Foundations of the Frankfurt School of Social Research by Judith T. Marcus Zoltan Tar

Author:Judith T. Marcus, Zoltan Tar [Judith T. Marcus, Zoltan Tar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Public Policy, Social Policy, Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9781000676853
Google: EFDVDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

The object of this critique is the neohumanism of Weimar and its glorification of Greek art. This seemingly historical polemic has a methodological aspect which I want to bring to the foreground: Adorno, at least implicitly, speaks here against the model that was used by the early Lukács to situate the novel form. Adorno undercuts the fundamental assumption of Lukács’s Theorie des Romans that early Greek literature was grounded in social conditions which were free of alienation.

This critique of classicism becomes important because it is at the same time a critique of a model which was further developed by Lucien Goldmann. For Goldmann the task of the critic and sociologist of literature is to establish a homology between the social and the literary structure.8 Adorno’s theory looks similar, yet this similarity is deceptive. While Adorno shares with Goldmann the interest in formal structure and rejects any kind of Inhaltssoziologie as vulgar materialism, he is careful not to press the correlation into the homology model. The difference becomes apparent when Adorno defines his approach as immanent. The critic is starting out from the text rather than beginning with an analysis of the social structure. It is the explication of the work of art which offers insight into the social conditions that defined the production of the work of art. In his essay “Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft” he unfolds the notion that the social meaning of the poem is expressed through its language. The poem relates to social history only indirectly. Adorno calls the poem a philosophical and historical sundial; by deciphering the structure of the poem the critic decodes the meaning of social history. Again, this sounds like Goldmann’s theory, but we have to note the distinction: The interpretation of the poem refers to the meaning of history, not to the facts or objective structures. The two realms are mediated by philosophy—more specifically the philosophy of the early Marx. Unlike Goldmann, Adorno would never identify the work of art with an individual social group or class. This procedure which is typical of Goldmann’s criticism, is unacceptable to Adorno on principle. The correspondence between art and society, the aesthetic and the social meaning, transcends the particular group or class. Authentic are only those works which are representative of the whole. The choice of the sundial as the key metaphor signals that for Adorno the important element in the text is its expressive force and much less the author and his/her intentions to build up a coherent vision of the world. The individual author enters the sphere of criticism only as the human voice, the historical subjectivity that objectifies the expression through the work. Thus the emphasis is placed on the objective side: The authentic work of art is given the status of a permanent testament of human history—it embodies the hopes and sufferings, the expectations and contradictions of the human race.

In Ästhetische Theorie Adorno tries to unfold this argument: “If [the authentic work of art] stands in opposition to empirical reality

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