenkommunikation. Die Kritische Theorie und ihre Folgen,” in Wolfgang Bonss and Axel Honneth, eds. Sozialforschung als Kritik: Zum Sozialwissenschaftlichen Potential der Kritischen Theorie (Frankfurt 1982); Philip Rosen, “Adorno and Film Music: Theoretical Notes on Composing for the Films,” Yale French Studies (1980), 60:157-182; Miriam Hansen, “Introduction to Adorno, ‘Transparencies on Film’ (1966)” New German Critique (Fall/Winter, 1981-82) 24/25:186-98; Matei Calinescu, Faces of Modernity: Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch (Bloomington, 1977); Jon Brenkman, “Mass Media: From Collective Experience to the Culture of Privatization,” Social Text (Winter 1979), 1:94-109; Thomas Andrae, “Adorno on Film and Mass Culture,” Jump Cut (May 1979) vol. 20: For still more recent considerations, see J. Frow, “Mediation and Metaphor Adorno and the Sociology of Art.” Clio (1982), 12:57-66, and Patrick Brantlinger, Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture and Social Decay (Ithaca: 1983), chap. 7.

69. Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” New German Critique (Fall 1975) 6:12-19; “Transparencies on Film,” New German Critique (Fall/Winter 1981-82), 24/25:199-205.

70. Bruce Brown, Marx, Freud, and the Critique of Everyday Life: Toward A Permanent Cultural Revolution (New York, 1973); Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia (Boston, 1975).

71. Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World (New York, 1977); The Culture of Narcissism (New York, 1979).

72. Joel Kovel, A Complete Guide to Therapy (New York, 1977); The Age of Desire: Reflections of a Radical Psychoanalyst (New York, 1981).

73. See, for example, Jessica Benjamin, “The End of Internalization: Adorno's Social Psychology,” Telos (Summer 1977), 32:42-64; “Authority and the Family Revisited: or, a World Without Fathers,” New German Critique (Winter 1978), 13:35-57; “Die Antinomien des patriarchalischen Denkens: Kritische Theorie und Psychoanalyse,” in Bonss and Honneth; Mark Poster, Critical Theory of the Family (New York, 1978).

74. Pier Aldo Rovatti, “Critical Theory and Phenomenology,” Telos (Spring 1973), 15:25-40. Rovatti is an editor of Aut Aut and heavily influenced by the phenomenological Marxism of Enzo Paci, which also had a strong impact on Piccone. See, for example, his “Beyond Identity Theory” in O'Neill, in which he attacks the Frankfurt School for its lack of appreciation for Husserl.

75. Paul Piccone, “The Crisis of One-Dimensionality,” Telos (Spring 1978), 35:43-54; “The Changing Function of Critical Theory,” New German Critique (Fall 1977), 12:29-37. Piccone's point is that the system is so well-established now that it can tolerate, indeed even generate, pockets of “artificial” negativity that nonetheless function to stabilize it.

76. Fred R. Dallmayr, “Phenomenology and Critical Theory: Adorno,” Cultural Hermeneutics, 3:367-405; Twilight of Subjectivity: Contributions to a Post-Individualist Theory (Amherst, 1981). It might also be noted that another philosophical target of Adorno's, Wittgenstein, has been defended in precisely the same way. According to H. Stuart Hughes, “in Adorno's failure to come to grips with the Philosophical Investigations, an enormous intellectual opportunity was missed—the chance to associate two of the finest intelligences of the century in the enterprise of bridging the philosophical traditions which Wittgenstein's death had cut off in midcourse” (The Sea Change, p. 167).

77. Dallmayr, “Phenomenology and Critical Theory: Adorno,” p. 395.

78. Herman Mörchen, Adorno und Heidegger—Untersuchung einer philosophischen Kommunikationsverweigerung (Stuttgart, 1981).

79. Jean-Francois Lyotard, “Adorno as the Devil,” Telos (Spring 1974), 19:128-37.

80. See, for example, James Miller, “Some Implication of Nietzsche's Thought for Marxism,” Telos (Fall 1978), 37:22-41 and Rose, pp. 18f. Another common theme that some commentators have claimed links Adorno and Derrida is the importance of Husserl as a target of their work. It would, in fact, be very interesting to compare Adorno's Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie with Derrida's Speech and Phenomena: and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, 1973).

81. Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin: Or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London, 1981), p. 141.

82. Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore, 1982).

83. Ibid., p. 75.

84. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, 1982), p. xii.

85. Tom Long, “Marx and Western Marxism in the 1970's,” The Berkeley Journal of Sociology (1980), 25:36.

86. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York, 1972), p. 231.

87. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York, 1980), p. 145.

88. Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text (Winter 1979), 1:130-48. See also his further reflections on these issues in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, 1981); and his “Reflections in Conclusion” to Aesthetics and Politics.

89. Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” p. 148.

90. Habermas, “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” New German Critique (Winter 1981), 22:3-14.

91. Habermas, “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment,” New German Critique (Spring/Summer 1982), 26:13-30.

92. See, for example, Peter Uwe Hohendahl, review of Buck-Morss in Telos (Winter 1977-78), 34:185.

93. As the examples cited above demonstrate, his American reception has been confined almost entirely to academic circles. But a glimmer of a slightly more popular appreciation may perhaps be discerned in the fact that a play entitled “The Dialectic of Enlightenment” by Daryl Chin was produced off-Broadway in New York in 1982. The play seems to have borrowed only the title from Horkheimer and Adorno's work. But surely there is some significance in the fact that the reviewer for The Village Voice, Roderick Mason Faber, could assume enough recognition of the authors to pun on one of their names in his negative review, which was called “Adore? No.”

94. See Rose, p. 13.

95. Adorno, “Die Wunde Heine,” in Noten zur Literatur, Gesammelte Schriften 2 (Frankfurt, 1974), p. 100.

96. Harvey Gross, “Adorno in Los Angeles: The Intellectual in Emigration,” Humanities in Society (Fall 1979), 2:350.