Adorno

The City of Frankfurt and its University 81

isolated individuals in their youthful protest against traditional forms.
Instead, art should seek valid expression as ‘the dissolution of the self
into a higher unity’.
Early on Adorno had come up against the limits of the sovereign
human subject: ‘What has become subjective and contingent remains
subjective and contingent in its effect as well. We are all in danger of
sinning against the human spirit.’^40 This was Adorno’s conclusion in
an early essay on expressionism. It was plain that from the outset intel-
lectual activity had a fundamentally ethical streak in his eyes. His ideas
might have seemed close to cultural conservatism, but he escaped this
by his determination to liberate himself from traditional patterns of
thought. Thus his critical stance followed from his experience that the
traditional forms of art were as obsolete as the bourgeois way of life as
such. There was no alternative to Rimbaud’s credo ‘Il faut être absolument
moderne!’ And this modernity in the realm of art was linked to the
spirit of opposition that brought him closer to left-wing revolutionary
movements.
Of course, like many other intellectuals, he had to confront the ques-
tion of how this open-ended future was to be achieved in practice. It
was his belief that criticism was the only instrument that would work. It
protects the mind from dogmatic sclerosis and promotes the willingness
to risk innovation both in art and in forms of social community. The
revolution Arnold Schoenberg had brought about in music provided
Adorno with a model. What had to be done to make the spark leap
from the realm of art to that of society?