Asking Adorno About
Postmodern Popular Theatre

I. Adorno Amid the Postmodernists
II. Ideology, Reconiliation and High / Low Aesthetics
III. Postmodernist Pessimism and Autonomous Spaces
IV. Commodified Images and Experience: Müller as Model
Bibliography

Free Man: Marxism shows us Marx as the author of the old competitive capitalism, incapable of coping with the social capitalism of the present stage. I hate this betrayal as much as I hate the mummification.

Prisoner: I agree with you, and with your motives. But is it possible?

Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx  

No theory escapes the marketplace. Each one is offered as a possibility among competing opinions; all are put up for choice; all are swallowed. There are no blinders for thought to don against this, and the self-righteous conviction that my own theory is spared that fate will surely deteriorate into self-advertising.  

Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics

I. Adorno amid the Postmodernists

Any attempt to theorise contemporary cultural production cannot but help confront the ubiquitous spectre of postmodernity. Oscar Wilde's remark, made more than a century ago, that we live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces, appears to have displayed remarkable prophetic power. If the moderns saw it coming, there were few who did so with greater sagacity than Theodor Adorno, whose most pessimistic predictions have come to pass, as one recent commentator, regretfully, put it (Bernstein 1991, 23). Despite this, Adorno's work has experienced a veritable excommunication from the market-place of postmodern theory--his defence of high art somehow inadmissible in an age of democratic culture. Even Fredric Jameson, perhaps the most conspicuous inheritor of his legacy, curtly condemns Adorno's critical vocabulary to obsolescence.[1] Should we too then treat Adorno as a "dead dog"?[2]

While the situation we confront appears to have undergone a substantial transformation in comparison with the USA of the forties (the original context of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, wherein lies the first perspicuous account of the culture industry), I find the assumption that the terms of the postmodern debate have therefore superseded the conceptual terrain charted by Adorno's critical theory to be premature, to say the least. For instance, I believe there to be a significant correspondence between Adorno's work and that of the situationists, specifically Guy Debord's concept of a "society of the spectacle"-which in turn forms the rational kernel of Baudrillard's mystified postmodern pronouncements. Furthermore, I find Adorno's work to be a timely corrective to what I perceive as an occasional tendency among some contemporary interventionist projects towards an unreconstructed appropriation of the work of Gramsci or Bakhtin. It neatly avoids the slide towards an effacement of the categorical distinction between mass and popular, through its use of the term "the culture industry"--used, to quote Adorno:

[I]n order to exclude from the outset the interpretation agreeable to [the culture industry's] advocates: that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art. . . . The culture industry intentionally integrates its consumers from above (1991, 85; my emphasis).

Given the continuing pertinence of Adorno's work, I would like to explore the possibility of its recuperation for a radical, critical project that takes the form of a popular theatrical practice. While I agree with the veracity of Adorno's predictions, I think it is a distortion and simplification of his work to draw the conclusions that he is nothing more than a prophet of doom and that we have now entered the predicted distopia without hope or resistance to the "massive Being of capital," as Jameson puts it (1991, 48).

There is an obvious objection, however, to the use of Adorno's work in formulating a popular theatre--namely, what is perceived as his intractable elitism. Despite this apparent disregard of the working class--without whom Marxist theoretical practice loses its justification--Adorno's analyses of the culture industry have at root a concern for the powerless and, as such, should not be precociously dismissed in the name of anti-elitism and the more demonstrably democratic cultural analyses characteristic of postmodernism's apologists. Adorno attempts to meet the criteria laid out by Marx as regards critique, namely that we should not focus our analysis on the surface phenomena (within the topography of which we may locate the postmodernists' unceasing celebration of the emancipatory, empowering and progressive potentials of mass-culture, apparently unperturbed by such outdated concepts as the critique of the freedom of the market),[3] but instead, as Marx urges, trace the entirely different processes at work in the depths, where, to quote Marx, "this apparent individual equality and liberty disappear[s]" (1857-8, 247).[4] Such critical astuteness forms a clear thread throughout Adorno's oeuvre--from his analysis of the mythic elements internal to the constitution of the Enlightenment, to the deleterious effects of the seemingly innocuous engagement with horoscopes, or the seemingly altruistic gesture of symphonies broadcast as "a public service."[5]

More than this, however, Marx insists that critique should offer a means of remedying the situation:

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower (1843-4, 244).

Like theory, art cannot concretize Utopia, not even negatively. . . . While firmly rejecting the appearance of reconciliation, art none the less holds fast to the idea of reconciliation in an antagonistic world. Thus, art is the true consciousness of an epoch in which Utopia . . . is as real a possibility as total catastrophic destruction (1970, 48).

II. Ideology, Reconciliation and High / Low Aesthetics

Adorno's interest in the work of art is in its potential to express truth in an age in which the dialectic of Enlightenment appears to be tending towards an increased barbarism. Art as a cognitive faculty for thought freed from domination depends upon its autonomy, that is, its distinction from the commodified realm of mass culture and its "mass deception." To quote Adorno, "the division itself is the truth: it does at least express the negativity of the culture which the different spheres constitute" (Adorno and Horkheimer 1944, 135). The divide thus corresponds to the fact of the division of labour in capitalist society.[6] Accordingly, until that division is abolished high art and mass culture are unable to be reconciled--they are "two halves of an integral freedom that do not add up" (Adorno 1936, 53). The appearance of their reconciliation in the postmodern artefact therefore must be a false one, symptomatic of its subsumption by the culture industry--making it art which "prefers to join forces with reified consciousness rather than stay on the side of an ideology of illusory humanness" (Adorno 1970, 22).[7] Heiner Müller[8] expresses a similar sentiment when asked to reflect on how the bad conscience arising from the intellectual's privileged position in relation to the worker may be reconciled, replying "[t]hat is a question which can't be answered in my lifetime" (1975, 172). So long as the division of labour persists its reconciliation in the accessible work of art is illusory and mendacious.

In contrast to the spurious, formulaic products of the culture industry, Adorno's aesthetics defines the authentic work of art as that which contains a socially significant epistemological quality-its truth content:

[T]he cognitive quality of art, i.e. its truth content, transcends knowledge of reality qua empirical existent. Art turns into knowledge as it grasps the essence of reality, forcing it to reveal itself in appearance and at the same time putting itself in opposition to appearance (1970, 366).

The project I am attempting to outline is a theatrical practice that is able to manifest this epistemological quality of authentic art. Considering the context outlined above, however, the proposal to utilise this critical element within the framework of a popular theatre appears to be a contradiction in terms. We are unable to "co-opt" the resistance within high art through an apparent reconciliation of the antithesis high/low, since this would mask the cognition of the division of labour in life--the cultural, in masking the economic, would be ideological.

The concept of ideology itself usefully embodies the tensions at work here. This is because the two broad senses in which it is understood lie at the heart of a distinction between two correspondingly different aesthetic practices and their claims to political validity.[9] Firstly, to speak of "masking" implies some notion of deception or illusion--that is, the usually pejorative sense in which ideology denotes ideas that are abstracted from the real material conditions and relationships that, combined with "given concept-material," determine them.[10] This is the sense of ideology as false-consciousness. The other, usually more neutral, sense is that of ideology as a system of ideas appropriate to a particular class. Thus there is proletarian ideology or bourgeois ideology, with the sense of deception--the illusion of autonomy from material processes--attached only to the latter. It is this second sense of ideology as proletarian or not that is most prevalent within definitions of what constitutes a popular theatre (at least those which attempt to be politically progressive).

Within this tradition, popular culture is defined, in broadly Gramscian terms, as a dynamic site of political struggles and intervention. Popular theatre consequently places itself at the service of the working class, contributing to the expression and development of the "otherwise inchoate, ambiguous elements of its experience to the status of a coherent philosophy" (Eagleton 1991, 118). The work of John McGrath is an exemplary illustration of this position:

To create a kind of theatre that tells the story from a different perspective, in a language that a different group of people understand, i.e. to create a working-class form of theatre appropriate to the late twentieth century, we have to look at the language of working-class entertainment, at least to see what kind of language it is (McGrath 1981, 22).

[R]elated outwards to discernible patterns, structures of society, historical realities that can connect with the audience's perception of reality and cause them to engage with it; as long as the perspective is thought through, not merely received, and the story is based on rigorous examination of experience, rather than the convenient fictions of the ruling class and its media (90).

The distinction between truth as such and truth as an adequate expression of false consciousness is untenable, because no true consciousness has ever existed to this day and there is no Archimedean point from which this distinction is perceptible. . . . Great works of art are unable to lie. Even when their content is illusory, it does represent truth because it is a necessary illusion. It is only the botched and misconceived ones that are untrue. By re-enacting reality's spell, art sublimates it into an image while at the same time freeing itself from it. . . . Truth and ideology do not represent good and bad respectively. Art contains them both (1970, 188-9; 332).

This is not an argument for doing away with notions like tendentious art and its unsophisticated descendants. While the aesthetics of taste would like to do just that, there is a sense in which such notions are legitimate, if only because we have entered a historical phase where the longing for, and the will to, change are extremely intense. All this does not annul the power of the law of form (1970, 349).

III. Postmodernist Pessimism and Autonomous Spaces

As I have attempted to illustrate, the emphasis on "negativity" within Adorno's thought is not necessarily synonymous with an ineluctable pessimism. If marxist theory has traditionally consisted of a dialectic of the analysis of domination and the identification of revolutionary subjectivity, however, then Adorno, along with the Frankfurt school generally, has a tendency to allow the second term to fall away within his analyses (Murphy 1994, 51). As we have seen, though, this is countered by the identification of a resistance--albeit one of a precarious nature. It is little wonder that Jameson's account of a resistanceless postmodernism--relying as it does on but one side of what tends towards a theoretical one-sidedness in the first place--is so despondent.

Adorno posits the possibility of a resistant space on the incompleteness of the domination exercised by capital and the market. He locates a lag within this subsumption in Europe, such that the educational system and various artistic and cultural practices were permitted some degree of autonomy (Adorno and Horkheimer 1944, 132-3). With the recovery of this lag, however, Jameson registers a "fundamental mutation in the sphere of culture in the world of late capitalism" (1991, 47):

[W]e must go on to affirm that the dissolution of an autonomous sphere of culture is . . . to be imagined in terms of an explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life . . . can be said to have become "cultural" in some original and yet untheorized sense. This proposition is, however, substantively quite consistent with the previous diagnosis of a society of the image or the simulacrum and the transformation of the "real" into so many pseudoevents (48).

The terms of the final comparison are telling. Previously, Jameson has equated Guy Debord's society of the spectacle with "the culture of the simulacrum" (18); a dubious move replicated here. The former--insisting on the existence of an antagonistic, revolutionary subjectivity--suggests the possibility of critical intervention, since "the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images" (Debord 1967, #4). The latter, however, is conspicuously bereft of such antagonism--and so, unfortunately, with Jameson's analysis. He appears to be reiterating Adorno when he claims that modern art drew its power from its operation via archaic modes of production. Its very existence as an autonomous entity was possible thanks only to capital's "uneven development" (Jameson 1991, 307). Similarly, Jameson insists that "old-fashioned ideological critique" was possible only with the critical distance enabled by the autonomous existence of "pre-capitalist enclaves" (46-9).

I suggest, however, that rather than imagining a resistant, critical space in terms of an ontologically-substantive "archimedean point" external to the "massive Being of capital," the moment of critique lies in an extrapolation from the immanent antagonisms of contemporary society. While Adorno's critical space may have appeared to require an externality, in the form of a temporal lag, in order to exist, in fact it was, it is, and always has been possible to intervene from within the mechanisms of domination, since their workings are never total, homogeneous and non-contradictory.[12]

Perhaps it would be enabling, both theoretically and practically, to augment Jameson's acknowledgement of the fundamental mutation with a critical framework which elaborates the antagonisms that reside beneath the suffocating placidity of his "postmodernist space." If Adorno's work has much in common with Guy Debord's analysis of domination, the development of the latter's identification of subjectivity by someone like Antonio Negri and the Italian autonomists may prove efficacious to the recuperation this project proposes. For example, Guattari and Negri echo Jameson when they suggest that the semiotics of capital have succeeded in colonising "the remaining private sphere-family, personal life, free time, and perhaps even fantasy and dreams" (Guattari and Negri 1985, 25). They go on, however, to insist that this "gives rise in turn to new forms of resistance on these most immediate levels" (26). By formulating the colonisation as the actualisation of Marx's description of the move from the formal to the real subsumption of labour under capital--such that all of society becomes a "social factory"[13] --they succeed too in articulating an approach able to recompose "molecular" struggles within a "molar" generalisation of the antagonisms.[14] While Negri does not specifically address Jameson's diagnosis of our postmodern condition, considering its lack of a subjective dimension I do not think it would be excessive to align it with what Negri terms "a purely objective point of view, that is from the point of view of capital" (Negri 1989, 73)--which, as Guy Debord warns, might be a use of the concept of a society of the spectacle "as a defence of the spectacular system" (Debord 1967, #203).

As far as Adorno's aesthetics is concerned, if, as he claims, "art belongs to the stage of antagonistic life" (Adorno 1970, 48) are we to take the hegemony of the resolved, conflict-free products of the culture industry as testimony to the abolition of social antagonisms in life? If not, and antagonisms do still exist, then I would contend that "authentic" art is still, at least theoretically, possible--provided we retain some form of Adorno's aesthetics as its criteria. He states that the critical capacity of art exists only when "it has become autonomous" (Adorno 1970, 320). With the dissolution of an autonomous sphere of culture and its explosion throughout the "social factory" of real subsumption, however--whereby "all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles," as Debord puts it (1967, #1)--the critical capacity of art would appear, at first sight, to have been annihilated.

One possible way to overcome this predicament may be to interrogate the word "autonomous" itself. For Adorno, a work of art may be said to have become autonomous by "congealing into an entity unto itself--rather than proving itself to be 'socially useful'" (Adorno 1970, 321). This is what enables it to possess a truth content. He also uses the word "autonomous" to refer to the existence of a separate domain of culture--that is, the generalised condition of aesthetic production within a specific social structure.

Since "truth content is tied up with individual works rather than with art as such" (191), perhaps an individual work of art might, through the elaboration of its constituent antagonisms, produce a moment of autonomy in Adorno's first sense of the word, while the generalised conditions are no longer "autonomous" in his second sense. After all, the autonomy of the aesthetic realm was never ontological, but rather ideological--it was only ever a semblance of autonomy. The question is how a particular work of art might, rather than submitting to its generalised fate (making it part of the culture industry), instead critically reflect upon that fate (without denying the general conditions of its production, or failing in its attempt to "mediate antagonism [in such a way as] to produce a coherent work" (Osbourne 1989, 34)).

Previously, as we have seen, authentic art was able to exist because capital had only formally subsumed society (that is, archaic modes of production, or Jameson's "pre-capitalist enclaves," were tolerated). Within that period, however, aesthetic autonomy had already begun to be challenged. Adorno asserts that the demise of aesthetic autonomy within modernism had little to do with the results of industrialisation, but rather was the result of a task of critical reflection imposed on art, in the light of the social critique levelled at its ideological character (1970, 189-90; 331). Art had responded by introducing the aesthetic concept of "anti-art," thus attempting to "go beyond its own concept in order to remain faithful to itself" (42-3).

If, as Müller suggests, "[i]n a free market, the illusion of the autonomy of art, a pre-condition of modernism, collapses" (1990a, 114)--therefore seeming to condemn it to the vicissitudes of the culture industry--perhaps the fact that art had already begun to anticipate such a collapse may indicate a possible strategy of resistance. For Adorno:

[The authentic work of art,] according to immanent criticism, is not one which resolves objective conditions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure (Adorno, quoted by Jay 1973, 179).

IV. Commodified Images and Experience: Müller-as-Model

Given that, within the parameters outlined above, the production of an authentic work of art is still possible in our contemporary situation, I believe we are in a position to delineate the parameters of an interaction of the two traditions--a popular theatre as an authentic work of art. The central contradiction running through the project so far is the apparently antithetical attitudes that the two modes of producing theatre have towards their intended consumers--the audience. How may a piece of "high" art be considered popular? To this end, I intend to employ certain strands of the work of Heiner Müller, whose relationship to popular culture is particularly illuminating.

Within the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno provides the most succinct description of the predication of high art's resistance on the exclusion of the working class:

The purity of bourgeois art, which hypostasized itself as a world of freedom in contrast to what was happening in the material world, was from the beginning bought with the exclusion of the lower classes-with whose cause, the real universality, art keeps faith precisely by its freedom from the ends of the false universality (Adorno and Horkheimer 1944, 135).

Adorno appears to be tacitly denying the reception of high art by the working class, due to its very conditions of production. While as a means through which to understand bourgeois art such a model is useful, in constructing a progressive popular theatre such an exclusion is undesirable, to say the least. I would suggest that there is no reason to assume that in reflecting upon the truth content of an authentic work of art a working-class audience would be inherently incapable of including, within that reflection, the aspect of the work's predication on an unfree society--since to be authentic, the work would have to contain this dimension of antagonism, as I have elaborated in detail above.

The distinction between the two traditions lies elsewhere. McGrath has suggested that one key aspect of the popular is its directness:

A working-class audience likes to know exactly what you are trying to do or say to it. A middle-class audience prefers obliqueness and innuendo. It likes to feel the superiority of exercising its perceptions which have been so expensively acquired, thus opening up areas of ambiguity and avoiding any stark choice of attitude. . . . [W]orking-class audiences have minds of their own and they like to hear what your mind is (1981, 54).

Brenner: What were you trying to do with Hamletmachine? What did you want to say? Why did you write it?
Müller: If I know what I want to say, I say it. I don't have to write it (1990a, 237).

Interpretation is the work of the spectator and is not to take place on the stage. The spectator must not be absolved from this work. That's consumerism . . . capitalist theatre (Müller, quoted by Wright 1989, 130).

As long as a thing works it is not successful, and when success is there then the impact is over. This is because there can only be an impact if, for example in the theatre, the audience is split, brought home to its real situation. . . . Success happens when everybody is cheering, in other words, when there is nothing more to say. For me the theatre is a medium which still permits one to avoid that kind of success (Müller 1984, 138; 139).

As I indicated above, McGrath's model is without doubt the more politically efficacious as an instrument for the formation of a self-conscious agency and its development "towards maturity and hegemony" (McGrath 1981, 21). If, on the other hand, we are interested in a critical aesthetic practice that might contribute to an oppositional epistemology, which may in turn inform the agenda of political action (albeit in an oblique way), then it is the latter of each of the oppositions that should serve as our model--for which the difficulty and "dissensus" of Müller's theatre is exemplary.

Despite these oppositions, however, the two traditions converge in their relationship to the category of experience. From this, I would suggest not only does the fate of experience in contemporary society present us with a compelling case for the increasing importance of the Adorno-Müller strand, but paradoxically, that fate provides us with the means by which the latter may operate as a popular theatre.

If authentic art is to continue to exist, it must, following Adorno's criteria, not only incorporate the results of the development of the conditions of production from formal to real subsumption, but also register the crisis of experience that the spectacle's concrete manufacture of alienation precipitates (Debord 1967, #32):

Art is truly modern when it has the capacity to absorb the results of industrialisation under capitalist relations of production, while following its own experimental mode and at the same time giving expression to the crisis of experience (Adorno 1970, 50).

The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life. Not only is the relation to the commodity visible but it is all one sees: the world one sees is its world (1967, #42; last emphasis mine).

From my reading of Müller's work, however, it seems to me that his theatre attempts to take account of this tendency; he says at one point "I want to see the face of war. And that's not easy, now the face of war is McDonald's" (1990a, 83). The antagonism with the commodity becomes something embodied in the very constitution of his theatre. Given our increasingly subsumed context, the capacity for resistance that this mode achieves becomes of vital importance. But in what way may such a resistant practice be considered "popular"?

I believe that, as a result of the move from formal to real subsumption, it is possible to perceive a changed relationship between the images of popular culture and reality, such that it becomes possible to indicate a theatrical practice that retains the critical capacity we have discussed, the reception of which does not imply the apparently exclusionary nature of "high" art. I think that it is arguable that under the subsumption of a society of the spectacle the "artistic materials" that Adorno discusses necessarily consist of commodified images, such that, as Adorno suggests, "[t]o paint a la cubiste in the year 1970 [and especially 1995] is like making advertising posters. And the originals are not immune, either, to this kind of sell out" (1970, 417). If we place such use within the parameters of Adorno's aesthetics' antagonistic striving for harmony, while simultaneously "rejecting the appearance of reconciliation," however, I believe that it is possible to dialectically transform such artistic materials, such that rather than functioning as advertisements they contribute to an oppositional epistemology. It is precisely the ubiquity of such materials, the omnipresence of the commodified image in our spectacular culture, that provides the accessibility required for the "excluded" receiver.

According to Adorno's aesthetics, the constituent antagonisms of the work of art consist of an objective, mimetic moment (roughly speaking, its content) and a subjective, rational moment (correspondingly, its form). Despite apparently beginning with the premise that such commodified images adequately describe reality (the moment of mimesis), we are able to effect a dialectical critique precisely to the extent that our treatment of the material exposes this adequation as a series of contradictions--that social reality is always in excess of its description through these materials.[16] It is in this vein that I read Müller's work. In defence of the reading of his plays as "plays of disappointment," he suggests that "the utopian feature is in the form, and not the content"; or, elsewhere, "what is political is the treatment of the material. In other words, it's the form, not the content" (Müller 1986, 163; 1990a, 236).

While in its manipulation of familiar images such a practice appears to endorse the status quo, their treatment within a distorting, dissonant framework enables the possibility of critical intervention; they are exposed to a verfremdungseffekt. I understand Müller to effect a kind of progressive fusion of Adornian and Brechtian attitudes to art, such that the latter's techniques are placed in the service of the earlier's critique of Brecht's "experimental objects of a predetermined thesis" (Adorno 1991, 63).[17] If the treatment of the commodified images within the schema of mass culture is such that, as Adorno suggests, "any achievement of imagination, any expectation that imagination might of its own accord gather together the discrete elements of the real into its truth, is rejected as an improper presumption" (Adorno 1991, 55), then Müller's work is interested in a resuscitation of such a critical capacity:

If one starts from the assumption that capitalist societies, indeed every industrial society, the GDR included, tends to repress and instrumentalise imagination--then for me the political task of art today is precisely the mobilisation of imagination. To return to our example of Fantasia, the metaphorical function of the Disney film is to reduce the symbolic force of images to one meaning, to make them immediately allegorical. [In the progressive work of art] a world of images is created that does not lend itself to conceptual formulation and that cannot be reduced to a one-dimensional metaphor. This is what I try to do in my theatre (Müller 1984, 138).

[M]ass culture expressly claims to be close to reality only to betray this claim immediately by redirecting it to conflicts in the sphere of consumption. . . . In its mirror mass culture is always the fairest in the land (1991, 57; 58).

Shakespeare is a mirror through the ages, our hope a world he doesn't reflect anymore... The horror that emanates from Shakespeare's mirror images is the recurrence of the same. . . . A Shakespeare variant: Macbeth sees Banquo's ghost, and a difference. Our task-or the rest will be statistics and a matter of computers-is to work at this difference (Müller 1990b, 32; 33).

However, the elimination of the antagonism cannot hide, even in postmodernism, the maturation of human society in which the paradox of the most complete abstraction of labour, together with its extraordinary productivity, is dissolved and becomes, according to Marx, a power of the collective individual, the liberation of singularity and the discovery and joy of free, communal activity. This enormous contradiction is latent in postmodernism (Negri 1989, 204-5).

Spiegel: Could you imagine how the workers of the Bergman-Borsig factory will react to Hamletmachine?
Müller: They will probably say "What is this crap?" And then we can talk. 

Heiner Müller, Germania

Prisoner: Class antagonism in the post-modern world. Maybe you're right. Then it means, at this point, filling with a material content the struggle against power.
Free Man: Precisely.  

Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx

---

Notes

1 "[A]ny sophisticated theory of the postmodern ought to bear something of the same relationship to Horkheimer and Adorno's old 'Culture Industry' concept as MTV or fractal ads bear to fifties television series" (Jameson 1991, x).

2 See Marx's discussion of his use of Hegel, when the fashion was to treat him as a "dead dog"-where upon "I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker." See the "Afterword" to the 2nd German edition (1873) of volume one of Capital (Tucker 1978, 302).

3 "[M]ass art has taken that alienation of the masses from art, blindly sustained in life by society, up into the process of production as its presupposition, lives from it and deliberately reproduces it" (Adorno 1991, 55); "It is not the individuals who are set free by free competition; it is, rather, capital which is set free" (Marx 1857-8, 650).

4 "[I]n present bourgeois society as a whole, this positing of prices and their circulation etc., appears as the surface process, beneath which, in the depths, entirely different processes go on, in which this apparent individual equality and liberty disappear" (Marx 1857-8, 247).

5 See chapter one of Dialectic of Enlightenment, chapter one of The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, and the latter half of chapter four of Dialectic of Enlightenment, respectively (Adorno and Horkheimer 1944; Adorno 1994).

6 "Division of labour only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labour appears. . . . these three moments, the forces of production, the state of society, and consciousness, can and must come into contradiction with one another, because the division of labour implies the possibility, nay the fact that intellectual and material activity-enjoyment and labour, production and consumption-devolve on different individuals, and that the only possibility of their not coming into contradiction lies in the negation in its turn of the division of labour. . . . Division of labour and private property are, moreover, identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the product of the activity. . . . And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man exists in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man's own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him" (Marx and Engels 1845-6, 159-160).

7 "What is new is that the irreconcilable elements of culture, art and distraction, are subordinated to one end and subsumed under one false formula: the totality of the culture industry" (Adorno and Horkheimer 1944, 136).

8 A playwright most often hailed as inaugurating a postmodern theatre, but who has insisted that the only postmodernist he knows was "a modernist who worked in a post office" (Müller 1984, 137).

9 See Raymond Williams' section on "Ideology" in Keywords (1976), for a brief history of these two strands; and Terry Eagleton, Ideology, An Introduction (1991), for a longer study (although, at least with the latter's section on Adorno, a certain amount of scepticism is advised, particularly as far as its conflation of Marcuse and Adorno's thinking is concerned).

10 "[T]he philosophy of every epoch, since it is a definite sphere in the division of labour, has as its presupposition certain definite thought material handed down to it by its predecessors, from which it takes its start. . . . Here economy creates nothing new, but it determines the way in which the thought material found in existence is altered and further developed, and that too for the most part indirectly" (Engels 1890, 764).

11 "The culture industry intentionally integrates its consumers from above. To the detriment of both it forces together the spheres of high and low art, separated for thousands of years. The seriousness of high art is destroyed in speculation about its efficacy; the seriousness of the lower perishes with the civilizational constraints imposed on the rebellious resistance inherent within it as long as social control was not yet total" (Adorno 1991, 85).

12 See Warren Montag "What is at Stake in the Debate on Postmodernism?" (1988), who levels this critique at Jameson, though without referencing either Adorno's work, or the consequences such a critique has for postmodern aesthetics.

13 The move from formal to real subsumption is described by Negri thus: "Antiquated forms of production, of property and of the market may in this way have an orderly coexistence with capitalist hegemony. But capital then proceeds to penetrate and conquer the whole of society and there arrives at a moment in which the old forms of production, of property and of circulation break down: in this situation, not only is the capitalist mode of production hegemonic, but the capitalist form of the labour process became the only existing one. The entire society becomes one enormous factory, or rather, the factory spreads throughout the whole of society. In this situation, production is social and all activities are productive" (1989, 204).

14 "[H]ere we are truly 'beyond Marx,' but also beyond all possible methodologies of pluralism or of transversality. The field of research is determined by the continual tension between the plurality of real instances and the explosive duality of antagonism. . . . The theory of surplus value breaks down the antagonism into a microphysics of power. The theory of class composition restates the problem of power in a perspective where recomposition is not that of a unity, but that of a multiplicity of needs, and of liberty" (Negri 1979, 14).

15 See note #13 for an explanation of these terms.

16 "Contradiction is non-identity under the aspect of identity; the dialectical primary of the principle of contradiction makes the thought of unity the measure of heterogeneity. As the heterogeneous collides with its limit it exceeds itself. Dialectics is the consistent sense of non-identity" (Adorno 1966, 5).

17 It is interesting to note that considering the modernist "quartet" of Lukács, Benjamin, Brecht and Adorno, as a basis for development, Jameson's suggestion for a progressive postmodern art would pull in the opposite direction to that suggested here--in that he privileges the pedagogical aspects of Lukacs and Brecht (1991, 50). While Müller's work has been read in light of Benjamin (and more obviously, Brecht), I find that it has much in common with Adorno's aesthetics-a reading which suggests a fruitful line of research and, to my knowledge, a more or less unexplored one.

18 See David Harvey's essay (1989), for an analysis of the economic implications of a postmodern "mirror economy."

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Terence Smith, © 1996