The Melancholy Science An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno The Melancholy Science An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno Gillian Rose M © Gillian Rose 1978 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission. First published 1978 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Associated companies in Delhi Dublin Hong Kong Johannesburg Lagos Melbourne New York Singapore and Tokyo British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Rose, Gillian The melancholy science. 1 • Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund I. Title 193 B3I99.A34 ISBN 978-0-333-23214-9 ISBN 978-1-349-15985-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-15985-7 This book is sold subject to the standard conditions of the Net Book Agreement. 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Contents Acknowledgements vu Preface IX 1 The Crisis in Culture I The Frankfurt School, I 923-50 I The Frankfurt School, I95o-6g 6 Adorno 8 2 The Search for Style I I Morality and Style I I The Essay as Form I4 jlvfinima Moralia I6 The Tradition of Irony I8 3 The La01ent over Reification 27 Reification as a Sociological Category 27 Historical 28 The Abuse of 'Reification' 28 Misattributions of 'Reification' 30 Simmel and Reification 32 The Young Lukacs and the Young Benjamin 35 Against Lukacs and Against Benjamin 40 Analytical 43 Adorno and Reification 43 Negative Dialectic 44 Reification 46 How is Critical Theory Possible? 48 4 A Changed Concept of Dialectic 52 The Critique of Philosophy 52 Hegel 56 Kierkegaard 62 Husser! 65 Heidegger 70 A Changed Concept of Dialectic 75 5 The Dispute over PositivisDl 77 The Critique of Sociology 77 Contents VI Durkheim and Weber 82 Class and Organisation 86 Theory of the Individual 9I Sociology and Empirical Research 95 Towards an Empirical Sociology I02 6 The Dispute over Moclernistn 109 The Sociology of Culture 109 The Dispute over Modernism I I4 Forces and Relations of Producti I I8 The Notes on Literature I2I New Music and Social Illusion I30 7 The Melancholy Science I38 Glossary I49 List of Abbreviations of Titles I 55 Notes and References 159 Bibliography I93 Subject Index 207 Name Index 210 Acknowledgements Many people have inspired, helped and criticised this work at various stages. I wish to thank especially Sir Isaiah Berlin, Julius Carlebach, Leszek Kolakowski, Steven Lukes and Sabine MacCormack. I wish to thank the following people who read and commented on all or part of the manuscript in its final stages: Zev Barbu, Tom Bottomore, Frank Glover-Smith, E. F. N. J ephcott. In addition I wish to thank Ulrike Meinhof, who checked all my translations and retranslations from the German, and Rogers Ragavan who gave me unstinting assistance in secretarial and practical matters. I am also grateful to the Librarian ofSt Antony's College, Oxford, for her patience in supplying books over the past few years, and to St Antony's College for their support. I wish to thank the Social Science Research Council, the University of Sussex and the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst for financial help during the course of the research, which was partly conducted at the Free University, West Berlin, and at the University of Constance, West Germany. My special thanks are given to Stefan Collini, Herminio Martins, John Raffan and Jacqueline Rose. Preface 'The melancholy science' which this book expounds is not a pessimistic science. By introducing Minima Moralia as .an offering from his 'me lancholy science'-an inversion of Nietzsche's 'joyful science'-Adorno undermines and inverts the sanguine and total claims of philosophy and sociology, and rejects any dichotomy such as optimistic/pessimisti<; for it implies an inherently fixed and static view. Adorno's work draws on traditions inherited from Marxian and non Marxian criticism of Hegel's philosophy, and on the pre-Marxian writings ofLukacs and ofBenjamin as much as on their Marxian writings. Interpretation of Adorno suffers when his aims and achievements are related solely to Marx or to a Marxian tradition which is sometimes undefined and sometimes overdefined, and, equally, when he is judged solely as a sociologist. Here, Adorno's thought is introduced and discussed in its own right, 'immanently', to use his own term. Where appropriate, Adorno's engagement with and transformation of the many intellectual traditions which inform his work is examined. Adorno's thought depends fundamentally on the category of re ification. This category has attained a strangely dominant role in much neo-Marxist and phenomenological literature and in recent sociological amalgams of these two traditions. It is used to evoke, often by mere suggestion or allusion, a very peculiar and complex epistemological setting which is rarely examined further or justified. In the Marxian tradition 'reification' is most often employed as a way of generalising Marx's theory of value with the aim of producing a critical theory of social institutions and of culture, but frequently any critical force is lost in the process of generalisation. Adorno's work, the most ambitious and important to have emerged from the Institute for Social Research before 1969, is the most abstruse, and, in spite of its great influence, still the most misunderstood. This is partly a result of its deliberately paradoxical, polemical and fractured nature which has made it eminently quotable but egregiously miscon- X Preface 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. Chapter 1 The Crisis in Culture The Frankfurt School, 1923-50 All the tensions within the German academic community which accompanied the changes in political, cultural and intellectual life in Germany since 18go were reproduced in the Institute for Social Research from its inception in Frankfurt in 1923.1 These changes were widely diagnosed as a 'crisis in culture' .2 By this very definition the 'crisis' was deplored yet exacerbated. The Institute carried these tensions with it into exile and when it returned to Germany after the war and found itself the sole heir to a discredited tradition the inherited tensions became even more acute. These tensions are evident in the work of most of the School's members, and most clearly, self-consciously and importantly in the work of Theodor W. Adorno. From 18go the German academic community reacted in a variety of ways to the sudden and momentous development of capitalism in Germany, and to the new role of Germany in the world. This resulted in disillusionment with various scientific and philosophical methods, and the pedagogical and philosophical revival which followed occurred across the political spectrum, to the extent that the spectrum was represented in the universities. The different attempts to 're-engage learning' and reinvigorate German life have been indicted for their political naivety and irresponsibility.3 Although the Frankfurt School was deliberately set up to be outside the academic community, the aims and work of the Institute amount to a most ambitious attempt to 're engage learning'. 4 For, on the one hand, the School tried more concretely than any university department to reunify the fragmented branches of knowledge in the social sciences without sacrificing the fruits of any of