I remember well the month when I began to read Theodor W. Adorno's Ästhetische Theorie. It was May 1977, during a lovely spring in Toronto. Joyce and I were house-sitting for a professor of political philosophy. In the quiet of someone else's study, surrounded by books that were not my own, I began to read Adorno's impenetrable, compelling, evocative German prose. Some days I made little headway. Other days I found myself swept along by the drama of the text, yet unable to tell anyone else where I had been or what I had learned. Gradually, however, I began to glimpse the submerged dialectical structures that sustain Adorno's thought.

My reading notes from 1977 show that I experienced Ästhetische Theorie as an array of potentially interconnected fragments held together by a provocative social vision. Although I had little understanding then of Adorno's emphasis on parataxis and constellations, I read bits and pieces, relying on intuitions about their relevance for my own concerns: first several pages on modern art (AT 33–45/ 56–74), next the chapter on truth content (AT 118–36/179–205), then some pages on progress (AT 190–9/284–96) and on society (AT 225–35/334–48, 256–61/380–7), and finally a few pages fromthe “Paralipomena” (AT 282–5/419–24).