Theodor Adorno

Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno (11 September 1903 – 6 August 1969) German sociologist, philosopher, musicologist and composer.

Sourced:

• "In general they are intoxicated by the fame of mass culture, a fame which the latter knows how to manipulate; they could just as well get together in clubs for worshipping film stars or for collecting autographs. What is important to them is the sense of belonging as such, identification, without paying particular attention to its content. As girls, they have trained themselves to faint upon hearing the voice of a 'crooner'. Their applause, cued in by a light-signal, is transmitted directly on the popular radio programmes they are permitted to attend. They call themselves 'jitter-bugs', bugs which carry out reflex movements, performers of their own ecstasy. Merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impovrished and barren existance. The gesture of adolescence, which raves for this or that on one day with the ever-present possibility of damning it as idiocy on the next, is now socialized."
  • Quoted in The Sociology of Rock by Simon Frith, 1978, ISBN 0094602204, from Adorno's 'Perennial fashion-jazz'

• "Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture."
  • Quoted in The Sociology of Rock by Simon Frith, 1978, from Adorno's 'Perennial fashion-jazz'

• "When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails."
  • M Jay, The Dialectical Imagination. A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research (London, 1973), p279.

• "The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite."
  • Theodor Adorno (1981). "Perennial Fashion--Jazz", Prisms, p.129, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

• "If one is to take Lulu's twelve-tone chord as the integral totality of complementary harmony, then Berg's allegorical genius proves itself within a historical perspective which makes the brain reel: just as Lulu in the world of total illusion longs for nothing but her murderer and finally finds him in that sound, so does all harmony of unrequited happiness long for its fatal chord as the cipher of fulfillment--twelve-tone music is not to be separated from dissonance. Fatal: because all dynamics come to a standstill within it wihout finding release. The law of complementary harmony already implies the end of the musical experience of time, as this was heralded in the dissociation of time according to Expressionistic extremes."
  • Theodor Adorno. Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster. New York: Seabury, 1973.

• "Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric"
  • Theodor Adorno. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, 1951

Attributed:

• "When intellectual formulations are treated simply by relegating them to the past and permitting the simple passage of time to substitute for development, the suspicion is justified that such formulations have not really been mastered, but rather they are being suppressed."

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