Adorno

Adorno’s Path to Social Research 247

it concerned the collecting of data.... For the first time I saw adminis-
trative research before me.’^27 His astonishment at research of this kind
focused in the first instance on the fact that the client not only supplied
the questions to be investigated, but also determined the analytical
framework and the scope of the research. Moreover, Adorno was also
surprised to discover that media analysis was restricted to a predeter-
mined set of methods for conducting opinion surveys. The problem
with this, he objected, was that such demoscopic methods were capable
of eliciting only the subjective reactions of the listeners. In his view,
as he emphasized in a lengthy letter to Lazarsfeld on 21 March 1938,
it was essential to clarify two questions: first, what were the musical
qualities of the content of radio broadcasts, and, second, under what
conditions and with what intentions was music broadcast on the radio?
In his letter, he stressed:

The effort to ‘quantify’ results, to present them in numerical form

necessarily leads to a certain simplification. You may well be

able to measure in percentage terms how many listeners like pre-

classical music, how many classical or romantic music and how

many prefer verismo opera, and so on. But if you wish to include

the reasons they give for their preferences, it would most likely

turn out to be incapable of quantification. That is to say, these

reasons would diverge so utterly that it would be hard to classify

more than two under the same head, making it more or less

impossible to formulate statistical categories.^28

Adorno used such objections to resist ‘the statement and measure-
ment of effects without relating them to the “stimuli”, i.e., the objective
realities to which the consumers,... in this case the listeners, are react-
ing.’^29 One concept that struck him as particularly strange was that
of the ‘programme analyser’, an empirical measuring device which
enabled the listener to press a button to register what he liked or dis-
liked about a particular piece of music. Adorno refused to measure
culture in this way. ‘I reflected that culture was simply the condition
that precluded a mentality that tried to measure it.’^30
As for Lazarsfeld, he had succeeded in forming a quite definite
impression of Adorno after a few weeks, and he passed it on to the
directors of the project: ‘He is the very image of what one imagines
an absent-minded German professor to look like, and he behaves so
oddly that it makes me feel like a member of the Mayflower Society.
Admittedly, when you start talking to him, he utters a vast number of
interesting ideas. Like every new arrival here, he is determined to turn
everything upside down, but when you listen to him most of it sounds
quite sensible.’^31
In fact, Adorno had started his research activity by trying to win
Lazarsfeld over to his own views. With his letters, his exposé and also in