If you want to understand something about the nature of Adorno's overall project, read the guy below, sadly cut off as he is in mid-sentence. If your only contact with Adorno is the bitter "Minima Moralia" or the (to me) rebarbative "Negative Dialectics", this is an essential complement. If you aren't interested in radical cultural criticism...er, why are you reading this?

Critical Models is a collection of essays, articles and radio talks, mostly from quite late in Adorno's career. I am neither a philosopher nor an academic, and would be the first person to admit that I'm not quite up to Adorno's more Hegelian moments. I'm just casting about for help in an increasingly bland, homogenised, uncritical cultural environment, and the best thing about Critical Models is that it's Adorno being unusually _helpful_.

This is Adorno throwing himself into the task of trying to build a post-war democracy in Germany, not Adorno the cantankerous emigre complaining that doors shut more violently than they used to. He urges the value of promoting the status of teachers, of rooting out and criticising Nazi attitudes (who'd have thought that they'd still be flourishing fifty years on). Adorno is seldom a very approachable writer, but here he's making the effort to communicate to a mass audience, and to a relatively uneducated schmuck like me it's critical dynamite. The spine of my copy of Negative Dialectics may remain forever uncreased, but this one will be carried around.

It is important to point out that Teddie Adorno is spinning in his grave, for the very venue on which I am reviewing Critical Models is itself an example of the fetishized, reified and administered world that Adorno named, and critiqued. However, Adorno's philosophical tradition also includes the catchphrase what is, is right, and would probably view the Internet as more or less a necessary consequence of vast economic forces which it would be simple minded to simply ignore, or negate. And, his "dialectical" logic not only permits us to log on and praise him where praise is due: it requires us to do so.

This collection is of essays written after Adorno returned to the Federal Republic of Germany in the early 1950s. Because culturally Adorno was "very German" and indeed he resented the *Volkische* definition of Germanness imposed by Hitler, Adorno delayed his escape, as the son of a Jewish father and Catholic mother, from Hitlerdom to a dangerous point. He resided briefly in England and somewhat longer in America. Strangely, he did not like England and (given the choice) preferred America, and specifically California, the latter because of its climate.

This collection makes it clear that although Adorno was critical of many tendencies in America he was by no means knee-jerk in his criticism. Adorno enjoyed the very real democracy of American life and the very real empiricism of science as practised here...insofar as democracy and empiricism did not become, as a very different sort of emigre might call it, a shtick, or a number: or, as Adorno would call it, fetishized or reified.

But it is clear from these essays that Adorno would be very critical of changes in America that have occured since my generation, that of the immediate post-war Baby Boom, has taken over the shop. Adorno's work on Fascist tendencies in California, for example, located Fascism in our hearts and at our dinner tables. These tendencies are denied in ceremonies (such as the commemoration, last week, of the bombing in Oklahoma City) which are structured by press and lawyers in a way that fully denies anything like a spontaneous response.

One naturally wonders why it is that people at these commemorations, which memorialize real pain that should never be repeated, have to act in such structured fashions, and it was the structuring of Timothy McVeigh's life by similar tendencies that caused him, in all probability, to bomb the Murragh building.

It was irresponsible to decry social research that located Fascist and authoritarian tendencies so close to home and to expect no incidents such as the bombing of the Oklahoma City building. Adorno's work is a reminder to examine our own environment for barbarism, and Americans who have worked on issues of domestic abuse are in his tradition, even if they would actually find the guy irritating, arrogant and conceited...all of which he was.

Some of the book does require, because of Adorno's arrogance, a knowledge of German philosophy, which is not a laugh a minute by any means. The essay "On Subject and Object", for example, may be completely opaque, even to, and especially to, the "educated" reader if her education is in the typical American university. That's because what we mean by the subject may be divergent from what Ted meant, a difference expressed by our own "catchphrase", "that's subjective."

"That's subjective" means in ordinary usage that "that" can be dismissed, and despite the (laudable) place that mere listening plays in our life, "that's subjective" forecloses listening. Adorno writes from a tradition in which subjectivity is not a sink and instead is a source of value.

The surprising end of "on subject and object" is one in which the mere subject acquires value precisely by being removed from a place of origin: we realize, in the general murk of Adorno's style, that the very reason why we exhibit a false humility about our own subjectivity is that we are delivered a false story about our origins as "the first man", which exalts the subjectivity of a mythical Adam, and makes our own second-hand. Adorno makes the common sense point that given our initial resources (which are inferior, because less specialized, than those of other large mammals) "the first man" was probably the group, in which the "subjectivity" of each member had to be (paradoxically enough) treasured because it was a group resource.

The experience of reading the more difficult essays is one of struggle, and reward, in which one realizes that one's mere failure to comprehend is only in part a product of ignorance: it is one of dawn. This is in contrast to reading the typical American scholarly essay in which the very lack of participation and struggle...and the airy dismissal of important questions as marginalia, drives questions to the zone of the subconscious.

That is, Adorno is outside of the tradition which recast and rephrased problems into such a shape that they could be solved...that their solution was implied by their clear phrasing. Mathematics is an example of this. At its best (and Adorno conceded this in many ways) this tradition is a source of both power and democracy.

At its worst, however, and especially as applied to Adorno's own field of social research, this tradition makes people into objects precisely because it has to ignore the philosopher's tendency to delay, by questioning everything. The most obscene consequence of this is the political poll and its unstated influence on our elections.

Like Adorno's longer works but more accessibly, Critical Models rewards reading, and rereading: the very density of his style provides, in terms that would make the guy shudder, good value for the dollar...precisely because, as

This is a readable series of lectures on Kant by a man who was a genuine anti-philosopher.

As in many texts of the Frankfurt School, the Marxism is recreational. As Rolf Wiggershaus' history of the Frankfurt School indicates, Adorno and especially Horkheimer were always careful to sideline Marxist analysis. References to the "material basis" of apprehension of space and time, and of Kant's system considered historically, seem to be muted.

A key to understanding Adorno on Kant is an understanding of the negative concept of reification.

It is hard to foreground a negative concept, rigourously cancelling out invalid pictures of the world...including the image that arises from the very phrase, picture of the world, which is itself reified and not a little sad, in that the subject becomes a lonely visitor to an otherwise deserted sort of cinema on a senior citizen's discount.

The unconscious habit of reification is a feature of the "educated" elite of a postmodern late capitalism, in that in recent years and since Adorno's death in 1970, this class has shifted from reproducing itself by labor to commodifying, packaging and peddling reified forms of its labor. As opportunities for the so-called "chattering class" to work in media and government have declined in Western societies, increasingly the educated elite must marketize its production.

Of course, this process destroys new opportunities since the dominant form of any one intellectual commodity, while not identical to similar "products", has a tendency through extra-market means to eliminate competition. These extra-market means range from network externalities in the computer business to personal brutality (up to and including force and fraud) on the part of some entrepreneurs.

Nonetheless it is our responsibility to realize that here Adorno is trying to express a truth that is not (as it is pictured by incompetent, which is to say modal, professors of philosophy) at all captured by a reified IMAGE of the mind, a wall straight out of Pyramus and Thisbe (in Adorno's book, the "block"), and the Kantian things in themselves.

For Adorno, subjectivity and objectivity do not represent independent categories (this seems to be a theme of his late work.) Descartes, starting with an extreme subjectivity, felt compelled to logically derive an objective world. This while securing objectivity as far as Descartes, and perhaps his Mom, were concerned, made it in terms of an ontological pecking-order logically derived from the cogito. But the entire edifice's very danger of collapse becomes to the artisan philosopher a source of continued unease.

Adorno instead proposes a negative critique. What if subjectivity and objectivity are neither irreducible the one to the other?

It seems that for Ted, subjectivity's objective content and its synthetic apriori features are a necessary feature of subjectivity, and the continuous apprehension of an objective reality by a mininum of one subject mean that the two categories are both necessary, do not presuppose each other and form an organic unity.

Moreover, another necessary feature of subjectivity is its shareablility as opposed to dreams and other fugue states. Western philosophy has been starting with Descartes has been overly concerned with nondefault states as a sort of clever dodge and one reflects on the fondness of philosophy graduate students, during the collapse of American analytic philosophy during the 1970s, for the bottle. Recent philosophy, perhaps due to muscular feminism, has restored the default state of healthy consciousness to center stage without too much back-talk from surviving members of the analytic tribe, who are too hung-over to come up with any more clever counter-examples.

Furthermore, if we deny that we are talking about an empirical I as studied by cognitive neuroscience, dreams and fugue states automatically become of less interest. For the most part, the phenomenological world consists of me when NOT in any form of fugue state, and my fellow citizens NOT in any form of fugue state. And even if we bracket out considerations of existence the world contains history in the form of multiple generations of people passing through different stages of life.

A difference between discourse about the "I', the ego, the subject, in English-American analytic philosophy, and the way it is discussed in Kant and the philosophers after him including Adorno, is that the "I" of the latter has a normative content. An older era would say a certain amount of healthy-mindedness is found in this "I" as a necessary feature for this is the only way we can generalize this "I" so that statements about it can apply to ALL "I's."

A common feature of fugue states, from the brown study to the full-bore alcoholic toot, is the destruction, first of intersubjectivity and then subjectivity. I am well aware that it would be pernicious to merely assume healthy-mindedness and this entire area is in need of further research.

We can find transcendental arguments in the strangest places as in the case of discourse ethics, and the need for citizens (to be citizens) to be assured of minimal political and economic rights.

For example, a feature of American debates on health insurance happens to be neglect of its transcendental character. If we presuppose a political and independent sphere consisting of Lockean subjects with strong rights and responsibilities, then the physical liquidation (even though gradual, and no-one's responsibility) of these subjects because, transcendentally, our concern.

This is to arrive (I believe) at Husserl's strong protest against the accusation that Husserl was an empirical psychologist when Husserl described shared ideas.

A Continental tradition of which Adorno and Husserl are a part declares that there are, over and above the empirical contents of our minds, intersubjective concepts including ethical and artistic concepts. Husserl was not a psychologist maudit, nor was Kant a cognitive neuroscientist, because in Husserl's case Ideas could not be abstracted from the content and in Kant's case the subject's apprehension of reality was not guaranteed by an empirical nexus.

Kant's world is established by declaring victory; not so much the triumphant cry I am but the greater shout it is.

This work completes Adorno¡¦s metacritique on modern German transcendental idealism for the English speaking world. Taken with Negative Dialectics, The Jargon of Authenticity, The Three Studies on Hegel, and Against Epistemology, this text unlocks the unique tradition of Kant and Hegel and Husserl and Heidegger. Adorno¡¦s reading weaves immanently between positivism, idealism, Neo-Kantianism, phenomenology and ontology to present Kant in a unique manner that is particularly interesting to the postmodern debate. Adorno, who holds to modernity and the notion of reason in Kant (linked to a dynamic use of Hegelian dialectics), brings Kant back into the debate on reason for contemporary understanding. Adorno will show the relation between metaphysics and ideology through metaphysical indifference. An indifference which Kant¡¦s philosophy opposed.

The subject of this classic of musical analysis is the complicated phenomenon of Mahler's music and our response to it. The treatment is philosophical/psychological/analytic and the abstractness and complexity of the prose is typical of what one would find in a doctoral thesis, except that it is beautifully written (and Jephcott's translation is itself a work of art).

To introduce the subject let me start with an experience of my own, which is no doubt typical. My introduction to Mahler's music was through the Ninth and Tenth symphonies, which is like starting a mountain climb already at the top of the mountain. I was 22 and naturally quite bowled over. Imagine my chagrin then at hearing the Fourth for the first time -- what is this Haydnesque genre piece that ends with a naive song? How could it have been written by the same composer? As always, though, Mahler's music works on one's subconscious and a few days later I felt compelled to listen again, and what a revelation this was! The first movement, in particular, is absolutely extraordinary. It starts with a curious repeated figure, four flutes in unison playing fifths plus a grace note, accompanied by bells; this leads directly into the deceptively classical-sounding main theme and reappears throughout the first movement (and also in the last) as a kind of magic talisman with multiple meanings. The main theme is followed by a striking sunny interlude in A, with bases rocking pizzicato in fifths, a scurrying violin figure, and violas trilling like insects singing in a meadow. I had the impression of an adult and child walking through a field on a summer day. There's a brief change to the minor, then some high sustained notes in the flutes. These are repeated more emphatically by high clarinets, heralding an ominous change, as if the bucolic scene were being overrun by scudding clouds. Things are not what they seemed, and we don't know where we are! Somehow, we've gotten lost in a forest inhabited by goblins, spooky though not actually menacing. There's a swirling sensation accompanied by dark intimations in the bass, chromatic muted trumpets, and repeated sustained high chords in the flutes; the effect is weirdly haunting. After a while a commotion in C develops, drums crescendo, and then suddenly pure terror -- a high trumpet playing fortissimo. By some process of pure magic, the music suddenly recovers its former equanimity and adult and child (who turn out to be one and the same) find themselves back in the sunny meadow. What sublime irony, and how true to human nature -- when we see something uncanny that disturbs us, we try to put it behind us, forget it. Mahler alone is capable of evoking such feelings. Only a magician could have written the Fourth, and Mahler's achievement here is just as great as in the very different late works, not to mention the middle symphonies.

I could cite other personal examples, as could any Mahlerian. We might disagree about particulars, but each of us carries away something essential from Mahler's music and is enriched by it. And we are quite confident that the experience is qualitatively the same from listener to listener.

Adorno approaches the subject of our response to Mahler's music and what it means through his own experiences of it. But what a listener! It's as if a very learned friend with a doctorate in Mahler stopped by to discuss the subject over tea and ended up staying all week. A gifted writer and philosopher, as well as a professionally trained composer who studied with Berg, Adorno discusses all the symphonies except the Tenth and is always interesting even when you disagree with him. Musicological jargon is mostly avoided, although philosophical-rhetorical terms abound (he loves the word "aporia").

Two caveats. First, the treatment is vulnerable to the charge of "over-intellectualization". One recalls Mahler's reply to William Ritter, an early admirer:"... I find myself much less complicated than your image of me, which could almost throw me into a state of panic." It seems that we, and particularly Adorno, are the complicated ones. We project our feelings onto the music, which seems to invite them to an extent that would surprise even the composer. The mystery of why this is so, and the multifariousness of Mahler, the capacity of his music to be offensive, highly questionable, fascinating, and sublime all at the same time, form the subject of the book.

Second, and more seriously, he disparages Mahler's "ominous positivity" and thereby underestimates the Eighth Symphony at least (readers may agree that the finale of the Seventh is problematic; he does not discuss the extraordinary Tenth, which achieves a wholly serene, positive conclusion). But the positive in Mahler is an essential part of his dynamic disequilibrium; without it, there would be no aporia and the music would degenerate into mere cynicism. Most of the symphonies follow a pattern -- conflict, followed by attempted reconciliation and reconstruction. This process is entirely sincere, and if it fails even in Mahler's hands, it's because he's attempting to do the impossible. Even in the Sixth, the most "tragic" and "despairing" of the symphonies, a good performance will reveal powerful updrafts. To deny the positive in Mahler is to chop him in two. That Adorno's book is nonetheless required reading is testimony to the value of his other observations.

Who then is this book for? It is best for Mahlerians of long standing, those who are well past the first flush of discovery and have regained their musical equilibrium so to speak, and who want to put Mahler in perspective, or even just "share" opinions with an uncommonly intelligent and sensitive critic.

If you know anything about Theodor Adorno, you might well be familiar with the entire edifice of western cultural and philosophic thought; Kant,Hegel,Kierkegaard,and Marx,the history of art,literature,painting and music. Less film,a realm Adorno never got to know. Here in Mahler,we have a concise profile of this one time neglected composer, long misunderstood,even today. I recall a rehearsal with Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic who couldn't quite understand Bernstein's raving from the heart,for clarity yet passion. Adorno knew Mahler's art much better than Mahler ever did for we learn this from Adorno, that Mahler simply abandoned himself to his own intuition to resolve his creative problems. Each chapter in this masterwork in miniature is self-sustaining. In the chapter "Tone" Adorno reveals the basic music materials of Mahler his orchestral pallete. The high positioned violins,in uncomfortable registers where they loose their souls to a menanced, shrill, thin timbre. The string section for Mahler is creatively undisciplined to begin with, each playing differing roles, each contributing its own independence, as in the opening of Mahler's "Ninth" Symphony, the melody tossed between the violins, tremoli in the violas, and the contrbass above or equal in register to all with harmonics. Mahler's progressiveness was in pure content,he was not one to pursue "tangible innovations" but secured his tenuous position with the diatonic mode,familiar scales and harmonic surfaces. A chiaroscuro of means (schatten) the shadows he creates with reliefs of foreground and background. Tonality is not so much renewed as an unheard voice enters the stage, Mahler's voice cracks,is overstrethched, the various woodwind passages like in the "Scherzo" of his "Seventh" Symphony. The forced tone is itself an expressive innovation of his own making a premonition of the darker legubrious brooding up the road in the orchestral works of Arnold Schoenberg. In fact we find ev! ery bit of these darker pages in Mahler before the horrors which await the citizens of Eastern Europe,even up to Bosnia. Adorno's focus is always how Mahler creates meaning within familiar confines,the roads that lead to simple harmonies. He disrupts the stability of rhythm,of gesture that once was, the familiar in Mahler's orchestral context becomes something quite different, no longer can the romantic symphony depend on redemption. Bruckner could depend on this, for he already found his spirituality, whereas Mahler spent his life in pursuit of it . Adorno in the chapter "Novel" reveals the non-progressive side of Mahler.He needed to depend on some stability so his musical characters come and go untarnished at times, the lowlife natural trombone,to the intimate/elegant solo violin, and the cracking horn moments in Mahler. This is where we find "Stufenreichtum" the richness of texture,the musical thread running from the full orchestral (tutti) everyone's voice heard, to the single voice the solos. This is Mahler's context from the distance "in sehr weiter entfernung" to the immediate. It is this expressive immediacy, he learned from Beethoven that gives way to developed chaos as his life wears away. The overblown vacuous "Eighth Symphony" resolved nothing for his real creativity, and the "Ninth" the ideas begin toward the irrational,Mahler is serious even in the "Rondo-Burleske" from the "Ninth",the almost improvised gesture reminded me of Charles Ives,who was writing just about the same time. Adorno's chapter "Variant-Form" we learn Mahler's technique progressed away from what an academic would consider "good" Mahler needn't be as glib as Richard Strauss,nor as consummate as Wagner. He learned music in another way and pointed toward a profound goal. A goal in which his music simply breaks its own voice "Durchbruch" as Adorno mentions where there was no comfort in traditional moments. Adorno opens thi! s expressive vault of Mahler and we can see Mahler again. As recently as Pierre Boulez in his ongoing recordings with The Chicago Symphony we find a Mahler quite as a turning point to the 20th century. Well Boulez brings Mahler into our century whether we want him there or not. Boulez brings a sublime ugliness at times to Mahler's simplicity, the functional predictable movements of harmony creates a kind of timbral dirt. Mahler wanted this. No we are not done with his marvelous "Symphonies" we can contemplate them for some time.

Of all the composers Adorno has thought about intensely, writing essays which merged into book lengths on Mahler,Berg, or Wagner, as well as countless articles and essays on music, Beethoven seems to be a high special preserve within his body of work. This is a work of fragments, and notes,incomplete thoughts collected into notebooks throughout Adorno's life which never was able to solidify under one leaf,or merge into a completed work. But if you've read his brilliant and overwhelming intellectual discourses in his "Philosophy of Modern Music" or "Negative Dialectics" or lastly, his posthumous "Aesthetic Theory" this is more a threshold unto perhaps Adorno's working methods, unformed thoughts and frequent postponments of thoughts, concepts and directions to be takened up later,perhaps for the reader to fulfill. Beethoven was the consummate artist, one committed to the musical subject,the continuation of time, a composer who sought to break rules as well as follow them. And in following them there is a liberation for what this allows,sometimes new forms,a breakage of the tonal scheme or creating a piano sound almost provincial yet innovative,as the "Waldstein Sonata". Adorno frequently draws on Beethoven the craftman, the manipulator and purveyor of materials, on tonality,motives,variations, and form in a state of becoming, and makes us aware once again, that the process of music is a time-bound one, one of an incessant durational frame. Beethoven dealt with first and foremost with reprisals, with materials, themes and harmonic schemes we have heard and will hear again. He dealt with something which is already in the world, and his music simply deals with the inevitability of those moments and their fate redemption or demise. Late Beethoven as well we learn was not a state of increased polyphonic complexity, "Missa Solemnis" was a retrogressive act,not one of innovation as his "Piano Sonatas" frequently were. Adorno reminds us of the dimensions of Beethoven's art we seem to forget,as the simplified moments, the economy of means reduced to pure power as the "Ninth Symphony" or reduction of subjectivity as the late "Sonatas" proclaims. The Late Music "Spatstil" was a music of reduction of harmonic schemes beginning too soon as the late "Quartets" the "C# minor". The editor here Rolf Tiedemann long an Adorno executor trys to make the fragmentariness of this incomplete work cohere with copious notes placed at the end, even interjecting excerpts from completed essays and entire works, as "Aesthetic Theory". Although useful I found this distracting and not all that absorbing.It seems we've never understood Beethoven or that the dimensions of his creativity have been layered,Adorno returns him back to a composer status, a contemporary or visitor of the postmodern field as if the ink never dried.

This book is part of a series of translations by Edmund Jephcott that also includes Adorno's lectures on Kant and ethics. I have little German but it seems to me that Jephcott knows how to translate, by immersing himself not in static German Kultur (which would be a bad mistake with regards to Adorno, a victim of bad culture) but by immersing himself in the current events in which Adorno's lecture was contextualized.

Now, this book is not what we here in the States would consider an "introduction" to "sociology.". That's because almost anything "101" is both indoctrination and education.

American social research has defined itself in reaction to Adorno. While Adorno repeatedly asserted his support for quantitative methods, American social research is based on an exclusionary reversal of the European overemphasis on theory…in which (as Adorno points out in this book) data gathering and moron math replace theory.

In terms of the philosophy of science, Adorno's ontology of social research happens to be right. Physics, unlike sociology, can stand outside the object of research for the very good reason that in physics, the objects of interest are either very small or very far away.

Whereas the sociologist studies phenomena which are very large and in the same room.

A physicist could not study black holes while being sucked into a black hole. A social theorist has to do social research at all times while also being sucked into various social black holes…including Hitler's expulsion of Adorno's kreis in the 1930s. Furthermore, unlike the physicist's work the sociologist's work immediately and necessarily becomes part of the phenomena.

In Godel's proof, the statements that generate Godel's contradiction are outlier cases. In Heisenberg the self-reflexive phenomenon occurs only at the level of elementary particles.

In sociology and in anthropology, however, these phenomena happen all the time.

A true introduction to social theory would therefore foreground this ontological issue, but in fact, Sociology for Dummies 101 does not.

Instead, American sociology in reaction to Adorno proclaims the acceptance of "methodological individualism" as canonical for entry.

Methodological individualism is a metaphysic (which justifies itself as pragmatic) which declares that insofar as we're concerned, society can be reduced to individuals following goals. In this ontology talk about larger elementary structures such as "the proletariat" on the left or "the nation" on the right is relegated to "dogma." The reduction to absurdity is the gnomic utterance of the mad woman Margaret Thatcher: "there is no such thing as society."

It is indeed nonsense to speak of hypostatized entities such as "the proletariat" or "the nation" as if they could exist apart from the interests of their actual members. Part of the metaphysical puzzle of nuclear war was the insanity, on the part of Soviet leaders, in believing that by killing 90% of the proletariat they could ensure the victory of the proletariat: yet indirectly, the hypostatizing thought of Stalinism generates this insane ontology.

The reverse insanity is to even attempt to make sensible conclusions about society from a mass of data...and, as needed, confuse images of reality with elementary "facts." Its size is a practical problem which means that no justification is available from American pragmatism, the epistemology which underlies methodological individualism and this means that methodological individualism contradicts itself...it doesn't work.

But the real problem is Godelian/Heisenbergian as seen in the large American industry of SAT test preparation, resume writing, and corporate grab-ass. It is that methodological individualism scales up from individual observations that are gamed by ordinary slobs, who don't like to be treated as lab rats, and who in many cases are temporary, paid employees of firms, who allow themselves to be objectified for a fistful of dollars and free chow.

Adorno presents a foundational solution based on Kant.

Suppose, examining the simultaneous existence of individual choice and the emergence of larger structures including that structure visible (in an example of Adorno's) when one is unable to borrow money or get a job, we were to say that this analysis, which acknowledges the existence of BOTH individual choice AND larger structures, neither of which would exist without the other. [I have of course, just reinvented the intellectual foundations of European Social Democracy.]

This resembles Kant because this surrender was part of the Kantian method. In ontology it is the admission that while we cannot know the world as such in the way we demand, there is nonetheless a difference between dream and reality, a transcendental difference established by the benign circularity of an argument which shows that the existence of a distinction is presupposed as a condition of knowledge, and thus argument, itself.

In American-ese, I can well imagine Adorno saying "sure, my Frankfurt school is part of society and it plays the game. My guy Horkheimer concealed its Marxism when we were in California during the McCarthy era because we like to eat. But I deny that this falsifies our conclusions as self-interested. This is because individuals and their individual institutions NECESSARILY exist alone with ALL OTHER individuals and institutions as part of a society which WOULD NOT EXIST without at least two individuals talking to each other."

"You can't say that this cheerful admission of being part of society falsifies what we say. This is because the economics that results from individualist sociology proclaims self-interest as paramount. This places the apologists for methodological individualism and a dogma which dares not speak its name under the logically identical cloud of suspicion...which works both ways. Now get out of my office."

The most moving part of the book is the end, for Godde and Jephcott have preserved the audience's hissing when Adorno defends another academic's right to speak. He was probably hissed by clowns who are now senior executives at Deutsches Bank and Springer, who unlearned left politics but retained the ability to use methodological discourtesy (and left sexism) as a tactical tool and used it in the corporate climb.

Theodore Adorno (two years after these lectures) died from the stresses of 1968.

To anyone fascinated by the genius of Adorno there is perhaps no other book more exemplary than his study of Kierkegaard. One will find all the strains of his later thought permeating this polemic against existential subjectivity. Yet dispite the relentlessness of his attack, Adorno seems to be writing a eulogy for Kierkegaard's misdirected melancholy. Articulating the beauty of an aesthetically pure Christianity, exposing its essential mythology as rooted in despair, Adorno acheived a work of genius that compels me to wonder why it has seemingly been ignored. Robert Hullot-Kentor should be credited with a good translation and the motivation to bring a delightfully obscure work to the English speaking world.

A theme of the late Adorno was the "organic" connection of linked terms: for the late Adorno, philosophy had the musical task of balancing claims at opposite ends of these organic polarities.

In Plato, Adorno shows, there is no conception of the reality of matter as opposed to Form; in Platonism, matter is merely Maya and illusion. Aristotle's insight was that the Form implies that we have to take an interest in matter because Form is always a Form-of with a material content. A square is in this picture filled with matter of some color; the perfect man has a material biography including encounters with the material (such as the Wedding Feast at Cana: marriage's sanctity is this transit of Venus.)

Nor, in Aristotle-Adorno, would the Form be at all improved by removing, in a Platonic spirit, as much matter as possible in a retreat from the world in search of "pure" form. Most mystics in the Hellenist period were consciously or unconsciously, Platonists who sought through reduction in contact with the material access to a mystical. As the twentieth century Islamic philosopher Sayyid Qutb has shown, this creates a cleavage or schizophrenia in Western thought: a divorce.

Western mental reservations about the goodness of the received, material, world result from the fact that (as Adorno shows) Aristotle quite straighforwardly prized the Form over the Content, preserving the Platonic value structure. Adorno shows that Aristotle did so because ancient philosophers had no clear conception of the dialectic.

Now, this is a claim of the sort that Adorno's very critics hunt for in the thicket of his prose like Indiana Jones, and, once they find this fool's gold, they fail to read on; for is it not the case that dialectic comes from the Greek?

Dialectic did come from the Greek but Continental philosophers don't mean by "dialectic" its root meaning of conversation, instead something more like talking to oneself in which the philosopher is literally sundered by the overpowering structure of his thought at the point where he realizes that as a part of the historical world he must self-apply his philosophy, treating himself as Other.

It is at this point that contradictions emerge which point the way not to collapse but to a new structure.

Adorno's dialectic, which he found absent in Aristotle, was one in which the Concept makes its own demands upon the thinker who winds up, not compromising with the World Spirit but in wholehearted agreement with its necessity.

We have to cultivate Adorno's remarkable ability to think in three dimensions here and historically; for thanks to Orwell, the very phrase, "wholeheartedly in agreement with the necessity of the World Spirit" becomes Winston Smith at the end of 1984. In fact, Adorno, despite the simple-minded demonology of the American right, was not at all wholeheartedly in agreement with the NOWS after the Holocaust and his negativity, also a matter of paradoxical scorn in American circles, generated his thought after 1945.

The canard of the American right is that European intellectuals of the 1950s like Adorno somehow manufactured the Stalinism of the 1930s (sic.: if you're going to lie, lie big: it is unexplained how the future influenced the past.)

Another canard of the American right is the attempt to pin responsibility for the Holocaust, ahistorically, on European intellectuals, and Adorno is usually in the round-up of the usual suspects. The Hegelian belief in the reality of moral progress is portrayed as generating schemes, for social improvement, which generate schemes, for mass murder, as if privatized schemes do not also have their own potential, almost by default.

For Adorno, there was no empirically attainable way to attain redemption after the death camps. For the Anglo-American philosopher, who Adorno represents in this book as the deracinated Wittgenstein, "die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist" (the world is what happens), the Holocaust as a fact therefore closes the matter: we find an echo of this in the facticity of interviews, on horror, of The Guy in the Bar...s seen, for example, in Claude Lanzmann's Shoah.

The Guy says "get over it,... don't bring it up, Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist." Adorno's nemesis (like the Guy on the Weimar street-car who yelled at young Ted for his pretentious speech, pretentious speech being close to the language of redemption: like the knucklehead on the El who yelled at my kid for reading a book), the Guy is unconsciously influenced by Positivism and concludes from the empirical horror of Stalinism and the Holocaust that there is no "redemption", only revenge, only Tony Soprano, bada-bing.

The Guy in the Bar, an irresponsible philosopher in the sense that this clown witlessly inherits philosophy without examination, is, in his schizophrenic willingness to divorce form from content, in charge of modern American media...in which the form of facticity and polls drive what passes for political thought. Die Welt ist Alles, was Herr Gallup sprachen.

Adorno's ghost is needed to exorcise Guys in Bars, including those with tenure.

Adorno realized that form and content exist in an organic unity. Language that witlessly forgets this is the sort of political language that takes upon a favored form such as "freedom" without bothering to fill the form with content such as free men and women, and instead, in the Name of the Form, fills America's jails.

Half-educated, half-indoctrinated bien pensants are then systematically gulled into support for crime following the empty signifier of the Form. This has in my experience reduced and brutalized smart people to Guys in Bars.

Metaphysics is not palmistry, nor theology, nor the posit of supernatural entities. Nor is it restricted by any known law to the mulish rejection of an excess over der Fall. It is instead an ongoing critique of the very attempt to grope beyond and this critique itself is evidence for the Unseen: it is a rumor of redemption, and that is all we need: that is all we deserve.

I search for a book with a title; "la filosofia della musica moderna" of Theodor Adorno, publishing by Einaudi.I am waiting for more news. Thanks a lot!

Although out-of-print this is an event in the history of music comparable to primary musical works.It had to be Theodor Adorno a consummate intellect that created a new mode of contemplating contemporary art, music simply being the realm he knew more intimately,literature a close second. His prolific student from the late Fifties, Jurgen Habermas once said of Adorno, that he created theory spontaneously, simply within the course of a discussion, adept at synthesizing his thoughts as he spoke. But Adorno's importance for contemporary expression was assured,in that Adorno brought the complexity of philosophic,social and political thought to music. Something hardly done prior, and is only now within the past ten years beginning to be realized. See numerous studies on Adorno and his approach to speaking about music. To read the "Philosophy of Modern Music" is to understand Adorno's departures for his thought is the most exposed. Written in short cursive, aphorisitic-like paragraphs, almost approaching a sketch of a thought is to reveal a complexity, but one which engages his subject. The two polar opposites here are composers, Arnold Schoenberg(representing the progressive elements in music), and Igor Stravinsky(representing the backward-looking retrogressive elements). Adorno had considered the private artist working in seclusion as the highest form of rebellion, of subversion, for Adorno had contempt for the marketplace and how that magnetized and transformed art. Something of the market, in the late Forties was prevalent in jazz and film. Had Adorno lived into the age of computers and simulation,he would have seen to full extent how his thought has been realized in ever purified forms. Adorno thought Schoenberg's discovery of the 12-Tone dodecaphonic compositional method as a sign of progress. 12-Tone in a profound way was a synthesis, a conduit of the theoretical advancements of the history of music.It was both a beginning and an endpoint. But Schoenberg's method, althought quite new and unfinished allowed for all the parameters of music to be defined and developed, "Total Organization of the Elements of Music" is one paragraph here or section, "Differetiation and Coarseness" yet another referring to thinking about sound, as a sculptor would of his/her materials, shapting them, giving them form and direction. Stravinsky contrarywise indulged in looking backward, at the folksongs of his native Russia for music materials to be manipulated and the projection of sound without its deep attenuation. A view that is subjective now in retrospect,for Stravinsky was a grand orchestrator and a craftsman. But in Stravinsky, in particular his early period of the marvelously powerful ballet music, sound is pulverized,and is forced into suppressed forms,usually ashifting alternating suite of pieces,refocusing our short attention spans as required and, all in the projection of an image, a screeen for which the ballet takes place. But Adorno had takened issue with Stravinsky's subject matter as well as his technical means, a puppet in "Petrouska" one given over to a master without hope nor recourse.Likewise the "Rite of Spring" a virgin is simply sacrificed without recourse and we have the human image portraying the inevitability of natural forces, something Europe was about to experience first hand with the rise of fascism. These sections here are "Depersonalization" and "Fetishism of Means", explains Stravinsky's creativity stepping backwards within himself. In "Modes of Listening" Adorno refers to the "Shock" value that pummels the listener and the degradation of hearing into a music you merely submit to, whereas in Schoenberg there is more a sense of give and take,of the music allowing contemplative time. Again to my mind this is all relative, for these festures I find in both composers oeuvre. Still I find a conceptual power in Adorno,one that still nourishes today in the mileau of after-postmodernity.

Famously bad translation of the central piece of Adorno's philosophy. I recommend getting Aesthetic Theory now and waiting for the next translator's attempt.

Negative Dialectic is very thought-provoking and difficult text in itself, but it is worth of the effort. If you are interested in Adorno, it is a must-have. Yet the English translation is unbearably inadequate, you may make better sense of it, if you consult with the original German text. The companion piece to Negative Dialectics is Adorno's Prism. Get Prism first, and wait for a better translation of ND.

Michel Foucault once stated that it was a great tragedy that the Frankfurt School and the French post-structuralists were unaware of each other's work. He felt that the two schools of thought could have gained much from dialogue, and this text illustrates his point in its relatedness to postmodern discourses on the limits of knowledge and the ends of positivistic philosophy.

Adorno addresses the relationship between the concept and the nonconceptualities, which is nothing more that the relationship between discourse and the Other in post-structuralist phraseology. The text is extraordinarily difficult - not always a problem explainable via the difficulties of the ideas involved - and I often find myself spending an hour reading and re-reading a page or two before being able to come to terms with the content. Personally, I enjoy such difficult reading, however, and find it an avenue for developing critical reasoning skills at the sime time as I re-investigate the problems addressed in the difficult prose.

I highly recommend this text for anyone interested in pessemistic, carefully thought-out discourses on the limits placed on understanding by the "pigeon-holeing" of conceptualization, anyone who enjoys cracking hard nuts via time, sweat, and frustration, and anyone looking for a difficult text to read superficially and criticize emptily as being an example of the poverty of post WWII continental philosophy. In a sense, it is a book for all . . .