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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
When Theodor W. Adorno returned to Germany from his exile in the United States, he was appointed as a lecturer and researcher at the University of Frankfurt and he immediately made a name for himself as a leading public intellectual. Adorno’s widespread influence on the postwar debates was due in part to the public lectures he gave outside of the university in which he analysed and commented on social, cultural and political developments of the time.
This second volume brings together Adorno’s lectures given between 1949 and 1968 on social and political themes. With an engaging and improvisational style, Adorno spoke with infectious vigour about architecture and city planning, the relationship between the individual and society, the authoritarian personality and far-right extremism, political education and the current state of sociology, among other subjects. After Auschwitz, it was incumbent on Germany to undertake intensive memory work and to confront the reality of its own moral destruction, while rebuilding its political and economic systems. To rebuild was taken to mean rediscovery and looking outward, but Adorno also nurtured a vision of tradition which – far from being unthinkingly conservative – would attest to society’s honestly-appraised relationship to the past while it underwent the process of modernization. The volume illustrates Adorno’s deep commitment to holding society to standards commensurate with the aspirations of a modern world emerging from the horrors of war.
This volume of his lectures is a unique document of Adorno’s startling ability to bring critical theory into dialogue with the times in which he lived. It will be of great value to anyone interested in the work of Adorno and critical theory, in German intellectual and cultural history and in sociology and politics.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Urban Architecture and the Social Order
(1949)
Notes
The Contemporary Relevance of Sociology
(1951)
Notes
On the Relationship between Individual and Society Today
(1957)
Notes
The Purpose of Education in Relation to Students and their Expectations
(1957)
Notes
Human Society Today
(1957)
Notes
The Authoritarian Personality
(1960)
Notes
The Unity of Research and Teaching in the Social Conditions of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
(1961)
Notes
Is Superstition Harmless?
(1963)
Notes
The Concept of Political Education
(1963)
Notes
Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism
(1967)
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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LECTURES 1949–1968
Volume 2: Social Theory and Politics
Theodor W. Adorno
Edited by Michael Schwarz
Translated by Nicholas Walker
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in German as Vortrage 1949–1968, herausgegeben von Michael Schwarz. Taken from Nachgelassene Schriften, Abteilung V (Band I): Vortrage und Gesprache. Copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag AG Berlin 2019. All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag AG Berlin.
This English edition © Polity Press, 2025
The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Work in the Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).
Pages 169–186 reproduced from Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism © Polity Press, 2020. Translated by Wieland Hoban.
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5241-2 – hardback
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URBAN ARCHITECTURE AND THE SOCIAL ORDER9 December 1949
[…]1 The question of beauty with regard to a town or city is a problem that concerns the field of aesthetics. When we talk about the beauty of a town, we are not really referring to the merely formal beauty of the buildings or structures involved, and nor indeed are we referring to what is traditionally called the ‘expression’ involved in poetry or music. For there is a specific sense in which the beauty of a town – if I may employ philosophical concepts here – occupies a kind of intermediate position in between the beauty of nature and the beauty which belongs to art. In other words, it is certainly not the case that some expressly developed intention, some definite idea lying behind a town, as it were, is what decides its beauty. On the contrary, the beauty that speaks to us in a town, in an ancient town such as Bamberg or Rothenburg for example, is a remarkable interrelationship of particular forms and organic development on the one hand and a certain trace of the historical on the other – which then turns into a kind of expression which addresses us. The expression that belongs to a town lies in what has been; it speaks to us out of the present as history, as that which has come to pass.
I believe that any consideration regarding the beauty of a town that tried to focus exclusively on just one of these moments, on the moment of artistic beauty on one side or on the distinctive moment of historical beauty on the other, would actually fail to do justice to the phenomenon itself. This whole way of considering a town as a thing of artistic beauty belongs to an extremely late phase of historical development. For it emerged from the sort of reform movements that started in Britain in the nineteenth century with thinkers such as Ruskin and William Morris and that represented a reaction to industrialization.2 In the German context, these aspirations led towards Jugendstil and to the idea of an expressly planned sort of beauty in urban architecture – a particularly fine example of which is of course familiar to you here in Darmstadt on account of the artist colony that was based here.3
This conception of a town or city in terms of artistic beauty actually presupposes4 that the historical element of the beautiful in urban architecture no longer survives as such but had become effectively free-floating or independent. The beauty of a town is now something that has to be fashioned or produced rather than something that takes shape in the interplay between the different elements. The problem that arises here is already a specifically social problem. For it points back to the situation of bourgeois society in which the bourgeoisie, in accordance with its economic principle of unlimited and unfettered enterprise capitalism, effectively unleashed a wave of uncontrolled building and construction, even though it was also well aware of the devastation and destruction which is produced in the process. Thus it attempts, in terms of its own assumptions and on its own terrain, to heal this disastrous and socially generated result by purely aesthetic means. There is no doubt that it is a social problem whether a particular social order is capable of healing the formations or deformations which are typically associated with it by reflecting upon them and pursuing aesthetic speculations in this regard. You will all be well aware that the artistic movement of the ‘New Objectivity’, understood in the broadest sense, strongly developed that concern with independent beauty – a beauty valued purely on its own terms and for its own sake – that had already found expression in architecture. In truth this involves the question whether a form of society for which the dissolution of every traditional style is inevitable is capable in turn of freely and deliberately creating another style beyond its former historical role.
You can already see from this initial example that questions of urban architecture and development are inextricably connected with the particular sphere of society within which they transpire. But I believe that the perspective I would describe as ‘municipal’ in the broadest sense is just as inadequate as the purely aesthetic perspective, and this not only because it is partial and neglects the internal relations and structure of society itself to focus solely on more limited problems such as the composition of a given group, the particular professional needs involved in urban development, the statistics related to population, and things of that sort. But that is not really the problem here. For I believe – and this is surely a problem that you encounter all the time in the context of your own work, although as a social theorist I should probably mention it specifically – that the municipal perspective is almost inevitably equivalent to a basically administrative point of view. And such a view essentially seems to imply that urban development is regarded by the specialist as a problem to be solved from above, by those authorized to do so through the social division of labour, although the people for whom the building projects are destined have relatively little to say in the matter. It is debatable of course how far those for whom such things were undertaken ever had as much to say as might appear from a romantic view of things. Indeed, this was almost certainly not the case. Yet I would almost say that the municipal approach turns the people it deals with into objects rather than allowing them to become subjects. Once again this reflects a basic aspect of society, for our society is constituted in such a way that the human beings who belong to it can exercise very little control over their fate and cannot freely determine their own existence for themselves. To an enormous degree they are dependent on objective social structures that consign them to this or that position and no other, on structures that they must obey or accommodate themselves to. If I may be so bold, speaking as a philosopher, as to express one demand here, it would be this: to recognize that one of the most important tasks for those responsible for urban development is not to absolutize their own situation but to acknowledge the relationship I have attempted to outline. They should always try not to see the user or occupier simply as an object to be moved to this or that place, as someone for whom the building or amenity in question has to be provided, but must actually yield to the higher insight of those providing it. The most important concern must be to think about the human beings themselves here. In other words, when we are talking about the reconstruction of towns and cities, we must not fall victim to the widespread and reified view that human beings are the objects of institutions but, rather, acknowledge that institutions exist for the sake of human beings.
At this point, however, I would like to dispel any suspicion of naivety on my part. I know as well as any of you that such a demand is far easier made than done. I know as well as you that, if one simply let everyone go ahead and build however they liked, this would not only produce terrible results but probably lead to completely impractical things as well. But there is a difference here, rather like that we can observe in the field of medicine. You can go into countless clinics where you will feel that you are really objects as far as the clinic is concerned, that you are there for the clinic rather than the other way round. In a well-run clinic, on the other hand, you will notice how the patient is not dealt with in an abstract manner but is treated much more concretely as an individual human being. How the things I have talked about are possible, whether it would be a good idea to have advisers drawn from the general population to participate in plans for urban reconstruction, I am not in a position to judge. I can well imagine that working with advisers of this kind would not be particularly easy or gratifying. But I can also imagine, where really human concerns need to be considered rather than the more technical architectural issues, that such constant contact with the people affected would be far more beneficial than simply inserting them into preconceived plans and projects.
Thus I hope you will now have a fair idea of what I have tried to outline and present for you. My intention is twofold: I would like to offer you a few examples for the interaction of urban architecture and society that strike me as historically instructive and then, in some brief final remarks, draw a couple of conclusions in relation to the contemporary situation.
First, on the issue of urban architecture as a historical question. The principal example I want to mention, though it is less an example than something that embodies the entire problem at issue, is the distinction that you are all familiar with from the literature, namely that between things that are supposed to have arisen spontaneously and things that have arisen in an expressly planned or deliberate way. I have already had an opportunity to exchange a few words about this question with Prof. Gruber,5 and I am pleased that he has confirmed my own suspicion that, even in the case of the medieval town or city, things were probably not nearly as spontaneous as people have imagined. In reality it seems likely that all or at least an overwhelmingly large number of towns did not grow up as organically as it might initially appear but, in some sense, reflected a kind of plan. Be that as it may, I believe that this distinction in relation to the spontaneous emergence of towns expresses a social antagonism, a social contradiction, that can be explained, even though it has actually found expression in all previous history or pre-history. On the one hand we have the planned cities, what we could even describe as extravagantly planned cities – everyone in Germany knows about Mannheim,6 to mention one of the most striking examples – which display the advantage of rationality, the way in which the smirch of the irrational is largely avoided here, the way such places privilege air and light, and in a certain sense are designed with a view to the life needs and communication needs of those who live there. On the other hand, with these towns you also always feel a certain sense of alienation, if I can put it that way, a sense that such places have somehow been forcibly imposed on people in an external manner. It is different with places that now strike us as romantic towns, places that certainly seem close to human beings, where that contradiction between the view from above and the life of individual human beings appears to have been largely overcome, although such towns in turn are not well suited to the actual and rightly appreciated needs of human beings. It is probably the case that the whole of previous history has been exposed to this antagonism, this struggle, between rationality and irrationality, so that on the one side this element of irrationality has done more justice to the needs of humanity than the element of planning, although in its own way it also proves to be a regressive form of life that creates suffering for people; thus, whereas rationality reveals the more progressive dimension, the aspect of planning, it still does not really serve the actual concerns of human beings themselves but remains something imposed upon them from above on the part of the dominant powers that be. If we now assume that this antagonism of rationality and irrationality actually permeates history as an indissoluble feature, it would not be too much to venture the hypothesis that this could only be resolved in a truly and substantively democratic society where human beings were genuinely masters of their own fate, or had become the subjects rather than the objects of society.
In this connection I would just like to say a word about the much discussed question regarding the beauty of medieval towns. This question is usually raised by asking the following: ‘Were these towns actually planned, or do they owe their beauty simply to the tradition of craft and artisanry?’ Allow me for the moment to disregard the question whether the so-called aesthetic beauty involved here is purely aesthetic in character, or whether it includes a certain element of yearning that is projected on our part – something that cannot be judged in purely aesthetic terms. Let us just acknowledge this beauty, just as it has spoken to us when we have happened to arrive in a town such as Würzburg or Bamberg. I would like at least to suggest that the question regarding the source of this beauty does not really lie in the problem as between urban planning or tradition; rather, it resides in the social structure that underlay the development of these towns. They were the creations of a simple market economy in which things were certainly produced for the market, but where the means of production were not yet separated from the producers themselves, where all the relations involved were clearly visible, and where, above all, for a range of economic and sociological reasons that I cannot explore here, the structure of the community itself exhibited a largely static character and did not undergo significant further developments. If you just consider the structure of such a relatively static and mostly still domestically oriented market society, then within the town centre you will find such a high degree of affinity between the productive interests of the citizens and the general interest of the town itself that the underlying social structure specifically gives rise – because there is no antagonism between the individual and the whole – to that harmonious relationship between unity and variety that expressly speaks to us in the beauty that belongs to medieval towns. Thus the solution to our question is not to be sought in the idea that master builders tried to arrange everything this way or that the craftsmen and artisans for their part created everything this way. Instead, we should simply recognize that the needs of the individuals concerned enabled them to build and develop things in precisely the way that was actually appropriate to this self-maintaining social whole. You can see from this how even what looks like a purely aesthetic problem, like that regarding the distinctive beauty of medieval towns, can be traced back to a specifically social form, namely the static sociological form, within which these towns developed. I might just point out in passing that one of the most celebrated features of the beauty of such towns is the way in which the streets all reveal an end point, something which lends them a kind of pleasing finitude. Once again this is socially and historically conditioned. The limited and less extensive character of these streets can be explained in terms of their social purpose, and the fact that the towns in question were more self-sufficient and did not immediately refer out beyond themselves. It is not, of course, that there was no real intercourse or communication between these towns, but the town itself still constituted a kind of closed economic unit in its own right. In modern cities, where this is no longer the case, the idea of individual streets just ending with some particular edifice or structure as their effective destination would be absurd and entirely impractical. It may well be that the established aesthetic doctrine that only limited or self-contained streets of this kind are really beautiful has also produced a change in other arts such as music. Thus we now recognize there is a beauty that belongs to the infinite, to the incomplete, to the fragmentary, to things which lie on quite a different level, even though I think it is quite conceivable that the urban aesthetics of today still represents a commitment to a classical idea of limited and determinate form, something which is certainly no longer adequate to the creative freedom of the arts today.
A further problem concerns the construction and provision of rented housing. I have already mentioned the astonishing fact that there is almost no relevant literature on the massively important problem of housing. The question of the individual house or apartment arose from the tradition of the French hôtel, which originally signified a residence for the nobility and gradually came to mean, as early as the seventeenth century, a rented house or dwelling. I do not want to go into the general problem of rented houses or apartments, especially since the available material on this subject – apart from the writings of Werner Hegemann7 – is extraordinarily meagre. I would just like to draw your attention to one particular problem here. It has become quite common today to talk about ‘blocks’ of flats or tenements in a very derogatory way. But those of you who have travelled in Latin countries, or especially those of you who know Paris, will be familiar with the sort of apartment buildings that display absolutely none of the appalling and unattractive features that characterize so many tenement blocks from the nineteenth century. In this connection you will immediately say something like this: ‘These beautiful apartment buildings that you can find in Paris, these lofty and beautiful apartment buildings that can also be seen in some of the older quarters of Vienna, still have something we might describe as style about them, whereas in the nineteenth century, after the classicism of that period, any such concept of style simply collapsed.’ It seems to me, however, that the reference to style here represents little but an appeal to practical principles that allow you to presuppose8 what actually needs to be investigated. We really have to ask what it means to say that style prevails here but no longer prevails there, and what the social reasons involved are. It quickly becomes clear that a very general notion of house building considered as a commercial enterprise is not really sufficient here and that we need to develop far more specific concepts in this regard. It appears to me that the most important consideration here is that, in the era of the mercantile system, in the early modern form of class society when emerging capitalism was subject to broad regulation by government, there were still certain obstacles to the unfettered principle of economic competition that was of course already implicit in this system. There was thus still an element of planning that impeded the worst excesses that would otherwise probably already have been committed. Here you encounter a paradox that the social sciences have given us plenty of opportunities to observe, namely the way in which certain apparently regressive institutions – such as remnants of the feudal order or the role of the court in encouraging cultural and artistic life as a whole – by no means exerted a merely negative influence on the development of culture in the broadest sense. On the contrary, a certain degree of cultural and intellectual independence, of sensitivity, of consideration for others, was able to flourish here in a way that was certainly not the case in the context of advanced, ruthless and unfettered capitalism. I take it that the real reason why our towns and cities have become so grey in the period since the nineteenth century lies in the fact that enterprise capitalism had not been fully unleashed before that time. Only then do we see that terrible polarization in the context of urban building and development which strikes me as so distressing: on the one hand we have the ideal of the over-decorated, grandiose and castle-like dwelling for the wealthy, and on the other the sort of structure that Schinkel called a house without architecture9 – which he first encountered in the tenements that used to be seen in north Berlin.10 This could be described as a world polarized between the Kurfürstendamm and the Ackerstrasse. The ghastliness of the Ackerstrasse is the exact counterpart to that of the Kurfürstendamm. The emphatic division of society into utterly incompatible classes was reflected in the character of the architecture, and indeed not only in the sense that the poor quarters of the city fell victim to this separation, for the wealthy also had their part to play in the resulting ugliness. I would say that the polarization of the nineteenth century city in terms of two principles of ugliness is the direct expression of the internal division of society itself and should be interpreted in this sense, which means that it is impossible to try and correct things here from one of these poles alone. The ugliness of the tenement building probably springs not from the fact that it is completely unadorned but, rather, from the fact that it was never really conceived in terms of the occupier, from the standpoint of the dweller as a subject who is supposed to live there or feel comfortable there; for it is conceived in advance precisely as an object of exchange, as something that costs as little as possible and brings in as much as possible. This economizing aspect, combined with the wish to make a rather monumental impression, is probably what first gave rise to these large-scale tenements. If we analyse why the proletarian tenement is so ugly in spite of its unadorned character – and why indeed such lack of ornament can exemplify a certain beauty that we have learnt to recognize precisely in unadorned things – we see that the solution to this problem involves an aesthetic and a sociological question that it would be extremely worthwhile to pursue. Perhaps you will permit me, as an outsider, to draw your attention to this still rather disconcerting problem. I would argue that it is not a universal economic category, like that associated with rented housing, that decides upon the quality or otherwise of the urban structure as a whole, but rather the concrete position that is occupied by the relevant group within society itself. When the individual exercises a direct influence upon the house or apartment in the context of an unfolding bourgeois society, this also finds a purely aesthetic expression. But when that is no longer the case, when the social dehumanization of human beings has proceeded so far that the concept of dwelling itself has been shattered, when the home has become transformed into a social object, then a certain balance that once produced things of great value and quality is disturbed, and we are confronted by ugly and repellent things instead. This is the range of problems that the issue of housing has allowed you to think about here today.
Now I would like to offer you a third example of the internal connection between problems of urban planning and particular social formations. As you all know, the most prevalent type of house in England is the private family house, the sort of houses you find in London in their thousands, if not actually their millions. In New York you have something rather similar in the so-called brownstone houses, those somewhat gloomy buildings in the streets of Manhattan which are broken up here and there by skyscrapers or by those enormous ‘apartment houses’ that resemble skyscrapers. The individual apartment, on the other hand, what in London they call a ‘flat’, is something of a novelty which in England still carries some suggestion of the proletarian slum about it. This form of dwelling has not really fully established itself in that country. Now when you look at the private family houses, when you visit an Anglo-Saxon country for the first time, you will probably react in much the way I did myself, speaking as a layman in matters of architecture. You will experience a certain sense of shock. The shock springs from the fact that these private houses look so similar to one another, indeed are effectively all the same. You have only to consult the well-known books on urban architecture and look at the pictures of English cities – you will see there are these long rows of private family houses that look as similar to one another as one egg is to another. But why this sense of shock? It is not exactly because every unit looks the same, or simply because of the abstract identity here. Unless I am much mistaken, I think the shock derives from the fact that, while the buildings are so similar, every individual building almost identical with the next, each one somehow presents itself as if it were quite special, or even unique. This is the shock of the Doppelgänger, the principle of the double reduced to caricature. It is like the shock we experience on meeting a pair of identical twins who insist on being seen as two quite individual human beings, although they are physiologically so alike they seem to have dispensed with all individuality. This has been taken to an absolute extreme in the Anglo-Saxon version of the private family house. The problem I have indicated here is once again a social one. We are talking about an antagonism that is intrinsically rooted in the bourgeois world, especially in its Anglo-Saxon form; for on the one hand every individual entertains the ideology of being unique and irreplaceable, and actually claims to be so, while on the other our society measures value in terms of abstract units where the expenditure of time and money are concerned; the differences between human beings, in terms of their real existence, are massively ignored or minimized so that, while people – to put this in an extreme way – certainly regard themselves as individuals, in terms of their real weight or influence in society11 they are infinitely less than that. This is also reflected in the context of architecture in the way that it tends towards a unified style for specifically economic reasons, namely because buildings can then be produced more cheaply. They only really serve the self-sufficient economic demands calculated in terms of such units, yet the principle of individuation is nominally still retained, so we get these essentially replicated houses where each house pretends to be the only one of its kind in the world even though they are all entirely the same.
The reason why I have discussed this particular problem with you here is that the broader problems of urban architecture and planning reflect the fundamental contradictions of society itself, which produce the kind of town or city that is in question. If the fundamental antagonism in the capitalist world of the nineteenth century allows human beings to appear to themselves as individuals, while in reality they are the mere shapes or figures of the underlying capitalist struggle, this contradiction cannot fail to find its immediate expression. The ugliness of the buildings and structures is nothing but the visible manifestation of this contradiction. Perhaps these remarks will suffice to show you how what may seem like purely aesthetic or purely technical problems of urban architecture are profoundly connected with social issues and questions.
I would now just like to try and explore a few thoughts with regard to the contemporary situation. I do not want to draw specific conclusions for you from what I have already said. For one thing, my observations have been too rhapsodic and I cannot claim to develop them here in a systematic fashion. But I can attempt to show how such observations also apply to specifically modern problems of urban architecture now that you have all got some sense of the direction my thoughts on this question have been taking.
The first observation I would like to emphasize for you here is that the rebuilding of our cities cannot be undertaken in the spirit of historicism. And I mean this very seriously. In view of the experiences that I have had during the four weeks I have been back in Germany,12 I find it rather hard to speak quite as radically as I feel I need to as someone for whom aesthetics is a fundamental concern. Perhaps the best thing would simply be for me to say something to you directly about this very difficulty. The shock which the sight of our ruined cities provokes, and above all the great destruction wrought upon the older centres of these cities, is such that it is probably impossible for any of us to absorb these experiences fully, to come to terms in some way with all of this. We stand before a world, before a real world, which has assumed the character of a nightmare.13 Wherever we are exposed to shocks that we cannot avoid, we constantly tend, psychologically speaking, to develop a repetition compulsion14 – a tendency, in other words, to re-enact the situation we were originally unable to master in order to come to terms with it in some way. I believe that the idea of simply denying the unspeakable things that have transpired, that the idea of restoring the cities to the way they were before, is almost unavoidable, given the catastrophic and unabsorbable character of what happened here. Thus I feel it would be frivolous and irresponsible if I failed to emphasize the full gravity of the situation that confronts us. For I believe that the inability of human beings today to acknowledge the past, and the tendency of contemporary humanity – which has been decisively influenced by positivism and shaped by technology – to repudiate everything that is no longer immediately present to it and to throw everything historical onto the rubbish heap, has led to the appalling examples of inhumanity we have all witnessed under fascism. At the same time, however, we do not really feel we can simply return to the past, to historicism, and that not only because, as I am frequently reminded, any reconstruction of the old towns and cities in their former state would be quite unsuitable to the new conditions of life, of modern transport and communications. I am not actually that convinced by this point about the new conditions of transport. I am familiar with a number of cities such as Paris or southern cities such as Naples which are full of old-fashioned nooks and crannies and winding streets, yet still deal with their traffic better than many American cities do. At first sight this is very paradoxical. It partly depends on how people themselves relate to technology. If an Italian from the south is completely familiar with his car and really knows how to handle it, as easily as his father knew how to handle his donkey cart, then he will manage far better in a winding old town than a modern American driver who is just used to racing along in his car and has basically learnt to think only in terms of modern motorways.
I believe that the issue here is much deeper. For if we tried to rebuild the cities in their traditional form, this would simply be to evoke a form of society that actually no longer exists.
Perhaps you will allow me to express a specific philosophical thought at this point, although many of you will probably entertain a highly sceptical attitude to philosophy. When we talk about tradition, this does not imply the idea of simply continuing or imitating something that has existed before. For there are many examples from the history of art to show that the true power of tradition also makes itself felt in a certain resistance, in that which confronts what has been as something entirely different – something which through this opposition actually testifies to the power of what has been. Thus we often find that the subterranean power that leads this resistance and opposition has more in common with the genuine tradition, and is more deeply connected with it, than something which merely represents a dead replica of the tradition without really springing from it at all. Hence I believe that perhaps we remain more faithful to our destroyed cities if we do not try and rebuild them in their previous form than if we actually try and do so. I said that the devastated city centres essentially contradict the character of modern society. I also said that I do not believe that the much discussed problem of transport and communication is decisive. I would like at least to give you some idea of what I see as the really decisive thing here. Those city centres effectively presupposed an individualist society that was still oriented to the idea of a closed domestic economy where the site of production was not really separated from the site of everyday life, a situation we would often find in the case of smaller communities like a village. Today, on the other hand, in a highly industrialized society these two things have been separated from each other. In this particular sense there is no longer any such thing as a ‘home’. If we attempted to orient urban architecture and development to fundamental social conditions that for underlying economic reasons no longer really obtain, we would slavishly fall victim to a historicizing romanticism that would simply end up in proximity to certain nineteenth-century intentions that we really have to leave behind. I am talking about the danger, for example, that, if we tried to rebuild Nuremberg as it once was, what we would get is not ‘old Nuremberg’ but a toyshop that mimics old Nuremberg.
Here I would like you to consider a fundamental social point. One of the most disturbing experiences we can have, when the catastrophes that have befallen our cities have begun to recede into the past, is the thought that such catastrophes did not exactly come out of thin air – although they did literally come from the air – but are only the executants of fundamental tendencies that belong to society as a whole, of tendencies which perhaps came together here in an extremely concentrated way, but which it no longer seems possible to prevent or eliminate entirely. Perhaps we could say in a somewhat frivolous tone that the destruction of our towns and cities amounts to a great act of demolition for those areas which are not only unsuited to the character of society but which, for those who were forced to live in them, were not remotely as pleasant or attractive as strikes us when we look at these old towns. I would imagine that the pleasure which these aesthetes take in such things is extraordinarily distant, for example, from the kind of existence led by a small-scale barber living on the fourth floor. And given the general problem concerning the relationship between urban architecture and aesthetics, I believe we should all beware of simply allowing ourselves to be swayed by our aesthetic needs. I can tell you that I myself spent my early childhood in the old town area of Frankfurt15 and, having witnessed some of the living conditions of the place, I certainly understand the different perspectives of those who contemplate such a town aesthetically and those who live there.
Now you may ask me: ‘Should then the reconstruction of a town go along with the general movement and direction of the time?’ It is enormously difficult to answer this question. There is actually no point where I feel more hesitant to offer an answer than precisely here. But I simply want to raise the basic problem. This seems to be that, while modern architecture is intrinsically necessary in the sense that we cannot simply reject it and turn back to an older conception of architecture, we must nonetheless acknowledge that modern architecture in itself also embodies something of the coldness and alienation of the world in which we live today. For there is a danger of endorsing a materialist mass culture, typified by the factory block and ‘trust-style’ architecture, on the one side and the idea of estates and ‘settlements’ on the other. There is a noticeable and disconcerting tendency to dissolve the differences between town and country, to make the rural areas more and more similar to the urban ones. I have only to remind you of the villages which have been disfigured by neon lighting, while on the other hand the edges of the towns and cities themselves pass over in a ragged and rather desolate way into the surrounding countryside. From this development, which also leads us to the sight of huts, shacks and settlement camps, it seems we can conclude that the social problem of urban architecture can probably be identified only by reference to those points at which the greatest social pressure is felt and exerted, and the place where this pressure is specifically revealed today is the institution of the tower block and the housing estate. I would just say here that the madness of our whole current situation is nowhere more clearly shown than in this: that, in a world where the technical possibilities of providing all human beings with a decent place to live are overwhelmingly available,we still see in this same world how countless human beings are – I am tempted to say – imprisoned in such estates. This is a tendency that is by no means restricted to the so-called capitalist countries, for we see that these same camp-style estates are now also disturbingly common in the Soviet Union. I would therefore say that this tendency to transform the world into a system of tower blocks, which can only be compared with some of the huge constructions of IG industries, is definitely not something that we should endorse simply because it seems required by the times. On the contrary, I would say that the task of the town planner, in spite of all the difficulties that lie in the way, is to consider at every moment precisely how to plan houses and towns that are fit not for producers and consumers, for employees and employers, but rather for free human beings to live in. I would like to say that this is the decisive moral and social demand that needs to be addressed to urban planners and architects today.
Perhaps I may just consider an entirely concrete problem here, namely the problem about how exactly the work of reconstruction is to begin. I believe that these pressing questions of the day are especially significant from the social point of view. I am referring to the debate about whether we should begin by rebuilding dwellings or focus initially on rebuilding sites of production. Common sense clearly tells us that we have to start with the latter, since we absolutely need to get economic life going again. Now I have no wish to impugn common sense, but I cannot quite shake off the suspicion that the commercial interests of those who say this are hardly irrelevant here, and that they may be more concerned with their own interests than perhaps initially appears. My own view, for what it is worth, is that we need to create suitable places where human beings can live a decent life instead of just knocking up shoeboxes, and then we must probably also turn to the task of getting production going again. But this really presupposes an outlook that regards our fellow human beings precisely as human beings rather than simply as appendages of the machinery of civilization.
I would just like to add a few concluding remarks. Earlier on I said something about the danger of romantic historicism. Now you might feel you have good reason to accuse me of romanticism here; and you might say: ‘Well, when you say that as architects we should always think of people as subjects rather than as objects, you should try putting yourself in our position and dealing with actual people, and then you will see that the most ferocious resistance in every respect comes from the very people you are supposed to be talking to.’ Thus you may object, as an architect friend of mine once put it, that the architectural ideal you often come up against is the demand for a stork’s nest on the roof or for a cellar done out as an air-raid shelter.16 Now I do not want to blame the people you have to deal with in this regard. I know very well from my own aesthetic experience in the field of music that such expressions of resistance come primarily from those who consume the thing in question rather than from those who actually produce it. Thus when I suggested that you should not respond to the question of reconstruction in a dictatorial way, but try more democratically to do justice to what people want, this cannot be done in a servile way either; for in that case the result would likely be the kind of naive kitsch that would make your hair stand on end. I believe that this problem once again expresses a fundamentally social issue. For the overall social development of humanity has unfolded in such a way that, as a result of the increasing coldness of the relations between people, human beings come to experience a certain yearning for the past, even as society cuts off the path to a better future that is more worthy of humanity. If those who access and use the things that we build for them come across to us as reactionary in their attitudes, I would not say that in the last analysis they should be blamed for this, since it simply reflects a development of society as a whole which is becoming increasingly rationalized even as it also becomes increasingly unresponsive, increasingly backward looking, and increasingly reified. This contradiction, where we have clearly seen how the ideology of ‘blood and soil’ is also associated with the growing technologization of human life, is itself a reproach to society. As experts and professionals we are easily tempted to respond to all this simply with an arrogant and dismissive gesture. But if what I have been saying is right, the real task for urban architects and planners today is surely this: that, with all our expertise and specialist knowledge regarding the aforementioned problems, we try and defend the genuine cause and concern of human beings even in the face of such opposition, that at every moment we strive in full awareness of our task to realize the true interests of the human beings that we are dealing with. So that even when they exhibit certain limited, insensitive and backward-looking petit-bourgeois perspectives, we continue to act on their behalf and defend what we recognize to be right even in the face of this opposition. This cannot be achieved by simply decreeing what is to be done from on high; it can only be accomplished by entering into a concrete engagement with the people who are affected. I would like to say that the function of a modern urban planner or architect is precisely that which we commonly express in art with a simple motto that has become very dear to me: ‘We need to be avant-garde.’
Notes
Abbreviations
GS: Adorno’s writings are cited from the German edition, Gesammelte Schriften (ed. Rolf Tiedemann, in collaboration with Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss and Klaus Schultz. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986); where available, English translations have also been cited and corresponding references and publication details added to the editor’s notes.
Adorno delivered this lecture – the first he gave on returning to Germany from emigration – on 9 December 1949 to a colloquium on urban architecture and planning at the Technische Hochschule in Darmstadt. It was published for the first time in Adorno, Ein Bildmonographie, ed. Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003, pp. 214–28.
Sources for the lecture include the preparatory notes (Vt 21) entitled ‘Themes on Urban Architecture and Society’, materials that Adorno used as a basis for an improvised talk. The basis for the text published here is a transcription designated ‘hk’ that has been preserved as typescript (Vt 22) and as carbon copy (V23). The transcription is entitled: ‘Lecture by Prof. Adorno at the Colloquium on Urban Architecture and the Social Order at the Tech. College in Darmstadt on 9 December 1949’. Unfortunately, the beginning of the lecture is missing in the transcription.
1
The use of square brackets in this form indicates a lacuna in the transcription or other sources of Adorno’s lectures and addresses.
2
Conjectural reading of
Ruskin
for
Rosebean
. Adorno is referring here to the ‘Arts and Crafts Movement’: ‘A reform movement pioneered by artists and artisans in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century under the influence of John Ruskin and William Morris. The movement was principally concerned with the renewal of craft and artisanal traditions in the age of industrial mass production. This socially engaged movement was also an important influence on
Jugendstil
, the Deutscher Werkbund, and the Bauhaus’ (Brigitte Riese and Hans-Joachim Kadatz,
Seemanns Sachlexicon Kunst & Architektur
, Leipzig, 2008, p. 31).
3
The artist colony in Darmstadt was founded in 1899 by Archduke Ernst Ludwig (1868–1937), who invited the architects Joseph Maria Olbrich (1868–1937) and Peter Behrens (1868–1940), along with several other artists and artisans associated with the
Jugendstil
movement, to participate in the project. Among the buildings and structures that resulted from this cooperation we might mention the Hochzeitsturm, the Ernst-Ludwig Haus, the Haus Behrens and the Haus Olbrich.
4
Conjectural reading of
setzt
for
sagt
.
5
The architect, town planner and curator of monuments Karl Gruber (1885–1966) occupied the chair of urban architecture at the Technical Academy in Darmstadt between 1933 and 1954. His book
Die Gestalt der deutschen Stadt
[The form and appearance of the German town] was published in Leipzig in 1937 (repr., Munich, 1952). After the end of the Second World War Gruber developed plans for the reconstruction of Darmstadt.
6
The old centre of the city of Mannheim, located between the Rhein and the Neckar, is characterized by a carefully planned network of streets, the original quadrangular design of which dates back to the early 1600s.
7
The writer and architect Werner Hegemann (1881–1936). Adorno is probably thinking of Hegemann’s book
Das steinerne Berlin. Geschichte der größten Mietskasernenstadt der Welt
[Berlin in stone: the history of the world’s biggest tenement city] (Berlin, 1930), a text that had been reviewed by Benjamin (see Walter Benjamin,
Kritiken und Rezensionen
, ed. Heinrich Kaulen, Berlin, 2011, pp. 280–6 [
Werke und Nachlaß
, Vol. 13]).
8
Conjectural reading of
voraussetzen
for
voraussagen
.
9
The painter and architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841) referred to the factory buildings he had observed on a visit to Manchester in his diary on 17 July 1826: ‘These enormous blocks, built under the direction of a foreman, devoid of real architecture, constructed from red brick solely with a view to the barest of needs, produce an uncanny impression’ (
Aus Schinkels Nachlaß. Reisetagebücher, Briefe und Aphorismen. Mitgeteilt und mit einem Verzeichnis sämtlicher Werke Schinkel’s versehen von Alfred Freiherrn von Wolzogen
, Vol. 3, Berlin, 1863, p. 114). It is possible that Adorno knew of these remarks through the work of Werner Hegemann, who quotes them in his book
Das steinerne Berlin
, p. 257 (see note 7 above).
10
Adorno was familiar with North Berlin in the time before the Second World War. He knew this area from visiting his future wife Gretel Karplus, who had lived in the Prinzenallee until 1937.
11
Conjectural reading of
Gewicht
for
Gewinn
.
12
Adorno had returned to Frankfurt on 2 November 1949.
13
On 3 November 1949 Adorno had noted down the following observations in his diary:
A long time walking through the town. First the Bockenheimer Landstraße, relatively intact for Frankfurt, i.e., only every second house in ruins. Frenzied activity of reconstruction everywhere. The Opera is burnt out and smirks: dedicated to the True, the Good and the Beautiful. Then Goethestraße, the Goetheplatz barely recognizable. Vor der Hauptwache mostly a ruin. Charlotte’s Zeilpalast mostly burnt out, though the parterre still in use. The Katherinenkirche, where I was baptized, destroyed; the same goes for the Liebfrauenkirche. Walked down the Neue Kräme. The Old Town is a nightmare where everything looks as if it’s completely in the wrong place, including the whole cathedral, as seen from the Römerberg. The only remaining Fountain of Justice is there in the devastated Römerbeg. Only on reaching the Eiserne Steg did the fantastical aspect of it all really hit me; it was as though I were somehow not really there. (Adorno, Eine Bildmonographie, pp. 210f.)
14
Adorno takes up the concept of ‘repetition compulsion’ from Sigmund Freud; see especially his essay
Jenseits des Lustprinzips
of 1920 (S. Freud,
Gesammelte Werke
, ed. Anna Freud et al., Vol. XIII:
Jenseits des Lustprinzips / Massenpsychologie und Ichanalyse / Das Ich und das Es
, Frankfurt, 1963, p. 17;
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
, Vol. XVIII. London: Vintage Books, 2001:
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
, pp. 18ff.).
15
Adorno and his family had lived at Schöne Aussicht 9, alongside the river, in the old town of Frankfurt am Main. In 1914 the family moved to Oberrad, which was situated just outside the city.
16
See also GS 4, p. 120, and GS 8, p. 440. The ‘architect friend of mine’ to whom Adorno refers here was probably Ferdinand Kramer (1898–1985) who became director of the School of Architecture at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt in 1952 and held this post until 1964.
THE CONTEMPORARY RELEVANCE OF SOCIOLOGY23 February 1951
[…] I should like to thank you all for having turned up in such numbers here this evening. I think I am also justified in taking this as an expression of your interest in the matter in question rather than simply of an interest in the somewhat sparse and, I would immediately add, modest observations that I would like to make before you regarding the theme of our discussion today, namely the question of the contemporary relevance of sociology. For it is an essential feature of this discipline that it is actually very difficult to provide a general overview of the field which is covered by this subject, that it is easy to lose oneself in rather arbitrary reflections in this connection, and that any really substantial intellectual contribution we might have to offer can, to a very significant degree, only be produced in the context of quite specific concrete work. On the other hand, I feel compelled at the very least to introduce you to a range of relatively general problems, although I am also aware that I must content myself here with what are only ‘formal indications’1 of these problems, to use an expression of Husserl, who has already been mentioned by Herr Solms.2 And I would just ask you to bear this point constantly in mind from the very start. Now in order to bring out the relevance and significance of sociology today, and specifically in terms of the relationship between sociology and politics, it would probably be enough simply to remind you of the very recent past where this particular discipline is concerned. For sociology, as you know, was definitely persona non grata in the eyes of the National Socialists and was effectively, if not officially, repressed or discouraged by them. And it may not be the worst way of justifying sociology’s right to exist if we reflect for a moment upon what it was that actually motivated this extreme hostility to sociology on the part of the National Socialists. I would explain it in terms of the fact that the National Socialists – precisely because they were essentially concerned with imposing on people a form of politics which was nonetheless fundamentally opposed to the interests, to the real interests, of the people in question – took infinite pains to direct attention away from the actual life process of society, from the effective collective processes that determine our existence. And sociology was already suspect in their eyes simply because it is not concerned with offering a replica of the reality they wished to impose on people precisely in order to play fast and loose with reality itself. For sociology, by contrast, is concerned with what is actually happening within the social process as a whole, and indeed I would not hesitate to describe the task of sociology in something like these terms. However, I would ask you not to take this as a definition; I am well aware that one cannot really define such complex disciplines as our own, and perhaps I might add that, as a philosopher, I am enough of a Hegelian to harbour a profound scepticism about any investigation that commences with definitions.3
