Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 22:53:22 +0200
From: Claus Hansen <clausdh-AT-tdcspace.dk>
Subject: Adorno and Empirical Sociology


Well I can't say I am surprised that you raise doubts on the possibility of 
creating an Adorno inspired empirical sociology. Maybe you are indeed right 
about this, I do not know yet and as far as I know no one has tried 
answering this question, which was the reason for asking for more 
reference. I can give you a quick view on my thoughts on it though I would 
not claim to know that great a deal about the contemporary discussion for 
instance regarding the theory/method connection as others have.

My Masters Thesis in Sociology is an attempt at reconstructing an Adorno 
inspired empirical sociology as I believe it could be fruitful. My reasons 
for this is not wholly unfounded, the Danish sociologist, Henning Bech, has 
published a book on Modernity and Homosexuality (When Men Meet, Polity 
Press, 1997) that is to a great extent influenced by Adorno, Benjamin and 
Kracauer. The crucial point that is influenced by Adorno is of course his 
idea of 'granting primacy to the object' making Bech insist on trying to 
grasp the materiality of the lifeworld (our embodiment, use of aesthetic 
surfaces, the influence on 'moods' or 'tunings' etc). However, Bech is very 
eclectic and he does not supply the epistemological or methodological 
grounding on how to conduct this material sociology (or Social 
Physiognomics as Adorno termed it). This is what I would like to do, 
especially in the light of some recent interpretations of Adorno that in my 
opinion makes his thought more contemporary (for instance J.M. Bernstein 
and S. Jarvis).

My contention so far is that Social Physiognomics has a lot in common with 
Glaser & Strauss' 'Grounded Theory' approach (a point Müller-Doohm also 
briefly states in his book). The first step in a research design inspired 
by Adorno would be to generate concepts by immersing oneself in the context 
being researched in a manner much the same as the one describes by Glaser & 
Strauss in The Discovery of Grounded Theory. This would of course involve a 
lot of different methods ranging from interviews and observation to the 
(discourse or content) analysis of crucial documents, pictures and the like 
depending on the object under inquiry. In my own research of women playing 
rock music the methods used consisted of life story interviews, pictures of 
the women, observation of them in concert situations, reviews and articles 
from music magazines and we also had an eye on the function the women had 
for the music (what instruments did they play, which sounds do these 
instruments make and how do the women sing). In order to 'grant primacy to 
the object' it would be necessary to alter the methods used so as to 'fit' 
the research 'objects'. Knowledge of which methods could (or should) be 
used is not only to be gained by a prior understanding of the research 
object or from litterature describing the object but also from the 
contradictions inherent in the 'Materials of Experience' (hereafter MoE) 
(Bech's word for empirical data). According to Adorno, the non-identical 
manifests itself as contradictions in identity-thinking which is the reason 
why one should look for these in the MoE. We found, for instance, 
contradictions inherent in the life story interviews (which were our prime 
source of MoE) - for instance the women denied being harassed 
while  recounting events that could only be understood as episodes of 
harassment. By using contradictions as the guiding-line for further inquiry 
it could be possible to construct a constellation of concepts (or of 
different 'versions' of the same concept) that would help 'grant primacy to 
the object'.

While this generation of 'substantive theory' where the concepts generated 
from the MoE after being connected to each other (and perhaps to some 
'formal theory') would be the end point for Glaser & Strauss this is only 
the necessary beginning for Adorno what he calls 'physiognomic 
registration'. Here it would be appropriate to recall Adorno's distinction 
between essence and appearance: because of the dialectic of enlightenment, 
the primacy of identity thinking, that has resulted in a fundamental 
disenchanment of all aspects of life even of our language and therefore our 
ability to experience (because experiences are always conceptually 
mediated) we cannot be sure that things are what they seem on the 'surface' 
(I know this sounds hopelessly unfashionable and metaphysical but I find 
that J.M. Bernsteins account of Adorno gives his thought the necessary 
grounding in contemporary debates in philosophy - as I have said many times 
before I can heartly recommend the book as it is IMHO the Adorno 
interpretation). The 'essence' of society according to Adorno is its 
character of totality and from this it follows that we cannot grasp the 
totality by appealing to only one of its moments (for instance the concepts 
generated during the process of research) as these moments are themselves 
mediated by the totality (and thus only the appearances of this totality).

Let me qoute a part from my thesis:

'To obtain knowledge of the essence of society we need to decipher the 
phenomena, to 'read individual faits sociaux as ciphers for a wider social 
reality'. Thus, we cannot be content with grounding sociology in the simple 
understanding of the meaning of social actions carried out by individuals 
as was the ideal of Weber's sociology. A disenchanted language calls for a 
more radical approach: 'A dialectical concept of meaning would not be a 
correlate of Weber's meaningful understanding but rather the societal 
essence which shapes appearances, appears in them and conceals itself in 
them' (ItPD 37). This characterisation of the procedure for an Adornian 
sociology also explains why he calls his approach social physiognomics: if 
physiognomic is 'the art of judging human character from facial features' 
(American Heritage Dictionary 2000) then social physiognomics must the 'the 
art of judging the character of society from its façade', its mere 
appearance to us. One could wonder how this could be, but according to 
Adorno this is due to the fact that 'essence must appear' (ItPD 12).

In this respect sociological theories are required in order to understand 
the social phenomena one has found during the research. However, there is 
one crucial difference between Adorno's view on this and more the 
contemporary one that states more or less the same. For Adorno what is 
needed is not only sociological theory but a theory of the societal 
totality - a theory of society. Without such a theory it would not be 
possible to 'read individual faits sociaux as ciphers for a wider reality'. 
Sociological theories (in the more ordinary sense of the word for instance 
Mertons understanding of Middle-Range theories) are what Adorno calls the 
constellation of concepts that emerge from the analysis of MoE. One could 
of course object to this that it will result in nothing but mere projection 
of such theories of societal totality onto the MoE. However, in this 
respect Adorno emphasises the importance of relying on empirical studies in 
sociology because it 'prevents blindly superimposed constructions', 
prevents these decipherings to become so utterly speculative that they have 
no connection to reality. Thus, 'the task of empirical research [is] to 
protect the concept of essential laws from mythologization' (SaER 84). In 
other words, theory and MoE stand in a dialectical relation to each other 
in such a way that theory is generated and adjusted in the light of 
empirical findings and that these findings are concurrently deciphered in 
accordance with the theory of society employed. I think this idea of 
relating empirical findings to theory is a major issue in contemporary 
debates regarding sociology and its methodology (please correct me if I'm 
wrong) and I think that Adorno is very modern in his approach here? 
Furthermore I believe he is one of the only ones to provide the necessary 
epistemological grounding of the attempt to relate empirical findings and 
theory. Derek Layder is trying much of the same in his Adaptive Theory 
approach, but I find his arguments for doing it less than convincing, but 
me contention is that Bhaskar would be a good place to look if one were to 
find another person that could ground such an approach. Unfortunately I do 
not know that much about critical realism. But this is only my tentative 
thoughts so please correct me if I am wrong it would be a great help in 
finishing the thesis as well.

I haven't said anything about the distinction and dichotomy between 
quantitative and qualitative research methods, and it would seem as if 
Adorno's social physiognomics could only be done by using qualitative 
research methods. I do not believe this to be the case. Even if it is 
considerably more difficult to conduct 'inductive' quantative research it 
can be done (for instance using factor analysis as a useful tool). However, 
I do believe that Adorno would grant primacy to the qualitative studies as 
an entry point to the research (as was done in The Authoritarian 
Personality), but once a first generation of concepts has been done it 
would be very fruitful to 'test the concepts' using quantitative research 
methods - for instance as a way of gaining knowledge of the relationship 
between the concepts in the constellation (as was also done in the 
Authoritarian Personality when constructing the different scales designed 
to measure different aspects of personality). In this way there would 
emerge a dialectical relationship between the two types of research 
methods. The 'results' of the quantitative research would of course have to 
be deciphered as describes above in order for them to say anything of the 
societal totality.

A last remark is that while this has only dealt with Adorno's methodology I 
also believe that some of the specific methods he used can be and has in 
fact been revived with great success. The type of content analysis that 
Adorno did in his studies of astrology and the radio speech of certain 
right-wing demagogues in USA  should not be seen as typical content 
analysis. In fact it reminds me more of the discourse analysis approach 
that is so popular at the moment (at least here in Denmark) - Adorno refers 
to Benjamin, Bloch and Kracauer as the original 'inventors' of this type of 
content analysis. He also to a wide extent used music, litterature and 
pictures as MoE and analysed the traces of the societal totality that lies 
hidden in these. This is also quite original I believe (we didn't get any 
education in how to this any way on my university) even if it could be 
sophisticated to a great deal by more contemporary approaches. Last, but 
not least I find the use of scales in the Authoritarian Personality also 
highly original - using the correlation between different scales as 
evidence for some kind of underlying connection between seemingly unrelated 
issues (that is they did not appear on the surface to have anything to do 
with each other).

Well that was all I had I hope this answers your question or even better 
stimulate you to point out the inadequacies of my understanding so I can 
learn even more about Adorno or contemporary sociological debates 
concerning empirical studies.

Best regards,

Claus




At 12:36 19-07-03 -0400, you wrote:



>I have to admit some scepticism regarding the possibilities of creating an
>Adorno inspired empirical sociology. But I would be interested in hearing
>here on this list, an argument for what might come out of such an effort.
>There has been, it seems to me, enourmous progress in sociology over the
>decades since Adorno came on the scene specifically around the issue of
>methods (advances in quantitative methods, important work in
>historical/comparative methods and increasing sophistication in
>qualitative methods) and the theory/method connection. I am going to try
>to put aside my relative disinterest in Adorno's empirical contributions,
>since (putting aside the Lazarsfeld/Adorno issue) it hardly seems like he
>made many important empirical contributions in the past. I would try to
>learn to
>take free kicks from Beckham in soccer, since trying to bend it like
>Beckham makes sense, since he did does it so well.
>But trying to study things empirically like Adorno? Seems a stretch...
>But I would be interested in hearing the core of the argument for trying
>to build on Adorno's empirical approach, hopefully from someone up to date
>with recent developments in sociology regarding thinking about the
>relationship between theory and methods.
>
>
>Neil G. McLaughlin                      KTH-620
>Associate Professor                     McMaster University
>Department of Sociology                 Hamilton, Ontario
>E-mail: nmclaugh-AT-mcmaster.ca            L8S 4M4
>Phone (905) 525-9140 Ext. 23611         Canada
>
>On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Claus Hansen wrote:
>
> > Dear list,
> >
> > I was wondering if any of you knew any articles dealing with Adorno's
> > sociological works and especially his visions on how to conduct empirical
> > sociology. I would also be glad if anyone knew if anyone had tried to
> > elaborate a bit on his 'epistemology' and how it could be utilised for
> > sociology. So far I have found the following:
> >
> > Stefan Mller-Doohm has published a book called - Die Soziologie Theodor W.
> > Adorno's (1996, Campus Verlag) that sketches both some substantial issues
> > in Adorno's 'sociological theory' and some answers as to how one should
> > 'conduct' Adornian inspired empirical sociology. He has also published a
> > few articles dealing with the same issue. Then there is the part of the
> > 'Adorno-Konferenz 1983' (1983, Suhrkamp)  that deals on his methodology -
> > all in all three articles by Wolfgang Bonss, Jrgen Risert and Ulrich
> > Oevermann. There is also a single English article by Ryan Drake called
> > 'Objectivity and Insecurity. Adorno and Empirical Social Research'
> > (Philosophy Today, Summer 2000). There are of course also a chapter in
> > Rose's, Melancholy Science and Buck-Morss', The Origin of Negative 
> Dialectics.
> >
> > Does anyone know of any other articles in English, German or any
> > Scandinavian language?
> >
> > Thank you,
> >
> > Claus
> >
> > 
> ____________________________________________________________________________
> > "Hos mange mennesker er det allerede en uforskammethed, nr de siger 'jeg'"
> > (T.W. Adorno)
> >
> >
> >

____________________________________________________________________________
"Hos mange mennesker er det allerede en uforskammethed, nċr de siger 'jeg'" 
(T.W. Adorno)  

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