The jazz essay proved the Frankfurt method could read society in a minor phenomenon.
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
Category: Craft and Method
- XREF: Resonates with Adorno’s later jazz critique and the whole ‘micrology’ method applied to mass culture.
Related
- Horkheimer endorsed analyzing trivial phenomena to reveal society’s contradictions (similarity 0.85)
- Adorno believed his jazz essay already satisfied empirical methods (similarity 0.81)
- Adorno read jazz as the subject ridiculing itself, then generalized to all art (similarity 0.81)
- Adorno read jazz syncopation as illusory individual breakout masking collective subjection (similarity 0.78)