No Ears Required

The article considers whether some of the categories and rhetorical maneuvers used in castigating „popular culture” might be similar (or even identical) to categories and strategies more often found in racist arguments.  After surveying sociological, psychological and philosophical explanations for the nature and genesis of anti-Semitic categories (writings by Gordon Allport, Kenneth Burke, Imre Hermann, Horkheimer–Adorno, György Csepeli), the author looks at a number of pre-1945 anti-Semitic texts (by Dühring, Poncins, Hitler and others), and tries to identify their rhetorical apparatus.  Through a close textual analysis of  T.W.Adorno’s study „Popular Music” (1962), he argues that Adorno uses (1) a similar rhetorical apparatus and (2) an analogous cognitive approach as the anti-Semitic authors when he creates the category of inferior and insidious „popular music”.