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Adorno on Democracy in America: Countertendencies and Democratic Enlightenment1 ---Shannon Mariotti, Southwestern University mariotts@southwestern.edu To give some context, here is an abstract of the larger book manuscript from which I draw this short paper and talk: Adorno on Democracy in America: My book project explores the American roots and contemporary relevance of the German critical social theorist Theodor W. Adorno’s critique of existing democracy as well as his normative ideal of democracy. Illuminating how Adorno’s thoughts reflect the context of their genesis, I also show how his theory can inform and guide contemporary democratic politics. Drawing from newly published essays, radio addresses, and lectures that Adorno originally composed in English during his time in the U.S., my manuscript revises the traditional understanding of Adorno as a high modernist aesthete, a cultural elitist, and a notoriously inaccessible theorist. I show how Adorno’s project is deeply democratic at its core while also exploring moments where he speaks in a different register, to the demos that lies at the heart of his theoretical concerns. Writing about democracy in America, in English, while in the U.S., Adorno translates and introduces his ideas to a broader public in ways that reflect a desire to understand and inform the problems and possibilities of democracy as they are enacted at the level of the everyday customs, conventions, and habits of citizens. Reframing our image of Adorno in the process of drawing out the lessons of these newly available writings composed in the U.S., I also use Adorno’s thought to intervene in, and inform, key debates in contemporary American democratic theory and practice: Adorno’s unconventional perspectives can revitalize our democratic politics, add conceptual rigor to democratic theory, and remind us of the normative promise that used to attach more closely to the concept of “democracy.

“The American attack on democracy usually takes place in the name of democracy.”

-Adorno, The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses, pg. 50.

“… counterpropaganda should point out as concretely as possible in every case the distortions of democratic ideas which take place in the name of democracy. The proof of such distortions would be one of the most efficient weapons for defending democracy.”

-Adorno, The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses, pg. 51.

“We want to face the danger of this sea, not for the sake of fleeing to cultural islands, but for better navigation. Any investigator who does not see the dangers of that sea and who simply allows himself to be drugged by its grandeur, and who sees its waves as waves of unbroken progress, is very likely to be drowned.”

-Adorno, Current of Music, pg. 62.

                                                                                                               1 Draft prepared for American Democracy Forum conference: please do not cite without permission of the author. Also, please note: the texts that I draw from here are all also in Adorno’s Gesammelte Schriften, but I have not yet added in all the corresponding citations to it.

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In a recent piece, titled “We Are All Democrats Now,” Wendy Brown highlights a peculiar

inverse relationship that increasingly characterizes our contemporary political landscape: as

various social, political, and economic forces undermine any sense that the demos has power or

is ruling itself, leading to what she characterizes as a “crisis of de-democratization,” the rhetoric

of democracy has become strikingly more pervasive and ubiquitous.1 The concept of democracy

“has historically unparalleled global popularity today yet has never been more conceptually

footloose or substantively hollow.”2 How, Brown asks, “has it come to pass that in parts of the

globe that have long traveled under the sign of democracy, the people are not, in any sense,

ruling themselves?”3 Brown argues that we must move beyond the uncritical rhetorical

celebration of democracy to confront a series of difficult questions, such as whether it is viable,

whether it is possible, whether we still believe in it, whether humans still want the freedoms that

have been associated with democracy, and if so, how the demos can “identify and reach for the

powers to be held in common if democracy is to become anything more than a gloss of

legitimacy for its inversion.”4

In an earlier era, the German critical social theorist Theodor W. Adorno was maligned as

elitist, apolitical, and undemocratic for asking similarly difficult yet valuable questions that

dispel comfortable illusions and penetrate to the heart of democratic theory and practice.5 Indeed,

Adorno anticipated some of the concerns Brown identifies, especially the paradoxical

phenomenon where we are more democratic rhetorically at the same moment that we are less

democratic substantively.6 Even as Adorno explores the authoritarian, proto-fascistic elements of

American culture in the WWII era, he notes that everyone uses the language of democracy, to the

extent that even “the American attack on democracy usually takes place in the name of

democracy.” But Adorno may inform our contemporary thinking about democracy for a second

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reason: he offers some conceptual rigor to what Brown thinks has become an “empty signifier”

given how he defines democracy in specific ways while also identifying a normative dimension

to it that orients his whole analysis. For these reasons, and given the bent of recent scholarship

on Adorno and the political as well as Adorno in America, we may now be at a point where we

can fruitfully and productively go back to Adorno to think through some dilemmas of democracy

in America. First, recent studies have analyzed the practical, ethical, and political dimensions of

Adorno’s life and work, exploring his thoughts on critique and theory as a praxis, articulating the

nature of his unique modes of political engagement, as well as analyzing how his work might

inform radical and democratic political thought and action.7 Second, recent scholarship has

explored Adorno’s relationship with America. While associated most deeply with his native

Germany, Adorno actually wrote his most influential texts during the fifteen year time-span he

spent in the United States having been forced to flee Germany prior to WWII: scholars have

begun to appreciate how Adorno’s time in the U.S. was not something fleeting, incidental, or

minor, but shaped his thought in a constitutive way.8 Third, though there are as yet few examples

of this kind of work, scholars have also begun to explore how we might draw from Adorno to

productively inform contemporary democratic politics.9 Building on three different strands of

recent scholarship, my project addresses a lacuna in the existing literature: few scholars have

written about the texts analyzed here at all except as parts of Adorno’s biography or as social

history and they have yet to be fully recognized or explored as the practice side of the theory of

negative dialectics developed throughout his corpus.

Because I am most interested in the instances where Adorno is seeking to communicate

with and engage the U.S. public, here I focus my analysis primarily on the considerations on

radio that he composed in English for an American audience.10 For this talk and short paper, I

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draw from the essays collected as Current of Music and from The Psychological Technique of

Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses, both of which were written while Adorno was living in

New York between 1938 and 1941 and draw from his work with Paul Lazarsfeld’s Princeton

Radio Research Project, which aimed to analyze the social significance of radio.11 Analyzing the

radio to explore democracy in America, in English, while in the U.S., Adorno translates and

introduces his thoughts on immanent critique in the form of negative dialectics to a broader

public in ways that reflect a desire to understand and inform the problems and possibilities of

democracy as they are enacted at the level of the everyday customs, conventions, and habits of

citizens. To make this case, I analyze a short essay, titled “Democratic Leadership and Mass

Manipulation,” published in 1950 and originally composed in English, as a key to understanding

Adorno’s texts on American culture more broadly.12 I show how Adorno’s writings on political

culture in the U.S. are part and parcel of his larger project of “democratic pedagogy” and

“democratic enlightenment.” Ultimately, my project seeks to correct the tenacious yet distorted

interpretation of Adorno as an elitist mandarin with a privileged distance from democratic

politics, to reframe our understanding of his attitude toward democracy in the U.S. while also

trying to draw out the productive lessons that his writings on American political culture might

hold for us today.

In the larger manuscript, I also outline Adorno’s understanding of negative dialectics and

his more theoretical discussions of democracy, but in the interest of time and space, here I will

just say that for Adorno, for democracy to be real and robust, people must be free and able to

exercise critical capacities in everyday life, to resist what they are supposed to accept as ‘given.”

As he says, “Critique is essential to all democracy. Not only does democracy require the freedom

to criticize and need critical impulses. Democracy is nothing less than defined by critique.”13

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Indeed, for Adorno, “Democracy, according to its very idea, promises people that they

themselves would make decisions about their world” and yet, most existing forms of democracy

“actually prevent them from this ‘deciding for oneself about the world.”14 The pervasiveness of

the forces working against meaningful democracy also helps us see how the problems that

Adorno is concerned with throughout his writings – the culture industry, idealism, capitalism,

alienation – are all also centrally problems for democracy. At root, his work as a whole is

concerned with highlighting social, political, and economic obstacles to autonomy – and thus to

democracy – and to promoting ways of overcoming them.

I. In his short essay title “Democratic Leadership and Mass Manipulation,” Adorno begins by

expressing concern with how economic structures and ostensibly democratic institutions in the

U.S. undermine the autonomy that meaningful democracy depends upon, working against the

lived exercise and practice of democracy on the part of ordinary people and instead cultivating a

dependent citizenry. As he puts it,

“Through various processes such as the tremendous numerical increase of modern parties, their dependence on highly concentrated vested interests, and their institutionalization, the truly democratic functioning of leadership, as far as it had ever been achieved in reality, has vanished. The interaction between party and leadership has become more and more limited to abstract manifestations of the will of the majority through ballots, the mechanisms of which are largely subject to control by the established leadership…”15

If we think about democracy “in a merely formalistic way” and “accept the will of the majority

per se, without consideration for the content of democratic decisions,” we may end up with

“complete perversions of democracy itself and, ultimately, to its abolition.16 As the experience of

Germany highlighted and as Adorno’s experience in America also illuminated, strains of fascism

can co-exist with formally democratic structures: “It has been known throughout the ages…that

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the majority of the people frequently act blindly in accordance with the will of powerful

institutions or demagogic figures, and in opposition both to the basic concepts of democratism

and their own rational interests.”17 Institutional factors in turn undermine citizens’ everyday

practices of democracy, with dire consequences: when “the people feel that they are unable

actually to determine their own fate” and are “disillusioned about the authenticity and

effectiveness of democratic political processes, they are tempted to surrender the substance of

democratic self-determination and to cast their lot with those whom they consider at least

powerful: their leaders.”18 Which only further undermines their autonomy and makes a bad

situation worse. Though even here, the system that cultivates dependency is not pervasive:

Adorno notes that this is all “notwithstanding the fact that in decisive situations ‘grass-roots’

democracy, as opposed to public opinion, shows amazing vitality.”19

Turning to the theme that is the focus of the piece, however, Adorno argues that if

democracy gains its normative, authentic, and robust meaning from the everyday critical

practices of individuals, then a new form of democratic leadership is also necessary:

Today perhaps more than ever, it is the function of democratic leadership to make the subjects of democracy, the people, conscious of their own wants and needs as against the ideologies which are hammered into their heads by the innumerable communication of vested interests. They must come to understand those tenets of democracy which, if violated, logically impede the exercise of their own rights and reduce them from self-determining subjects to objects of opaque political maneuvers” (italics in original).20

He speaks of studying the pathological tendencies of existing democracy in America so as to

“derive from them, as it were, vaccines against antidemocratic indoctrination.” Here, Adorno

refers to, for example, “the American tradition of common sense,” their “sales resistance” and

suspicion of being sold a bill of goods and being made to look like a “sucker,” as well as their

suspicion and anger if they feel that their “sincerest feelings” are being “perverted and gratified

by a swindle.”21 He speaks of how “the energy inherent in their longing may finally turn against

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its exploitation” and how “psychological exploitation, if unveiled, will turn into a boomerang”

and swing back in the other direction.22 As he says, to “those who prate about the immaturity of

the masses this may seem to be a hopeless endeavor. However, the argument that people have to

be taken as they are is only a half-truth; it overlooks the mass potential of autonomy and

spontaneity which is very much alive.”23 For Adorno, “there can be no doubt about the existence

of strong countertendencies against the all-pervasive patterns of our cultural climate” and the

project of “democratic enlightenment” has to “lean on these countertendencies…”24 Adorno’s

use of the metaphor of a “vaccine” is especially apt: a vaccine is a cure that works through

exposure to a less potent form of the disease itself, and indeed, we see Adorno trying to derive

‘solutions’ by immersing himself in retrograde cultural objects that nevertheless also represent

potential seedbeds for more substantive forms of democracy. He (perhaps ironically?) titles this

strategy “Operation Boomerang” and speaks of his desire to translate his findings so they are

understandable to a broad audience, to communicate these ideas “on a large scale.” Indeed, the

role of democratic leadership that Adorno outlines here consists of drawing out the

countertendencies in American culture that can work as “vaccines” against the otherwise

pervasive economic, social, and political forces that work to construct citizens as dependent as

opposed to autonomous. Democratic leadership consists in illuminating the contradictions of

American culture to prompt an uncomfortable, disruptive, but productive and illuminating kind

of unsettlement: “The shock evinced by the dawning awareness of such a possibility may well

help to bring about the aforementioned lever effect.”25 As he says, “Though our approach will

not reorganize the unconscious of those whom we hope to reach, it may nevertheless reveal to

them that they themselves, as well as their ideology, represent a problem.”26 In the larger book

project, I analyze all of Adorno’s writings on American culture to show how he is consistently

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undertaking the strategy of identifying vaccines and countertendencies to strengthen American

democracy that he outlines in the short essay on leadership, but for the purposes of this paper I

will just give some examples from two texts.

II. Adorno on the Radio: Current of Music and The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther

Thomas’ Radio Addresses

At the time Adorno was writing, radio was increasingly seen as a tool for democracy, as a way to

educate the “masses” – a new and very powerful influence, much like the computer and the

internet today. But while Adorno’s analysis evaluates the democratic value of the radio, his

conclusions are unconventional. He does not see the technology as automatically valuable to

democracy either in its message or its mode of expression – not surprising given how he

witnessed Hitler’s use of the radio – but he does seem to have been interested in its potential as a

pedagogical tool and gave many radio lectures himself which seem part and parcel of his

educational agenda to translate the practice of negative dialectics to a wider audience.27 Thus

despite it potential, he challenges the view that the radio itself is automatically a democratic

medium of communication, instead showing it generally to be part and parcel of the broader

capitalist culture, even containing many authoritarian elements. Adorno thinks that analyzing

what he calls the “physiognomy” of the radio – by which he means voice of the radio, the face of

the radio, its manner of expression as opposed to its content, what he calls the how of the radio –

will allow us to see the hidden contradictions of modern American society: we can read the face

of modern American society by studying the mode of expression of the radio. But though he

finds the mode of expression of the radio tending toward authoritarianism, he also unearths

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democratically valuable countertendencies in some of the ways that Americans respond to the

radio, in the how of Americans, we might say.

Adorno sees the radio as so strongly reflective of dominant strains of the WWII era

culture in the U.S. that he speaks of “a new type of human being” and dubs it “the radio

generation.” He outlines several “structural apriori axioms” that shape existing democracy in the

U.S., all of which are encompassed by the cultural object of the radio. First, most significantly,

and not surprisingly, he emphasizes the influence of capitalism. There is a “general trend”

toward a “heavy concentration of capital” and a “shrinking of the free market in favor of

monopolized mass production of standardized goods; this holds true particularly of the

communications industry.”28 Adorno also sees deep tensions between the productive capabilities

of the U.S. and the capitalist nature of the means of production, which keep the fruits of

production private instead of making them available for common benefit. As he puts it, “We live

in a society of commodities – that is, a society in which production of goods is taking place, not

primarily to satisfy human wants and needs but for profit. Human needs are satisfied only

incidentally, as it were. This basic condition of production affects the form of the product as well

as the human interrelationships.”29 Even something as “ethereal and sublime” as music – which

Adorno describes as “a human force” – has become part of the capitalist mode of productive,

commodified, standardized, and “consumed like other consumer goods.” Indeed, he notes that

“ethereal and sublime” have become “trademarks.” Second, existing political and economic

institutions force individuals to adapt if they are to survive, figuring humans as dependent, as

objects rather than subjects, in the various spheres of their life, especially at work: “The structure

of the workplace…no longer permits ‘practice’ or ‘experience’ in the old sense…A single path

leads from the conveyer belt via the office machine to the ‘capturing’ of spontaneous intellectual

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acts through reified, quantified processes.”30 Third, Adorno’s critique of the radio – both in terms

of the medium and the message – also reflects his thoughts on the culture industry generally.

Adorno characterizes listening to popular music as “a perpetual busman’s holiday,” where the

patterns and practices that characterize the capitalism also shape the leisure activities that are

supposed to be a break from work: “This mode of production, which engendered fears and

anxiety about unemployment, loss of income, war, has its non-productive correlate in

entertainment; that is, relaxation which does not involve the effort of concentration at all. People

want to have fun” and the stimulus such entertainment provides permits “an escape from the

boredom of mechanized labor.”31 Thus popular music is part of the dominant ideology – “social

cement” – that adjusts people “to the mechanisms of present-day life.”32 Ultimately, for the

“Radio Generation,” “happiness consists mostly in integrating, in having the abilities that

everyone has and doing what everyone does. They are without illusions. They finally see the

world as it is, but pay the price of no longer seeing how it could be.”33 Adorno is concerned with

the ways people are being made into what Marcuse called “one dimensional” beings, adjusting to

the imperatives of mainstream culture without even the internal struggle against civilization that

Freud assumed (and saw the root of our neuroses). The elements of the self that could resist

“what is” are being winnowed away and individuals are making increasingly dependent, less able

to resist the world they are given, and thus less autonomous.

But how is the radio phenomena related to what Adorno calls “pseudo-democracy” and

indeed, even authoritarian in some ways? First, the radio speaks to us in ways that feel

immediate and personal, that seem “real” and authentic and thus people “may be inclined to

believe that anything offered by the radio voice is real, because of this illusion of closeness…It

has a testimonial value: radio, itself, said it.”34 But despite this closeness, there is also an

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impersonal quality to the radio voice: “The very fact that they are confronted by voices without

being able to argue with the person who is speaking, or even may feel somewhat in the dark

about who is speaking – the machine or the man – may help to establish the authority of the

tool.”35 Second, radio presents itself as the authority in ways that position the listener as

something small and insignificant in relation, another facet of modernity that intensifies the

individual’s feeling of dependence and impotence: “as paradoxical as it sounds, the authority of

radio becomes greater the more it addresses the listener in his privacy. An organized mass of

listeners might feel their own strength and even rise to a sort of opposition. The isolated listener

definitely feels overwhelmed by the might of the personal voice of an anonymous

organization.”36 Because the individual listens to the public voice of the radio in the private

sphere of his or her own home, “it appears to pour out of the cells of his own most intimate life”

and the listener “gets the impression that his own cupboard, his own phonograph, his own

bedroom speaks to him in a personal way, devoid of the intermediary stages of the printed word”

and consequently, “the more perfectly he is ready to accept wholesale whatever he hears.”37

Thus, “Radio upholds the illusion of privacy and individual independence in a situation where

such privacy and independence do not really exist, which contradicts it,” a phenomenon that “fits

completely the experience of how modern mass society works in other fields.”38

But it is important to remember that Adorno’s goal here is to critique the contemporary

landscape with an eye toward developing better skills of navigation, as one of my opening

epigraphs indicates. He directs his words in part toward educators with an eye toward developing

what he elsewhere calls “democratic enlightenment” by facing the realities of the “radio

generation.” He begins to carry out his strategy of searching out countertendencies to act as

vaccines against pseudo-democracy, noting that “the nature of this society must form the point of

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departure for any attempt at change” and arguing that there is “reason to assume that the loss of

some abilities is accompanied by the freeing of certain others, and these are precisely what

destines them to carry out changes that would never have been possible for the ‘old’

individuals.”39 Adorno thinks “the decisive problem” today are obstacles that work against

critical thought, the “thought ban that exists today” that makes it difficult for people to critique

the environment that they instead work hard to try to adapt to, for their own security. But like a

boomerang, these pernicious aspects of this Radio Generation can be turned toward productive

purposes:

“The same people who will no longer allow themselves to think (or do similar things such as read books, discuss theoretical questions, etc.) have become ‘canny’ and can no longer be fooled…It is a matter of pushing this ‘canniness’ so far that it breaks through its bond to the immediate world of action and transforms itself into real thinking. If that succeeds, it is precisely those ‘crippled’ human beings who will be most able to put an end to that crippling. Their coldness can become a readiness to make sacrifices for truth, their improvisation can turn into a cunning in the fight against giant organization, and their speechlessness can become a willingness – without words or arguments – to do what needs to be done.”40

To draw out such countertendencies, he focuses on the ways people respond to and interact with

the radio, highlighting the various tactics that listeners employ to assert their own autonomy over

and against the authority of the radio, showing how their ways of interacting with it contain a

latent frustration and a nascent critique that might be drawn out as a vaccine.

Twirling the Dial and “Good Reception”: Standardization and homogenization are basic

features of the radio phenomenon, where the identical material is offered to anyone who listens:

“This standardization, in a way, is the essence of radio itself. The abstract fact that an identical

content appears at innumerable places at the same time practically coincides with the concrete

fact of standardization – namely, that the same material is impressed upon a great number of

people.”41 This, Adorno notes, is self-evident and would not be important were it not also the

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motivation for several different responses from the listener: “It is necessary, however, to keep

[standardization] in mind as a basic fact because only against its background can all its

countertendencies be properly understood.”42 In response to this standardization, the listener

channel surfs and “twirls the dial,” as an expression of a frustrated desire for difference and a

frustrated assertion of autonomy, a resistance against “getting the same stuff everywhere.”43 For

Adorno, “the man who plays on his radio as if it were an instrument, obtaining ready-made,

accordion-like chords dragged into each other in a dilettantish way, is a sort of model for all

behavior where individual initiative attempts to alter ubiquity-standardization.”44

Adjusting the dial to get “good reception” represents a different kind of countertendency:

“behind this desire” lies another “hidden resistance” to the static authority represented by the

radio.45 In trying to get good reception, the listener connects with, interacts with, tries to work

the machinery himself in a way that seeks to exert some agency over it:

“He knows he cannot really influence the phenomenon; so he substitutes for this influence the ideal of doing as good a job as possible. Instead of being able to do something against the mechanism when such an attempt would be futile, he wants to do something with the mechanism and identify himself with this attempt at the expense of what he is allegedly pursuing. Good reception becomes a fetish.”46

Here, the listener works with the radio and “obeys its laws so completely that [he] gets the

illusionary self-satisfaction that the workings of the mechanism are his own.” Adorno sees

people as threatened by the “alienated and anonymous power of monopolistic institutions” but

they respond to this fear by trying to connect with the powerful mechanism, developing

something like Stockholm syndrome: “One of the only psychological refuges is identification

with those very powers, just as a prisoner may grow to love the barred windows of his cell.”47

And yet, there is a potentially productive countertendency here: this desire “to be the real master

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of machinery is a relic” of a frustrated but “genuine spontaneity,” a “desire to preserve his

individuality…”48

Fan Mail: Adorno also analyzes fan mail letters, which can display a kind of exuberance

that he describes as “standardized enthusiasm”: because of the authority of the announcer and the

radio as a social institution, in what is essentially a form of manufactured consent, fan mail

writers “identified those songs which they regarded as most popular with those they happened to

like themselves.”49 But despite this general demonstration of the listener’s ability to “appreciate”

the same music the announcer has deemed good, the fan asserts himself in the letter and attempts

to “impress his will upon broadcasters” by criticizing something or explaining why they like

something.50 Herein lies the countertendency: in writing fan mail, the individual “maintains the

original motive of individual resistance” and “does not flatly accept what is offered to him.”51

This desire for greater autonomy is expressed through fan mail, which indicates that the

consumer “is unwilling to recognize that he is totally dependent and he likes to preserve the

illusion of private initiative and free choice.”52 Paradoxically, “The less the listener has to

choose, the more is he made to believe that he has a choice; and the more the whole machine

functions only for the sake of profit, the more must he be convinced that it is functioning for him

and his sake only or, as it is put, as a public service.”53 But given the value Americans place on

free choice, on not being told what to do, and on not being “swindled,” if this standardization

was undisguised, it might “promote a resistance which could easily endanger the whole

system.”54 In another reference to how this method of critique enacts the practice of negative

dialectics, Adorno notes that when we listen to the object of the radio, “facts apparently so far

apart as dial-twirling and fan-mail writing begin to speak” and these important countertendencies

become apparent.55

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Adorno continues this project of identifying countertendencies that might strengthen

American democracy and drawing out “vaccines” in The Psychological Technique of Martin

Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses. Martin Luther Thomas was a Christian right radio personality

on the air in the 1930s, who railed against communism, Jews, foreign policy, the Roosevelt

Administration, especially its unemployment policies, bureaucracy, and, in an apocalyptic style,

emphasized many other vaguely outlined indicators of the coming end of the world. Most of the

book is concerned with a micro-level analysis of the techniques Thomas uses to attract and

maintain an audience: there is the “lone wolf” tactic (4), the “emotional release” device (6), the

“persecuted innocence” technique (10), the “indefatigability” device (13), the “messenger” tactic

(15); the “a great little man” strategy (18), the “human interest” device (24), the “listen to your

leader” device (37), the “fait accompli” technique (42), the aforementioned meta-level

“democratic cloak” technique (50), the “if you only knew” tactic (53), the “dirty linen” device

(58), the “tingling backbone device” (61), the “last hour” tactic (64), the “black hand” device

(68), the “speaking with tongues” trick (78), the “personal experience” strategy (87), the “anti-

institutions” trick (91), and the “faith of our fathers” technique (100).

But at each step along the way, Adorno also shows how Thomas’ techniques and tactics

are only effective because of how they play on people’s very real fears, anxieties, and suspicions,

taking advantage of both their feeling of powerlessness and their desire for some kind of change.

Under such conditions, people are ripe for emotional manipulation, and yet a countertendency, as

we will see, underlies each point of manipulation. Adorno notes that Thomas, “steals, as it were,

the concept of revolution,” rendering the people’s frustration impotent: given that his followers

are “deeply discontented” and “even destitute,” “their objective situation might possibly convert

them into radical revolutionaries,” but “one of the main tasks of the fascist is to prevent this and

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to divert revolutionary trends into their own line of thought, for their own purposes.”56 The

fascist agitator divests people of their “spontaneity” and reroutes their sense of unrest and

discontent, into dependence on a charismatic leader or passivity in the face of an impending

apocalypse or catastrophe, dissipating radical energies into passive waiting for the end of the

world.

The power that the idea of “democracy” has over Americans is perhaps the

countertendency that has the greatest potential to act as a vaccine. This concept is so embedded

in American culture that even American authoritarianism must work through the idea of

“democracy” itself, rooting itself in ideas of freedom and liberty, and drawing on the legacy of

“the Founders.” As Adorno notes, the fact that “the American tradition is ideologically bound up

with democratic ideas and institutions has tended to give some elements of democracy a quasi-

magical halo, an irrational weight of their own.”57 In America, democracy is used as a “cloak”

for various ends: democracy is attacked “in the name of democracy” even with an aim to

“overthrow democracy in the name of democracy.” Whereas “Hitler and his henchmen could

openly attack democracy as such,” the “strength of democratic tradition in America makes this

impossible” and every kind of propaganda must advance itself with democratic rhetoric: “The

famous saying of Huey Long’s, that is there ever should be fascism in America, it would be

called antifascism, goes for all of his kin. The American attack on democracy usually takes place

in the name of democracy.”58 Thomas constantly refers to the American Constitution, the ideals

of the Founders, and invokes “democratic personalities” such as Jackson or Lincoln, claiming

that his goal is preserving and protecting the goals of the framers and these original liberties.

Ultimately, this all “shows that the fascist agitator still has to reckon with democratic ideas as

living forces and that he has a chance for success only by perverting them for his own

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purposes.”59 This represents a countertendency: for Adorno, “counterpropaganda should point

out as concretely as possible in every case the distortions of democratic ideas which take place in

the name of democracy. The proof of such distortions would be one of the most efficient

weapons for defending democracy.”60

III. Conclusion: “Democratic Pedagogy” and “Democratic Enlightenment”

Pulling all the threads of this essay together, we can see how Adorno’s work on the cultural

object of the radio is an enactment of what he elsewhere calls “democratic pedagogy” that aims

to draw out “substantive democratic forms” in the U.S. that act as “countertendencies” and might

function as a “vaccine,” against more prevalent fascistic elements of pseudo-democracy in

America. My goal throughout this piece has been to analyze Adorno’s writings on radio to

reshape our image of his attitude toward American democracy, but his method might also hold

valuable lessons for us today. First, Adorno’s mode of critique works in opposition to the

abstracting tendencies that characterize some forms of contemporary theorizing: adopting his

level of close cultural analysis – looking at the contemporary cognates of radio and of the

rhetorical tools of proselytizing political figures – may allow us to identify important

countertendencies in what otherwise, from a more abstracting viewpoint, might look like an

unbroken pattern of authoritarianism and dependency. When seen up close, contemporary

American culture may also contain the seed-bed for greater ‘democratic enlightenment.’ Second,

Adorno’s strategy of identifying countertendencies works with those who he sees as presenting

obstacles to substantive democracy, instead of sharpening and deepening divisions between those

on the left and those on the right. Adorno’s mode of finding nonidentical, small-scale utopian

elements that protest against the existing ideology even as they are a part of it might help work

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against the polarization that increasingly characterizes the contemporary U.S. political context.

His method encourages us to articulate common ground among various movements for political

change and use these energies of discontent to discuss and debate what avenues might truly

further the goals of freedom and democracy that are so much a part of American political

rhetoric of all stripes. Third, whereas much of contemporary democratic theory looks for wholly

new political forms to work against existing problems, completely outside of the matrix of liberal

capitalism, Adorno’s method allows us to find alternative possibilities within existing forms,

working with what we already have to change what we have, so to speak, to excavate latent

possibilities even in the existing pathologies of our culture, even in a retrograde political

landscape. Finally, at the very least, we might use Adorno’s cautionary warning that “the

American attack on democracy usually takes place in the name of democracy” to analyze the

various arguments that are made in the name of democracy today.61 Adorno reminds us that

democracy is a normative promise that the people might have power and asks us to think more

deeply about what contemporary forces distort that promise as well as what might be required to

fulfill it.

                                                                                                               1 Wendy Brown, “We Are All Democrats Now,” in Democracy in What State? (Columbia University Press: New York, 2011), pp. 44-57. See also Wendy Brown, “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” in Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 37-59. Wendy Brown, “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization,” in Political Theory, Vol. 34, No. 6 (Dec. 2006), pp. 690-714. 2 “We Are All Democrats Now,” 44. 3 ibid., 46. 4 “We Are All Democrats Now,” 57. 5 Georg Lukács image is worth recalling because of the ways it has colored interpretations of Adorno. As Lukács wrote in 1916, “A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’…‘a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered.’ Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 22. 66 As Russell Berman notes in his piece “Adorno’s Politics,” “By labeling Adorno politically impossible, his critics provide themselves an illusory security in their own political self-understanding,” demonizing Adorno for “pointing

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                                                                                                               out the difficulties” inherent to progressive politics: “In other words, the image of Adorno, the unpolitical aesthete, is little more than a phantom that haunts a left that cultivates its own self-deceptions about an immediacy of political practice” (111). Russell Berman, "Adorno's Politics," in Adorno: A Critical Reader, ed. Nigel and Andrew Rubin Gibson, Blackwell Critical Readers (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002). 7 See, for example, by order of publication: Paul Apostolidis, The Stations of the Cross: Adorno and Christian Right Radio (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995, 2007). J.M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See the chapter titled “Recovering the Ethical and Political Force of Adorno’s Aesthetic-Critical Theory,” in Martin Morris, Rethinking the Communicative Turn: Adorno, Habermas and the Problem of Communicative Freedom (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). Russell Berman, "Adorno's Politics," in Adorno: A Critical Reader, ed. Nigel and Andrew Rubin Gibson, Blackwell Critical Readers (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002). J.M. Bernstein, "Negative Dialectics as Fate," in Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Brian O’Connor, Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004). Lorenz Jäger, Adorno: A Political Biography, trans. Stewart Spencer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Malden: Polity Press, 2005). J.M. Bernstein, "Intact and Fragmented Bodies: Versions of Ethics 'after Auschwitz"," New German Critique 97 (2006). Paul Apostolidis, “Negative Dialectics and Inclusive Communication,” in Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno, Renée Heberle, Ed. (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006). Espen Hammer, Adorno & the Political (New York: Routledge, 2006). See also the special issue of New German Critique on the topic of “Adorno and Ethics,” 97 (2006). Richard Wolin, The Frankfurt School Revisited and Other Essays on Politics and Society (New York: Routledge, 2006). Roger Foster, Adorno: the Recovery of Experience (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007). Detlev Claussen, Adorno: One Last Genius (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2008). Marianne Tettlebaum, "Political Philosophy," in Adorno: Key Concepts, ed. Deborah Cook, Key Concepts (Stocksfield, UK: Acumen, 2008). Fernando Matamoros John Holloway, and Sergio Tischler, ed., Negativity and Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism (London: Pluto Press, 2009). Gerhard Schweppenhäuser, Theodor W. Adorno: An Introduction, ed. Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson, Post-Contemporary Interventions (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). Andrew Douglas, “Democratic Darkness and Adorno’s Redemptive Criticism,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 36:7 (2010), 819-836. See also my reviews of some of these works, Shannon Mariotti, "Critique from the Margins: Adorno and the Politics of Withdrawal," Political Theory 36, no. 3 (2008). Shannon Mariotti, "Communicating to the Demos," Review of Politics Summer (2010). 8 See Martin Jay, "Adorno in America," in Permanent Exile: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 124. Claus Offe, "Theodor W. Adorno: 'Culture Industry' and Other Views of the 'American Century'," in Reflections on America: Tocqueville, Weber, and Adorno in the United States (Malden, MA: Polity, 2005). Detlev Claussen, "Intellectual Transfer: Theodor W. Adorno's American Experience," New German Critique 97, no. Winter (2006). David Jenemann’s Adorno in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Russell Berman, Ulrich Plass, and Joshua Rayman, editors., "Adorno and America," Telos 149, no. Winter (2009). See also Joshua Rayman, "Adorno's American Reception," TELOS 149, no. Winter (2009). See also Shannon Mariotti, "Damaged Life as Exuberant Vitality in America: Adorno, Alienation, and the Psychic Economy," TELOS 149, no. Winter (2009). Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 9 Recent work by Paul Apostolidis shows how we might draw from Adorno to productively inform contemporary democratic politics. Apostolidis’ book Stations of the Cross: Adorno and Christian Right Radio employs Adorno’s theory of negative dialectics to undertake an imminent critique of the evangelical group Focus on the Family to show how left democratic politics might more effectively engage evangelicalism and mobilize its nonidentical qualities, rather than dismissing Christian right discourse entirely. Paul Apostolidis, Stations of the Cross: Adorno and Christian Right Radio (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). Paul Apostolidis, “Negative Dialectics and Inclusive Communication,” in Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno, Renée Heberle, Ed. (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006). 10 The list of publications that Adorno originally composed in English is quite extensive: See Adorno’s Currents of Music (Polity, 2009); The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas: Radio Addresses (Stanford University Press, 2000) (also in his Gesammelte Schriften Band 9); The Authoritarian Personality: Studies in Prejudice (W.W. Norton, 1993); “Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda” (in The Stars Down to Earth and other essays on the irrational in culture (Routledge, 2001) (also in Gesammelte Schriften, Band 8, II); “Freudian Theory and the Pattern

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                                                                                                               of Fascist Propaganda” (collected in his Gesammelte Schriften, Band 8, II); The Stars Down to Earth and other essays on the irrational in culture (Routledge, 2001); “Democratic Leadership and Mass Manipulation,” in Alvin Gouldner, ed. Studies in Leadership: Leadership and Democratic Action, Russell and Russell, 1965 (also in Gesammelte Schriften Band 20; Composing for the Films (Continuum, 2007). 11 Adorno did try to publish Current of Music in 1940 with Oxford University Press, but his proposal was rejected and he seems to have given up on the project after moving to California. For more information on the context of Current of Music, see Robert Hullot-Kentor’s editor’s introduction, titled “Second Salvage: Prolegomenon to a Reconstruction of Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory (Malden, MA: Polity, 2009). See also Stefan Muller-Doohm’s excellent biography for more information on Adorno’s fraught relationship with Paul Lazarsfeld of the Princeton Radio Research Project. Stefan Muller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography (Malden, MA: Polity, 2009). 12 Theodor Adorno, “Democratic Leadership and Mass Manipulation,” in Studies in Leadership: Leadership and Democratic Action, Alvin Gould, ed. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1950). 13 “Critique,” 281. 14 “Discussion to Lecture ‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” 296. 15 “Leadership,” 418. 16 “Leadership,” 419. 17 “Leadership,” 419. 18 “Leadership,” 419. 19 “Leadership,” 428. 20 “Leadership,” 420. 21 “Leadership,” 434. 22 “Leadership,” 434. 23 “Leadership,” 423. 24 “Leadership,” 420. 25 “Leadership,” 431. 26 “Leadership,” 431. 27 In sections of Current of Music, Adorno criticizes the content of mainstream radio programming, especially popular music programs and classical “music appreciation” programs, for the way they were monologic as opposed to dialogic, and cultivated a sense of reverence toward “great composers,” a sense of dependence on “expert authorities,” a sense of music as a standardized commodity, and generally tended to infantalize and talk down to the audience. But he also followed up this critical analysis with his own attempt to use the medium as a more truly democratic pedagogical tool. In the section of Current of Music titled “What a Music Appreciation Hour Should Be’: Expose, Radio Programmes on WNYC and Drafts,” he outlines a plan for a music appreciation program that was more dialogic (through feedback, through question and answer sessions), that respects the audience’s maturity, that emphasizes music as a “human force” instead of a “fun commodity,” and that, in every way, encourages the exercise of the audience’s faculties of independence critical judgment instead of positioning them as dependent, sitting at the feet of great men. Describing his planned program, he notes: “No final value judgments will be communicated. One should abstain in particular from attempting to convince listeners and advertising music, or praising masterpieces and great composers…One should guide listeners towards greater true discernment and serious, critical independence.”27 And Adorno did, to some extent, put this plan into practice. In Current of Music, there is a list of twelve lectures to begin the course but he also aired a number of radio programs based on this model on WNYC. The inaugural program aired on Feb. 22, 1940, the first program on or after April 25, 1940, the second and third program ran on undated times, the fourth broadcast was on May 19, 1940, and the fifth program aired on June 11, 1940. In addition, most of the essays collected in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords were initially German radio addresses broadcast in the 1960s. 28 Theodor Adorno, “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” Current of Music (Malden, MA: Polity, 2009), 136. 29 “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” 136. 30 Theodor Adorno, “The Problem of a New Type of Human Being,” Current of Music (Malden, MA: Polity, 2009), 464. 31 Theodor Adorno, “On Popular Music,” Current of Music (Malden, MA: Polity, 2009), 309. 32 “On Popular Music,” Current of Music, 316. 33 “The Problem of a New Type of Human Being,” Current of Music, 466. 34 “Radio Physiognomics,” Current of Music, 47. 35 “Radio Physiognomics,” Current of Music, 47.

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                                                                                                               36 “Radio Physiognomics,” Current of Music, 70. 37 “Radio Physiognomics,” Current of Music, 70. 38 “Radio Physiognomics,” Current of Music, 71. 39 “The Problem of a New Type of Human Being,” Current of Music, 466. 40 “The Problem of a New Type of Human Being,” Current of Music, 467. 41 “Radio Physiognomics,” Current of Music, 95. 42 “Radio Physiognomics,” Current of Music, 95. 43 “Radio Physiognomics,” Current of Music, 96. 44 “Radio Physiognomics,” Current of Music, 97. 45 “Radio Physiognomics,” Current of Music, 97, 98, 100. 46 “Radio Physiognomics,” Current of Music, 102. 47 “Radio Physiognomics,” Current of Music, 104. 48 “Radio Physiognomics,” Current of Music, 102. 49 “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” Current of Music, 140. 50 “Radio Physiognomics,” Current of Music, 106. 51 “Radio Physiognomics,” Current of Music, 108. 52 “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” Current of Music, 141. 53 “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” Current of Music, 141. 54 “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” Current of Music, 141. 55 “Radio Physiognomics,” Current of Music, 109. 56 Ibid., 66. 57 Ibid., 52. 58 Ibid., 50. 59 Ibid., 51. 60 Ibid., 51. 61 Psychological Technique, 50.