early 66 years ago, on the 16th of November in 1937, T.W.
Adorno (1903-1969) wrote a letter to the Institute of Social
Research (ISR)—the center of “critical theory”—with a
proposal. Adorno was living in Oxford at the time. He had
drifted from partial into permanent exile as hopes faded of
a brief NS-interlude. Anticipating such a development, even
before the National Socialists came to power, the German
institute had begun work abroad in 1932 and it received new
impetus after coming to New York in 1934. In his letter
Adorno outlined his ideas for a project “on the feminine
character.”
From an analysis of the bourgeois woman under capitalism,
Adorno proposed a deduction of her gender-specific
personality traits. As examples he cited “the completely
irrational behavior of women in dealing with commodities,”
their pleasure in shopping, or even the gesture of the girl,
who, “while giving herself to her lover is dominated by
anxiety that something will happen to her dress or her
hair-do”—as if the woman had already fetishized herself in
such a way “that she had placed her own commodity character
between herself and her own sexual activity.” This, Adorno
concluded, called for a “theory of female frigidity.”
I
The critique of “stereotypical thinking” and the study of
prejudice in general were revolutionized by the American
research projects of the ISR during the 1940s. These were
guided by the central claim of The Authoritarian Personality
(1950) by Adorno et altera: “that the political, economic,
and social convictions of an individual often form a broad
and coherent pattern, as if bound together by a “mentality”
or “spirit,” and that this pattern is an expression of
deep-lying trends in his personality.” The disposition to
think in rigid categories (“stereotyping”) and the outward
projection of unconscious emotional impulses (“projectivity”)
were investigated as significant variables of prejudice.
That is why the misogynous stereotypes used by Adorno in his
letter sound so surprising. His “undeveloped expressions”
were probably articulated because what Pierre Bourdieu
termed the “structural censor” weakens during intimate
communication. That should not occur in academic discourse.
The question then is whether Adorno made similar references
in his published work.
Even apart from its content, however, Adorno’s letter from
1937 presents an interesting document with regard to the
history of the ISR in exile. Living in exile in different
countries, its members had to communicate through letters.
All were committed to sustaining the original
interdisciplinary approach of the Institute. Every topic was
analyzed from the most diverse disciplinary perspectives
such as philosophy, literary studies, musicology and
economics with the intent of “making society with its
contradictions visible” (Horkheimer). All of this was based
on linking Marx’s political economy with Freud’s
psychoanalysis.
The Institute had a three-pronged structure: a board of
directors under the direction of Max Horkheimer (1895-1973)
with Erich Fromm (1900-1980) and Friedrich Pollock
(1894-1970) as co-directors, and Leo Löwenthal (1900-1993)
as editor of the institute’s Zeitschrift für
Sozialforschung: The second tier of the institute’s
organization included collaborators such as Herbert Marcuse
(1898-1979) and Franz Neumann (1900-1954) while the third
tier was composed of free lancers like Walter Benjamin
(1892-1940) who had emigrated to France and Alfred
Sohn-Rethel (1899-1990) who went to England. Adorno, who was
still living in England, represented a notable exception in
this hierarchy. He still had not found his niche.
Nevertheless he was convinced that he—more than the
others—should be in charge of the Institute’s conceptual
work and that he should occupy the most important role
alongside Horkheimer.
Adorno emphasized that his proposal, though part of an
internal communication, was not intended as private
correspondence. A copy of his outline was sent to Horkheimer.
The letter itself, however, was addressed to Fromm whom
Adorno also had in mind as the researcher of the “feminine
character.” This is astonishing since hardly any
communication had taken place between these two men. Adorno
considered Fromm his rival. Only during the last two
decades, however, has Fromm’s impact on critical theory and
the Institute in general been rediscovered. Nevertheless
apart from Horkheimer, Erich Fromm was “arguably the most
important theoretician during the early years of the
Frankfurt School” (Bronner) and certainly its most important
specialist on psychoanalysis. The history of the Institute
for Social Research in exile developed in two phases which
can virtually be personified in Fromm and Adorno—or rather,
their relationship to Horkheimer who was at its centre.
Until 1937 when Fromm’s “divorce” from the institute
began—it would be finalized in 1939—he was the most
important intellectual confidant of Horkheimer. In 1938,
however, Adorno replaced him after marrying Gretel Karplus
in the late summer 1937 and moving to the United States
during the spring of that year.
Adorno had often tried to move from the periphery to the
centre before. His jealousy can be seen in his many letters
expressing his own ideas, his harsh criticism of others
closer to Horkheimer, and his proposals for a number of
projects that he would lead. This competitiveness, whether
Adorno subconsciously knew it or not, also pervades the
letter of November 1937. That he did so may be deduced from
his description of the situation in terms of a classic
family conflict and his numerous long letters to Horkheimer
where he “for years, again and again, had pressed for his
incorporation into the ISR in the manner of a girlfriend
intent on marriage” (Letter of Adorno to Horkheimer,
November 2, 1934).
II
Adorno’s letter suggested nothing less than a paradigm shift
with regard to the conception of psychology and society for
the Institute of Social Research. Three points seem to me of
particular interest:
1. If the relationship between men and women until then was
predominantly analyzed in sociological,
sociological-psychological and historical terms, from the
standpoint of today, Adorno can be seen as attempting to
develop a radical “Gender”—perspective on capitalism. The
proposal as such—research “on the feminine
character”—derived fully from the logic of works that the
Institute had already undertaken. “Gender” (avant la lettre)
had been researched extensively with regard to various
subjects: the social-psychological significance of the
mother-right theory by Fromm, but also Horkheimer and
Benjamin; comparative research on the sociology of the
family by Jay Rumney, who directed the London branch of the
Institute for Social Research, and literary criticism with
regard to the emancipation of women in the 19th century by
Leo Löwenthal. These works belonged in the tradition of the
classical Marxist ideas on women formulated by Engels, Paul
Lafargue, the son-in-law of Marx and a founder of French
socialism, and August Bebel, the long-time leader of German
Social Democracy. All of them belong to an Enlightenment
tradition that saw women as symbols of capitalist
exploitation. In dialectical terms, according to Löwenthal,
women could thus “represent a glance towards a freer
development of humanity” while, on the other hand, Adorno
found precisely “Woman” to be the executor of capitalism who
represented capitalist exploitation in an explicitly
gender-specific manner. “Bourgeois woman,” to him, served as
the agency of capitalist development.
2. Sociologically-speaking Adorno also suggested a shift
from the macro- to the micro-structure in the analysis of
gender relations. Instead of the concept of “authority,”
which had until then been central to the Institute, Adorno
wanted its members to provide their analysis with new
specificity by using Marx’s idea concerning the “fetish
character of commodities.” This was fully in accord with
Horkheimer’s conviction that Marx’s analysis of
commodification is “not one that is underwritten by so many
equitable motives (which would make him a pluralistic
sociologist), but rather that the category of commodity is
one that sheds light on society as a whole” (Letter from
Horkheimer to H. Mayer, March 32, 1939). If the fetish
character of commodities was universal to capitalism, in
this vein, it was obviously necessary to study the effects
of the commodity form on sexual exchange. Did not sexuality
assume analogous fetish forms that were postulated by Marx
in the fetish chapter of the Capital for commodification?
And did not “Woman” much more than “Man” represent the
commodity character of capitalism, that is regression,
irrationality and infantilism?
3. In light of all this, Adorno wanted to reexamine economic
terms like the “fetish character of commodities” by using
psychoanalytic concepts like “frigidity” or “castration
anxiety.” In the technical use of “fetish,” indeed, two
specialized discourses merged: the critique of political
economy inherited from Marx and the psychoanalysis of Freud.
Both had originated in the anthropological discourse of the
18th century. Only in 1932, however, would the important
Marxist thinker, Karl Korsch, publish an edition of
Capital in which he became the first to note the
relevance of Marx’s concept of the fetish character of
commodities. This influential edition circulated in
intellectual circles to which both Brecht and Benjamin
belonged. This Marxist perspective was well known to Adorno,
not least due to his extensive debate with Benjamin over the
“diverse definition of the commodity in high capitalism”
(Letter from Benjamin to Adorno from June 10, 1935). Both
were also influenced by the 1936 manuscripts of the
economist Alfred Sohn-Rethel dealing with the “commodity
form” whereby commodities are valued not for their
use-value, or for the ways they can concretely be employed,
but rather for their exchange value that expresses itself
more abstractly in money. Thus, insofar as the life-world of
advanced capitalism is ever more surely realized in the
categories of exchange, its use value can no longer be
sensuously experienced. This inversion is what Marx
expressed with his metaphor of the “fetish character of the
commodity.”
More than half a century after the publication of the first
volume of Das Kapital (1867) it seemed plausible to
consider how the fetish character of the commodity form was
defining what had previously seemed to transcend capitalism.
“Woman” as a prescribed “natural being,” as a “product of
history that denatures her” (Dialektik der Aufklärung,
1947) serves as an example. The dialectics of the artificial
and the natural, of use and exchange value, consequently
made it plausible for Adorno to speak about the “fetish
character of women.” This however could only be a starting
point for analysis. First the “objective” or “material”
connection between Marx’s theory of the commody and Freud’s
psychoanalysis would have to be proven. Adorno was of,
course, fully aware of this. His letter may have been
“irresponsibly improvised,” as he himself put it.
Nevertheless, he was convinced that he had developed “key
positions on the present situation” (Adorno to Fromm,
November 16, 1937). The question revolves around whether
this paradigm shift is plausible in Adorno’s published work
where he used Marx’s theory of the commodity form as his
theoretical frame of reference. Space constraints prevent my
elaborating this point apart from the few following points.
This theory was most consistently pursued by Adorno from
1934 to 1939 and applied in three published essays on the
social functions of music: “On Jazz” (1936), “The Fetish
Character of Music and the Regression of Listening” (1938)
and “Fragments on Wagner” (1939/40), which were later
published as a full-length monograph, In Search of Wagner.
All these kinds of music, according to Adorno, were
characteristic of the monopoly stage of capitalism. His
theory explained the commodity character of Jazz through its
stereotypical form. It relentlessly conformed to the norms
or rules while seemingly breaking them. According to Adorno,
this reflected an unconscious and paradoxical unity of fear
and fulfillment, obedience and reward, as well as a form of
gaining potency by emasculation (in German: “wenn ich mich
entmannen lasse, bin ich erst potent”). Social and
psychological ambivalence of this sort expresses a voluntary
subjection to power and domination. In this vein, the
listener of jazz or popular music would be
characterized—like women—by regression, infantility, and
irrationality.
III
Adorno’s studies on music were also works of social theory.
Horkheimer said of “On Jazz”: “With this strict analysis of
an apparently trivial phenomenon, you make society with all
of its contradictions visible” (Letter from Horkheimer to
Adorno, October 23, 1936). In these essays dating from 1936
to 1939-40 the theory of music, capitalist society, and
“gender”—avant la lettre—formed a unity. Adorno was,
however, sharply criticized by some members of the
Institute: Pollock, an economist, accused him of flirting
with Marxist terminology while Adorno’s use of
psychoanalytic terms reminded others of “the mundane sexual
babble of New York” (Letter from Adorno to Horkheimer, June
25, 1936). In other words, what he wrote was not economic
enough for the economists and not analytic enough for the
psychoanalysts (Letter from H. Mayer to Horkheimer, April
23, 1939).
Adorno’s assumptions on women also seem not to have been
entirely convincing to Fromm. The addressee of Adorno’s
letter replied coolly and politely. One has the impression
of a subtle irony when Fromm seems to emulate Adorno’s
dialectical mode of expression: “I believe that women
simultaneously embody the qualities of commodities in the
most and least pronounced ways” (Letter from Fromm to Adorno,
January 4, 1938). The Institute never followed through on
Adorno’s project “on the feminine character.” Promising
beginnings were made in analyzing the social psychology and
the social history of the sexes during the phase of the
close collaboration between Horkheimer and Fromm. But they
were ‘forgotten’ in the wake of Adornos paradigm shift. With
the explicit signification of “Woman” as a subject of social
research, indeed, all further research on this topic by the
Institute came to a halt.
* * *
Adorno to Fromm
November 16, 1937
Dear Mr. Fromm:
I assume that you heard from Horkheimer or Leo about my idea
for a journal article—first—on the feminine character. I
have not heard from New York. Neither do I know whether this
is feasible at this point or whether it fits into
Horkhekimer’s or your work schedule. It has been on my mind
a lot, however, so that I can’t stop help indicating briefly
what I am aiming at.
The initial interest is connected with the discussions that
led to the studies on authority and family [Max Horkheimer/Erich
Fromm/Herbert Marcuse (eds.): Studien über Autorität und
Familie, Paris 1936] some time ago; it is about the glue
that holds current society together even while it creates
increased suffering and the threat of catastrophe for its
members. Back then the state, religion and family authority
were considered the foundations of this bond. But for some
time now it has appeared to me that these explications are
no longer appropriate. In fascist ideology the state plays
the main role: perhaps that is true in backward Italy but
not at all in highly industrialized Germany. On the
contrary: in Nazi ideology any etatism is disdained for the
sake of the “people.” It is clear to me that, even in
England, the vast majority is indifferent towards religion.
Regarding authority, much can be said: in the current phase
the crucial authority is not that of the family, however,
but that of fetishized collective groups. In view of these
insights, I think it necessary to pose the question
regarding the glue that binds society together anew. And I
am inclined—to tell the most important first—to see this
glue in the economic principle even as it affects both the
conscious and the unconscious of the people, the development
of which defines the law of movement of society, and drives
it towards catastrophe: namely the commodity.
More and more I am convinced that the actual coincidence of
Marxist theory and psychoanalysis lies not only in analogies
of superstructure and base with ego and id etc., but rather
in the connection between the fetish character of the
commodities and the fetishized character of human beings. I
believe that the methodological difference between Marxism
and psychoanalysis becomes can be overcome only at the
moment, in which it becomes possible to show successfully
how the economic fetishism turns into psychic fetishism;
this is something that—in a side note—also suggests tracing
back the economic fetish character beyond capitalist society
potentially to prehistoric times, in which the original
facts of economic fetishism found their first mental
sources. But for now I will leave aside this point that is
probably connected to certain tendencies of your interest in
Bachofen and your going back to the Oedipus complex.
The immediate stimulus for the idea of analyzing the
feminine character was a passage in Leo’s [Löwenthal: “Das
Individuum in der individualistischen Gesellschaft.” In
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung vol. 5 (1936), 321-363]
essay on Ibsen, in which he attributes a lesser degree of
reification and mutilated sexuality and a lesser degree of
repression to woman than to man. Immediately, Leo’s remark
appeared to me to be somewhat romantic, and the more I
thought about it, and the more consciously I observed
things, the more it seemed to me that woman today is to a
certain extent dominated more by the commodity character
than man and that she is—now I am varying an old and nice
formula of yours—functioning as the agency of the commodity
in society. Very closely related to this, it appears to me
that women and their specific consumer consciousness must be
regarded as the social glue to a far greater extent than,
say, family authority with its ascetic sexual morality,
which is already crumbling without having any significant
effect on the character of the middle-class.
(As you see, I strongly oppose Reich, as I do in other
pieces, who regressed to the pre-Marxist, Feuerbachian
point-of-view of “wholesome sensuousness” in, what is for a
talented psychologist, unbelievable naiveté and who via his
detour through anarchism will undoubtedly end up with
reformism. Any observation could teach him that even
sexually uninhibited, or at least in the primitive sense,
completely uninhibited women bear the worst features of the
bourgeois character.)
One could certainly object that we find here—and also with
the political-reactionary behaviour of the majority of
women—a new attitude, which was evoked directly out of fear
in a catastrophic situation. But I am inclined to doubt
that. The history of the unconscious has to deal with
incomparably longer periods of time; I rather suspect that
Ibsen’s Heddas and Noras are the illusions of a desperate
individual, and that he assumed the female childishness
produced by capitalist society for an immediate and natural
trait. If this were the case, then from a Marxist point of
view, Strindberg would be right against Ibsen in a sense in
which I was not aware at all of in New York, namely insofar
as he destroys Ibsen’s anthropological illusion and shows
that in modern society there is hardly any refuge of
“nature” left. My view was reinforced by my work on my
almost completed piece on Wagner. In his work, through
characters like Isolde and Brunnhilde, woman has all those
accents of romantic directness, and they seem to be unharmed
by the evil world forces, ready to sacrifice, even ready for
their death. On the other hand the characters of Fricka or
Gudrune or even Elsa show that Wagner unconsciously
perceived specifically bourgeois traits in women, and it was
quite revealing to me that Siegfried in the Twilight of
the Gods misses the last chance to get rid of the
bewitched ring uttering: “If I wasted my property on you, my
wife would be angry with me!”
I now imagine one could attempt to show that woman, due to
her exclusion from production, developed special traits of
the bourgeois which, though different from those of man, do
not transcend bourgeois society as Leo seems to assume in
the Ibsen essay—although I don’t think he would insist on
this anymore. Yes, I’ll even go as far as to blindly assume
that Horkheimer agrees with me when I claim that especially
the traits with which woman seems to maintain her
“directness” in reality are the stigmata that the
bourgeoisie inflicted on her; traits, that conceal in a
veritable context of bedazzlement what will be possible in
terms of her actual nature. Put analytically it is obviously
the case, that with most women, precisely due to their
economic position, the formation of the ego has remained
incomplete. The higher amount of infantilism they bear in
comparison to men, however, does not make them more
progressive in comparison to men. The task now would be,
though I wouldn’t dare to engage it as someone who is
neither an economist nor an analyst, to identify first a
couple of specifically female traits as a way of analyzing
women’s position in the economy; then showing exactly how
these traits work for the preservation of society, and
finally how these traits in particular lead into the fascist
reproduction of stupidity.
These traits seem to be closely connected to the
relationship between the consumer and the commodity that I
cannot prejudge. One should analyze thoroughly the
completely irrational behavior of women in dealing with
commodities—shopping, clothes, hairdressing etc.—and it will
probably become evident that all those moments that seem to
serve sex appeal are in reality desexualized. The gesture of
the girl who, while giving herself to her lover, is
dominated by the anxiety that something will happen to her
dress or her hair-do that might ruin dress and haircut
appears crucial to me. And I assume that even the sexuality
of the woman is largely desexualized, as if her fetish of
herself? Her character being a commodity, for example, in
the form of the often occurring sentiment of
being-too-good-for-it had constantly interjected itself
between the women and her own sexual activity, even in total
promiscuity. Here a social theory of female frigidity could
be developed. This in my view does not stem from the amount
of sexual limitations to which women are subjected, or from
the fact that they do not find the right partner, but that
they even during coitus in their own perception continue to
see themselves in terms of exchange value for a naturally
non-existent purpose and that they will not be able to reach
orgasm due to this displacement. Even in sexuality, use
value has been smothered by exchange value. It would
certainly be a dialectical point if one could show that lust
could only be reconstituted through the complete
implementation of exchange value; in other words: that the
only remedy against the fetishizing of sexuality is sexual
fetishism. Perhaps you could discuss this with Horkheimer
with whom I often discussed this issue—in any case from the
standpoint of male and not female psychology.
I imagine that this work will culminate in a critique of the
“feminine” in the way this term is affirmatively used today
society. After it has been reduced to the mechanism of its
production one could show what kind of ideological function
this term actually exerts and, by this, demonstrate even in
psychology, the system converts its real victims into a
source for its protection; thus, one could demonstrate the
inescapable context of bedazzlement that dominate the
contemporary processes of society. I could imagine the
critique of Goethe’s “eternal feminine” as a blasphemous
ending. Needless to say that this work should not be seen as
an “attack” on women but as their defense against a
patriarchal society that made them what they are today and
that they can employ for its own ends just because they are
what they are.
The most useful approach to this project is perhaps to study
Freud’s remarks on female psychology i.e. the inner
analytical discourse, as to whether female psychology is
biologically characteristic of woman or conditioned through
her identification with man. I tend to believe that the
actual biological aspects are at least covered and distorted
within bourgeois female psychology; on the other hand, I
think, one can do without a substructure or a mechanism of
identification, which anyway would probably be hard to
prove, if one succeeds in reducing female psychology
directly to the position of women in the process of
production and consumption. Probably the identification with
man occurs only via detours—via the commodities whose
worship seems the key to me. Whether commodities are being
identified in a very deep-seated way with male genitals I
cannot say, but it appears to me that there are many reasons
to believe so. I would also like to point out that certain
phenomena in the Anglo-Saxon world like “flirting” and
“having a good time,” running around from one party to the
next etc. seem to elucidate what I have in mind much more
effectively than how we know these things in backward
Germany or in France.
I would be glad if these preliminary and undeveloped
annotations were of use to you and if you could pursue this
complex of issues. I am certainly convinced that they
contains key insights into the current situation. Since this
suggestion of mine is not a private matter I took for
granted your consent and sent a copy of this to Horkheimer.
I hope to see you soon.
With kind regards
Yours,
Teddi Wiesengrund
(Typescript; Erich Fromm Papers, The New York Public
Library) Translated by Kai Artur Diers
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