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Theodore Adorno's criticism has interested me personally since I first encountered his and Max Horkheimer's media criticism as an undergraduate. As a dual magazine journalism and English major, his theories about advertising and the media (fun fact for anyone who's intereseted: Horkheimer and Adorno were German exhiles living and working in Hollywood) attracted me, and probably played some slight role in my decision not to become a journalist. I hadn't encountered his ideas about poetry before (though I knew something of his criticism of Enlightenment and Romantic thinking), but I find in it much of the same appeal I had for his other work, particularly in its discussion of the dialectic between the "I" and society. I think it is important to note, however, the difference in Adorno's definition of language from those held by many of the other poets and critics we've read this semester. Adorno notes this definition in his statement that "language mediates lyric poetry and society in their innermost core." The second direct object in the clause refers to this definition, that language "mediates" the individual's experience of the world and what society is on a broader level. This may seem closely alligned with Wittgenstein's propositon, that language is our experience of the world, but a world of difference lies between. For me, this distinction makes the idea of subjectivity constructed through language a much more real and sensible proposition. Adorno's thesis, "that the lyric work is always the subjective expression of a social antagonism," seems like a much more believable statement than some other theorists ideas of identity construction through subjectivity in language because of the place Adorno assigns language in his model. While he states that "language should not be absolutized as the voice of Being as opposed to the lyric subject," he does separate language from concepts and from society, though both use it and are connected by it. Language is "the medium of concepts," a substance for both making and conveying them, but the transmission is not a one-to-one send/recieve communication. The artist may use his medium to make his art however he likes, but the degree to which his message will be understood by more or less people, in more or less consistent ways, depends upon the extent to which he will play by the socially-constructed (symbolic) rules of society. In this way, the individual and society can engage in a dialogue, without the (impossible) necessity of the individual to withdraw him or herself from society and in this way Adorno shows how the antagonistic "I" of Romantic lyric poetry is, in fact, engaging in this dialogue, despite its apparent efforts to withdraw itself from society altogether. Language is the medium that binds the two, but the relationship is one in which some agency can be taken, at least on the level of thought. Language is not everything, despite the fact that we cannot separate ourselves from it.