Adorno Theodor W. - Adorno on Popular Culture

Adorno on Popular Culture completes a critical review of Adornos writings on culture that began with the publication of my earlier book Adorno on Music. I would like to express my thanks to my good friend, Chris Rojek for his encouragement to me personally and his enthusiasm for the writings of Adorno. I am grateful to Mari Shullaw, the senior sociology editor at Routledge who agreed to take the project on and to find a space for the new volume in the ILS. Finally, I wish to express my thanks to the Leverhulme Trust for the award of a Major Research Fellowship (20013) which has provided me with a period of sustained research and writing time.

Most of the chapters of the present text centre themselves around a reading of an article sometimes more than one or a chapter of a book by Adorno. This was also the method of Adorno on Music. In both volumes, I opted to undertake a close reading of primary texts and to preserve, for the reader, so far as is possible, the sustained theoretical tension of Adornos argumentation in the specific writings chosen for discussion. There is inevitably a certain degree of thematic overlap among topics but that, too, is a feature of Adornos own writings which, like the music he admires, develop a great many variations from a very few basic themes.

It would be wrong, however, to see this book as a straightforward exposition of Adornos ideas. Notwithstanding the care I have taken to capture his line of argumentation, I have always had an agenda of my own that drives my interest in his writings. It will be apparent to the reader at key points in the text; for example, where I juxtapose Adornos ideas with those of others none of them, with the exception of Benjamin, is selected from the pantheon of theorists with whom he is usually associated. Some of these juxtapositions reveal the wider associations of Adornos cultural critique with the work of American critics, for example, David Riesman. Adorno is also confronted with himself in other guises as in the chapter in which a connection is drawn between the Dialectic of Enlightenment and Wagners Ring cycle. In the chapter on Popular Music Adornos arguments are brought up against the very different and in many ways opposed views of Winthrop I have brought Adornos work on radio and film into relationship with two movies that deal with popular culture of the period in which Adorno was writing, Woody Allens Radio Days and The Purple Rose of Cairo. In the final chapter, I have drawn even more directly on my own theorizing in order to put Adornos ideas under a degree of critical pressure and to complete the process of walking a critical line that I began in the final chapter of the previous volume.

There are other secondary works, many of them excellent, that discuss Adornos ideas on popular culture and music. There are books, too, that locate his ideas in the discourse universes of Marxism and Critical Theory to which he clearly belongs. If I have chosen a different approach to his work, it is largely because my method has been to narrow my focus in the exposition to a fresh reading of primary texts. Nevertheless, the secondary literature on Adorno has most certainly helped to shape my understanding of his work. In this regard, no-one will be surprised to see me name the following as those whose books have personally influenced me the most: Rose Subotnik (1990, 1996), Max Halle Paddison (1993), Martin Jay (1973), Susan Buck-Morss (1977), Gillian Rose (1978), Jay Bernstein (1993). There are other excellent secondary sources in addition to these (see Deborah Cook 1996).

Notwithstanding the critical agenda that is carried both implicitly throughout and explicitly in the latter part of this book and the disagreements I have with Adorno, which are significant, perhaps fundamental it will not escape the reader that this book, like its predecessor, is a critical appreciation of Adornos ideas with the accent on appreciation. I have learned too much from him for it to be otherwise.

Robert Witkin

Exeter, January 2002