Reflections from a damaged discipline: Adorno, religious radio, and the critique of historical reason

Author: Waggoner, Matt

Source: Culture and Religion, Volume 5, Number 1, March 2004 , pp. 23-40(18)

Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group

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Abstract:

The Psychological Techniques of Martin Luther Thomas' Radio Addresses (Adorno, 2000) echoes Adorno's analogous critique of the culture industry by detecting an ideological effect, prior to any given content, intrinsic to the form of radio religion. Notwithstanding the text's narrowness, I argue that Adorno's analysis of Thomas' 'fait accompli technique'--presenting claims as previously established certainties--was both typical of his work and insightful for issues in cultural criticism. First, it refused subjectivist reductions of sociological effects to false consciousness. Second, it warned that historicism runs the risk of repeating the fait accompli when it treats what exists empirically as the only possible reality, or when it treats empirical givens as representatives of a future redemption. I argue that Adorno's dismissal of religious radio was consistent with his critique of positivism, and that the Thomas study models an historicist methodology that refuses, against its own logic, to reduce otherness to its own categories.

Keywords: Adorno; religion; radio; historicism; culture; politics

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0143830042000200346

Publication date: 2004-03-01