Have you ever had that really specific, slightly
uncanny feeling when you turn on the radio? Maybe
you're just mindlessly scrolling through a new
releases playlist and you get hit with this wave
of... of deja vu it's that sensation where you
swear you've never heard this specific song before
it's brand new but at the same time you feel
like you've already heard it a thousand times
it's the pop song paradox yes it feels fresh
but it's completely familiar it's safe it's catchy
it hooks you but it doesn't you know it never
actually surprises you exactly it's haunting
in a way or okay think about those personalized
ads you buy one pair of running shoes just one
and suddenly the entire internet decides your
whole identity is marathon runner. Oh, yeah.
Everything is targeted. It feels like the machine
knows you, but it's actually just... It's just
shoving you into a prefabricated box. It feels
manipulative. It feels manipulative because,
well, in many ways it is. And while we tend to
think of this as a very modern problem, you know,
a symptom of the algorithm age of big tech and
all that, there was a man who predicted this
exact state of affairs. He did. Decades before
the Internet was even a glimmer in a computer
scientist's eye. And today we are unpacking the
life and mind of that man, Theodore W. Adorno.
He was a German philosopher who looked at the
bright, happy world of pop culture and saw a
factory floor. This is a guy who fled the Nazis,
hated jazz with a burning passion, and argued
that our leisure time, our weekends, our movie
nights, is actually just an extension of our
workday. He is a fascinating, difficult, and
often very intimidating figure. I mean, he was
a man of massive contradiction. Like walking
contradiction. Totally. He was a Marxist who
was constantly accused of being an elitist snob.
He's a victim of fascism who was later attacked
by left -wing students for being too conservative.
And my personal favorite. Yes. He was a classical
music prodigy who also analyzed horoscopes to
understand the decline of Western civilization.
Which is a bold combination of interests, you
have to admit. It is. Yeah. But our mission today
is to get past that intimidation factor. We are
going to look at his journey. From being a wunderkind
in Frankfurt to an exile in sunny California,
writing about the devil with Thomas Mann. And
we're going to tackle his most famous, his most
heavy -heating concept, the culture industry.
And we have quite a stack of sources today. It
ranges from, you know, biographical accounts
of his early life to his incredibly dense philosophical
works like Dialectic of Enlightenment. And then
on the other side, critiques from modern musicologists
who think he just got it all completely wrong.
So it's a heavy stack. It is, but we're going
to break it down. So let's start at the very
beginning. Who was this guy before he became
this? grand hotel abyss of philosophy. Can you
paint the picture for us? Yeah. To really understand
Adorno, you have to visualize his environment.
If you could look into his childhood room, you'd
see a messy desk, just towering stacks of sheet
music, thick philosophy books, and this looming
shadow of the early 20th century in Germany.
He was born in 1903 in Frankfurt. But here is
the first interesting detail. His name wasn't
originally Adorno. He was born Theodor Ludwig
Weissengrind. Weissengrind. That sounds, well,
that sounds significantly more German and very
different from the name we all know him by. Where
did the change come from? Well, it reflects the
duality of his background, which is absolutely
crucial to understanding his worldview. His father,
Oscar Weisingrind, was a wealthy wine merchant
and an assimilated Jew who had converted to Protestantism.
Okay. His mother, Maria Calvella Adorno della
Piana, was a Catholic from Corsica and a professional
singer. So he had the business side and the artistic
side right there in his genetics. Yeah. A wine
merchant father and a singing mother. Very much
so. And the artistic side was absolutely dominant
in his childhood. He actually dropped Weisingrind
and took his mother's surname, Adorno, later
in life, specifically when he became... a naturalized
U .S. citizen. It was partly a move to distance
himself from a German identity that had so violently
rejected him, but also an embrace of that maternal
artistic lineage. I mean, growing up, he wasn't
just hearing music, he was breathing it. His
mother had performed at the imperial court in
Vienna, and her sister, his aunt Agathe, lived
with them. She was also a brilliant pianist and
singer. It sounds like a house where you just
couldn't walk into a room without tripping over
a piano sonata or interrupting an auraria. It
was exactly that. And Adorno wasn't just a passive
listener. This is so important. He was a prodigy.
By the age of 12, he wasn't just playing chopsticks.
He was playing Beethoven on the piano with really
serious proficiency. Wow. So when we talk about
him later analyzing music, you have to remember
he isn't just the theorist looking at it from
the outside. He knows how the sausage is made
because he can make it himself. That's a great
point. He has the practical skill. He does. But
of course, the books were there, too. I mean,
by the time he graduated top of his class from
the gymnasium, he was already reading incredibly
dense philosophy works by people like Gergely
Lukacs and Ernst Bloch. I think back to my high
school years and I I barely survived reading
The Great Gatsby. This kid is reading Marxist
theory and Hegelian dialectics before he can
even vote. It speaks to the, well, the sheer
intensity of his intellectual upbringing. He
didn't have a normal childhood in the sense of,
you know, playing soccer in the street. His playground
was the intellect. And he had a guide. He struck
up this very important friendship with a man
named Siegfried Krakauer. Krakauer, okay. Krakauer
was a literary editor and significantly older,
but they would spend their Saturday afternoons
together reading Immanuel Kant's Critique of
Pure Reason. Saturday afternoon reading Kant.
That is a very... specific definition of fun.
It is. But I'm guessing they weren't just reading
it to pass a test. No, and this is the key. This
really sets the stage for everything Adorno does
later. Adorno said that under Krakauer's guidance,
they didn't read Kant like a textbook. They weren't
just analyzing epistemology, you know, how we
know what we know. Right. They read it as a coded
text. They were trying to read the spirit of
history through the philosophy. They believed
that if you looked hard enough at these dense
texts, you could uncover the hidden truth of
the historical situation they were living in.
That's a fascinating way to look at philosophy.
It's like they were detectives. Yeah. Like they
were looking for clues about the social structure
of the 18th century hidden inside the dry logic
of Kant. Precisely. They believe that a philosopher
isn't just writing about abstract ideas. They
are unconsciously writing down all the tensions
and contradictions of their own society. And
that method looking for the social truth hidden
inside a piece of art or a philosophical text
that became Adorno's signature move. He would
later do the. exact same thing with a pop song.
He'd listen to it and say, I'm not listening
to the melody. I'm listening to the economic
structure that produced it. But before he fully
committed to being a philosopher, he had to chase
his first love, which was music. So in 1925,
he moves to Vienna and Vienna in the 20s. I mean,
that must have been the center of the universe
for a serious musician. It was the center of
the avant -garde universe for sure. Adorno went
there to study composition with Albenberg. Now,
Berg was a disciple of Arnold Schoenberg, and
together they were the core of what was called
the Second Viennese School. Okay, we need to
pause on Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School
because this comes up constantly in Adorno's
work. What was their deal? Why were they so controversial?
They were rebels in the truest sense of the word.
They felt that traditional tonal music, the stuff
that sounds nice to our ears, the music of Mozart,
Beethoven, even Wagner, that it had run its course.
It was exhausted. They believed that the whole
harmonic system where a song starts in a key,
goes on a little journey, and then resolves back
home. They thought that was a lie. They felt
it was a kind of fake comfort. So they developed
the 12 -tone technique, or atonality. For the
listener who isn't a music theory buff, how would
you describe the sound of atonality? What does
it feel like to listen to? It sounds dissonant.
It's jarring. It's anxious. It deliberately refuses
to give the listener an easy, comforting melody.
There is no home key to return to. It's meant
to capture the feeling of being locked, of being
unmoored. He liked this. He didn't just like
it. He morally supported it. He called Albanberg
his master and teacher. For Adorno, this kind
of music was honest. It reflected the fractured,
chaotic, anxious reality of the modern world.
He started writing these essays just trashing
stabilized music composers like Richard Strauss,
who were still writing this pretty romantic stuff.
So for him, pretty music was dishonest music.
Exactly. He thought that kind of music was deceptive.
It was trying to tell people the world was beautiful
and orderly. And in fact, it was falling apart
at the seams. That's a recurring theme with him,
isn't it? The morality of aesthetics. If the
art is too pretty, it's probably lying to you.
So he's in Vienna. He's hanging out the radicals,
writing at Tonal Music. When does this shift
happen? When does he realize he's more of a philosopher
than a composer? Well, it was a gradual realization.
He saw that his true talent really lay in analyzing
the music rather than creating it. He wrote to
Berg at one point, admitting that he felt his
future was in theory. He was a good composer,
but he was a brilliant thinker. But there was
an event that forced his hand. A massive one.
The real turning point, the thing that shattered
his world and forced him to change his entire
trajectory, was the rise of Nazism. Right. 1933,
Hitler seizes power. And Adorno's world collapsed
almost. overnight. You have to remember he is
an intellectual. He was associated with Marxist
thought and he was of Jewish descent. He was
the trifecta of what the Nazis hated. A prime
target. Absolutely. His right to teach was revoked.
His house in Frankfurt was searched by the police.
And then came the rejection letter from the right
chamber of literature. I read about this in the
sources. The wording is absolutely chilling.
It's bureaucratic cruelty at its finest. They
denied him membership because he was non -Aryan.
And the letter explicitly stated that because
of his background, he was unable to feel and
appreciate an obligation to the German nation.
Imagine being told that. Yeah. That you were
incapable of feeling an obligation to your own
home, the place you were born, the language you
speak. Just because of who your father was? It's
devastating, and it forced him into exile. This
kicked off a 15 -year journey that would take
him from the hallowed halls of Oxford, where
he was, kind of humiliatingly, treated like a
student again, despite being a brilliant scholar,
to the bustling streets of New York City, and
then eventually to the sunny coast of California.
Let's talk about that New York chapter, because
this is where I think the Adorno versus the world
dynamic. Starts to get, well, it's funny, in
a dark sitcom kind of way, he gets involved in
something called the Radio Project, right? Yes,
the Princeton Radio Project. It was funded by
the Rockefeller Foundation and led by a sociologist
named Paul Lazarsfeld. Lazarsfeld was brilliant,
but he was very... What do you mean by that?
He was a positivist. He believed in data, in
numbers, in charts. He wanted hard empirical
evidence. So you have Adorno, this intense European
theorist who reads Kant for fun and believes
truth is hidden in the spirit of history. Yes.
And Lazarsfeld, who just wants to see the spreadsheets.
Exactly. It was a complete and total culture
clash. Lazarsfeld wanted to know how people listen
to the radio. He wanted hard data. He wanted
to know if people liked song A more than song
B. They even had this device. Oh, this is incredible.
They called it the Lazarsfeld Stanton Program
Analyzer, or affectionately, Little Annie. Little
Annie. And listeners would be given this device,
and they could press a green button if they liked
a part of a song, and a red button if they disliked
it, all while the song was playing. The proto
-like button. Adorno must have looked at that
and just lost his mind. He despised it. He looked
at this button and essentially said, are you
kidding me? His insight, I think, was profound.
He wrote, culture was simply the condition that
precluded a mentality that tried to measure it.
That's a dense sentence. Let's really unpack
that. What is he actually saying there? He's
saying that the moment you try to measure the
impact of a symphony or any piece of art by just
pressing a binary button, yes or no, like or
dislike, you have fundamentally destroyed the
experience of the art. You've killed it. You've
killed it. Art is a process. It unfolds over
time. If you are reducing Beethoven to a series
of thumbs up or thumbs down moments in real time,
you aren't listening to Beethoven anymore. You're
just consuming noise. He argued that the meaning
of a symphony heard while you're walking around
or lying in bed or sitting in a concert hall
is fundamentally different. Context is everything.
So he's saying you can't treat music like a data
point. It's not a flavor of ice cream you can
just say you like or dislike. Precisely. And
he felt that by treating it as data, the radio
project was actually part of the problem. They
were treating listeners as consumers to be analyzed,
not as human beings experiencing art. Right.
And there's a wonderful anecdote from this time
that sums up his complete confusion with American
culture. A colleague comes up to him and asks,
Dr. Adorno, are you an introvert or an extrovert?
A standard personality quiz question. We wouldn't
even blink at that today. To us, it's completely
normal. To Adorno, he was just... He later wrote
that he realized Americans think in multiple
choice questionnaire models as if the human soul,
this complex, contradictory, messy thing can
be checked into box A or box B. Wow. He found
it reductive and honestly terrifying. He saw
it as a sign that people were losing their ability
to think in complex, nuanced terms. So he clashes
with the data guys in New York. He's clearly
not fitting in. Yeah. And eventually he heads
west. To California. To German California, as
Thomas Mann called it. In the 1940s, Pacific
Palisades was the surreal enclave of exiled German
intellectuals. You have to picture this. You
have Adorno, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Arnold
Schoenberg. That's a lineup. Some of the greatest
minds of European history, all living within
a few miles of each other, right next to Hollywood
stars, driving cars for the first time, and sitting
under palm trees. It's such a bizarre image.
All these brilliant minds fleeing Hitler, sitting
in the California sunshine, probably just complaining
about the lack of good bread. Probably. And collaborating.
This is a lesser known fact, but Adorno actually
helped Thomas Mann write the musical sections
of his famous novel, Dr. Faustus. I didn't know
that. The novel is about a composer who sells
his soul to the devil in exchange for musical
genius. And Mann essentially asked Adorno, how
would you compose music if you were in league
with the devil? And Adorno was like, I gotcha.
I know exactly how that sounds. He did. He advised
Mann on the descriptions of the fictional composer's
work, basing it largely on the 12 -tone technique
of Schoenberg. It just shows how deeply Adorno
thought about the dark, the demonic side of creativity.
He believed that real, honest art in the 20th
century had to be dark. It had to be difficult.
Which brings us directly to the core of his work,
the big theory. While he's in the U .S. watching
the rise of Hollywood and mass marketing in this
multiple choice culture, he writes along with
Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. And
in that book, they coined the term that defines
his entire legacy, the culture industry. This
is the centerpiece, the culture industry. And
I want to really stress the wording here. He
doesn't call it popular culture. He doesn't call
it mass art. He calls it an industry. Why is
that distinction so important to him? Because
calling it popular culture implies that it comes
from the people, that it's some kind of grassroots
expression of what people genuinely like. Right.
That it bubbles up from below. Adorno argues
the exact opposite. He says mass media, radio,
film, magazines and later TV is a top down system.
It is a factory. And its goal is not to enlighten
or challenge or express some deep truth. Its
goal is to produce standardized goods to keep
people passive. Passive how? What does the industry
gain from us being passive? Well, Adorno argued
that the culture industry is designed to make
capitalism aesthetically pleasing. It's the soma
of our society, to borrow from Ellis Huxley.
It keeps us distracted, obedient, and ultimately
content with the status quo. So it's a kind of
drug? It is. Think about it. If you were exhausted
from working at a factory or an office all day,
you were drained. You don't want to come home
and read difficult philosophy or listen to atonal
music that challenges your very soul. zone out.
You want to watch a sitcom. You want to hear
a catchy pop song that doesn't ask anything of
you. Exactly. And Adorno acknowledges this need,
but he argues that the industry exploits it.
It offers you entertainment that requires zero
mental effort. He called it baby food. Predigested.
Yes. It's already been chewed for you. You just
have to swallow. And to achieve this, the industry
relies on two key concepts, standardization and
pseudo -individualization. OK, these are big
terms. Let's unpack standardization first. What
does he mean by that? Standardization is the
idea that everything in the culture industry
follows a rigid, predictable formula. A pop song
has a verse, a chorus, a bridge, another chorus.
A superhero movie has an origin story, a setback,
a training montage, and a big CGI battle at the
end. The beats are always the same. Always. The
details change. Maybe the superhero wears red,
maybe he wears blue, but the underlying structural
is ironclad. Adorno says, we aren't responding
to the content, we are responding to the formula.
We find comfort in knowing exactly what is going
to happen next. But wait, if everything was exactly
the same, wouldn't we notice? I mean, wouldn't
we get bored and just stop buying it? That is
where pseudo -individualization comes in. This
is the trick, the magic trick of the whole system.
The industry adds small flaws or quirks a hook
in a song, a specific actor's charisma in a movie,
a slightly different setting for a sitcom. These
are designed to give the illusion of choice and
novelty. So it's like different flavors of the
same soda. It's all just sugar, water, and carbonation,
but one is cherry and one is lime. That is the
perfect analogy. Adorno argues that we fall into
this consumer trap. We think, oh, this song really
speaks to me. It's so unique. The industry has
just tweaked the packaging to make you feel like
an individual. He calls it the halo of the free
choice. You feel free because you can choose
between brand A and brand B, but you aren't free
to choose something outside the system. That
is devastatingly cynical. But also, I have to
admit, when I look at the top 10 chart or the
selection of movies at the Cineplex, I kind of
see what he means. He even broke it down psychologically.
He outlined how we process a hit song. He listed
what he called the five components of recognition.
It's almost a step -by -step guide to how we
get brainwashed by a catchy tune. Okay, walk
us through these. I want to know how I'm being
manipulated. Okay, so imagine a new song comes
on the radio. Step one is... Vague remembrance.
Vague remembrance. You hear it and you think,
wait, have I heard this before? It feels familiar
because it's using the same standardized blocks,
the same four chords, the same beat as every
other song you like. So it triggers that warm,
fuzzy feeling of familiarity. Okay, step two.
Actual identification. You recognize the song.
You place it, oh, this is that new track by Taylor
Swift or whoever it is. You have successfully
identified the product. Right, like checking
a box. What's step three? Subsumption by label.
You categorize it. This is a banger. This is
a sad ballad. This is a workout song. You file
it away in your mental genre box. You aren't
really listening to the notes anymore. You're
filing the data. Yeah, that's accurate. Okay,
step four. Self -reflection and the act of recognition.
This is where the ego gets involved. You feel
good about yourself for recognizing it. You think,
I know this song. I'm in the loop. I am culturally
relevant. The pleasure comes not from the music
itself, but from the act of identifying it. You're
patting yourself on the back. And the final step,
the nail in the coffin. Psychological transfer
of authority to the object. This is the kicker.
You transfer your own power, your own critical
judgment to the song. You submit to it. You say,
this is a great song, when in reality you have
just been conditioned to accept it. So you don't
actually love the song. You submit to the social
power of the song. You like it because everyone
else likes it, and the machine told you to like
it. Wow. That is, that's intense. It makes listening
to the top 40 sound like a cult initiation. For
Adorno, it wasn't far off. He saw this passivity,
this willingness to just accept what is fed to
you as incredibly dangerous. And not just because
it makes for boring art. He believed this mindset
directly paved the way for fascism. Which connects
to his other major work, right? The authoritarian
personality. Because while he's analyzing pop
songs, he's always trying to figure out the biggest
question of the 20th century. How did a civilized
country like Germany fall for Hitler? Exactly.
Adorno didn't see fascism just as a political
party that seized power. He saw it as a psychology,
a personality type. After the war, he worked
on this massive sociological study that developed
the F scale, the fascism scale. And what were
they measuring with that? They were looking for
specific personality traits that made someone
susceptible to authoritarian propaganda. And
they found a cluster of them. Things like blind
obedience to authority, extreme aggression toward
outsiders or minority groups, rigid conventionalism,
you know, always sticking to the rules, and a
real lack of spontaneity. And how does this connect
back to the culture industry? What's the link?
This is the bridge. Adorno argued that propaganda
doesn't just hypnotize normal people out of nowhere.
It exploits a psychological area that has already
been softened up, preconditioned by mass culture.
He wrote that fascist propaganda treats people
as genuine children of today's standardized mass
culture. So if you're trained to accept standardized
music and standardized movies without questioning
them. You're primed to accept standardized political
slogans. If you lose the ability to think critically
about your entertainment if you just swallow
the baby food without thinking you might lose
the ability to think critically about your political
leaders. You become one of the obedient listeners.
That is a terrifying thought. The idea that bad
TV prepares you for a dictator. It is. And it's
why Adorno took pop culture so seriously. He
didn't hate it just because he was a snob, though.
OK, he was a bit of a snob. A little bit. He
hated it because he thought it was eroding the
democratic mind. So in 1949, Adorno finally goes
back to Germany. The war is over. The Nazis are
gone. But he doesn't think the danger is over,
does he? Not at all. He returns to Frankfurt
to help rebuild the Institute for Social Research,
and he becomes a lightning rod for criticism.
He argues that National Socialism didn't just
vanish in 1945 when Hitler died. He believed
it survived in the mindsets of the people and
within the institutions themselves. He wrote
extensively about education after Auschwitz,
arguing that the primary number one goal of all
education should be ensuring that something like
Auschwitz never happens again. And this is where
he drops. One of his most famous and most controversial
lines. A line that poets and artists have been
arguing about for decades. To write poetry after
Auschwitz is barbaric. It's a line that is so
often misunderstood. People hear that and they
think he meant no more art allowed. That's how
it sounds. Stop writing poems. It's over. Pack
it up, everybody. But what he really meant was
that traditional culture, the culture of beauty
and romance and uplift, had failed. It hadn't
prevented the Holocaust. The Nazis listened to
Beethoven and read Guthau while they ran the
death camps. That's a chilling point. So to continue
writing beautiful, comforting poetry as if nothing
had happened was a lie. It was barbaric because
it ignored the reality of the horror. He believed
that art, after Auschwitz, had a duty to be difficult.
It had to reflect the suffering, not to paper
over it. Which brings us back to music. Because
if there's one thing Adorno is famous for on
the internet today, besides the culture industry,
it's being the guy who absolutely hated jazz.
The jazz problem, yes. It is undoubtedly the
most polarizing part of his entire legacy. Why,
though? I mean, jazz is usually seen as the ultimate
expression of freedom, improvisation, soul, breaking
the rules. How does Adorno look at a Miles Davis
solo and see... It's a huge leap, isn't it? But
Adorno looked at jazz and he saw the complete
opposite of what we see. He viewed it as just
another product of the culture industry. He argued
that the improvisation in jazz was fake. Fake?
How can improvisation be fake? That's the whole
point. He said that while a jazz musician might
take a solo, they are doing it within a rigid,
standardized structure, usually a 44 -time signature
and a set of harmonic progressions. He called
this pseudo -individualization all over again.
The illusion of freedom. The illusion of freedom.
He thought the wildness of jazz was a marketing
gimmick. He thought the syncopation, the offbeat
rhythm, was just a decoration on top of what
was essentially a rigid military march beat.
He thought it made people feel free while they
were actually just dancing to a rigid, controlled
beat. I feel like there are a lot of jazz musicians
and historians and fans who would want to have
a word with him about that. And many critics
have. I mean, historians like Eric Hobsbawm have
called Adorno's writings on jazz some of the
stupidest pages ever written. They argue he was
elitist, that he didn't understand the African
-American context of the music, how it was a
language of resistance and community, and that
he was just blinded by his European classical
training. He was listening to American jazz with
German ears, and he just didn't get it. It does
seem like a massive blind spot. He can analyze
a Beethoven sonata to death, but he hears a...
saxophone and just thinks factory product. It's
definitely his biggest and most criticized blind
spot. But to be fair to his own internal logic,
remember, he championed the new music Schoenberg
and the atonals precisely because it wasn't pleasurable.
It forced the listener to think, to confront
dissonance. He thought jazz, because it was danceable
and enjoyable, was just another drug for the
masses. So for him, art shouldn't be fun. He
believed it should be true. And the truth for
him wasn't fun. Before we get too heavy on his
famous grumpiness, we have to mention the traffic
light. The Adorno traffic light. I love this
story because it's so petty and so human. Yes.
Amidst all this high -minded theory about fascism
and atonal music, there is a very practical Adorno
legacy in the city of Frankfurt. In 1962, a pedestrian
was killed near the university crossing a busy
road. And Adorno wrote this furious letter to
the city demanding a traffic light be installed
to protect the students. Did he get it? It took
them 25 years. It was finally installed long
after he died. But it's just this nice reminder
that despite his reputation as this aloof theorist
in an ivory tower, he was engaged with the physical
safety of his city. He did care about the students.
Which makes the end of his life even more tragic.
Yeah. Let's move to the 1960s. The student protest
movement explodes in West Germany. And these
students, they love Adorno. At first. They absolutely
did. They read Dialectic of Enlightenment. They
saw him as a hero of the left. They thought,
here's the guy who explained how the system controls
us, how capitalism dupes us. He gave them the
intellectual ammunition. He did. But 1968 was
a time of action. Molotov cocktails, barricades
in the streets, massive protests against the
Vietnam War. The students wanted Adorno to lead
them. They wanted him to grab a megaphone and
join them on the barricades. And Adorno says.
No. He says absolutely not. He completely rejected
what he called actionism. He believed that mindless
action was just as bad as mindless consumption.
He famously wrote to Herbert Marcuse, another
Frankfurt school thinker who did support the
students, that building barricades was ridiculous
against those who administer the bomb. So what
was his solution? Just think harder. Essentially,
yes. He refused to be a mouthpiece for the movement.
He believed the philosopher's job was to think,
to critique, not to throw stones. And the students
did not take that well. They turned on him viciously.
They started calling him Teddy the Classicist.
They disrupted his lectures. At one point, there
was a banner that read, Berlin's left -wing fascists
greet Teddy the Classicist. Ouch. Left -wing
fascists. That's throwing his own theory right
back in his face. It is. And it all culminated
in one of the most bizarre and, frankly, sad
incidents in the history of philosophy, the so
-called Breast Incident. April 1969. Set the
scene for us. Adorno is attempting to give a
lecture called An Introduction to Dialectical
Thinking. The hall is packed. A student gets
up and writes on the blackboard, If Adorno is
left in peace, capitalism will never cease. Okay,
a clear provocation. And then three female students
approach the podium. They bare their breasts
and scatter flower petals over Adorno's head.
It sounds like a prank or a piece of performance
art, but for a man of his dignity and his generation.
It was profoundly humiliating. It was a complete
breakdown of the intellectual space he held so
sacred. He tried to hide behind his briefcase.
He grabbed his hat and coat and he just fled
the lecture hall. He canceled the rest of his
lecture series. He was reportedly deeply, deeply
depressed by it. He felt his life's work, educating
the next generation to think critically, was
being mocked by the very people he tried to teach.
They were using this kind of pseudo -activity
to silence him. And he didn't live long after
that, did he? No. That summer in 1969, he went
to Switzerland to Zermatt and Wisp to try and
recover from the stress of it all. He died of
a heart attack on August 6th, 1969. It's a sad
end. The man who warned against the mob eventually
gets chased out by one. But here we are over
50 years later and we are still talking about
him. Why? Why does Adorno still matter in the
21st century? He matters because the world he
described in the 1940s looks exactly like the
world we live in today. In fact, you could argue
it's even more extreme now. We mentioned the
pop song paradox at the very start. Well, the
music critic Alex Ross pointed this out brilliantly.
He noted that today a few huge corporations,
Google, Apple, Amazon, preside over these unprecedented
monopolies of culture. It is exactly what Adorno
feared, but on a global scale. The algorithm
is the ultimate machine of pseudo -individualization.
We think we're choosing what to watch on Netflix
or what to listen to on Spotify, but the menu
is curated by a machine that's designed to keep
us watching, to keep us listening. Exactly. It's
always the same, as he called it. The algorithm
feeds you what you already like. It removes the
negativity, the challenge, the difficulty from
your cultural life. So what's the takeaway? Did
he leave us with a tool to fight it? He did.
His concept of negative dialectics. Okay, what
is that in a nutshell? How do we use it? It's
the idea that we must always question the system.
We must never get comfortable with simple answers.
We have to resist what he called identity thinking.
That's the urge to fit everything into neat little
boxes. The introvert -extrovert thing. Exactly.
We have to embrace the non -identical, the things
that don't fit, the things that are difficult.
We have to actively seek out and value the things
that don't compute. So his message to us today
would be... Stop pressing the like button. Stop
pressing the like button. Turn off the autoplay
and listen to something that challenges you.
Go see a movie that makes you uncomfortable.
Because comfort for Adorno is just another form
of control. If you are comfortable, you probably
aren't thinking. That's a provocative thought
to leave our listeners with. In an era of infinite
streaming content and these targeted feeds, have
we all become the obedient listeners that Adorno
warned us about? Or is there still a way to find
that serious art that disrupts the machine? That's
the question, isn't it? It is. That's it for
this deep dive into the Grand Hotel Abyss. We
hope you feel a little more enlightened, or at
least a little more critically aware of your
own entertainment. Keep questioning. See you
next time.