Theodor W.Adorno
German philosopher and musicologist Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) was a leading
member of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. He was appointed its director in
- Adorno’s thought is informed by a range of German thinkers, and his work could
be described as a heterodox Marxism with a strong Freudian influence. Thus commodity
fetishism and the role of the unconscious form a crucial part of his thinking. From Hegel,
Adorno inherited the notion of the dialectic, but appropriated it in its negative form. He
opposed the Hegelian notion of ‘identity’ thinking, and championed instead a way of
seeking to ‘describe’ an object negatively, by what it could not be, seeking to arrive at an
approximation of the ‘truth’ through a ‘constellation’ of such negative critiques.
In his aesthetic theory, Adorno recognized the emancipatory potential of art. Through
its autonomy, art offered a vision of an alternative world. It negated reified consciousness
and rejected the dominant order. However, only autonomous art—art that required the
engagement of the viewer—could offer this resistance. Adorno therefore distinguished
between art and the products of the culture industry whose purpose was largely that of
distraction and amusement.
In the essay ‘Functionalism Today’, Adorno addresses the question of architecture and
exposes the paradoxes within Adolf Loos’s treatment of functionalism and ornament. The
purposive and the purpose-free arts, according to Adorno, can never be absolutely
separated. They are held in a dialectical relationship. Purpose-free arts often have a social
function, while there can be no ‘chemically pure’ purposefulness. Thus functionalism in
architecture can never be pure functionalism. ‘The absolute rejection of style’, Adorno
concludes famously, ‘becomes itself a form of style.’ In his championing of
functionalism, Loos had dismissed ornament as the decadent product of erotic
symbolism. Yet, as Adorno argues, even the functional may attract the symbolic.
Symbols are born of the need to identify with one’s surroundings, and humans attach
symbolic significance to even the most technical of objects, such as the airplane or the
car.
The essay is an attack on the meanness of postwar German reconstruction. Against the
‘false’ objectivity of Neue Sachlichkeit, Adorno argues for an architecture of sustained
aesthetic reflection, an architecture ‘innervated’ by the imagination. Above all, he calls
for an architecture of generosity, which ‘thinks more of men than they actually are’.
Although criticized for his elitist treatment of art and for his deeply pessimistic
approach to the Enlightenment, Adorno remains a figure of enduring appeal. In particular
his early and incisive critique of the culture industry has exerted a marked influence on
theorists of postmodernity such as Fredric Jameson.