Table Of Content

Critical Models Interventions and Catchwords European Perspectives European Perspectives A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism Lawrence D. Kritzman, Editor European Perspectives presents outstanding books by leading European thinkers. With both classic and contemporary works, the series aims to shape the major intellectual controversies of our day and to facilitate the tasks of historical understanding. For a complete list of books in the series, see pages 411–12. Critical Models Interventions and Catchwords Theodor W.Adorno Translated by Henry W.Pickford Introduction by Lydia Goehr Columbia University Press New York C The Press gratefully acknowledges a grant from Inter Nationes toward costs of translating this work. Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex Eingriffe: Neun kritische Modellecopyright © 1963 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main Stichworte: Kritische Modelle 2copyright © 1969 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main Translation copyright © 1998 Columbia University Press Introduction copyright © 2005 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Adorno, Theodor W., 1903–1969. [Eingriffe. English] Critical models : interventions and catchwords / Theodor W. Adorno ; translated by Henry W. Pickford ; introduction by Lydia Goehr. p. cm. — (European perspectives) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-231-13504-1 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-231-13505-X (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Social history—20th century. 2. Social sciences—Philosophy. I. Pickford, Henry W. II. Adorno, Theodor W., 1903–1969. Stichworte. English. III. Title. IV. Series. HN16.A3313 2005 301'.01—dc22 2005049777 Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Preface vii Reviewing Adorno: Public Opinion and Critique Lydia Goehr xiii Interventions Nine Critical Models 1 Introduction 3 Why Still Philosophy 5 Philosophy and Teachers 19 Note on Human Science and Culture 37 Those Twenties 41 Prologue to Television 49 Television as Ideology 59 Sexual Taboos and Law Today 71 The Meaning of Working Through the Past 89 Opinion Delusion Society 105 Catchwords Critical Models 2 123 Introduction 125 Notes on Philosophical Thinking 127 vi contents Reason and Revelation 135 Progress 143 Gloss on Personality 161 Free Time 167 Taboos on the Teaching Vocation 177 Education After Auschwitz 191 On the Question: “What is German?” 205 Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America 215 Dialectical Epilegomena On Subject and Object 245 Marginalia to Theory and Praxis 259 Critical Models 3 279 Critique 281 Resignation 289 Appendix 1: Discussion of Professor Adorno’s Lecture “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” 295 Appendix 2: Introduction to the Lecture “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” 307 Publication Information 309 Notes 315 Index 397 Preface† Translators are the post-horses of enlightenment. — Pushkin The present volume is a critical edition of the two essay collections Adorno subtitled “critical models”and is based on the texts in the second part of volume 10 of his collected writings (Gesammelte Schriften:Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft II,edited by Rolf Tiedemann [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977]). Eingriffe: Neun kritische Modelle,was published in 1963 as volume 10 in the series edition suhrkamp; although Adorno had corrected the galleys, the second volume, Stichworte: Kritische Modelle 2, did not appear until shortly after his unexpected death in 1969, as volume 347 in edition suhrkamp. Also included here from volume 10 of the collected writings are two very late essays,“Critique”and “Resignation,”which Adorno had set aside for an eventual third volume of “critical models,” and an introduction to the lecture “The Meaning of Working Through the Past.”Finally,this edition provides a translation of the discussion between Adorno and his audience when he first gave this lecture; the discussion transcript was included in the essay’s initial publication though not in the subsequent book edition or in the collected writings.This document offers a vivid portrait of Adorno in the role of public intellectual,explicating himself ad hoc about what could be considered the practical motive of these essays: to promote political maturity by bringing reified consciousness to self- awareness.The purposefulness of that intention transcends the contin- gency of the occasions for which Adorno wrote many of these texts. viii preface For the context underlying the genesis and development of these essays is Adorno’s enormous role as a public philosopher and cultural critic following his return to Germany in 1949.Indeed,with the publication of Minima Moralia in 1951 Adorno became virtually a popular author;in a letter to his friend and early mentor,Siegfried Kracauer,he ascribed his surprising success to a fortunate conjunction of a general cultural vacuum and the waning interest in Heideggerian themes and reveled in the freedom his new fame afforded him.1And in 1963 he wrote with a mixture of pride and astonishment to his old friend that a paperback edition of Prisms (1955) was printed with a run of 25,000 copies, while Interventions appeared with an initial run of 18,000 copies; by 1969 the former was in its third edition and the latter had 33,000 copies.2 This popularity reflects Adorno’s resumption of the journalistic activities in mass print and radio he had pursued so robustly before the war.3 Incomplete documentation indicates that between 1950 and 1969 Adorno participated in more than 160 radio programs. While the medium of course lent itself to Adorno’s reflections on music, the overwhelming majority of his contributions was broadly intellectual,just as most of the essays collected here began as radio lectures.The Adorno emerging here is a far cry from the stereotypical mandarin aesthete; as his editor at Hessischer Rundfunk in Frankfurt recounts,Adorno told him: “I want to be understood by my listeners” . . .[Adorno] thought that I,as “an expert,”knew better how to achieve that.It was,surprisingly,of the utmost importance that he be understood even and especially in a medium of the “culture industry.”The sound technicians who were responsible for recording him afterward had to repeat spontaneously and in their own words what he had said,and often there ensued a discussion that was much better and more comprehensible than the lecture he had just read into the micro- phone.We had to take care that when he came to the radio station, there were appropriate sound technicians who were able to justify their answers to him.It was preferable to postpone a session rather than Adorno having to forego the important discussion afterward with our assistant.Once we recorded one such discussion between Adorno and his sound technician without him or her noticing,and then played it back to them.He found himself “surprisingly good,” which meant a great deal in consideration of his demanding conceit, his pronounced skepticism toward the mass media,and his general aversion for organizations and institutions that shape opinion.4 Although at times he seemed to dismiss these lectures as modest bagatelles and occasional pieces quickly dispatched,5 Adorno neverthe- preface ix less conscientiously reworked and published them,primarily in popular journals, which were read by well-educated citizens and those in posi- tions of cultural and political authority,before finally collecting them in the new inexpensive paperback book form.His engagement in the mass media was a logical consequence of his eminently practical intentions to effect change.6The concrete recommendations incorporated into several of these essays were meant as direct “interventions”;for example,along with other leading cultural figures Adorno was asked in 1969 for his posi- tion on the continued illegality and persecution of homosexuality in West Germany. The published anthology of responses included these introductory remarks to an extract from the essay “Sexual Taboos and Law Today”: Kindest thanks for your lovely letter.What I have to say on the topic of sexual morality, in the most diverse spheres of the harm that it wreaks,can be found in the essay “Sexual Taboos and Law Today” in Interventions, and in “Morals and Criminality” in the third volume of Notes to Literature.Both works I sent immediately to Dr.Heinemann as soon as he took over the Ministry of Justice, asking him to read them in the context of plans to reform the penal law,and I received an extremely friendly response.At the moment I wouldn’t know what to add to what I have written there.That I most fiercely oppose every kind of sexual repression should in the meantime be more or less common knowledge,which I gladly con- firm explicitly to you.7 In these essays perhaps more than anywhere else in his compendious oeuvre are the practical and political motivations of Adorno’s thought most visibly at work. Those motivations in turn shape the structure and style of “critical models”:specific analyses that tactically employ the negative dialectical strategy he expounded and exemplified with three “thought models”in Negative Dialectics, by which a phenomenon or concept pretending to self-sufficient immediacy is discursively unmasked as a societally medi- ated, historical result. Present conditions are shown to contradict the reigning ideology,and—rather than being discarded for not representing reality—the ideology is taken ‘at its word’, as the as yet unfulfilled promise of its realization.8When Adorno upholds that “the element of the homme de lettres,disparaged by a petty bourgeois scientific ethos,is indispensable to thought,” he is invoking a German tradition in neo- Marxist essayism that effloresced in the Weimar Republic but that reaches back via Nietzsche to the figure of the French Enlightenment moralist and the discursive form of the nonsystematic critique, as in