Adorno

A Theory Devoured by Thought 421

congratulated Adorno on his sixtieth birthday. ‘What has “actually”
happened for us no longer to be what we once were to each other now
that we have grown older? It is true that when we meet we are what we
were, but not at all with regard to whatever the history of philosophy
may preserve.’^43 On Bloch’s eightieth birthday, Adorno returned the
compliment and wrote an article in a Festschrift for Bloch published by
Siegfried Unseld. Adorno’s birthday telegram was quite emphatic: ‘Ernst,
old friend since very early on, philosophy chieftain, we wish you the
undiminished power of dreams, and are with you in spirit. Gretel and
Teddie.’^44 Later on, Adorno put forward the idea of a discussion on
Beckett, on the assumption that they shared a common evaluation of
the writer. Adorno wished to make use of Beckett to throw into focus
the relations between utopia and negativity, that is to say, his and Bloch’s
fundamental philosophical positions. This was in essence the continua-
tion of an earlier debate. In 1964, in Baden-Baden, there had been
a radio debate with the title ‘Something Missing. ..On the Contradic-
tions of Utopian Yearning’. The two discussants were eager to keep
things on a friendly footing, referred to each other as ‘my friend’ and
took care to keep the debate within the bounds of genuine dialogue.
Both were concerned to prevent the devaluation of utopian thinking.
While Bloch attempted to demonstrate the attractions of utopia by dis-
playing its contents, Adorno insisted that there could be no substantively
definable utopia; for utopia’s own sake we must resist ‘making an image
of utopia’. For ‘utopia is to be found essentially in the determinate
negation ... of what is, since, by demonstrating that what is takes con-
crete form as something false, it always at the same time points to what
should exist.’^45

The dispute about positivism:

Via discourse to the Frankfurt School

The scientistic adult mockery of ‘mind music’ simply drowns the creaking

of the cupboard drawers in which the questionnaires are deposited – the

sound of the enterprise of pure literalness.^46

In the course of the 1960s, Adorno had consolidated his position in
West German sociology to such a point that in November 1963 he was
elected to the post of chairman of the German Sociological Society.
He succeeded Otto Stammer, who had a chair in Berlin and belonged
to his own generation. He was followed in 1968 by Ralf Dahrendorf,
who had been born in 1929. At Adorno’s own suggestion, Ludwig von
Friedeburg was chosen as his vice-chairman. His period of office wit-
nessed two of the most important sociology conferences of the postwar
era. The first took place in Heidelberg in 1964 and was devoted to the
topic of ‘Max Weber and Sociology’; the second, in Frankfurt am Main