Adorno generalized his 1936 jazz reading into an account of the whole culture industry

Evidence

In his 1936 essay On Jazz' in the ZfS, Adorno, inspired by the concept of the sado-masochistic character, had attempted to present the core of the phenomenon of jazz as the subject's smiling ridicule of itself. This interpretation was now generalized into an interpretation of the culture industry as including both low’ and `high’ art. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 360

Categorization

• XREF: Links Adorno’s 1936 ZfS jazz essay, built on the sado-masochistic character concept, forward to the culture-industry chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment.