ADORNO FOR BEGINNERS

[L Spencer]

I have read quite a few books on Adorno, including quite a bit of 
material in German. Martin Jay's little monograph on Adorno is the 
only secondary work which gave me that satisfying feeling of being a 
"really good read". This is undoubtedly because Jay, an expert of 
sorts, was given a limited form, or genre (the book had to conform to 
the format of the Fontana Modern Masters series) and Jay respects the 
limits of the form, doesn't try to say everything and in fact leaves 
some very large questions quite properly open. 
    Jameson's book is in its way very valuable. Jameson has continued 
to remind us of how under-theorised capitalism (in its various 20th 
century strands and phases) continues to be. He is somewhat selective 
about the aspects of Adorno which he wishes to foreground and whose 
urgent relevance he wishes to defend. But Jameson is very clear about 
this selectivity and explains and defends the principles on which 
that selection has taken place.
    Susan Buck-Morss's book on "The Origins of Negative Dialectics" 
is a strange book. Clearly the result of dissertation research - but 
of an extraordinarily daring and original kind. The book is much too 
close to Adorno and Adorno's pupils to really do justice to a 
strangely tortured and convoluted relationship but it is still the 
source of wads of biographical and philological detail. Adorno never 
really comes into focus ... he overwhelms the book. But given the 
nature of the subject that is hardly a criticism. 
    There is now a considerable body of literature on Adorno's 
Aesthetic Theory and on Adorno as an aesthetician in a tradition as 
influenced by Schlegel (Friedrich) as by Hegel. He features in 
this way in Andrew Bowie's books on Romanticism and on Critical 
Theory and in a comparable way Michael Rosen's study 
(entitled "Voluntary Servitude") of the thematic of false 
consciousness as a way of understanding ideology ends with a very 
good chapter on Critical Theory which compares the approaches of 
Benjamin and Adorno. 
    I came across the remark a day or so ago that Benjamin and Adorno 
are rather like Socrates and Plato. It makes no sense to study the 
one without trying to get the figure of the other into some kind of 
focus. 

Lloyd



l.spencer@tasc.ac.uk

Lloyd Spencer, School of Media
Trinity & All Saints University College, 
Leeds LS18 5HD, England

Tel. (0113) 2 837 186     
Fax. (0113) 2 837 200