Horkheimer endorsed analyzing trivial phenomena to reveal society’s contradictions

Evidence

The essay on jazz seems to me to be a particularly excellent study. You manage to use a strict analysis of this apparently insignificant phenomenon to reveal society as a whole, with all its contradictions. The essay would have been a pièce de résistance wherever it had been published. In this issue of the journal, it also serves to preclude the erroneous impression that our method can only be applied to so-called large-scale problems or all-embracing historical periods, and your presentation alone shows that the correct way of looking at a problem has nothing at all to do with what is superficially considered important or urgent in scientific research. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 663

Categorization

• XREF: This validates Adorno’s method of reading large social totality through small phenomena — resonates with the ‘magnifying glass on the small’ ethos of the later Dialectic of Enlightenment and micro-history traditions. — connects to: Horkheimer saw only sensitive privileged classes as able to perceive society’s contradictions — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 198; Horkheimer sought applied topics that could present his theory as expert social knowledge — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1338
• SEED: Angle: the methodological argument that trivial/‘low’ subjects are valid scientific objects — a defense of pop-culture analysis in academia.

Broader Connections

• Horkheimer sought applied topics that could present his theory as expert social knowledge #expands (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1338
• Horkheimer saw only sensitive privileged classes as able to perceive society’s contradictions #expands (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 198