250 Part III: Emigration Years
(Musikantenmusik) and the phenomenon of the ‘noise band’ peculiar to
the radio. Given the scope of his arguments, it was not unreasonable
that he should have spoken of it as a ‘book’ in his letters to Krenek and
Benjamin.^37 In fact it was his intention to publish his own reflections
on the media together with a number of analyses of specific music pro-
grammes on the radio. However, his studies never reached that point.
His memorandum, which was written in the alien medium of English,
albeit in an ambitious style, ran into some blunt criticism from Lazarsfeld.
Lazarsfeld’s own copy contains a whole series of scathing marginal
comments: ‘impertinence’, ‘idiotic’, ‘what’s the point of this?’, ‘you never
know what he is talking about’, ‘dialectics as excuse not to have to think
in a disciplined way’, ‘without any feeling for importance’.^38 In particular,
he made two criticisms of substance. On the one hand, Adorno was said
to have described the radio system from the preconceived standpoint
of an elitist bourgeois position that prevented him from envisaging
alternative uses of radio that might arise from positions different from
his own rejectionist stance. On the other hand, he had a completely
mistaken view of social research, and this led him to make statements
that were utterly at variance with actual sociological practice. This in-
competence undermined the central ideas about music theory contained
in the memorandum, although these were of importance for the future
work of the project. In the five-page letter that Lazarsfeld sent Adorno,
he says, ‘You pride yourself in attacking other people because they
are neurotic and fetishists, but it doesn’t occur to you how open you are
yourself to such attacks.... Don’t you think it is a perfect fetishism
the way you use Latin words all through your text?... By the way,
I implored you repeatedly to use more responsible language and you
evidently were psychologically unable to follow my advice.’^39
Lazarsfeld’s criticisms of Adorno’s ideas about the social function of
radio were in many ways justified. Nevertheless, for all his sometimes
unnecessarily polemical tone his letter represented a kind of capitula-
tion: he was evidently in despair at the wild proliferation of speculative
ideas that he had conjured up, but which now began to irritate him. Did
he really wish to get rid of Adorno, as the latter surmised? Precisely
because he was unwilling to draw this conclusion he found himself in
the difficult situation of having to feed Adorno’s profusion of ideas into
an empirical research project that had to be based on the three stages
of concept-formation, operationalization and measurement.^40 This was
no small task. Adorno evidently perceived that Lazarsfeld was out of
his depth and he conjectured that his aggressive tone pointed to an
underlying weakness. This made it easy for Adorno simply to turn
the tables. On 6 September 1938, he wrote that he had been expected
‘to include everything that I could think of in the memorandum, and
it was together with you that I conceived the idea of “an experiment in
theory”.’^41 He also pointed out that he had been too preoccupied with
other duties, such as dealing with questionnaires, interviews, content