Adorno

Adorno's thinking has always been discussed with strong ambivalence. On the one hand, his micrological sensitivity and his ability to convey profound insights abruptly in the finest nuances of formulation have always fascinated. In doing so, Adorno himself delivered an impressive fulfillment of his demand to gain insights beyond the academic divisions between the humanities, cultural studies and social sciences. On the other hand, he was also heavily criticized by admirers of his "glorious genius" such as Jürgen Habermas for his lack of method and refusal to assert the basic theoretical premises of his thinking. This also includes the discomfort with Adorno's theoretical fixation on the German philosophical tradition. Most of all, however, he was attacked for his critique of the culture industry, which seemed to be merely the flip side of his educational centrism.
The present study represents an attempt at a new interpretation of this thought. It starts from the picture of Adorno that has been introduced and develops possibilities for expanding it, but also for criticizing it at crucial points, not least with regard to the conventional bashing of Adorno's critique of the culture industry. This new interpretation is based on a micrological traversal of the text through all areas of Adorno's thought. At the same time, it attempts to reconstruct basic theoretical models in the diversity of his perspectives. Both Adorno's music aesthetics and his music sociology play a strategically important role in this interpretation process, as they both contain revealing inner tensions. For example, there is a friction here between a dogmatic perspective on progress and a form-aesthetic perspective related to the post-structuralism of Roland Barthes.
In the end, the study also aims to break through a decisive sound barrier: Adorno's isolation from new developments in intellectual theory, such as those of Noam Chomsky or Jean Piaget. It is precisely such positions that offer valuable opportunities to reformulate Adorno. In its combination of immanent textual exegesis and the attempt to reconstruct subcutaneous basic structures of Adorno's thought, the study can also be used as an introduction to it.

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