Theodor Adorno's two claims, stripped of the prose that made them famous and difficult.

Mass culture sells the appearance of choice while reinforcing the arrangement that produced it. And a philosophy that resolves its contradictions has told a lie about a world in which they remain unresolved.

The second is the one that organizes everything he wrote, including the way he wrote it.

Why he refuses the synthesis

Hegel's dialectic moves through opposition to a higher position that preserves what was true in both — the operation called Aufhebung. Adorno accepts the movement and refuses the destination.

Negative Dialectics (1966) is the argument. His claim is that the reconciling move does conceptual violence: the particular thing gets taken up into a concept that never quite fits it, the misfit is discarded as inessential, and the system reports a harmony it manufactured. Do that in philosophy while society remains actually damaged, and the philosophy has performed on paper the reconciliation that has not happened anywhere else — and helped the damage pass unnoticed.

So the contradiction is held open. That is what negative means here: a dialectic that goes through the collisions and refuses the resolution, staying with what the concept could not absorb.

This explains the prose, which is the commonest complaint about him. Writing negative dialectics clearly, in well-formed expository paragraphs with conclusions, would enact exactly the resolution being refused. The difficulty is the position. Whether that is a defensible reason for being hard to read or an alibi for it is a fair question, and the honest answer is probably both.

Art, because argument cannot do it

If philosophy cannot state the reconciliation without faking it, something else has to carry the critique, and Adorno's candidate is the artwork.

Aesthetic Theory (1970, unfinished at his death) argues that an autonomous artwork — one that refuses the demands of the market it is produced in — holds the negation in its form. It does not state a criticism of the world. It is organized in a way the world is not, and the gap between the two is the content.

This is also why his musicology is philosophy rather than a hobby. Adorno had studied composition with Alban Berg in Vienna, and Philosophy of New Music (1949) sets Schoenberg against Stravinsky as two responses to the same situation: one following the material's own logic wherever it leads, the other retreating into borrowed forms. He is unfair to Stravinsky, and the framework shaped the postwar avant-garde anyway.

Where to start, and what to distrust

Minima Moralia (1951), written in Californian exile, is 153 aphorisms on damaged life and is the only book of his that can be read for pleasure. Start there.

Then the objections, which are substantial. The account of mass culture is sweeping about things he did not much examine and treats audiences as more passive than they are — a criticism cultural studies has been making since the 1970s, with evidence. His refusal of positive politics left the tradition without a program, which he was reproached for by students during his last year and which visibly wounded him.

And the deepest one, from inside: a critique that refuses on principle to say what would be better is hard to distinguish from one that has nothing to propose. Adorno would say that is the situation rather than a flaw in the description of it. It is still the thing to press him on.