Adorno, Theodor

Beliefs

The meanings Adorno allotted to both garbage and waste are neither straightforward nor interchangeable. Adorno argued that all culture after Auschwitz, including its critique, was garbage [Müll]. Or, in other words, that the sphere of “resurrected culture” (that which he saw as merely rehashing traditional values of truth, beauty, and goodness, as if the Holocaust had not happened) should be considered as mere refuse. At the same time, Adorno's critique of culture as garbage was also directly related to his condemnation of the trashy kitsch produced by capitalist culture.

Having fled Nazi Germany in 1938, Adorno lived in exile in the United States until 1953. The philosopher consequently experienced the janus-faced culture of the mid-20th century; the Hochkultur (high culture) of Germany versus the burgeoning U.S. culture industry and its soon-to-be all-consuming mass media. For him, the culture industry's production of lifestyle involved a problematic recycling of real culture, transforming aesthetics into commodities and muting any negative or critical potential the former might have had. According to Adorno, the culture industry dangerously sanctioned this demand for rubbish. He warned against capitalism's often ahistoric consciousness, which swept aside the past as garbage. He was critical of the logic of capitalist production, which he saw as relegating to the junk pile everything not in line with the most recent methods of industrial production. For Adorno, this also ultimately meant rubbishing what he thought of as life's valuable continuity. He argued that art had degenerated into culture by means of the entertainment industry, becoming confused with its own waste products as its aberrant influence grew. In correspondence with the German philosopher Walter [Page 5]Benjamin, Adorno suggested that even rubbish could be subject to capitalist exchange value. At the same time, Adorno saw the communism of the Eastern Bloc as having transformed culture into rubbish as a means of control, and he accused Josef Stalin of throwing modernism's great heroes, such as Franz Kafka and Vincent Van Gogh, onto the rubbish heap.

On the other hand, and in keeping with this critique, Adorno suggested that people should address the “waste products” and “blind spots” of history so as to reclaim their radical potential. For him, the relationship between waste and memory was powerful. He believed that a history of waste and blindness was equivalent to a history of dissonant or negative elements. For Adorno, the modernist works of art that resisted being commodified and turned into capitalist garbage were those that managed to retain a negativity and autonomy. He suggested that it would be rewarding to investigate the piles of rubbish, detritus, and filth upon which the works of major artists appear to be erected and to which they still owed something of their character.

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