Introduction to Adorno

Abstract

In printing Adorno's Industry Reconsidered, an essay which sums up ideas first developed in Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialektik der Aufkldrung,l New German Critique's intention is not only to elaborate again theories of manipulation, reification and administration of culture and their obvious negative implications for human praxis. Nor is our interest merely archival or historical; we are not publishing this essay simply because Adorno was one of the first to use critical Marxist thought to illuminate Western mass culture, which for years had been dismissed by conservative culture critics with elitist moralizing. It might make some sense to use the essay for its implicit attack on the impressionistic and mindless thesis of pluralism, current in American research on mass culture and popular taste, a thesis which predominates in the Journal of Popular Culture (1967 ff.) and in the recently published study by Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture (1974). However, it can not be considered a major task of contemporary Marxist research on mass culture to criticize once again the ideologically affirmative thesis of pluralism. How then can this essay--carried by the Hessian Broadcasting System in the spring of 1963 as a contribution to the International Radio University Program and later published in Ohne Leitbild (1967)-relate to present-day debates? Does it raise questions about mass culture and public sphere which still concern us today, even if we wish to abandon the conceptual framework of Adorno's philosophy? First, Adorno's concept of culture industry must be placed in a historical context and explained in relationship to other theories of mass culture as developed by Kracauer, Brecht and Benjamin. A historical understanding of of Adorno's position is all the more important since Adorno consistently avoided historic specificity in his work, though his thought unmistakably developed in reaction to historical events. The striking time-and-spacelessness of Industry Reconsidered points to Adorno's secret hostility toward history.2 This hostility in turn reflects his rejection of the determinate negation as a key concept of the philosophy of history, and indicates his insistence on negativity and refusal as crucial elements of a