ABSTRACT
Adorno claimed that ‘loneliness’ was the inner law of the modernist works that he admired, those of the Schoenberg school, with which he identified, or the plays of Samuel Beckett. The oppressive isolation of the individual in the modern world, the sense of spiritual bleakness and the decay of community made up the reality he saw inscribed in the inner cells of modernist art. To the masses, these art works may have appeared incomprehensible. To Adorno, what mattered most was not so much that we understand art but that art understands us. Artistic ‘languages’ are sensuous; they model ‘experience’ in perceptua. To be true, however, the model must be equal to the facts of social life. Art can also weave illusions, fulfil dreams or wishes or provide means of escape from reality by disguising or distorting it. In Adorno’s analysis, popular culture always finds itself on the wrong side of the dividing line between truth and lies. In this final chapter I will continue the process of putting this thesis under a degree of critical pressure. At the outset, my analysis, though differently constructed (and without some of Adorno’s more important theoretical commitments), runs parallel to his. Notwithstanding, our two paths diverge; what is offered does not constitute a proper critique but, rather, a continuation of a critical line that I began ‘walking’ in the last chapter of Adorno on Music.
