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Book Review: Adorno on Popular Culture, by Robert Witkin. New York and London: Routledge, 2003

In an often-quoted letter to his friend Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno wrote the following about the relation between high art and popular culture: “Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up.” Such a statement belies the idea that Adorno was concerned solely with valorizing modernist high art and denigrating popular entertainment. Rather, his interest was in defending those works that “authentically” reflected the condition of subjects under the conditions of monopoly capitalism or that helped foster a critical attitude towards instrumental social relations. Contrary to his elitist image perpetuated in much recent cultural-studies scholarship, Adorno’s work on popular culture is highly perceptive and deserves critical attention. Preferring depth to breadth, Witkin focuses his attention on a subset of Adorno’s writings and juxtaposes his ideas to the work of other thinkers, as a way of highlighting the contexts of Adorno’s thought. Through careful and perceptive readings of Adorno’s texts, Witkin illustrates the nuance that is often overlooked in superficial critiques of Adorno’s position. Witkin’s text opens with an attempt to distill Adorno’s notoriously complex theoretical framework down to a simple model that he then applies throughout to the texts examined. While the combination of “Adorno’s thought” and the phrase “simple model” will strike many as an oxymoron, the model that Witkin derives is concise and judiciously applied throughout the book. Witkin argues that in many cases Adorno employs a model of structuration that is actually relatively simple to understand. At its base is a dialectical relationship between part and whole, as well as between the parts themselves. As Witkin puts it: “While Adorno’s ideal of freedom rests upon the free and spontaneous movement of the parts – the individuals in a social system or the musical motives in a sonata – it also rests on the responsiveness of the parts or elements to each other, their mutual susceptibility” (p. 7). It is this dialectic that unites, according to Witkin, all of Adorno’s writing about the culture industries, as well as