252 Part III: Emigration Years
to assist him with the practical side of the research, was a disaster.
Adorno later recollected that hardly any meaningful communication
was possible with Wiebe, who had experience as a jazz musician and
was supposed to help Adorno with his study of popular music. Wiebe
resented Adorno’s socially critical attitude and criticized his European
opinions about culture as unwarranted arrogance.^49 For his part, however,
Adorno was not at all averse to ‘setting out for that famous other
side of the fence’ [i.e., to study the reactions of listeners].^50 This enabled
him to profit from the expertise of other members of the project in the
application of empirical methods to social research – both quantitative
and qualitative content analysis, case studies and motivation analyses.
This led Adorno from his research on subjective attitudes towards music
to discover the importance of the category of mediation in the mass-
communication process. He perceived the need to show empirically
that ‘social objectivities also manifest themselves indirectly in subjective
opinions and behaviour’.^51
Adorno benefited greatly from working with the sociologist George
Simpson. Simpson had translated Emile Durkheim’s book on the division
of labour and had interests in sociological theory as well as experience
of social research. He was a great help to Adorno when the latter found
it necessary to produce papers in English for publication as part of the
project. Although Adorno expended much time and effort in the attempt
to recast his own ideas in the categories of research,^52 this experience
made him only too aware that the link that Lazarsfeld sought to estab-
lish between sociological theory and social research amounted to an
attempt to square the circle. It was a kind of object lesson in the differ-
ence in principle between speculative theorizing and the procedures of
a form of social research based on the axiom that ‘science is measure-
ment’.^53 Since neither Adorno nor Lazarsfeld could see a way of linking
their respective conceptions of scholarship in a productive way, a breach
was inevitable in the long run.^54 As late as January 1939, Adorno asked
Horkheimer to mediate between him and Lazarsfeld. He did not just
want to be pigeonholed as a malcontent and he objected to being dis-
missed from the project once he had provided it with the requisite
theory.^55 Neither the intercession of Horkheimer and Löwenthal nor
Adorno’s own protest had any effect. At the end of 1939, when Lazarsfeld
put in a second application for a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation
for two years, the music section of the project was omitted from the
programme. Lazarsfeld said subsequently that John Marshall, who was
the responsible representative of the foundation, had the feeling that
‘the introduction of the Adorno variant of critical research into the
study of mass communications’ had been a failure.^56 Lazarsfeld undoubt-
edly perceived the fundamental theoretical differences between Adorno
and himself very clearly, but he did not wish to lose him entirely and
made efforts to persuade the foundation to maintain its financial support
for him until the end of the current project. He suggested to Marshall