The whole cannot be assembled from adding the halves of music’s contradiction.

Evidence

It is claimed that they actually like light music and listen to the higher type only for reasons of social prestige, when acquaintance with the text of a single hit song suffices to reveal the sole function this object of honest approbation can perform. The unity of the two spheres of music is thus that of an unresolved contradiction. They do not hang together in such a way that the lower could serve as a sort of popular introduction to the higher, or that higher could renew its lost collective strength by borrowing from the lower. The whole cannot be put together by adding the separated halves, but in both there appear, however distantly, the changes of the whole, which only moves in contradiction. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 74

Categorization

• DEFINE: A methodological statement: dialectical totality, not assembly of separated parts — the analytical stance the reader needs to run Adorno’s method.