Adorno: A Biography 1st Edition by Stefan Müller-Doohm (PDF)

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Even the biographical individual is a social category’, wrote Adorno. ‘It can only be defined in a living context together with others.’ In this major new biography, Stefan Müller-Doohm turns this maxim back on Adorno himself and provides a rich and comprehensive account of the life and work of one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century. This authoritative biography ranges across the whole of Adorno’s life and career, from his childhood and student years to his years in emigration in the United States and his return to postwar Germany. At the same time, Muller-Doohm examines the full range of Adorno’s writings on philosophy, sociology, literary theory, music theory and cultural criticism. Drawing on an array of sources from Adorno’s personal correspondence with Horkheimer, Benjamin, Berg, Marcuse, Kracauer and Mann to interviews, notes and both published and unpublished writings, Muller-Doohm situates Adorno’s contributions in the context of his times and provides a rich and balanced appraisal of his significance in the 20th Century as a whole.Müller-Doohm’s clear prose succeeds in making accessible some of the most complex areas of Adorno’s thought. This outstanding biography will be the standard work on Adorno for years to come.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I first found this book in 2004, in the Virgin superstore in Nice on the day Derrida died, but it was in French: I considered even then buying it, and laboring through it with my Petit Robert, so magisterial it seemed.Fortunately, the English translation provided by Rodney Livingstone is idiomatic and most readable.This is more than a biography, it is also an introduction to Adorno’s thought, which is comprehensively discussed as it unfolded under the awe-inspiring drama of a refugee who, as a formerly pampered child of the Wilhelmine *haute* bourgeois, had to undergo “the return of the nightmare of childhood” in the form of National Socialism: the absolute triumph of the bully.Many red herrings and university-pub arguments can be resolved using Muller-Doohm’s comprehensive scholarship. It’s clear from the text and the large number of footnotes and references that Adorno in no way disavowed his Jewish inheritance or betrayed radical students to the police.Other potential skeletons in Adorno’s closet are comprehensively addressed, including two embarassing early efforts: an opera based on Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn (which brings to mind Karl May westerns) and a review with moderate praise for a German oratorio based on words penned by Baldur von Schirach, the (half-American!) founder of Hitler youthdom.In the latter case, nondialectical reasoning devolves to mere free association in which almost any keyword can trigger a witch-hunt, because formal logic (as Adorno knew) is inadequate in any situation of missing information, which describes society as a whole then and now. Adorno neatly defused this situation, unlike so many others, by a straightforward admission of the truth: like Robert J. Oppenheimer, the American inventor of the atom bomb who like Adorno was privileged in childhood, Adorno was cash-register honest.Certainly, maddened monks of the new order can, and probably will, mine this text for nasty stuff. But the worst they will find is a midcentury bon vivant who had affairs outside of marriage with the tacit approval of a de Beauvoir-ish wife, Gretel Karplus, who was getting entirely too much material and spiritual gratification by her association with a husband loyal to her where it counted.That a philosophy and a sociology could emerge organically and idiomatically from a musician’s biography will of course offend the system-builders *malgre lui* of liberalism, who are heavily invested in the orthogonal and the rule-driven, because they have no negative ontology and can’t avoid making rules; the logic in which they find themselves embedded is a remorseless as Robespierre’s “Church of the Supreme Being”, and as dead on arrival, as we see in Iraq. Indeed, the very idea that a man who wanted to be a composer could instead become a sociologist based on his musical background will remind them of Adorno’s slightly fraudulent maternal grandfather, about which Stephan Muller-Doohm has information that is new, relative to older biographies of Adorno.Adorno’s maternal grandfather was an opportunistic fencing master who adopted the name Adorno to build an aristocratic clientele in the now-dead world of the nineteenth century, and the chapter on his grandfather is light opera…in which it all comes out right in the night, as it did in Rosa von Stamboul or the Student Prince, because of the improvement in bourgeois status during the 19th century in which a truly rising tide rose even somewhat leaky boats.But it is to be tone-deaf in the American way not to understand the “constellation” of light opera and the horrors of the twentieth century, about which Adorno was morally concerned, in that strong way which needs no religious grounding. Shostakovich was a composer Adorno did not admire, and Adorno does stand accused, in his musicology, of a simple racism constructed not by malice in his case but by refusal to leave Middle Europe psychologically. Nonetheless, Shostakovich unconsciously echoes an Adorno theme (the life that encompasses both beauty and horror, finding them irreconcilable) when in one of his symphonies, the operetta tune “And then I Go To Maxim’s!” becomes a German attack, musically, a mass bourgeois psychotic overwhelm.The chapter on Adorno’s grandfather conjures a world in which a significant segment of Europe’s population was rising up and not falling down as today, and an examination of our own internal psychology (as well as experiments such as that conducted on General Electric employees in the 1920s) shows us that we’re less alert to our objective position in society than to the sensation of motion up, or down.The direction went straight down, of course, in 1933, and the reader of this book is able through its great detail to cathect to what it must have felt like, which builds empathy 12 ways…sorely needed when people in the USA can be content with the idea of the same sort of thing happening to the sort of people who, in Baghdad, used to go to the rough equivalent of Maxim’s.In fact, the very statement that “a musician can’t ever be a sociologist!” is a type of that oh, so very categorial, so very administrative, statement which bugged Teddy, because the “can’t” is even in formal logic subject to the riposte, why the hell not.Americans used to know this, and Adorno and Horkheimer found this refreshing as Muller-Doohm recounts. But it’s an open secret, in today’s America, that the rules are naturalized. America has become old Europe.Adorno, like any man, had his limitations. A wag right here on Amazon (cf. the reviews of Aesthetic Theory) calls him the intellectual equivalent of white flight, and Adorno’s “On Jazz” was an unintended joke: as Muller-Doohm documents, Adorno simply confused American whitebread Pop (the 1940s equivalent of Britney and the Bee Gees) with jazz and blues. Adorno never retracted “On Jazz” although, as documented here, he knew Benny Goodman personally.We are spared any auto-da-fe, in the form of Adorno getting down to the sounds, such as are seen in Disney’s 1939 Fantasia where the “classical” musicians play “jazz”. Muller-Doohm mentions one American TV programme which Adorno liked, and this was a natural history program. Instead of a schizophrenic divide between work and leisure, or all work and no play, Adorno clearly drew no line.At the same time, he never seems to have found much of what he was looking for in Pop culture but always found something deficient. His reactions to the Beatles are reproduced and they bear the test of time, because in fact the Beatles became spokesmen for the rich in songs like “Revolution” less than ten years after Adorno grumped at them, and John Lennon, the most intelligent Beatle, went his own way.As to other red herrings, Adorno, as documented here, did call the cops on the rioting students.But this wasn’t the first time Teddy found himself on the business end of the dialectic. Student radicals, in Germany and the USA, demanded a nondialectical and indeed mechanistic “change”, a system reset on a world-computer. Today, the same clowns grown fat and old run companies and destroy lives in the name of the same second-order Maoism, a simpleton’s rejection of the dialectic.So seemingly marginal, so misunderstood, and such a perfect gentleman, Adorno was always oddly sorted with thugs like Brecht. But his own theory was organically connected with his biography in a way unseen in public intellectuals, who all too typically mixed appeals to others for a compassion and ability to simply live with others that they did not manifest in their personal lives (with Brecht and Sartre being exhibits A and A prime).Adorno lived the categorical imperative in the sense that for most public intellectuals, a world filled with their clones would be a nightmare, but a world of Teddies would be a civilization.Muller Doohm’s Adorno should in my view have Kant’s epitaph:”For his natural gifts, not merely as regards the talents and motives that may incite him to employ them-but especially the moral law within him, stretch so far beyond all earthly utility and advantage, that he feels himself bound to prize the mere consciousness of probity, apart from all advantageous consequences-even the shadowy gift of posthumous fame-above everything; and he is conscious of an inward call to constitute himself, by his conduct in this world-without regard to mere sublinary interests-the citizen of a better.”

⭐WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW IF YOU ARE CONSIDERING BUYING THIS BOOK: Get the hardback. The paperback has heavy paper and an inferior glue job. It came apart more than just about any book I’ve ever read. OVER ONE HUNDRED PAGES CAME OUT. The heavy paper is useful if you’re the type that writes in your books, as, with this one, I certainly was. But the glue is not up to its duties. Presumably the hardback is better; anyway, it’s hard to imagine a worse binding. The bookmaking here is frankly substandard.Adorno is the single most important philosopher of modern music that we have yet seen. He is the closest thing we have to a patron saint of Modernist composers – pity the poor Modernist composers, but at least Adorno said things that can show the urgency and importance of musical Modernism. His social philosophy and observations about modern life go very far to understanding such things as why modernist music is having such a hard time and why modern society is so corrupt and superficial. Without a doubt he was the first to systematically inveigh against what has by now become the American marketplace absorption of Classical music. He was not merely a prophet of the problem, he saw it and responded at the time in a knee-jerk sort of way. He can be praised for this, but unfortunately he allowed himself to be a bit of a knee-jerk himself. His writing style is often turgid – Bryan Magee is only a little impatient, not utterly unfair, when calls Adorno “unreadable” – but if you want to get at the issues of contemporary music, Adorno is your best help. No other philosopher since has been as concerned and involved with the issues facing the Modernist composer; turgidity is regrettable, but you’ve got little choice. You don’t do well to ignore Adorno. Magee, as an example of a philosopher who has written about music-related matters, has written beautifully about Wagner, but part and parcel of this is that he is not as concerned to understand musical Modernism. If you are familiar with the fin-de-siecle Viennese musical situation, which was so important in the development of modern music, when you read Karl Popper’s remarks about music in his autobiography, you realize that Popper’s philosophical application of aesthetics falls far short of his theories about science – Popper was, in practice, apparently no better than many of his countrymen, a plain old musical bigot, who actually expresses the idea that we don’t need Rosenkavalier because we already have Le Nozze di Figaro. This reminds me of Omar Sharif’s line in Lawrence of Arabia “The Prince already has an Englishman.” Musical bigotry doesn’t get worse than that without taking up an electric guitar.Adorno was a problem and not infrequently a pest to deal with. Schoenberg, an idol of his, hated him for his verbosity. Adorno is also completely wrong-headed about the place of Modernism in the world – he doesn’t do the cause any favors by deliberately taking the view that Modernism is some kind of enemy figure of culture. He actually took the role of critic with negative method and/or perspective. I wish he had not done this. Modernism is beautiful.I suppose Adorno took the view he did because he was usually jumping into the fray of the “Antithesis” part of every dialectical process he could detect. If so, this could really be a way of systematically squaring him off, by realizing that he was in the “turbulence” part of dialectical process. He seems to have thought this was proper; the manifold reasons for this are beyond the scope of this forum, but if you know his preferred philosophical ingredients, perhaps you agree. Stefan Mueller-Doohm is partisan to his subject, but their are worse crimes in the world, and reading this biography is at this time the best chance we have to begin to process Adorno whole.I would like to offer one suggestion as to a future use of Adorno’s ideas: I think the way he talks, especially in Aesthetic Theory, about the artwork as a kind of “alternative” to events in the participant’s life (that means the audience too of course) could be useful in the development of Evolutionary Robotics. I am trying to give this problem some thought. As I suggested earlier, I don’t think it is necessary to accept Adorno’s negative position; that is a part of his thought that I think can be compartmentalized and separated out from the rest. The first thing that occurs to me is that in a world in which there is a constant re-ordering of priorities of so-called “relevance,” a person’s attendance at a concert, or the fact of his having read a book etc., can be prioritized over other events – in his own life. As long as the individual has chief right to set these priorities, this could be an incredibly useful way of ordering anything from a life to a program to an Artificial Intelligence. Life can be a model for AI, and AI can make the substitutions an individual might prefer. So there is a chance for an interactivity between a person’s life and the AI he can make of it. Read the Latin on a dollar bill and you can realize that we have been working on this for awhile now: Novus ordo seclorum is a motto of our country. The best way to understand what a computer does is to remember the French word for the machine: it is the “ordinateur,” that which “ordains,” in other words, that which puts things into a new ordinal ordering. The interactivity of life and art is one of Adorno’s themes, and through philosophy can I think be useful in the development of AI. Reading him is an experience of flashes of brilliance coming out of an often pellucid mire, but it can be worth it.Adorno was an astute observer of the crimes of the marketplace, perhaps his greatest practical virtue, and not a small one. He can help you set your head straight about popular music and its cynical manipulation by the media, since he was actually there in the U.S. in the 1940s when the music industry created its first “phony think-tank” and did its first and most damaging “false-research-to-assure-the-unsuspecting-public” type of maneuver, such as the tobacco industry did, and the carbonmongers are doing now. Adorno saw through it and screamed bloody murder then and there, got himself kicked off the team, but he screamed bloody murder about it for the rest of his life. He could be very thick about things when he did not generate their circumstances – I think he missed the point about the “Happening” that was famously staged at one of his classes – I think the three barebreasted girls were meant to be either Rheinmaidens, or Marx’s three daughters. But he sure couldn’t play along, even though he said he wanted to be a playboy in his next life.If you have any interest in Adorno, but don’t want to start with a Hegelian-sounding tome or miscellaneous essays, this is the place to start. You will be able to trace his influences as he came to them and vice versa. Thank you, Stefan.

⭐Müller-Doohm’s biography, and translated by Rodney Livingston, of this great intellectual critica and artist gives us a comprehensive picture of Adorno’s life and work. Written from the standpoint of a detailed sociologist, Müller-Doohm effectively traces the many projects and personal connections that animated Adorno’s life-work. From his ealry efforts as a student of Alban Berg (in Vienna) to his participation of the first wave of the Frankfurt School, and later to his years in L.A., Adorno’s life was devoted to the resistance against the enclosure by a society of thoughtless domination and regression. Adorno emerges here as a tireless advocate for the life of the mind (understood as critical praxis) against both the dominant schools of existentialism and positivism of his time. Through serious engagements with his many letters with Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Ernst Bloch, and others, we finally get a detailed survey of his collaborative ambitions. Probably by virtue of Müller-Doohm’s training, the emphasis of the biography is sociological and aesthetic rather than philosophical (a distinction Adorno tirelessly called into question). Still, one would like a bit more analysis of the major philosophical works such as Negative Dialectics (which appears rather brusqely here), but the text acheives a true balance amidst Adorno’s many projects, as well as his activities as teacher, lecturer, and researcher.

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