Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of “culture industry” was at the moment of its formulation and continues to be today associated with his assessment of cinema and jazz.1 Culture industry is, thus, commonly understood as an adjective Adorno applied to measure if something is or is not an authentic piece of art.In that sense, one could watch a movie and then ask oneself: is this movie good, or is it “just” culture industry?Even though Adorno’s reflections on cinema and jazz are not exempted from misjudgments, his theory of culture industry could be interpreted as a research program, one which Adorno developed throughout his entire life. This program comprises considerations on art and technology and a theory of how culture undermines subjectivity, helps individuals adapt to capitalist reality, and can eventually prepare the ground for authoritarian propaganda. This article analyses the early developments of this concept and hopes to contribute to its enlargement and to the recognition of its importance to understand the relationship between politics, technology, and culture in current society.

Every time there is a development of new communicational technologies, it entails many political consequences. We are now witnessing this complicated intertwinement between social media and the rise of far-right politics. During the Weimar years, German culture suffered a cartelization process, which was analogous to the cartelization of industry at the time. Alfred Hugenberg, for instance, an important member of the right-wing German National Party, “built up an empire in the communications industry and became the strident, enormously influential voice of the counterrevolution.”2 Radio and cinema would also become a central piece of Nazi propaganda. In a letter to Benjamin, from July 2nd, 1937, Adorno stated that he was interested in researching “mass art in monopoly capitalism” and would like to include the detective novel, new realism, decorative arts, cinema, as well as newspapers and radio in his considerations. Nevertheless, this plan would not be carried out by Adorno while in Europe.

In the late 1930s, the Nazi persecution continued to push intellectuals out of the country. Adorno arrived in the United States in 1938. For this exile to happen, Horkheimer made a last-minute arrangement: Adorno would work part-time for the Institute for Social Research in New York and part-time in a job that he had arranged for him – the Princeton Radio Research Project.3 Paul F. Lazarsfeld, an Austrian émigré who would later become the great name of American communication studies4 conducted the project, and Hadley Cantril and Frank Stanton were its co-directors. Adorno was delegated the task of developing the musical part of the project, called “Music Study.” When he embarked for America, however, he had no idea of what to expect from this Radio Project. The very use of this word “Project,” according to Adorno, translated into German as Forschungsvorhaben, was unknown to him.5

The project was based in an unusual place, considering its connection with Princeton University and the Rockefeller Foundation’s abundant resources, which funded it: Newark, New Jersey. This choice is related to Lazarsfeld’s role in the project’s organization, which was linked to his “Newark Research Center.” In Adorno’s words, “When I traveled there through the tunnel under the Hudson, I felt a little as if I were in Kafka’s “Nature Theater of Oklahoma.”6

The primary purpose of the project was to understand the effects of mass media on society, especially radio, magazines, and movies, but also books, news and politics. The role of the radio would become even more significant with Franklin Delano Roosevelt (and his series of “Fireside chats”) and with the deflagration of World War II, as it served primarily as a means of political propaganda.7 Despite Adorno’s previous work’s scarce affinities with the project, Lazarsfeld insisted on his participation as a specialist in music and, if part of that invitation was due to the solidarity with a fellow intellectual who escaped Nazi persecution, it was not reduced to this, given that Lazarsfeld was also a great admirer of Adorno’s music criticism.

Their collaboration, however, did not take root. When he arrived in the United States, Adorno’s goal was to apply the models he had developed in the essay “On the fetish character in music and the regression of listening” (1938) and in the fragments on Wagner written between 1938 and 1939, thus mixing sociological, technical and aesthetic analyses. What Adorno came across, instead, was so-called “administrative research,” a kind of market research that was not guided by academic criteria. As the Rockefeller Foundation funded the research, investigations had to take place within the Commercial Radio System’s boundaries and should provide empirical results.8 Lazarsfeld demanded, for example, a typology of listeners. Anyone who has read Adorno’s Introduction to the Sociology of Music knows that he would eventually develop a typology of musical hearing in the 1960s, and his experience in the radio project was an essential contribution to this later book. By the late 1940s, however, Adorno’s attempts to establish this typology were still incipient and found enormous resistance on the part of Lazarsfeld, who found it quite useless to classify a type of listener from the following definition:

Sometimes music has the effect of freeing hidden sexual desires. This seems to be the case particularly with women who regard music as a sort of image of their male partner, to which they yield without ever identifying themselves with the music. It is this sort of attitude which is indicated by weeping. The amateur’s weeping when he listens to music (the musician will practically never weep) is one of the foremost tasks of the analysis of the emotional side of music.9

For Lazarsfeld, this kind of characterization — which would later appear in Adorno’s nomenclature as the “emotional listener” — was still a very abstract definition and without empirical validity.10

To grasp how the research project worked, the issue of musical taste, for instance, was investigated as follows: the listener pressed a button to indicate whether or not he or she liked a song (this example, once again, would appear years later in the Introduction to the Sociology of Music). Adorno refused to treat subjective reactions as if they were a primary and determining source of sociological knowledge. The “musical experience” itself, which cannot be verbalized for him, was thus obliterated. In the project, instead of starting from the subjective materials to achieve the objective social and psychological determinants, the research’s point of departure was precisely the subjective and it remained within its realm.

This event also made Adorno aware of issues regarding the idea of “spontaneity,” for the allegedly “spontaneous” reactions of the listeners were indisputably preconditioned. This question of “spontaneity” was one of Adorno’s most significative divergence motifs within the research group. For him, the spontaneous appreciation of art did not refer to an alleged immediate experience of it, but precisely the opposite, that is, an experience not only previously informed, but also attentive.11 In Adorno’s words:

The phenomena with which the sociology of the mass media must be concerned, particularly in America, cannot be separated from standardization, the transformation of artistic creations into consumer goods, and the calculated pseudo-individualization and similar manifestations of what is called Verdinglichung — reification — in German. It is matched by a reified, largely manipulable consciousness scarcely capable any longer of spontaneous experience.12

According to Adorno, he could even dispense with philosophical analysis to illustrate this point with an everyday example:

Among the frequently changing colleagues who came in contact with me in the Princeton Project was a young lady. After a few days she came to confide in me and asked in a completely charming way, “Dr. Adorno, would you mind a personal question?” I said, “it depends on the question, but just go ahead.” And she continued, “Please tell me: are you an extrovert or an introvert?” It was as if she was already thinking, as a living being, according to the pattern of the so-called “cafeteria” questions on questionnaires, by which she has been conditioned. She could fit herself into such rigid and preconceived categories, as one can often observe in Germany when, for example, in marriage advertisements, the partners characterize themselves by the signs of the Zodiac that they were born under: Virgo, Aries. Reified minds are in no way limited to America, but are fostered by the general tendency of society. But I first became aware of this in America.13

Following his involvement in this Project, Adorno formulated a critique which would be present in many of his texts on art and culture, namely, the idea that there is a kind of objective spirit which organizes individual behaviors when it comes to cultural phenomena, the culture industry being one of them. However, according to Adorno, the notion of something “spiritual,” independent and autonomous to the individual, escaped the liberal scope of sociological conceptions in the United States. That is, the intellect was always associated with the person who carries it. One could confirm Adorno’s hypothesis by realizing how difficult it is to translate the German word Geistto English. All individuals have a “mind,” which is usually the preferred conversion for Geist, but the latter overflows individual minds, though also present in them. To cite another example of this, Adorno narrates an episode in which he explained a movement of Schubert’s Symphony in B minor to a small audience of radio listeners. At the end of the explanation, one of the participants said that Adorno had been compelling, however, had he dressed himself in Schubert’s clothes and worn a mask, it would be much easier to believe he was right. As the critic spoke from the “outside,” it was harder to trust that Schubert’s intentions while composing his work were those advocated by Adorno, as if the symphony did not possess objective aspects that would allow anyone to interpret it similarly.

Following the project’s guidelines, Adorno talked to listeners, applied surveys, worked with a jazz musician who was his assistant, and with many experts on empirical data, and from 1938 to 1941, was deeply involved in the research of American mass culture. As Adorno himself pointed out, it was precisely when he was confronted with the demand to “measure culture” that he came to conclude that culture is precisely what excludes a mindset capable of measuring it.14

During this time, Adorno wrote a series of essays. The best known and most read are those related to popular music. The consequence of their wider dissemination might lead one to believe his participation in the radio project was limited to popular music analysis. Even though it has occupied part of his reflections, it is necessary to emphasize that Adorno was appointed as a classical music specialist. One of his main assignments was to analyze the impact of its radio transmission on listeners.

Adorno highlights four primary texts that resulted from this experience. These texts were written with the collaboration of an American sociologist (who was the translator of Durkheim and therefore had familiarity with European science) called George Simpson. In theory, Simpson should be Adorno’s editorial assistant; however, he exerted quite an influence on Adorno’s texts during the time. Versed in both American and European models of science, as Adorno wrote, he “not only encouraged me to write as radically and uncompromisingly as possible, he also gave his all to make it succeed.”15 According to Adorno’s testimony, Simpson helped him translate his ideas into American sociological vocabulary. The texts are as follows: “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” published in Kenyon Review in 1945 and based on a 1940 lecture; “On popular music” published in Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences in 1941; “Study of the NBC Music Appreciation Hour,” which remained unpublished until 1994; and finally, “The Radio Symphony,” published in the Radio Research compendium in 1941.

The collaboration with the project, which would be extremely fruitful for Adorno’s intellectual experience and subsequent production, was permeated by many misunderstandings. Consequently, the “Music Study Project,” the title of Adorno’s part in Lazarsfeld’s project, was canceled. Adorno then left for Los Angeles and dedicated himself in the four years that followed, along with Max Horkheimer, to the writing of Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which the concept of culture industry would display a more definite outline.

A Social Critique of Radio Music

Today the commodity character of music tends radically to alter it. In his day, Bach was considered and considered himself an artisan, although his music functioned as art. Today music is considered ethereal and sublime, although it actually functions as a commodity. Today the terms ethereal and sublime have become trademarks. Music has become a means instead of an end, a fetish. […] This produces “commodity listening” […] It is the ideal of aunt Jemima’s ready mix for pancakes extended to the field of music.16

The epigraph above was extracted from the aforementioned text originally published in The Kenyon Review in the spring of 1945. It was inspired by a lecture Lazarsfeld had persuaded Adorno to deliver to his colleagues at the Princeton Radio Project in 1940, to clarify his assessment of music. Adorno’s involvement in the project was marked by several moments like this, in which Lazarsfeld sought to integrate him and the other colleagues, since they did not understand his way of thinking and, as a result, Adorno’s collaboration stirred many conflicts.

The comparison between music and pancake mix was meant to demonstrate the deceptive character of the idea that radio would be able to deliver quality, custom-made, and unique music programming to each listener, as believing that a pancake ready-mix could provide something of the quality, freshness, and personality offered by a pancake made by a close aunt (not to mention that the flagrantly racist and sexist stereotype promoted by the products with the label “aunt Jemima”). At first sight, Adorno appears to be elitist in his evaluation; however, this is not a defense of the “exclusivity” of the work of art, but a critique of the contempt of culture that lies behind its treatment as any commodity one consumes ready-made. It should be noted that Adorno refers to an inversion that will be increasingly recurrent in his texts in this period. Music considered “ethereal and sublime” starts to function as a “commodity.” The understanding of art depends, in this context, on the function it exerts.

A fundamental element of these writings, which caused a series of misunderstandings in Adorno’s reception, is worth emphasizing. The texts, written in English, refer to the process of commodification of music, that is, the process of becoming a commodity of music. In English, however, the idea of “commodification” is significantly close to the idea of commercialization. It would seem that Adorno, thus, refers to the idea of “commodification” of music, in the commercial sense of the term, but he alludes to the process of “becoming a commodity” of music, which is quite different, as we shall see.

Adorno begins the text in question by stating that the radio tends to be approached in two different ways. The first is linked to market research – simply exposing several individuals to various treatments and observing their reaction. That is, sociologists usually map consumption from fractions of class, gender, age, among others. The second way, proposed by Lazarsfeld, deviates from the first, as it is guided by questions such as the following: “How can we bring good music to as many listeners as possible?” Lazarsfeld termed it “benevolent administrative research.” At the beginning of the text, Adorno argues for the complementarity between Lazarsfeld’s and his position, but what he does is completely demolish the former’s view on the subject.

A few years later, Adorno would write that he considered it to be his “objectively proffered assignment to interpret phenomena — not to ascertain, sift, and classify facts and make them available as information.”17 This, according to Adorno, corresponded not only to his idea of Philosophy but also of Sociology. Adorno thus scrutinizes Lazarsfeld’s question. The first obstacle to confront the one who starts from this benevolent question, according to Adorno, is precisely to establish what good music is. Is “good” taken as “consecrated” by mere social convention? If the answer is yes, and Beethoven, for example, is taken as an excellent composer, states Adorno, “is it not possible that this music, by the very problems it sets for itself, is far away from our own situation?”18 In other words, is it possible to consider that it has become something like a piece in a museum and thus is not able to convey us anything else? Is radio the best way to broadcast this kind of music?

Moreover, what does “broad audience” mean? Adorno argues that social critique of music on the radio has to consider some elements which seemed to be ignored by the project: the relation between the behavior of the listeners and broader social behavior patterns and the social position the radio occupies, as well as the role it plays in society as a whole.

For those accustomed to Adorno’s aesthetic and social critique — refined and challenging, even to the reader used to it – the text is curious, for Adorno focuses on the most “pedestrian” elements possible, in the sociological sense of the term, of which the project participants seem to have no idea. He argued that we live in a society where the primary purpose is the production of goods, which are produced for profit instead of the satisfaction of human needs; where the communication industry is monopolized, which results in a greater standardization of the cultural goods it produces and distributes; where, as the difficulties to reproduce such a society increase, the greater is the force to preserve, at any cost, the existing relations of power and property; where the antagonisms that permeate social life in capitalism are not restricted to the economic sphere but also structure cultural life.

Hence, distributing information about music would not be the same as fostering a musical culture. We can see here how Adorno’s interpretation draws on Walter Benjamin’s thesis of technological reproducibility, noting how the work of art, when reproduced on a mass scale, becomes one information among many others, which we will not remember soon after consumption. Adorno resorts, once again, to an empirical example. He analyzes the fans’ letters of a Midwestern educational radio, which broadcasts classical music and recognizes in them a kind of “standardized enthusiasm.” All letters are structured in a similar fashion:

Dear X, your music shop is swell. It widens my musical horizon and gives me an ever deeper feeling for the profound qualities of our great music. I can no longer bear the trashy jazz which we usually have to listen to. Continue with your grand work and let us have more of it.19

The standardization of the letters, which do not refer to any aspect of the musical fact of the program, leads Adorno to the conclusion that the listeners merely replicate the language utilized by the radio announcer, who challenges them to demonstrate their high cultural level while listening to their program on the radio.20 This behavior is similar to that of “the fanatical radio listener entering a bakery and asking for ‘that delicious, golden crispy Bond Bread,’”21 echoing ipsis litteris the words of the brand’s advertisement.

The increasing standardization of the listeners’ reactions is an ideological effect of the radio, realized in spite of the intention of its producers. Music under the yoke of radio “serves to keep listeners from criticizing social realities; in short, it has a soporific effect upon social consciousness.”22 Again, it is worth remembering Benjamin and his theory of the decline of experience in Modernity. Radio works here as an anesthetic,23 a consolation at the end of a day of hard work, which differs from other goods (the stations that plays jazz, for example) just by transmitting more “sophisticated” merchandise. The standardization promoted by radio prevents the appreciation of music and creates a pseudo-individuality by imposing a product on the listener and making him or her believe that it was freely chosen.

The bankrupt farmer, writes Adorno, is comforted by the fact that Toscanini is playing only for him. In this case, music assumes a function that was unknown to it as art: it generates pride and self-satisfaction. This function assumed by music occludes its immanent meaning, preventing a real relationship between the subject and the consumed object, that is, the intention of the consumer of art has nothing to do with the work of art “itself” but is driven by the satisfaction of consuming a certain kind of “art,” like “classical music” and the particularity of each work of art itself ends up not being related at all with its consumption. At this point, Adorno points out, it is necessary to recognize that, although entertainment may have its uses, the ideological character of radio consists of a mix-up: Radio, while pure entertainment, presents itself as the vehicle of great music. In this text, Adorno takes up one of the aspects of the essay on “On the fetish character in music and the regression of listening.” The way the radio imposes how one listens to Beethoven, he writes, fixed on the melody and not on the whole, causes people to hear the Fifth Symphony as if it were quotations from the Fifth Symphony, i.e., in an atomized manner, which would lead to a regression of listening. Regression here must be understood as a psychoanalytical category and not just an aesthetic one. In short, a kind of “childish musical language” is thus created. One reencounters here the comparison with the pancakes: just as an entire society loses the ability to make a meal step by step when replacing it with a ready-mix of pancakes, in the long run rendering it unable even to feed itself independently, just like a child (one must recall that pancake is typically fed to children and appeals to the sweet and soft, easily chewable child’s taste buds), the same behavior emerges when it comes to so-called cultural goods, which are consumed ready, to the point where whole generations lose the ability to grasp a symphony as a whole. The pancake metaphor points to a process of reification and regression of all the senses in capitalism, from taste to hearing, which the experience in the United States made clear for Adorno.

At this point, Adorno explains the idea of a Sociology and a critique which aim to interpret phenomena, instead of just describing them, especially concerning the public:

We must try to understand them better than they understand themselves. This brings us easily to conflict with common sense notions, such as “giving the people what they want” […] music is not a realm of subjective states and relative values […] as soon as one enters the field of musical technology and structure, the arbitrariness of evaluation vanishes, and we are faced with decisions of right and wrong and true and false.24

The core of what would later become Adorno’s sociology of art and his aesthetic theory is thus delineated, namely, the notion that theory should not relinquish the idea of truth.25 Nevertheless, this no longer applies to the culture industry, whose relativism, produced by the varied supply of cultural products, dispenses with the idea of judgment.

Analytical Study of the NBC “Music Appreciation Hour”

This study, written between 1938 and 1940, is the only text from the period in which Adorno worked on the radio project that remained unpublished. Its first publication only occurred in 1994. The reason for this long adjournment was that the text simply did not please anybody. Adorno had insisted on criticizing a program that reached millions of students and was very consecrated in the US because of its allegedly democratic character, which was to “bring” classical music, previously restricted to small circles, for the middle classes which did not attend concert halls and also because of its supposedly pedagogical character.26

Adorno analyzes the printed material of an NBC radio program, aimed at children and teenagers, with the chief objective of introducing listeners to classical music. The program was composed of four courses divided into series. “Series A” dealt with the physical aspect of the music, i.e., instruments and orchestra. “Series B,” in turn, concerned the imaginative aspect of music, whereas “series C” explored its “intellectual” aspects (what the program presented as the structure and form of pure music). “Series D” sought to show how music related to the life of its composer, operating as its expression. Adorno analyzes the four stages of the course systematically to demonstrate how the program of national scope and non-commercial use failed in its central intention of placing people in a real relationship with music.

He points out some of the program’s pedagogical and factual errors, analyzes its form, and proposes solutions to its problems. Recurring themes in Adorno’s oeuvre reappear or appear for the first time here. Some of them are worth underlining.

In the written material provided by NBC, one reads the following sentence: “Those who use their mind more actively are the ones who get the most fun.”27 One encounters here the theme of aesthetic hedonism, which would be taken up by Adorno decades later in his Aesthetic Theory. Therefore, the radio program demands that the effect of the work of art and its validity is “fun.” This term appears repetitively in the program and, according to Adorno’s analysis, submits music to the criteria of the market, in the sense that something must be “pleasant” and “worth its money”28 in order to circulate. As such, musical appreciation becomes comparable, according to Adorno, to the fun one has while watching the World Series baseball game. In addition to attributing to works of art a function that is foreign to them as a formal principle, this type of approach produces a split in the appreciation of a work and its understanding: “any music which one listens to spontaneously, that is, with active comprehension of its context, ceases to be “relaxing” and no longer brings amusement.”29 For Adorno, spontaneous appreciation of works of art involves attention and reflection and differs radically from a notion of immediate or relaxed apprehension.

The issue of convergence between pleasure and recognition is related to this question. This theme had already appeared in “On the fetish character in music and the regression of listening,” an essay in which Adorno discussed the process of reification of hearing that would lead to identification between “liking a song” and merely “recognizing it.” Adorno analyzes one of the theses transmitted by the program: “Music is not ours to enjoy until it is ‘out of the air’ and ‘in our heads.’”30 One of the program’s goals was to guide the listener from the outside of a song to its interior, training them on recognizing musical themes, the easiest part of the song according to the program. Through contests, the program stimulated apprentice listeners to quickly recognize a song’s theme and thus ignored that which united the music as a totality, producing an atomized listening. In addition to the easier, but no less true interpretation that the notion of a song that comes “out of the air” and goes “in our heads” involves a relation of private appropriation of music, Adorno suggests that the exaggerated stimulus to the recognition of the themes promoted by the program encourages the identification between recognition and pleasure. However, this pleasure comes no longer from the enjoyment of music itself, but from the awareness that one recognizes the song. Once again, one who reads Adorno’s Introduction to the Sociology of Music will find here the seed of the typology of the “expert listener,” a person who may be well acquainted with the history of music and is able of quickly recognizing themes and composers but is incapable of establishing a direct relationship with it.

The identification of pleasure and recognition refers to an aspect of the concept of “culture industry” often overlooked precisely because of the lack of a more holistic reading of Adorno’s work, namely, the “function” that a work of art takes on in a given context. In the Introduction to the Sociology of Music, Adorno illustrated this aspect using the example of Chopin. He states that Chopin’s music, marked by an aristocratic gesture that separates it from everyday life’s material traits, i.e., its characterization as “chamber music,” takes on a completely different function when it is inserted as background music in a Hollywood film, for instance. Thus, “with respect to class relations in particular, a music’s social function may diverge from the social meaning it embodies, even when the embodiment is as obvious as Chopin.”31 If this idea is combined with Adorno’s reflections on the radio, one notices how the way in which music is consumed can occlude the social meaning it embodies, that is, the function that it exerts in a certain context might deviate considerably from its “intrinsic substance.”32

This implies that one does not find in Adorno’s oeuvre an appreciation of “high culture” to the detriment of “popular culture,” identified here with culture industry. On the contrary, the “expert listener” characterization and the analysis of the relation between pleasure and recognition allow one to see how Adorno is himself a critic of the “fetish” of so-called high culture. “Culture industry,” understood through this prism, becomes a way of understanding how the very contents of works of art, as well as their form, are subsumed by their “function” in that system. In this case, there is an evident opposition between “disseminating information about music” and “teaching something about music.” Nonetheless, the concept of “culture industry” was still in its embryonic phase at the time.

Once again, it is worth mentioning an example of how Adorno arrived at these conclusions from the analysis of the program material. One of the course’s pedagogical proposals was to present each instrument’s sound as a unique personality and one that would imitate the sounds of nature; a clarinet would sound just like a donkey, for example. The idea was to make children recognize the input of each specific sound in the song. Adorno raises three problems related to this pedagogical proposal. Firstly, most orchestral music made use of their instruments as “disembodied sounds,” and the discovery that instruments could function as “personalities” came somewhat late and is attributed to Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner. Then, the difficulty of recognizing each instrument’s personality would give rise to a second problem of a pedagogical nature. In a Haydn symphony, for example, it would be impossible to recognize these “personalities” because instruments would work amid the coherence of the parts: “A child waiting for the individual voice of the flute and its “message” necessarily will be disappointed or will strive to hear it by eliminating all musical sound “extraneous” to the flute, for the flute in Haydn has no such voice and no such message in itself”.33

The pedagogical consequence of this method of teaching would be the breakdown of the child’s confidence in adults and frustration with the process of truly learning music. The child who hopes to hear this “instrumental personality,” which does not emerge, says Adorno, feels betrayed by adults. In addition, such a procedure would raise a third problem, namely the creation of a “technique-minded” learner:

A child who waits, when listening to a Haydn symphony, for the entrance of the flute, the violins, or the kettle drums, misses the music itself and becomes what may be called “technique-minded”; that is to say, the child concentrates on recognizing each instrument very much as the adolescent strives to recognize every motor car by its degree or pattern of streamlining. This attitude, which substitutes the means for the end, is a paradigm of what can appropriately be termed the fetishistic attitude toward music.34

What is at stake in the excerpt above is the creation of a technical listening. It should be noted that Adorno’s critique is not directed at the mass or the collective character of the radio. In the essay in question, Adorno does not mention that atomized listening could arise from the fact that radio produces distracted and fragmented listening — after all, it can be heard simultaneously with other activities such as studying, working, or doing housework. Nor does the focus of his criticism fall upon the radio technique itself. The main problem of what would later come to be known as “culture industry” is not only the standardization of its products, the loss of the autonomy of art in front of the entertainment industry but rather the transformation of the very way in which art is experienced. If aesthetic experience was one day linked to subjective formation – albeit exclusively for members of the aristocracy– the importance of understanding the immanent meaning of music was linked not only to an aesthetic question but also to a mode of organizing experience as a whole.

The fact that this was a class privilege is not definitive in this argument, because class privileges continued to exist, even in late capitalism, but experience was lost more and more throughout the social body. What Adorno regards as problematic is the dismantling of an experience — which was by no means unproblematic – in the name of an attitude towards art and so-called cultural goods that spread to other spheres, and which has at its core a reversal of means and ends, a blockage of spontaneity, an inability to comprehend an artistic (and social) phenomenon in its totality. Hence, he calls this behavior “fetishist” by referring to Marx.

The technical mind is one which knows only the various elements of an oeuvre but does not understand the relation of the parts to the whole, just as Marx described the mind of political economists, familiar with every single economic category, but completely unable to grasp how they were related in capitalism.35 And without understanding, there is no criticism. Adorno seeks to comprehend the reasons for explaining why one no longer knows how to respond when confronted by works of art. This response does not lie in the collective character of the radio or the vicissitudes of its technological development, but in the way which what is called culture — and which Adorno and Horkheimer will call “culture industry” — deforms the structure of experience and replaces it with a “misleading substitute experience” [trügende Ersatzerfahrung],36 transforming the appreciation of the public and even the “privileged” public into an attitude saturated with a technical mindset.

The Radio Symphony: An Experiment in Theory

“The Radio Symphony” came out in 1941. The essay’s main idea is that the radio’s proposal to bring serious music to its listeners by playing symphonies is not what it seems. Compared to the other texts produced by Adorno in this period, this is the most dated one. Adorno argued that the radio distorted the sound at the time, so the symphony was never adequately heard. Among the issues raised by the author, the main one referred to a technical question, which he considered to have been overcome a few years later.37 The transmission technology characterized by the AM band was not, in his view, neutral. The presence of what Adorno calls a “hear-stripe,” a kind of buzzing produced by the broadcast, would compromise the hearing of an orchestra compared to the experience of listening to it in a concert hall. His thesis is that the variations produced by radio in music while transmitting it undermines the symphonic proposal. Although new forms of transmission supplanted several technical aspects of the text, one of Adorno’s arguments endured: the idea of ‘atomized listening’.

The text consists of a case study centered on the outcome of the integral form of a Beethoven symphony when played on the radio. Its criticism’s main point concerns the impossibility of understanding the symphony as an integrated totality. Adorno analyzes the role of sound intensity in a symphony, the treatment of its structure, the production of a trivialization of music, and what he calls “quotation listening” promoted by radio transmission.

Far from the conventional definition of a symphony as the sequence between exhibition, development, and repetition, Adorno argues that:

What characterizes a symphony when experienced in immediate listening, as distinct not only from chamber music but also from orchestral forms such as the suite or the “tone poem,” is a particular intensity and concentration. This intensity rests musically upon the incomparably greater density and concision of thematic relationships of the symphonic as against other forms. […] They imply first a complete economy of craft; that is to say, a truly symphonic movement contains nothing fortuitous […] A Beethoven symphonic movement is essentially the unity of a manifold as well as the manifoldness of unity, namely, of the identical thematic material. This interrelationship of perpetual variation is unfolded as a process – never through mere “statement of detail.” It is the most completely organized piece of music that can be achieved.38

Adorno understands the symphony as an inescapable relationship between parts and whole, between unity and diversity, and therefore criticizes everything that compromises this perception in radio transmission. The role of sound and what is called “absolute dynamics” play a significant role here. Adorno makes a comparison with architecture: just as the nature of the impression we have of a cathedral differs entirely from the impression we have of its model, so the impression we have of a symphony will depend on the intensity of the sound:

The power of a symphony to “absorb” its parts into the organized whole depends, in part, upon the sound volume. […] To “enter” a symphony means to listen to it not only as to something before one but as something around one as well, as a medium in which one “lives.”39

The absolute symphonic dimensions, states Adorno, are linked to the experience of a symphonic space; in the private room, in contrast with a music hall, the magnitude of the sound would generate disproportions. Moreover, the collective dimension of the symphony is lost on the radio (both because one does not see the orchestra and because one usually listens to this music alone) and, in this condition of isolation and self-isolation, music would become something similar to a piece of furniture in a private room. This produces, according to Adorno, an “atomization of listening,” corresponding, in fact, to the atomization of the individual; at home, you can turn off the radio at any time, and this allows you to listen to only a few parts of the symphony, while in a concert hall one must obey specific rules that apply to everyone. Once again, one finds Adorno’s critique of a pancake-ready mix, that is, the idea that one is looking for something prefabricated, massified, and consumed individually, so that the spontaneity of a collective experience that takes place in a specific place and moment and that, unlike pancakes, one cannot take home and consume anytime one wants.

In this text, as in others mentioned here, Adorno exposes the connection of the phenomenon of ‘atomized listening’ with the preponderance of the theme in the symphonic listening stimulated by the radio, which would be defined as a ‘quotation listening.’ The radio symphony would produce a romanticization of music from the worship of reified details that obviate the relation between part and all. In Adorno’s words,

For by sounding like a quotation — the quintessence of the whole — the trivialized theme assumes a peculiar air of authority, which gives it cultural tone. […] the anxiety of the listeners to recognize the so-called Great Symphonies by their quotable themes is mainly due to their desire to identify themselves with the standards of the accepted and to prove themselves to be small cultural owners within big ownership culture.40

Beethoven’s symphony, Adorno points out, is replaced by the presentation of cast-iron items in this form of listening. However, that is the least essential element, for this person takes pleasure out of listening to what has the stamp of “great music,” not music itself. In this process, there is a kind of re-enchantment of the art that comes from its commodity form, which occurs after the process of loss of its aura, according to Benjamin’s concept of mechanical reproducibility.

On Popular Music

“On Popular Music” is undoubtedly the most crucial text of the period regarding the future construction of the “culture industry” concept. The text first appeared in 1941 in Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences and dealt with standardization, pseudo-individualization, and the difference between serious and light music. The concept of pseudo-individuality was also the embryo of the concept of “personalization” later used in the Authoritarian Personality research.

The exposition of the differences between serious music and popular music is the starting point of the essay, and, like the study on NBC, this is a critical text to dissolve some stereotypes related to Adorno’s works. The definition of popular music is one of the main issues regarding the deconstruction of such stereotypes. Adorno points out that the difference between serious music and popular music does not lie in a difference regarding level, the former being “high art” and the latter “lower art.” Nor is the difference between them a matter of simplicity or complexity:

All works of the earlier Viennese classicism are, without exception, rhythmically simpler than stock arrangements of jazz. Melodically, the wide intervals of many hits such as »Deep Purple« or »Sunrise Serenade« are more challenging to follow per se than most melodies of, for example, Haydn, which consist mainly of circumscriptions of tonic triads, and second steps.41

What determines the difference between serious and popular features is that the latter has its structure determined by standardization. One of the main characteristics of popular music is that it offers an experience of familiarity that presupposes the whole beforehand and produces in its listener a tendency to pay much more attention to detail than to the relationship between the parts. The “novelty” in this kind of music comes only from the stylization of an ever-identical musical picture. In serious music, on the contrary, “every detail derives its musical sense from the concrete totality of the piece which, in turn, consists of the living relationship of the details and never of mere enforcement of a musical scheme.”42 In popular music, the details are replaceable, and their replacement does not alter the song’s overall meaning. Nowadays, this is very clear in the so-called pop music, although many people still advocate this type of production as something beyond entertainment.

Adorno analyzes the emergence of standardization, which, according to him, did not yet entirely arise from its industrial character, present only in the production and distribution of music that, within the scope of its conception, would be in an artisan stage. In the formulation of his Aesthetic Theory, the idea that cultural products are standardized even before their conception is a fundamental argument for understanding the phenomenon of the decline of the autonomy of art.

As Marx described, when a particular factory produces an innovation (which involved a specific technological or organizational development), it gains an advantage over the competition in a particular sector of the industry, but soon other factories imitate it in a “leap” (that is, without going through every single step of development). Adorno argues that the same thing happened with radio music: one song becomes a hit, and then all others rush to imitate it, resulting in what Adorno calls “crystallization of patterns.” The analogy with Marx ends there, for, as Adorno shows, instead of competition driving innovation, the communications sector monopolized itself and made the public averse to any change.43 To this day, this is visible not only in pop music but also in commercial cinema — in which superhero movies are filmed and re-filmed and multiplied every year — as in television – in which each country of the global South have their national versions of American variety shows.

The stylistic variation of the patterns disguises this identity and creates an illusion of individuality. Notwithstanding, one of the questions the essay raises, and which makes its diagnosis interesting nowadays, is the relation between this type of music and the creation of a system — at the same time social and psychological – of mechanisms of response (and behavior) incompatible with the notion of individuality in a liberal society. That is, the structural standardization of music establishes a feedback relationship with the standardization of responses. Such a system operates on several levels. In the scope of the audition, “the ear deals with the difficulties of hit music by achieving slight substitutions derived from the knowledge of the patterns.”44 Popular music aims to create stimuli that draw the listener’s attention while continuing to fit into what is considered “natural music,” that is, known to him/her.

In the sphere of popular music, in which no primary material mean of life prevails, it is necessary to preserve the appearance of freedom of choice, which is based on notions such as “taste” — a criterion, moreover, that Adorno refuses altogether as far as aesthetic judgment is concerned. This appearance is generated by a process that occurs not only in culture but in the individual him-/herself. In that sense,

The necessary correlate of musical standardization is pseudo-individualization. By pseudo-individualization, we mean endowing cultural mass production with the halo of free choice or open market based on standardization. Standardization of song hits keeps the customers in line by doing their listening for them, as it were. Pseudoindividualization, for its part, keeps them in line by making them forget that what they listen to is already listened to for them, or ‘pre-digested’.45

Popular music itself creates the listening habits of consumers. It produces its demand That is to say; our subjectivity is produced by capitalism. This idea was already present in Marx when he affirmed: “production accordingly produces not only an object for the subject but also a subject for the object.”46 The extreme example of pseudo-individualization would be, according to Adorno, jazz improvisations, which would have undergone a process of routinization. These improvisations would be firmly prescribed and delimited. The subservience of improvisation to standardization, states Adorno, would reveal two crucial features of popular music’s sociopsychological character. The first, previously mentioned, concerns how the development of detail in music remains connected to its underlying general scheme so that the listener does not find it strange. The second relates to the role of substitution in the process of improvisation, namely, to prevent the traces of improvisation from being taken as something other than ornaments, that is, as musical phenomena per se.

In so-called “consumption habits,” identity appears as a multiplicity of choices, and differentiation is produced starting from what is undifferentiated; likewise, “popular music” is divided into several different types — this is even clearer today. The listener learns to distinguish different types, as well as a band from another, and proceeds more and more according to what one hears, just as today the indies differentiate themselves from the listeners of pop music by their hipster outfit and people are classified (and classify themselves) through the type of music they listened to in adolescence. Adorno points out that popular music now resembles a multiple-choice questionnaire: there is only one right answer, and it has a dualistic structure — either one likes it or not.

The complement to standardization is the “plugging”. It refers to the way a hit is produced. Plugging has to do with making a song a hit by repeating it in the radio, cinema and so on until everybody knows it and recognize it. Adorno does not explore this vocabulary much in this text, but one cannot overlook the violence presupposed in terms of popular music, such as the hit and the beat itself. In a later text, Adorno would comment on the influence of a study by one of his colleagues in the project, Malcolm McDougald, called “The popular music industry,” which deals with the manipulation of taste and the process of creation of popular music through repetition of the same songs on the radio. The role of repetition would be to break the resistance of the individual to sameness, to accustom one to it. This repetition has fundamental psychological importance since it provides an automatic response of conformation to the absence of a possible escape to this situation.

Highly standardized songs need to be repeated several times for the individual to remember them (which does not happen with serious music), but this eventually turns into a paradox since standardization and plugging make the songs too quickly forgettable. They need to be standardized and display something distinctive simultaneously. Adorno states that this “distinguishing feature must not necessarily be melodic, but may consist of metrical irregularities, particular chords or particular sound colors.”47

Still, plugging can also operate through advertising music and film as something glamorous. Adorno compares this glamor to neon signs:

Boredom has become so great that only the brightest colors have any chance of being lifted out of the general drabness […] The term glamorous is applied to those faces, colors, sounds which, by the light they irradiate, differ from the rest. But all glamour girls look alike and the glamor effects of popular music are equivalent to each other.48

The glamor of popular music is an answer, says Adorno, to the listener’s desire of strength that the music advertises. Let us reflect on how pop music today differs so little from advertising. The “plugging” can also operate through styles or personalities, such as the cult of jazz bands’ leaders. Nonetheless, according to Adorno, this stimulates a musical language linked to dependency and childishness. If the music were good, it would not need glamor; if the individual could stand up to society, one would not need that kind of music. The lyrics and songs are then affected by children’s language, analogously to the idea of Aunt Jemima’s pancakes (Adorno cites the songs “Goody, Goody,” “A-tiscket-a-tasket,” “Cry, Baby, cry”). Popular music repeats the same formulas, just like a spoiled child.

Popular music and plugging aim to connect repetition, recognition, and acceptance. One likes music because it is recognized, and music is recognized because it is repeated incessantly. Though serious music would also comprise a process of recognition, it would function then, in contrast, as a means for the understanding of music:

The musical sense of any piece of music may indeed be defined as that dimension of the piece which cannot be grasped by recognition alone, by its identification with something one knows. It can be built up only by spontaneously linking the known elements — a reaction as spontaneous by the listener as it was spontaneous by the composer — to experience the inherent novelty of the composition. The musical sense is the New — something which cannot be traced back to and subsumed under the configuration of the known, but which springs out of it, if the listener comes to its aid. 49

Nevertheless, the promotion of popular music inverts means and ends, and recognition becomes its prime purpose:

The recognition of the mechanically familiar in a hit tune leaves nothing which can be grasped as new by a linking of the various elements. […] Hence, recognition and understanding must here coincide, whereas in serious music understanding is the act by which universal recognition leads to the emergence of something fundamentally new.50

Five main elements constitute the process of recognizing popular music, according to Adorno: a vague remembrance (as all songs look alike, nothing is remembered as unique, but everything has a familiar tone); an immediate identification (it leaps from a vague memory to the complete identification of the music); the subsumption of the label (which has the sense of associating music with its title, but also with its label); self-reflection in the act of identifying music (here Adorno refers to those individuals who subsume and identify the experience of listening with the identification of music, who rush to say the name of a hit and whistle to demonstrate to others their deep musical knowledge); and the idea of “psychological transference” (which concerns the tendency to attribute to the object the pleasure that comes from its possession, not from the object itself).

The analysis of the process of recognition is firmly anchored in the Marxist concept of “subsumption,” which is valid both in the sense of real subsumption of labor to capital and in the sense of absorption of non-commodified or old mercantile forms by the commodity form.51 A contradiction between form and substance emerges from this process.52 Here, Adorno draws a parallel of “commodity fetishism” with music and the socially diffused psychological relation with it; this relationship is marked by taking possession of the object, as something fixed, in the act of recognition and drawing pleasure from this possession. Adorno has in mind a person who takes pleasure in parading his/her knowledge about popular music, identifying bands, songs, and melodies in a group of friends. He uses the example of someone who says, “Wow! Night and Day is good!” Musical experience, or rather, the direct and immediate relationship with music is entirely obliterated by the fact that one takes pleasure from the act of recognition and not from music itself — in spite of the ideological effect related to one’s perception of taking pleasure from one’s object and not its consumption.

This mediation produced by the process of recognition (a process that takes place through the consumption of music), which completely ignores the music’s content, nevertheless applies both to the relationship with classical music and the relationship one has with popular music on the radio. For this reason, Adorno points out similar problems both in the symphonic musical program of the radio and in the transmission of popular music. Here, the social form transforms music’s content, subsuming it to the commodity logic, even if music is “free of charge.”

The notion of subsumption is fundamental for the theory of culture industry and results from the conjunction of Marx and Lukács’s reification theory and Marx’s theory of value. The theory of culture industry could also be related to the expanded reproduction process narrated by Marx, so that “culture industry” is understood as a social form of capital. In this sense, the transformation of the immanent meaning of an art object is produced by the function that it assumes. Form, imposed on a content that is foreign to it, ends up deforming it. According to Marx, the use-value appears in the act of consumption. In the act of the exchange, the value is realized, although the use-value is presupposed in the process. By applying the concept of subsumption in these texts to understand the relation capitalist society establishes with art (be it serious or popular music), Adorno argues that the process narrated by Marx is intensified. That is, the commodity logic would have developed to the point that it would even take over the sphere of consumption, precisely a sphere in which use-value (which attends “the needs of the stomach or fantasy”53) would supposedly prevail. The use-value no longer lies in music itself but is transposed to the consumption of music. Adorno recurs to dialects to demonstrate how value presents itself as use-value. If, as Marx described, use-value is subsumed by value, Adorno argues that, in late capitalism, use-value is subsumed twofold — since the use-value of consuming music replaces the use-value of music itself.

The gratuitousness of music and the various products of culture industry, however, help to conceal that, while listening to the radio, the subject is immersed in the reproduction of capital. For the listener, turning on the radio resembles the act of buying a commodity and enjoying it at home54. However, it is precisely in his/her private room, where one does not pay to listen to the radio, that one is completely immersed in the sphere of exchange. This is becoming increasingly clear with the development of social media, the internet and its unlimited access to free content.55

Marx experienced a type of capitalism in which the “immense collection of commodities”56 resembled a small bazaar compared to the late capitalism in which Adorno lived. In 19th century, there remained an idea that consumption — although capitalist society was never guided by it — found its rationale in the use-values of a commodity, whether for fantasy or material life. Marx’s time did not witness compulsive buying disorder, that is, the pathologies of buying syndromes that reveal the real face of current capitalism, in which value becomes more and more autonomous: one buys due to the pure pleasure/anxiety of buying. As Leo Maar points out, “music, when situated in the constellation of a society structured by the realization of value, presents the terms of the possible conversion of exchange value into use-value: this is its fetish.”57 The actual use-value of a commodity, which was already mere support, goes even further in this context. Once again, there is a quid pro quo; in this case, the value appears as use-value. Adorno is showing that this happens to radio music as early as the 1940s.

The subject of “free time” as labor time is also one of the text’s highlights. Following Benjamin’s argument about cinema, but with inverted signals, Adorno emphasizes how popular music appeals to “distraction” and “inattention” simultaneously:

The notion of distraction can be adequately understood only within its social setting and not in self-subsistent terms of individual psychology. Distraction is bound to the current mode of production, to the rationalized and mechanized labor process to which, directly or indirectly, masses are subject. This mode of production, which engenders fears and anxiety about unemployment, loss of income, war, has its ‘non-productive’ correlate in entertainment; that is, relaxation, which does not involve the effort of concentration at all. People want to have fun. A fully concentrated and conscious experience of art is possible only to those whose lives do not put such a strain on them that they want relief from both boredom and effort simultaneously in their spare time. The whole sphere of cheap commercial entertainment reflects this dual desire. It induces relaxation because it is patterned and pre-digested. These characteristics serve within the masses’ psychological household to spare them the effort of that participation (even in listening or observation) without which there can be no receptivity to art. On the other hand, the stimuli provided permit an escape from the boredom of mechanized labor.58

This leisure time in which the worker is spared, Adorno argues, fits only to reproduce and restore one’s ability to work. Both pseudo-individuality, boredom, and mechanization are articulated here. Leisure time offers the same mechanisms of the world of work and, through that, habituates the worker to it. The stimuli that film and radio offer present these mechanisms in the form of entertainment, which’s presupposed product is boredom. This is why the mode of listening linked to this conjuncture has as its main characteristic distraction, in which recognition is an attitude that comes without effort. Otherwise, if it offered the masses something that involved a reflexive and critical effort that would require concentration, cinema and radio would make the world of labor unbearable, as unbearable as returning to strenuous work after a vacation. In that case, the secret would be — as Adorno sought to show in these and other texts — to equalize the tedium of holidays and that of the world of labor so that their indifference would produce the sensation that it is impossible to escape it. This is the plugging of capitalist society itself.

Together, these texts delineate not only a theory of popular art or even a theory of art in late capitalism, but rather a theory of ideology. This becomes clear when Adorno refers to popular music as “social cement,” insofar as “the autonomy of music is replaced by a mere sociopsychological function. […] And the meaning listeners attribute to a material, the inherent logic of which is inaccessible to them, is above all a means by which they achieve some psychical adjustment to the mechanisms of present-day life.”59

Adorno alludes to the question of function. The ideological function obliterates the music’s material, the social content of music. Therefore, Adorno argues that this type of mediation promoted by media (which is both a technical and mercantile) turns popular music into a repressive phenomenon.

Adorno describes two types of popular music listeners: the “emotional listener,” already analyzed in the other texts, and the “rhythmically obedient listener.” Adorno’s characterization of what happens to music under culture industry could dispense with the typology if we were just interested in Adorno’s musical theory. But since we are also interested in relating radio and subjectivity, the typology is essential here, if not in its content, at least in its effort to grasp the role of radio music in producing administered, resigned individualities. This kind of exercise would be central in the formulation of the “authoritarian personality” and to establish its relation to culture industry. In this typology, it is possible to glimpse a germ of the fundamental argument of the Dialectic of Enlightenment; the “rhythmically obedient type” of listener, according to Adorno, is more susceptible to a process of adjustment to authoritarian collectivism, without this manifesting itself in the form of any particular political position. For this type, for whom the whole experience of music is related to the beat,

To play rhythmically means [...] to play in such a way that even if pseudo-individualizations — counter-accents and other ‘differentiations’ — occur, the relation to the ground meter is preserved. To be musical means to them to be capable of following given rhythmical patterns without being disturbed by ‘individualizing’ aberrations, and to fit even the syncopations into the basic time units. This is how their response to music immediately expresses their desire to obey.60

There is a clear association between pseudo-individualization and authoritarian personality as one of the former’s main traits is the radical adaptation to reality, which leaves no place for any negation or transcendence. Adorno suggests that, to adapt to the music of machines, one has to renounce one’s human feelings or, in other words, one must resemble them; reify oneself. The masochistic character will subsequently make an appearance.

The definition of the other type of listener, “the emotional one,” does not present many differences compared to the other texts except for one: in this essay, Adorno refers to the cinema to clarify his example. According to him, music and cinema provide a kind of confession of unhappiness — he is thinking about the people who cry in a romantic movie in the cinema — that reconciles the spectator with reality by producing an immediate relief that comes from the awareness of not being accomplished in this world. This example shows the complicated character of Adorno’s argument, which is not reduced to an idea that cinema alienates by making us believe that we are as happy as the stars of Hollywood. This is the reason why Adorno would write, in another text, that “mass culture is unadorned make-up. It assimilates itself to the realm of ends more than to anything else with a sober look that knows no-nonsense.”61 That is, ideology does not work only positively, affirming the existing society, but also negatively, that is, producing reconciliation precisely by offering a place for an experience of disillusionment.62 The popularity of shows such as Mr. Robot and Black Mirror point precisely to this trait these days.

Years later, Adorno would write that “Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate victim in real lite receive their beatings so that the spectators can accustom themselves to theirs.”63 The theory of culture industry as ideology is not a theory which states people welcome the illusions presented by culture industry because they are ignorant; in fact, “what appears to be ready acceptance and unproblematic gratification is very complex, covered by a veil of flimsy rationalizations.”64 Adorno rehearses here the idea that this process configures a sadomasochistic personality. Anyone who opposes this state of affairs is branded as someone who just does not know how to have fun. The abyss that separates individual and society, as well as the disproportion between them, causes individual resistance to yield, without ceasing to generate a series of reactions, such as rancor, which is pushed to deeper levels of the psychic structure:

Psychological energy must be directly invested to overcome resistance. For this resistance does not wholly disappear in yielding to external forces, but remains alive within the individual and still survives even at the very moment of acceptance. Here spite becomes drastically active.65

However, passivity is not enough, for the individual must strive to adapt. The similarities with the so-called “thesis of the integration of the proletariat” are striking at this point, which argues in favor of my argument of culture industry theory as a theory of ideology in late capitalism.66 For this reason, enthusiasm for culture industry, Adorno affirms, is often confused with fury; individuals “must transform the external order to which they are subservient into an internal order. The ego manipulates the endowment of musical commodities with libidinal energy.”67 These excerpts demonstrate how culture industry administrates hate and resentment since its emergence – which points to the fact that manipulation of these emotional drives by the alt-right today through social media is the update of an old mechanism.

Adorno makes a jest with the dancers who called themselves “jitterbugs.” This type of music related to swing was trendy in the 1940s in the US and was danced quickly. The word jitterbug is formed from the conjunction between the verb “jitter” (to act in a nervous, agitated way) and the noun “bug,” insect. The dancers, says Adorno, boast of the idea that they are insects that struggle. With an analysis of this behavior and its relation to music, Adorno concludes the text by stating that there is a complicated relationship between resistance and acceptance, the conscious and the unconscious:

Present-day mass reactions are very thinly veiled from consciousness. It is the paradox of the situation that it is almost insuperably difficult to break through this thin veil. Yet the truth is subjectively no longer so unconscious as it is expected to be. This is borne out by the fact that in the political praxis of authoritarian regimes the frank lie in which no one actually believes is more and more replacing the ‘ideologies’ of yesterday which had the power to convince those who believed in them. […] Rather, spontaneity is consumed by the tremendous effort which each individual has to make to accept what is enforced upon him — an effort which has developed for the very reason that the veneer veiling the controlling mechanisms has become so thin. To become a jitterbug or simply to ‘like’ popular music, it does not by any means sufficient to give oneself up and to fall in line passively. To become transformed into an insect, man needs the energy which might achieve his transformation into a man.68

Adorno refers to an idea that would be dear to him from that point on, namely, that adapting requires at least the same effort than resisting society, that is, “to be transformed into an insect, man needs that energy that could affect its transformation into a man.”69

Notes on Adorno’s Theory of Culture

In the first essay of the book Prisms, which names the book’s subtitle, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” Adorno alludes to the concept of “culture” as a supreme fetish70 and as something in which one cannot place naive faith. In his Aesthetic Theory, he endorses this idea, stating that “rabid criticism of culture is not radical. If affirmation is indeed an aspect of art, this affirmation is no more totally false than culture — because it failed — is totally false.”71 These reflections could not have been written before Adorno’s experience in the United States. According to his testimony,

In America, I was liberated from a certain naïve belief in culture and attained the capacity to see culture from the outside. To clarify the point: despite all social criticism and all consciousness of the primary 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, where no reverential silence in the presence of everything intellectual prevailed, as it did in Central and Western Europe far beyond the confines of the so-called educated classes; and the absence of this respect inclined the intellect toward critical self-scrutiny. This particularly affected the European presuppositions of musical cultivation in which I was immersed. Not that I renounced these assumptions or abandoned my conceptions of such culture; but it seems to be a fundamental distinction whether one bears these along unreflectingly or becomes aware of them precisely in contradistinction to the standards of the most technologically and industrially developed country.72

Adorno remained in the United States from 1938 to 1953. The sum of the texts on “culture industry” and related themes written by him in this period and the countless stories about his adventures in America, as himself liked to say, confirm how the formulation of the concept of “culture industry” derives from an intense experience of immersion in the US cultural and research environment. According to Adorno’s account, “I certainly knew what monopolistic capitalism and great trusts were; yet, I had not realized how far “rationalization” and standardization had permeated the so-called mass media.”73 Nevertheless, this experience was fundamental to the understanding of the culture industry as something that would be part of the process of capital reproduction and accumulation, and also to the later development of Adorno’s reflections on art and culture and to his investigation of authoritarianism.

One of the most significant difficulties in understanding Adorno’s critical theory lies precisely in the fact that Adorno does not work with a definite concept of culture, as is the tradition of English Marxism, for example.74 The concepts of “Enlightenment,” “culture industry,” “art,” among others, certainly establish a relation with the idea of culture, but the latter is not reduced to any of them.

According to Adorno, there is a separation between material life and spiritual life that results from the cleavage described by Marx between manual and intellectual labor. The autonomy of art, thus understood (and not in the Weberian sense of the rationalization of the spheres), carries with it the notion of freedom from praxis. Praxis is understood here as something linked to material necessities. Art as intellectual work is freed from these material moorings. Nevertheless, this autonomy entails a bad conscience. In his Aesthetic Theory, Adorno shows how each work of art worthy of the name bears the mark of this separation in its form. However, by conceiving — in the older Marxist tradition — this separation as something problematic, Adorno never makes a simple defense of the idea of culture. In his words, “What distinguishes dialectical from cultural criticism is that it heightens cultural criticism until the notion of culture is itself negated, fulfilled and surmounted in one.”75 It seems like the idea of culture needs to be denied so that its concept can be realized. The concept of culture carries with it the contradiction of society; that is to say, freedom “remains an equivocal promise of culture as long as its existence depends on a bewitched reality and, ultimately, on control over the work of others.”76

Adorno’s philosophy carries a deep mistrust in culture, although it seeks to comprehend its emancipatory potential. The same goes for the idea of Enlightenment, which is also criticized in the book written with Horkheimer. For this reason, this book, as well as the set of essays in Prisms, mobilizes well-known critics of both culture and Enlightenment: Sade, Veblen, Spengler, Nietzsche, among others. Adorno’s critical theory feeds both from Enlightenment enthusiasts like Kant and its discontents and seeks to show the dialectic intertwinement between seemingly opposing terms at various times.

Nevertheless, this is not all. It is worth emphasizing that the very writing of Dialectic of Enlightenment, always remembered by its approach to the traumatic event of Nazism, depended on the distrust of so-called “culture” made possible by living in the United States. The theory of “culture industry,” which in the debate with Benjamin takes the form of a dispute between autonomous art and political art, after the exile in America, also becomes (and perhaps mainly) not only a theory about the annihilation of the autonomy of art, but of the individual him-/herself:

The negation of the concept of the culture is itself under preparation. The significant factor therein is the dismissal of such concepts as autonomy, spontaneity, and criticism: autonomy, because the subject, rather than making conscious decisions, both have and wishes to subjugate itself to whatever has been pre-ordained. The reason for this is that the spirit, which, according to traditional cultural concepts, should be its law-giver, at every instant now experiences its impotence towards the overwhelming demands of mere being. Spontaneity diminishes because comprehensive planning takes precedence over the individual impulse, predetermining this impulse in turn, reducing it to the level of illusion, and no longer tolerating that play of forces which was expected to give rise to a free totality. Moreover, finally, criticism is dying out because the critical spirit is as disturbing as sand in a machine to that smoothly-running operation which is becoming more and more the model of the cultural. This critical spirit now seems antiquated, irresponsible and unworthy, much like ‘armchair’ thinking.77

Nowadays, with the rise of the far-right in the whole world, throwing sand in the machine is one of our primary and most urgent tasks. The issue of anti-intellectualism (the imperialism of “fun”), of the fragmentation of experience, of anger and resentment administration Adorno discovered in radio broadcasting of classical music is back in the center of our political and cultural debates. In 1967, Adorno delivered a lecture called “Aspects of the New Right-Wing extremism,” which was recently published. He stated then that what characterizes the far-right is its unlimited domain of propaganda technique. According to this suggestion, any left-wing project has to construct a critical approach to culture industry as a system that undermines capitalism’s critique and serves as a vehicle for propaganda.

Those who seek, opposed to Adorno, to show the autonomy or at least the intelligence of the products of culture industry, in doing so, lose the most substantial core of his critical theory, which consists precisely in apprehending these products amid their function in capitalist society. The “culture industry” is already hegemonic; it does not need pro bono advocates to stand up for it. Therefore, both critically and socially, one should apply, as Adorno put it, “Walter Benjamin’s thought on critics whose task it is to uphold the interest of the public against the public itself.”78

Acknowledgements.

I would like to thank professor Fredric Jameson who read this article as a piece of my dissertation and encouraged me to pursue the argument and publish the research. I also thank Michael Schwarz for receiving me twice for research stays at the Theodor W. Adorno’s Archive in the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Capes/Brazil funded this research.

1. Even among critical theory scholars, Adorno’s approach to cinema and jazz is not very popular. See Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in mass culture,” Social Text, Duke University Press, (1979) 130-148; Deborah Cook, The Culture Industry Revisited (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996); Heinz Steinert, Culture Industry (Oxford/Malden: Polity, 2003); Miriam B. Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley/Los Angeles/Londres: University of California Press, 2011).
2. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York/London, W.W. Norton & Company, 2001) 133.
3. See Detlev Claussen, One Last Genius (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008) and David Jenemann, Adorno in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
4. Lazarsfeld was initially linked to the Institute of Psychology at the University of Vienna. His Austro-Marxist background had aroused his interest in the field of electoral studies and occupational choices. Contact with American market research made him realize a correlation between occupational choices, electoral options, and consumption habits. Lazarsfeld received a scholarship to study in the United States in 1933 and took with him the “new model” of research that resulted from a mixture of social psychology, market research, and statistics. This model would turn him into a reference in communication studies and soon become known as sociological research par excellence. Paul Lazarsfeld, “An Episode in the History of Social Research: a Memoir,” The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960, ed. Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1969) 270-337.
5. Theodor W. Adorno. “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America” The intellectual migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960, ed. Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1969) 340.
6. Adorno, “Scientific Experiences” 342.
7. This was a significant concern of the Rockefeller Foundation, which funded the project, according to Foundation itself. See: https://rockfound.rockarch.org/pt/communications. Accessed October 12th, 2020.
8. Adorno’s battle against empiricism did not start in America but gained corpus due to the Radio Research Project. According to Brian Kane, this is one of the main topics of Current of Music, and the Radio analysis composes an attempt to turn phenomenology against itself through dialectics. Brian Kane, “Phenomenology, Physiognomy and the ‘Radio Voice,’” New German Critique, 43:3 (November 2016) 96.
9. Adorno apud Paul Lazarsfeld, “An Episode” 324.
10. Adorno’s conception of empiricism was very much different from Lazarsfeld. Adorno conceived empirical reality as the social processes that produced reality as we perceive it in an immediate sense. So, the factual was taken as a product of empiricism, not as its equivalent. On the contrary, Lazarsfeld was not interested in the discovering of the subjacent processes that constituted empirical reality but in the morphology of radio consumers.
11. Adorno had developed this idea in his essay “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” of 1938. The idea that the ability to listen to music regressed to the earlier stages of civilization was linked to the annihilation of a subjectivity capable of establishing a spontaneous relationship with art. If we use his formulations somewhat freely, we could emphasize that if Adorno observed this phenomenon in the so-called classical music, his intentions are confirmed by the all-pervasive attention deficits today, which prevent not only the focused listening of a symphony, for example. Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening”, Essays on Music,ed, Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) 255.
12. “Scientific Experiences” 346.
13. “Scientific Experiences” 347.
14. “Scientific Experiences” 347.
15. “Scientific Experiences” 351.
16. Theodor W. Adorno, “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” The Kenyon Review, Vol. 18.3/4 (Summer-Autumn, 1996) 231.
17. “Scientific Experiences” 339.
18. “A Social Critique” 230.
19. “A Social Critique” 233.
20. Adorno refers here to something that would be very relevant in sociology a few decades later: the problem of the relationship between “taste” or consumption and class society. Pierre Bourdieu, for instance, would dedicate himself to prove how culture is an essential element of class differentiation in many of his works. Adorno is grasping the phenomenon here and would return to this point in Introduction to Sociology of Music. Unlike Bourdieu, however, Adorno thought it was possible to distinguish between the function of art consumption and each work of art’s truth content. See La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1979).
21. “A Social Critique” 234.
22. “A Social Critique” 232.
23. In re-reading the essay on “The Work of Art ...” Buck-Morss demonstrates through Benjamin’s theory of the decline of experience that mass culture could exert an anesthetic effect on its reception instead of an aesthetic effect exerted by the work of art. The contrast between art and mass culture would also be contraposition between Aesthetics, understood as the sphere of perception, and Anaesthetics, rightly understood as the sphere of non-perception, of anesthesia. Comparing mass culture and drugs becomes recurrent in Adorno’s texts after he arrives in the United States, bringing forward familiar themes to our time, such as “addiction to television and computer games,” among others. See Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Essay Reconsidered Artwork,” October 62.The MIT Press (1992): 3-41.
24. “A Social Critique” 234-235.
25. In Adorno’s words: “without values nothing is understood aesthetically, and vice versa. In art, more than in any other sphere, it is right to speak of value. Like a mime, every work says: “I’m good, no?”; to which what responds is a comportment that knows to value.” Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Bloomsbury Revelations, 2013) 417.
26. See Bernard H. Haggin, Music in the Nation (New York: Duel, Sloan and Pearce, 1949).
27. Introduction to series B. apud Theodor W. Adorno. “Analytical Study of the NBC Music Appreciation Hour,” The Musical Quarterly, 78.2 (Summer 1994) 356.
28. “Analytical Study “ 355.
29. “Analytical Study” 356.
30. “Analytical Study” 358.
31. Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music (New York: The Seabury Press, 1976) 62.
32. This kind of reflection will reappear in several moments of Adorno’s work, as in Prisms, when he states that Bach “is changed into a neutralized cultural monument, in which aesthetic success mingles obscurely with a truth that has lost its intrinsic substance. They have made him into a composer for organ festivals in well-preserved Baroque towns, into ideology.” Theodor W. Adorno, “Bach Defended against His Devotees,” Prisms (Cambridge: MIT Press,1997) 135.
33. “Analytical Study,” and “Music Appreciation Hour” 330.
34. “Analytical Study,” and “Music Appreciation Hour” 331.
35. See Karl Marx, Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One (London/New York: Penguin Books/New Left Review, 1976).
36. Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 8 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972) 80.
37. This was not the first time Adorno concerned himself with the influence of the mechanical musical apparatus on hearing. In his writings in the Musikblätter Journal, he analyzed the effects of the gramophone. See Thomas Y. Levin, “For the Record: Adorno on Music in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” October. 55 (1990).
38. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Radio Symphony,” Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) 255.
39. “The Radio Symphony” 257.
40. “The Radio Symphony” 264.
41. Adorno, “On Popular Music” 441.
42. “On Popular Music” 439.
43. Currently, the works of Scholz and Srnicek show that the success of social media companies is utterly dependent on a monopolistic character. This phenomenon highlights the topicality of Adorno’s analysis. See Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), and Trebor Scholz, Platform Cooperativism. Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy (New York: Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, 2016).
44. “On Popular Music” 442.
45. “On Popular Music” 445.
46. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1904) 280.
47. “On Popular Music” 448.
48. “On Popular Music” 449.
49. “On Popular Music” 453.
50. “On Popular Music” 453.
51. The subsumption process also refers to the absorption of pre-capitalist forms and their transmutation under the aegis of capital. The concept of subsumption [Subsumtion, subsumieren] has a long history in Marxism. It appears in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the first volume of Capital (Chapters 11, 13, 14 - Marx differentiates the formal and the real subsumption of labor to capital) and the Grundrisse. This concept is then further developed in the unpublished Chapter IV of Book I of Capital. Even though it is not indisputable that Adorno has read Chapter IV and the Grundrisse in 1938, he was undoubtedly familiar with the volume I of Capital and the works of Lukács’s and Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s, where the concept is also present.
52. When subsumed by capital, this form without substance gains a substance - labor - that is strange to it, generating a reverse of the Hegelian dialectic. The idea is that the relation between capital and labor has this form, contradictory and, in a certain sense, dislocated. This disengagement would thus determine all the disagreement of the forms emanating from it. See Moishe Postone. “Lukács and the Dialectical Critique of Capitalism,” New Dialectics and Political Economy,ed. R. Albritton and J. Simoulidis (Houndsmill, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
53. Capital 125.
54. “Theodor Adorno was interested in the social power of dissemination, which he discusses as ‘reproduction,’ where what is reproduced is both ‘the music’ as such and its reproductive potential, which implies replication and degradation, but also reproduction with respect to the listener.” Babette Babich, “Adorno’s radio phenomenology: Technical Reproduction, Physiognomy and Music,” Philosophy and Social Criticism40.10 (2014) 959.
55. Undoubtedly, those who believe in the “gratuitousness” of the culture industry’s contents live an illusion that was already visible at the time of the propagation of the radio, but which is now set wide open by the obligation of data sharing and not only for targeted advertising. See Platform Capitalism.
56. Capital 125.
57. Wolfgang Leo Maar, “The Production of Society Through Culture Industry,” Revista Olhar, 2.3 (June 2002) 14.
58. “On Popular Music” 458.
59. “On Popular Music” 460.
60. “On Popular Music” 461.
61. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Scheme of Mass Culture,” The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J.M. Bernstein(London/New York: Routledge, 2001) 78.
62. Many readers of the Frankfurt School, such as Fredric Jameson, have sought to demonstrate that the products of so-called “mass culture,” however commodified they may be, contain utopian elements, such as modernist works of art. See Jameson, 1979. However, the idea that “culture industry” is also permeated by criticisms of the status quo, of a never attended happiness desire, among others, appears in Adorno’s several texts in this period. In that sense, the concept of “negativity” and experience [Erfahrung], which Adorno attributes to the autonomous art and the presence of critique and utopia, diverge. The critique of the system and the utopian elements, according to this view, reconcile much more than they deny culture industry if we highlight the function Adorno attributed to the elements of refusal, disillusionment, or utopia.
63. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. eds. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr; trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002) 110.
64. “On Popular Music” 462.
65. “On Popular Music” 464.
66. One of the most controversial points of Critical Theory lies precisely in this idea that one of the forms of capitalist domination occurs in the form of self-domination. This is part of their efforts to understand how the contradiction between capital and labor – which still bears the foundation of capitalism – did not have class struggle as an immediate result. On the contrary, the working class seemed to act more and more against their interests. In the 1930s, the Institute’s research began to investigate some elements considered regressive in the working class, which would lead it or at least part of it to support Hitler in Germany. Fomented by this post-competitive capitalism, a personality of a sadomasochistic feature has arisen, according to the Frankfurt School, and to understand it, they combined Freudian psychoanalysis with the reflections on the process of reification developed by Lukács in the 1920s. Important examples of this conjunction are present in the chapter on anti-Semitism in the Dialectic of Enlightenment and Adorno’s texts on the relationship between democracy and propaganda – “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda” [1951] and “Democratic Leadership and Mass Manipulation” [1958]. In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse develops this thesis of the integration of the proletariat aiming the welfare State in the US and the leveling of classes in the sphere of consumption and labor that would blur the contradiction between the working class and the bourgeoisie. The idea is precisely that consumption fulfills a function of integration by uniting the proletariat and bourgeoisie and disintegrating both classes as mass.
67. “On Popular Music” 466.
68. “On Popular Music” 468.
69. “On Popular Music” 468.
70. Prisms 22.
71. Aesthetic Theory 402.
72. “Scientific Experiences” 367.
73. “Scientific Experiences” 340, 341.
74. E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and Terry Eagleton are examples of this tradition of culturalist bias, even if this culturalism is conceived in materialistic terms.
75. Prisms 27-28.
76. Prisms 22.
77. Theodor W. Adorno, “Culture and Administration”, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture(London/New York, Routledge, 2001) 123.
78. “Culture and Administration” 129.