Adorno

Adorno’s Path to Social Research 259

had nothing to do with a false genuflection to the position of the institute,
but arose from ‘the experiences which we have all shared during the last
fifteen years’.^89
When Benjamin wrote this letter, he already had before him the
galley proofs of Adorno’s essay ‘On the Fetish-Character of Music and
the Regression of Listening’. He announced his own objections to the
argument advanced there that, when listening to the music purveyed
by the mass media, it is exchange value that is consumed.^90 The fact is
that ‘one can hardly imagine the “consumption” of exchange value as
anything else but an empathy with it.’^91 He also took issue with Adorno’s
statement that in certain circumstances music can become ‘comic’.^92
Adorno had evidently intended to make an indirect criticism of
Benjamin’s interpretation of Chaplin in the essay on ‘The Work of Art’.
Such comicalness cannot be seen ‘as an entirely negative phenomenon’,
a sign of decadence.^93 This interplay of criticism and counter-criticism
was characteristic of the communication between the two friends;
they ‘never acted differently’ and never practised criticism as a form
of one-upmanship.^94
Although Adorno was much taken up with his various duties both in
the institute and outside it, the intensity of his exchanges with Benjamin
scarcely suffered. Thus Adorno found time to make suggestions to
Benjamin in 1939 when the latter began to revise his Baudelaire essay
of the previous autumn and prepare it for publication.^95 Many of
Adorno’s ideas proved helpful to Benjamin, just as his criticisms had
encouraged him to produce a completely reworked essay version.^96
Adorno greeted this new version enthusiastically, describing it as ‘the
most perfect thing you have done since the book on baroque drama’,
distinguished by the fact that ‘every moment of the work is equally
close to the centre’.^97
After leaving the radio research project, Adorno seemed to enjoy
a special status when compared to the core staff in the institute, who
also represented the institute in the lecture series of the extension
division of Columbia University. He enjoyed the privilege of being a
contractually secure employee of the institute. At the same time, he
could claim to be Horkheimer’s chosen partner in writing the legendary
book on ‘dialectical logic’. This plan expressed with particular clarity
the tendency to ‘re-philosophize’ Horkheimer’s programme, which had
previously emphasized interdisciplinarity. This trend began with his
essay ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’.^98 His new philosophical orienta-
tion and its accompanying key concept of ‘critical theory’ fell on fertile
soil as far as Adorno was concerned. He hoped that he would soon
be able to form a close alliance with Horkheimer. Despite the many
other calls on the latter’s time, Adorno urged him not to lose sight of
this project. His declared enthusiasm was mixed with an undertone
of anxiety lest Horkheimer should end up choosing to work full-time on
the book on dialectic with Löwenthal or Marcuse instead of him. To his