Adorno’s dismissal of mass art contradicted his own demand for dialectics.

Evidence

When Adorno, who was concerned with the thorough dialecticization and rescue precisely of what was most reified, declared jazz and mass art to be unrescuable, this seemed arbitrary, and sprang from a point of view which was negatively just as one-sided as Benjamin’s positive view of film. … Adorno stated that regressive listening might, after all, suddenly turn round if art, at one with society, should ever leave the path of what is for ever the same', and went on, It is not popular music, but classical music which has produced a model of this possibility’and then mentioned the name Gustav Mahler. This, too, seemed highly arbitrary, and sprang from a point of view which obviously only entertained expectations of autonomous art and not of mass artno matter how much Adorno demanded dialectics in the lowest as well as in the most elevated phenomena. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 232

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the reader’s earlier collected claims about Adorno’s culture-industry arguments in the standard-bearer text; the tension between rescuing the reified and condemning mass art is the same dialectical knot. — connects to: Adorno’s blanket dismissal of mass art matched Benjamin’s overpraise in one-sidedness — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 872; Adorno’s Marxism was orthodox yet he openly contradicted Marx himself. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1613; Adorno pursued a free dialectic rather than a materialist one. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2275 (+2 more)
• DEFINE: Clarifies ‘regressive listening’ and ‘autonomous art’ as the operative Adornian terms the chapter is working with.
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Adorno’s blanket dismissal of mass art matched Benjamin’s overpraise in one-sidedness — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 872; Adorno’s Marxism was orthodox yet he openly contradicted Marx himself. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1613; Adorno pursued a free dialectic rather than a materialist one. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2275 (+2 more)