Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life

A favorite song of Adorno’s when he was a child was the composer Johannes Brahms’s Cradle Song. As a child, he thought the song referred not to flowers, but to the pins that kept the curtain over his bed in place. Adorno compares the way the curtain blocked out the light to how the “unconscious dark” is the only thing that can cancel out “undiminished brightness” (199).

Adorno also cites a lullaby about a dog that drives off a beggar. He remarks that this lullaby invokes the bourgeois fear of intruders. Reflecting on how in the songbook the beggar looked like a Jew, Adorno muses that the beggar represents the persecuted. By falling asleep to the lullaby, the child forgets in their sleep about the story’s reflection on the harsh reality of persecution.

Another childhood song is one about two rabbits who are shot at by a hunter and, after they fall down, are relieved to find out they are alive. Adorno glimpses in the song advice about how to deal with despair. Instead of giving into despair, one should “realize not merely that he is still alive but that there is still life” (200).

Even though the “culture industry” (200) claims to simply be fulfilling its customers’ wants, Adorno instead argues that the culture industry shapes their wants. It does so by anticipating the audience’s expectations and views of itself. Adorno compares the culture industry to the fairy tale witch who gives candy to children to enchant them or fatten them up.

Films serve to “disseminate ideologies” (202) either by offering people an escape from their daily lives or by conveying social messages. However, film cannot offer any true escape, since it only presents the same social values people have to live under in their real lives. With movies containing a social message, instead of presenting real ways to improve society, they only give the message that “good-will” is “enough to remove” society’s “faults” (202).

Adorno scoffs at the argument that cinema is a “popular art” (203). The more a film tries to become art, Adorno argues, the more “bogus” (203) it is because attempts to elevate film beyond the medium’s conventions are only jarring. Film cannot replicate the artistic value of older forms of folk art, because those forms of art developed under “agrarian relationships” (203). On the other hand, film is a product of the capitalist age when people are alienated from each other.

Film imposes a sanitized and overly optimistic view of society upon audiences. Movies are by their nature mass-produced, which makes the “humanity” (205) of any film suspect. Despite the integrity of filmmakers, movies are still created through committee decisions and technical and economic needs. Neither folk art nor film are “organic” (205). However, Adorno adds that folk art could reflect problems with the world whereas film disguises the alienation of society. Film causes people to “enjoy their own dehumanization as something human” (206).

Even before a society falls under totalitarian rule, it becomes more standardized. This is true even for political radicals, who despite themselves are pulled into the mainstream of social thought. Adorno gives the example of Marcel Proust, an author once seen as rebellious in his own time. By Adorno’s time, however, he is viewed as a token gay author who should be represented on anyone’s bookshelf. Even “non-comformist” (207) works of literature have become part of the market under capitalism.

Looking at recent editions of Nietzsche’s works, Adorno remarks there are “two Nietzsches” (208). One is a famous writer celebrated by the public, the other one is a “great prober of man and valuer of life” (208). Nietzsche is still presented as “new” (209) by modern society. Adorno compares Nietzsche’s reception in the 20th century to a message in a bottle left amidst a “flood of barbarism bursting on Europe” (209).

The problem with writing satire is not just that the current era is too awful to be satirized. Adorno also believes that irony has “come into contradiction with truth” (210). Irony is simply something being presented as itself without any commentary. However, irony is also highly subjective, meaning irony becomes ineffective once society reaches a “consensus” (210).

Before the 19th century, satire and irony tended to side with the elite and be used against social progress. After the rise of the bourgeoisie, however, satire and irony came to be used by society’s marginalized, albeit those who were becoming no longer marginalized. Now, the fact that diversity of opinion has given way to “real unanimity” (212) means that satire and irony are irrelevant, especially compared to the truth.

Dictation gives a writer a certain degree of distance from their own work to make it easier to revise. The person taking dictation might inadvertently help the writer by causing the writer to “dig in [their] heels” (212) and refuse to change their work despite earlier doubts.

Rather than the works of artists being the expression of their repressed desires, Adorno believes that “artists display violent instinct […] marked by neurosis” (213). This is shown in how artists do not care about having ordered lives and are attracted to “the coarse, the inane, the indecent” (213). Artists may work with the unreal, but they also accept the truth of reality. However, art also resists reality by refusing to simply copy reality.

Mass culture is shaped by both the “standardization of conscience” (214) and life being taken over by corporations. Artists have allowed their craft to become more subject to technical processes and have exercised greater self-control through psychology. At the same time, art has become more of a product on the market.

Artists and employers have a tendency to blame problems on their employers and patrons. Still, there are certain intellectuals who see no problem in trying to do anything for their own advantage. Since in modern society everyone is out for their own advantage, however, this is not seen as a problem. Perversely, the person who does “not play the game” (216) seems selfish. On the other hand, the one who follows the rules of modern society is not seen as egotistical.

“Cultivated philistines” (216) are no longer outraged by radical works, but instead they simply claim they fail to understand them. These people expect art to “‘give’ them something” (216), so when faced with art they do not understand, they blame their own ignorance.

A similar expectation to receive something also governs relationships. People in relationships are also more indifferent toward receiving love. These trends contribute to a “denial of real happiness” because happiness is seen as “uneconomic” (217).

Adorno reflects on a childhood teacher trying to teach him about music by proving he was familiar with then-contemporary music. The teacher remarked how music that was modern was already outdated. The new trend in music discussed by the teacher was neo-classicism, which by ignoring the individual idiosyncrasies of individual artists and drawing on the “spirit […] of technical progress” (218) was an omen of fascism.

With its attention to the “critical construction of being” (218), modernity is already falling out of favor in an increasingly collectivized society where “individuals […] exist without a self” (219). Just as modern society prevents people from envisioning real reform in politics, it also stifles artistic expression.

There is a social pressure to stop using nuances in language. Due to this pressure, what nuances are left in language come across as “‘flavour’” (219). Adorno sees this development as a result of “market interests” (220), political manipulations, and how language reflects Adorno’s times. Still, society itself is ignorant in matters of “knowledge and expression” (220), making institutional efforts to shape language pointless. Adorno encourages writers not to cling to old forms of nuance, but to only write words that directly and explicitly carry meaning.

Free verse has been derided by some critics, but Adorno argues that poetic free verse is a “strict negation of ultimate strictness” (221). By drawing on past conventions, free verse is an excellent mode of communication. Adorno goes so far as to say that it was not a coincidence that the golden age of free verse was the French Revolution, which was the “solemn entrance of human dignity and equality” (222). In fact, Adorno views prose writers as also engaging in free verse.

Adorno lists a number of sayings and brief observations. The purpose of art in the modern world is to “bring chaos into order” (222), and he remarks on how art comes out involuntarily and like magic. Since art comes from “fetishes” (222), it is to be expected that artists treat their work like fetishes. Drama may be a representation of higher spiritual concepts, but it depends as much on its audience as it does on itself. Music “rescues name as pure sound” although it cuts it off from material “things” (223); it may be the purest form of art.

No work of art should be judged in isolation, but in the context of culture and preexisting interpretations of it. However, in mass culture, works of art are being undermined by being adapted outside the context of tradition. The author Kafka lacked a self, which is the only thing linking him to existentialist philosophy. Surrealist art “sacrifices […] concern for its truth” to “the appearance of happiness” (224).

Cultural conservatives are wrong to see “enlightenment and art” as “simple antitheses” (224). Instead, beauty in art leads to contemplation of the art piece, which brings about enlightenment. In ancient times, this kind of contemplation inspired by beautiful items like gems was akin to magic. While magic is no longer taken seriously, such beauty is still associated with happiness, and this is the basis of art.

Cheap objects like a paper-weight can resemble art. This is because both can present “primeval images” (225) that reflect a primeval time when humanity could not dominate nature.

Art is based around a contradiction articulated by the philosopher Kant: “‘[P]urposefulness without purpose’” (226). Since art results in something tangible that is produced, however, art cannot get away from questions about its purpose. In the age of mass production, people have tried to distance art from the process of production. The quality of the technique put into its production is what separates true art from kitsch.

Adorno reflects on an entry from a diary kept by the German poet Christian Hebbel, in which he asks why life loses its magic as we age. He believes that “earning a living” (227) diminishes activities and objects by reducing them to “labour-time” (227), or their monetary worth. Instead, children judge things by the value they provide in using them, not by financial value. Adorno also speculates this is why children love animals, since they exist “without any purpose recognizable to man” (228).

The modern worker came about as a result of the development of wage labor. Everyone is not just a biological being, but also a creation of social forces. As capitalism continues to develop, workers have become more like “means of production and not […] living purposes” (229). However, Adorno rejects the metaphor of workers being turned into machines. Instead, he proposes the “taint” (229) is not something instilled in people, but lies with society.

Even the elements that are natural to people are being incorporated into the purposes of society. For example, while psychology once helped divide people’s lives into their free time and their labor time, now it is working to place people into “the service of production” (230). Even people’s personalities are manipulated by society, a process that Adorno describes as the “consummation of the division of labor within the individual” (231).

Beliefs in religion and the supernatural disguise and reflect society. Even death has become demystified in modern society. While Christianity once valued the individual in death through the idea of the immortal soul, modern society holds that every individual is replaceable. By making death meaningless to society, death has been “domesticated” (232). The most extreme form of this process was the mass murder carried out by the Nazi government.

Any criticism of modern society, Adorno claims, is refuted with the claim that historically things have been the same. Even if that were basically true, for Adorno it is clear that the newer versions of things in the past become worse than their old counterparts. For example, the Holocaust was worse than anything done by Timur, Genghis Khan, or Britain’s colonial government over India. History is, for Adorno, the “growth of horror” (235).

Industrial standardization means there is no longer anything new. Adorno argues that this development can be traced through the history of the word “sensation” (236). At first it simply meant to perceive something, but then it came to mean something novel and shocking. This type of sensation, regardless of what caused it, “replaces happiness” (236). 19th-century psychology reduced human experience to sensation. However, in the modern era, sensation of the new is simply the rediscovery of the old.

Just as the horror stories of Edgar Allen Poe and Charles Baudelaire eventually lose their shock, the German public became accustomed to the news of atrocities. Such horrors lose their “quality as sensation [and] burns out” (237). Adorno compares the fascination with newness to being addicted to a drug, but one that has lost its power.

Adorno believes that humanity, pessimistic about its future, has been placing its hopes into a “chimera” (238) representing the unborn future generations. However, this chimera only illuminates the fact that society no longer needs people.

Adorno describes a number of arguments against occult belief. He sees belief in supernatural concepts like astrology as a “second mythology” (239), as something following the decline of belief in God. It is also driven by humanity’s horror at what has resulted from its mastery of nature and technology. The second mythology is inferior to religious beliefs. While the old religions were the product of centuries of accumulated tradition and ideas, the second mythology is a rejection of both tradition and progress. In its place, occultism offers only fetishized commodities.

Occultism also represents the thought typical of late capitalism. For example, occult practices represent social domination through frightening people and arcane knowledge in a way that parallels economic statistics. At the same time, it results from the “subjectification of all meaning” and the denial of the “rationality of reality” (240). Adorno also believes that occultism is harmful by exploiting people’s need to understand the truth, and that society is destroying itself by resisting genuine change.

Professional practitioners of occultism can offer answers to every question, but the answers do not offer any practical assistance. While Judaism and Christianity believed spirituality and the body would remain together, as in the Christian belief in bodily resurrection, occultism separates spirit from the body, which reduces the soul to a “cheap imitation” (242) of the body. Nonetheless, occultists also try to use scientific empiricism to validate their beliefs.

Finally, Adorno accuses occultism of making existence a product of mind. Developing from this philosophical position, occultists promote the idea of spirits or a singular “world-spirit” that is indistinguishable from the world itself, negating the very concept of spirits. This promotes the old bourgeois view of a higher power protecting the “established, despiritualized order” (244).

Dialectical reasoning originated with the Sophists of ancient Greece. While it did provide a means for rebellion, it was also simultaneously a tool for control. This is because dialectical reason or “negative philosophy” (245) cuts through all supposed truths and the concept of moral truth itself. Most importantly for Adorno, it breaks down the idea that anything can exist in isolation and not as part of a general or a greater whole.

At the same time, dialectical reasoning provides insights into issues such as the marginalization of women. The trick is for philosophers to not use dialectical reasoning, but to surrender themselves to it.

When faced with despair, a philosopher should contemplate everything “from the standpoint of redemption” (247). However, this can only be done if one accepts that they are part of the world and cannot contemplate the world apart from it.