Adorno rejected measuring audience reactions apart from cultural content’s objectivity

Evidence

It appeared to me, and I am still persuaded today, that in the cultural sphere what is regarded by the psychology of perception as a mere “stimulus” is, in fact, qualitatively determined, a matter of “objective spirit” and knowable in its objectivity. I oppose stating and measuring effects without relating them to these “stimuli,” i.e., the objective content to which the consumers in the cultural industry, the radio listeners, react… To proceed from the subjects’ reactions, as if they were a primary and final source of sociological knowledge, seemed to me thoroughly superficial and misguided” What caused Adorno particular distress was the unmediated way in which cultural phenomena were transformed by his new American colleagues into quantitative data. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 663

Categorization

• DEFINE: Articulates the core doctrine of objective spirit as applied to culture — the stimulus is itself a qualitative object, not raw data awaiting measurement.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that cultural stimuli are qualitatively determined objective spirit, unknowable through consumer responses, is the crux of Adorno’s methodological split from American empiricism.
• XREF: connects to: Adorno saw quantifying culture as the reification typical of mass culture — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 664; Adorno rejected Lazarsfeld’s valid criticism and missed a unique learning chance; Adorno valued science’s importance but rejected its cognitive methods entirely — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2283 (+1 more)