Adorno’s Path to Social Research 251analyses and consultations with experts, to have had enough time to
present a fully worked-out memorandum. He had provided sufficient
evidence of his ability to produce internally consistent and logically
coherent texts in the large number of pieces of music analysis that he
had published. This was a reference not just to his older essay on jazz
and his articles on light music, but also to pieces he had written during
his first few months in New York and had published immediately in
volumes 7 and 8 of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. These were
the essays ‘On the Fetish-Character of Music and the Regression of
Listening’ and the ‘Fragments on Wagner’.^42
In the first article, the first to be written in America, the Marxian
and Freudian concepts of fetish-character and regression surface in the
German version, just as they had appeared in English in the memor-
andum.^43 Adorno wished to demonstrate the existence of two phenom-
ena which could simply not be verified by opinion surveys and interview
techniques. These were the fetishization of music as the component of
a culture that had been commercialized through and through, and,
parallel to that, the infantilism of the listening public whose ability to
listen had atrophied.^44 According to Adorno, the entire musical culture
was drifting towards conformism, trivialization and standardization. This
trend went hand in hand with the historical process of the ‘liquidation
of the individual’.^45 As music gradually lost the sounding-board of
a public capable of judgement, it became reduced to entertainment as
a form of distraction. Both in this essay and in his discussions in the
radio research project, Adorno doubted that the entertainment value
of popular music truly delivered enjoyment. But if the entertainment
industry does not really entertain, we are left with the paradox of a
‘displeasure in pleasure’.^46 Not content with that, Adorno insisted that
music is only appreciated for its prestige value as embodied in the star
conductor, the prima donna and the current hero of popular music.
Furthermore, he maintained that listening to music was confined to
picking out pleasurable extracts from a whole composition. ‘Ears
which are still only able to hear what one demands of them in what is
offered, and which register the abstract charm instead of synthesizing
the moments of charm, are bad ears.’^47
Needless to say, these claims, which were set in the context of a
general theory of cultural decay,^48 did in fact fall on ‘bad’, i.e., deaf,
ears in Lazarsfeld and his research group. But after their acrimonious
exchange of letters, the relationship and hence the prospect of further
collaboration was more than fraught. For this reason, nothing came of
the next part of the project, the production of a typology of listeners,
i.e., a statistical distribution of the different categories of radio listeners
on the basis of an opinion survey. An abbreviated version of Adorno’s
memorandum was discussed by the members of the project, but had
little resonance. In the same way, the planned cooperation between
Adorno and the young psychologist Gerhard Wiebe, who was supposed