Adorno and Benjamin reversed positions on whether avant-garde art should court the proletariat

Evidence

In his article On the Social Position of Music' in the first issue of the journal, Adorno had emphasized that music would fulfil its social function best if it marched forward in the immanent development of its problems, without gazing outwards towards society, and did not allow itself to be inhibited by the state of consciousness of the proletariat. The proletariat was crippled by class domination. In this Adorno was merely maintaining what he had once learned from Benjamin himself. In 1928, in One-Way Street, dedicated to the communist and one-time director of a trade union agitprop theatre, Asja Lacis, Benjamin had written about the current relevance of what Mallarmé, monadically, in his hermetic room, had discovered through a pre-established harmony with all the decisive events of our times in economics, technology, and public life’. Now, at the end of his essay, Benjamin had asserted the opposite. The only audience for the most advanced and daring products of the avant-garde in any of the arts had been the upper middle classes. What mattered, howeverand the surrealists had taken this point seriouslywas to put intellectuals in their proper place as technicians by putting their technology at the disposal of the proletariat: only the proletariat was dependent on the most advanced state of technology. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 778

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the Adorno/Benjamin aesthetic-theory debate that recurs in Frankfurt School historiography; the avant-garde-for-its-own-sake vs. political-instrument view mirrors later Adorno-Lukacs disputes. — connects to: Benjamin reversed his earlier view that hermetic avant-garde art serves revolution; Adorno and Benjamin independently converged on the same cultural-critique objects from opposite directions — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 348; Adorno and Benjamin diverged on whether Marxism solved or truncated problems — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 893
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion — Adorno championing hermetic autonomy while Benjamin (under Brecht’s influence) pushed art as proletarian technology — captures the deep fault line running through the whole Frankfurt School aesthetic project, and the irony that Adorno’s autonomous-art position came from Benjamin himself.

Broader Connections

• Adorno and Benjamin diverged on whether Marxism solved or truncated problems #qualifies (0.78) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 893
• Adorno and Benjamin independently converged on the same cultural-critique objects from opposite directions #complicates (0.72) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 348