American Adorno?

Under review here are two books—one, Current of Music, a previously unpublished work of Adorno's (with drafts and related materials) that grew out of his first research position in exile in America; the second a study by a younger scholar, surveying Adorno's American output, that looks to have started as a bid to be the first treatment of the long-lost opus.

As a refugee from Hitler, Adorno got his American visa on the promise of a post as head of the "music section" of Paul Lazarsfeld's PRRP (Princeton Radio Research Project: the classy ivy-league brand covered a consortium of associated universities funded by the Rockefeller Foundation). His work there involved carrying out the specific research tasks the PRRP had gained funding to support, and writing a manuscript on his own "radio theory." Current of Music presents six hundred pages (drafts, etc.) of that never-finished work-in-progress.

I'll admit I wasn't looking forward to reading Current of Music. Given the PRRP aegis, I expected Current of Music to be an exercise comparable to Adorno's pages in The Authoritarian Personality: empirical numbers-crunching premised on the reduction of qualitative issues to quantifiable data, a labor Adorno undertook as the price of his ticket in America. Adorno pushed to get Current of Music supported and published back in the day, but he doesn't seem to have minded abandoning it when its usefulness to his exigent American career had passed its sell-by date.

But Current of Music proves more interesting than that. If The Authoritarian Personality had to adopt the style of a lab report, Current of Music looks to have been the antidote, even the critique, of the data-processing "research" that was Adorno's day job. It is not a finished manuscript, but a mass of miscellaneous, sometimes overlapping, materials in various states of finish. A few sections report on empirical investigations involving "subjects" filling out questionnaires and the like, but even these (fewer than fifty pages) present their data with calls for more refined (i.e., more qualitative) methods. The bulk of the book is Adorno writing in his characteristically essayistic, free-wheeling, anti-empirical way, about radio, and about what radio as a mass- and pop-medium does to (mostly) classical music.

Robert Hullot-Kentor's introduction (in German) outlines Adorno's composition, revision, and redaction of these materials (52-69). The book offers two versions of the treatise on radio; the first is looser and more audacious, the second more "finished" and conventional—e.g., what the first elaborates as a "Radio Physiognomics," the second more cautiously treats under the rubric of "The Radio Voice." It's symptomatic of Adorno's distaste for the empirical that his first start on Current of Music launched from the aggressively maladroit metaphor of a "radio physiognomics." Adorno begins with a critique of this metaphor—"this concept of physiognomics is obsolete . . . [and] survives only as a problem" (75)—but crankily pursues this "obsolete" figuration in a way that recalls the almost caricaturally antiquarian atmospherics of Benjamin's Trauerspiel ("facies hippocratica" and the rest); perhaps "physiognomics" was also a way to avoid speaking of a "phenomenology" of radio, since Adorno in those years might have thought that word tainted. (Adorno resorted to "physiognomy" again in his late book on Mahler.) Adorno means "physiognomy" to connote the complex "unity" of an "objective" phenomenon. Radio, for example, is not merely a technology, but a cascade of social effects: "When a private person in a private room is subjected to a public utility mediated by a loudspeaker, his response takes on aspects of a response to an authoritarian voice even if the content of that voice or the speaker to whom the individual is listening has no authoritarian features whatsoever" (113). That authority-effect is the real object of Adorno's "physiognomics": "paradoxical as it sounds, the authority of radio becomes greater the more it addresses the listener in his privacy" (114). Updating to today, we might add: pop-culture is the more authoritarian the greater its pose of transgressiveness.

Hullot-Kentor rightly judges that...