Among the foremost members of the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno launched a tirade against the modern world. With an arsenal of unsupported assertions strung together without obvious connecting elements, Adorno set out to critique what he called the "phantasmagoria" of commodity...
[more]Among the foremost members of the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno launched a tirade against the modern world. With an arsenal of unsupported assertions strung together without obvious connecting elements, Adorno set out to critique what he called the "phantasmagoria" of commodity consumption.
A commodity, according to Adorno, is a deception: it conceals its mode of production behind an attractive veneer, becomes "reified" as an object without a history. Consequently, Adorno deemed it his philosophical task to get beneath these surfaces'”to discover material processes that would betray the seductive world of objects. The task, though philosophical in nature, was essentially a crusade for freedom; Adorno wanted to liberate the intellect from the model of commodity consumption.
Freedom would be possible only insofar as humanity could align its consciousness with material processes: forces that could not be simply identified and consumed, but had to be reckoned with in the mode of what they were not. According to Adorno, this was achievable by means of "negative dialectics," or thought through negations and displacements, as opposed to identifications and affirmations.
Adorno repeatedly turned to avant-garde art for support. The mental effort required to enjoy avant-garde art disrupted the mindless consumption that Adorno thought dominated society. It reached beneath the surface, remained closer to the level of material forces, and elicited its audience to do the same. By explicitly refusing to be recognized by means of everyday aesthetic forms, avant-garde art achieved a thorough-going negativity capable of overturning commercial society.
Born in Germany in 1903, Adorno studied in Frankfurt, Vienna, and New York. In addition to receiving his doctorate for philosophical studies in 1924, he also engaged sociology, psychology, and music. He was deeply influenced by the music of Schonberg (Adorno even wrote a series of articles about him), and moved to Vienna in 1925 to study composition with Alban Berg. Adorno consciously developed an interdisciplinary flexibility, as evidenced by the wide sweep of subjects that fell under his critical gaze.
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