2 - The Destruction of the Symphony: Adorno and American Radio

Summary

The resonances of Adorno's stay in the United States in his work are not always easy to isolate and determine, in large part since most of the work he actually completed while in America was of an empirical nature, and tied up with institutional team research projects he did not himself direct. As he himself admitted in a later stocktaking of this period, many of these American projects were then later reworked in essays published after his return to West Germany (Eingriffe, 716). In consequence, the effect of America on Adorno was a delayed and retrospective one, and can only be fully discerned through a synoptic reading of his later culture-critical essays with their earlier American origins. only in these later essays did the empirical research and the unsystematic experience (Erfahrung) garnered in America bear full speculative fruit; one suspects that this was due to Adorno's absence of contact with any nonspecialist public in America, since many of the later German essays were written as radio talks or journal articles, thus as critical and political interventions in a lay public sphere (Öffentlichkeit). Adorno's public interventions in Germany were very much bound up with that country's particular combination of lay and expert public, one that habermas has described as shaped by “Experten des Alltags” (literally “experts of the everyday,” or perhaps “nontechnical experts”).