Adorno sought great forms whose content rebelled against the work itself

Evidence

At the end of 1965, Adornofor the first time since 1953requested a sabbatical year to be able to finish those of his drafts that mean the most to me: a long book on the fundamentals of dialectics, and one on aesthetics', while I am still in full possession of my powers’. A visit to a new production of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, which he now found incredibly dull and old-fashioned, increased his doubts about whether works created for the present moment were really capable of lasting. His long books on the fundamentals of dialectics and aesthetics also sprang from an attempt to resolve the paradoxobserved, for example, in his Philosophy of Modern Musicthat the only works that counted today were those that no longer constituted works. Adorno was attempting to resolve this paradox in the spirit of his music teacher, Alban Berg, and to create great forms, works in fact, whose contents rebelled against the work. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2526

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox — only works that no longer constitute works now count — and Adorno’s attempt to build large forms that undo the work-form is a dense, paradigm-shifting knot worth sitting with.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in silence/absence as positive presence: here the work negates itself from within as the condition of its validity. — connects to: Adorno’s late books aimed to create works whose contents rebel against the work — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2526; Adorno’s fragmented aphoristic style was itself a philosophical position against system — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 834; Adorno’s negative dialectics located emancipation’s hints in modern art’s distortion — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 380

Broader Connections

• Adorno’s negative dialectics located emancipation’s hints in modern art’s distortion #expands (0.85) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 380
• Adorno’s fragmented aphoristic style was itself a philosophical position against system #expands (0.80) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 834