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Adorno's social theory is enjoying renewed attention, as is the debate to what extent is it Marxist. A central issue remains Adorno's concept of social totality: capitalism as a fully integrated society in which every difference is levelled. One problem this raises is why is he still committed to the Marxist concept of class. And second, how to understand his critique of the idea of proletarian class-consciousness, which seems to leave his critical theory without an addressee. The article suggests that, for Adorno, capitalist society exhibits what is termed here "differential integration." It is predicated both on the labor/capital distinction and, at the same time, on sufficient homology between the two, such that the qualitative class divide is experienced as mere quantitative variance. This efficacious gap between social structure and social experience is at the center of his concept of ideology. Ideology-critique for Adorno is mainly the critique of symptomatic misconceptions of how ideology functions, due to lack of attention to how the class structure is in fact not experienced as such. Adorno's alternative to proletarian class consciousness is "differential solidarity": consciousness of social domination that is on the one hand found across class divides yet is experienced differentially between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconstructs and defends Theodor Adorno's social theory by motivating the central role of abstract domination within it. Whereas critics such as Axel Honneth have charged Adorno with adhering to a reductive model of personal domination, I argue that the latter rather understands domination as a structural and de-individualized feature of capitalist society. If Adorno's social theory is to be explanatory, however, it must account for the source of the abstractions that dominate modern individuals and, in particular, that of value. While such an account remains undeveloped in Adorno, Marx provides resources for its development, in positing the constitution of value neither in production nor exchange alone, but in the social totality. This article argues that Marx's account is compatible with Adorno's, and that it may be used to render Adorno's theory of domination more credible on explanatory grounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists, economists, historians, anthropologists, political theorists, and literary critics have all turned their attention to the study of capitalism. But philosophers remain much less engaged. Why is this? And what could philosophy bring to the study of capitalism? Could it help in the development of a general theory? My main argument here is that philosophy does have an important role to play in the study of capitalism, particularly if we want to develop a general theory. Philosophers must describe something that is peculiar to capitalism, in philosophical terms, which has not been explained by sociological, economic, or psychological means. This subject matter does exist: it is the nature of rationality within capitalism. I suggest that this can best be explained by using the theory of the space of reasons, which helps to show how rational human practices shape social and economic institutions, and how our form of rationality is in turn shaped by those practices and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the centre of Adorno's critical theory of society lies the problem of Bann or Bannkreis: why do individuals systematically act in ways that reinforce conditions that are obviously incompatible with their freedom and pursuit of happiness? Despite criticism of Dewey's experimentalism by several Frankfurt School critical theorists claiming that the American pragmatist fails to account for systematic blockages to critique, Dewey does in fact formulate his approach to social critique as a response to the problem that social life might be made immune to transformative claims. In Human Nature and Conduct, thirty years prior to Adorno's Bannkreis, he conceptualizes a 'vicious circle' in which attempts to transform social life seem to be caught and points to a way out. This article shows that Adorno and Dewey share in a project at the heart of critical theory, the project of a disclosing critique of society. In different and mutually completing ways, the Frankfurt School critical theorist and the American pragmatist point out the extent to which their contemporary societies are caught in antagonistic and painful vicious circles and thereby point to the objective possibility of another form of social life. The article is historical, but it is animated by the intent to brush a fruitful path for disclosing critique today. From Adorno, this critical practice gains the idea that theory of society can be a disclosing gesture, which presents an important corrective to Dewey's failure to trace the eclipse of the public. From Dewey, it gets a reminder that these theories must find ways to continue into ordinary life experience through group action for their disclosure to come full circle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among theorists associated with the first generation of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse's position is singular in that he provides us with an unabashedly affirmative theory of politics as liberatory practice. The article discusses Marcuse's contribution to political thought by pointing out how, in particular, three aspects remain highly pertinent to contemporary thought: (a) his account of freedom as potentiality, to be actualized in political practice; (b) his conception of the political pre-figuration or pre-enactment of a liberated society; and (c) his rehabilitation of the human faculty of imagination that allows us to overcome the reality principle of the status quo by venturing, qua practice, into the realm of the revolutionary surreal, thereby enlarging the horizon of what is politically imaginable. In a final step Marcuse's contribution is contrasted with contemporary theories of the political. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate science denial is serious. It facilitates political procrastination and brings us ever closer to a world beset by growing food insecurity, heatwaves, floods, storms, fires and extensive losses to biodiversity. Numerous studies have unmasked the private agendas and corporate links behind organized denial, yet the question of how deniers find traction with democratic publics has received comparatively little attention. Empirical surveys demonstrate a connection between people who are susceptible to the contrarian voices of denial and those inclined towards right-wing authoritarianism. In this essay, I bring Adorno's mid-20th-century studies of right-wing authoritarian tendencies in American democracy to bear upon climate science denial. Adorno directs us away from a sole focus on how deniers manufacture doubt so as to give the impression that the science is not settled. He examines the ways that agitators not only spread misinformation but also foster emotional connections with people who seem to want to be conned. I locate organized denial within a strain of cultural life that Adorno describes as unserious. In late 1940s America, Adorno discerned a new shape of political subjectivity, which has become highly resonant today: a formally free individual who takes pleasure in lies that sound like truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a possible path for a materialist cultural sociology of art, focusing on the dynamics of art(s) domains and harnessing Adorno's dialectical notion of material anew. I seek to establish links between dynamics of the arts domains and the fostering of specific modes of engagement with them – and, potentially, stances in other domains of life. I argue that a return to Adorno's notion of (musical) material allows for such connections to be made: the 'material' is where the dynamics of the specific arts domains are inscribed; but it is also what is engaged with – by composers and artists as well as by interpreters, performers and publics. A dialectical material lens seems well suited for the critical study of the dynamic of arts domains in the 20th and 21st centuries, given the multiple artistic 'breaks' proclaimed. Focusing on some well-known movements in music and cuisine which sought to 'emancipate', 'democratise', and 'diversify' sounds and flavours, I analyse the processes through which they produced sound and flavour anew. I suggest that sounds and flavours themselves have become the carriers of logics relevant to music and cuisine, and that they have come to imperiously command modes of commitment (from composers and chefs, performers, listeners and diners alike) that evince specific stances. Through this necessarily sketchy survey, I provide indications that broader, cross-cutting cultural dynamics may be at stake. Overall, I seek to make clear what theoretical steps are afforded by the joint attention to materiality and the dynamic of art domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the turn to the aesthetic dimension in early 20th century critical theory, particularly in the work of Lukács, Benjamin and Adorno. It focuses on the concept of play (Spiel), which garnered particular attention as a possible form of aesthetic resistance to the reification of reason in modern society. The article traces the concept of play from the work of Lukács, who engaged with Schiller's notion of the play-drive but ultimately viewed it to be an inadequate form of aesthetic resistance, to the work of Benjamin, who optimistically embraced the revolutionary possibility of play. In contrast, the article argues that Adorno's work tacitly advances a critical concept of dark play that offers a third perspective between Lukács's pessimism and Benjamin's optimism, thus avoiding both the retreat into an apolitical aesthetic dimension and the uncritical embrace of play's revolutionary potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay revisits Adorno's relation to Marx through a reading of his recently translated seminar on Marx (1962) within the broader context of the two thinkers' views on the dialectic. While Adorno's critical comments in the seminar seem to be applicable to some of Marx's bold assertions about Hegel's dialectic, taken in isolation, they fail to challenge Marx's more rigorous analysis of the dialectic, as presented in his introduction to the Grundrisse. Nevertheless, read alongside Adorno's mature critique of identity, the text of the seminar could be interpreted as pointing to a much more serious criticism of Marx, that is, the criticism of the primacy of economy that animates Marx's dialectic from within. The essay is concluded with a warning against reducing Adorno's position on Marx to his criticism of the primacy of economy, followed by a brief reference to the fundamentally transitory character of critical theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Frankfurt School formulated a negative dialectics that keeps open the possibility for alternative social futures by explaining and diagnosing the non-existence of 'real possibilities' to actualize a better world. Ernst Bloch's category of 'mere possibility' makes a 'warmer' negative dialectics viable, a form that faces a grim reality head on yet loosens the prohibition against identifying pathways toward alternative social futures latent in social conditions, possibilities with the potentiality (the objective-external dimension of possibility), but lack the capacity (the subjective-internal dimension of possibility), to become actual. This allows negative dialectics to engage in relatively programmatic 'prospect-exploration' when tackling dire issues like climate change, even if the proposed solutions are deficient. Identifying merely possible climate change solutions skirts three problematic tendencies in prescriptive assessments of climate politics: (1) promoting the continuation of ineffective mitigation strategies (e.g., carbon markets), (2) calling for a revolution without a revolutionary subject, and (3) fatalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the roots of the Authoritarian Personality (AP) project in the neo-Freudian/phenomenological tradition of the Frankfurt School (FS). It focuses on three of its major proponents (Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse) and examines the construction of the F-scale. It outlines how, according to FS-influenced scholars, the AP arose from the disciplinary measures inflicted on late 19th and early 20th century German middle-class youth, and details the sado-masochistic political style of the prototypical AP. It covers the critical reception of this characterization and explanation of authoritarianism by Bob Altemeyer and Anglo-American positivism. It concludes by arguing that in overlooking the inner life of the AP, positivism blinds us to compelling truths, about authoritarianism, and also about ourselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Histories of the Arab–Israeli War of 1967 have advanced a curious commonplace. As they have sought to account for the decisive factors in what they treat as a decisive war, soldiers and interpreters of their arguments have tacitly resorted to what Adolf Loos once referred to as a 'principle of cladding', or bekleidungsprinzip, in order to explain the successes of Israel's armored corps. The bekleidungsprinzip is not a military principle but a dictum of fashion, according to which the renunciation of individual affect in dress is presumed to coincide with the emergence of the qualitative advantages of the modern. With little or no explanation to substantiate the relation between dress and success in armored warfare, histories of this war have instead explained that the causes of a decisive victory may have to be found in the relation between uniforms and technical uniformity. This presupposition possesses an intellectual history, in the course of which war intellectuals repeatedly sought to reconcile what they themselves posed as a contradiction between agency and structure by identifying a proper relation between habit and habitus. Elaborated in a series of doctrinal debates concerning the proper relation of the Jew to the tank in the Israel Defense Forces – and in subsequent interpretations of those disputes – the bekleidung argument is more than a mere curiosity of military history. It points, instead, to a theodicy of conflict according to which a reification of this history's false premises presents itself to view in repeated images of their transcendence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Key representatives of the dialectical tradition, Hegel and Adorno conceived philosophy as a critical tool, directed both at the naive realism of ordinary reason and the more sophisticated realism of modern scientific discourse. For the two authors, philosophy's main task is to question received ideas and practices and to expose their underlying contradictions, thereby enabling meaningful forms of cultural and political change. But while for Hegel this procedure takes the form of a systematic enquiry, leading from a spurious to a true account of reality, Adorno rejects the idea that reason and reality can be reconciled. On the one hand, he praises Hegel for having developed a truly dialectical form of criticism, set into motion by the immanent unfolding of reality's intrinsic contradictions. On the other hand, he views Hegel's emphasis on systematic integration as a form of dogmatism, which must itself be criticized. Instead of a 'positive' or 'closed' dialectic, fuelled by the expectation of a final overarching synthesis, Adorno calls for a 'negative' or 'open' dialectic, radically averse to all forms of unification. In doing so, however, he is led to question the very limits of conceptual reason, leaving criticism vulnerable to new forms of attack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My new book, Exile, Statelessness, and Migration. Playing Chess With History From Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin, considers the intertwined lives and work of Jewish intellectuals as they make their escape from war-torn Europe into new countries. Although the group which I consider, including Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Judith Shklar, Albert Hirschman and Isaiah Berlin, have a unique profile as migrants because of their formidable education and intellectual capital, I argue that their lives are still exemplary for many of the dilemmas and risks faced by all migrants. In the reply to critics, I consider such issues as the intellectual relations between Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer; differences between Arendt's and Adorno's views of an interpretive social science; and why international law played such an important role in the imagination of Jewish intellectuals. A further question involves the generalizability of the experience of Jewish otherness in European culture. Liberal societies always designate some others as their constitutive exterior. How continuous is the experience of emigré Jewish intellectuals with the exclusion of ethnic and racial minorities in our societies? Finally, if the founding of the State of Israel has by no means resolved the problems of statelessness but re-created it for the Palestinian population, what kind of political stance should we assume vis-à-vis this reality today? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay discusses a significant shift in conceptualizing the notion of representation found in Alain Badiou's ontology and Jacques Rancière's aesthetics. From Heidegger to Deleuze, the artwork was able to express an ontological truth about the world on the condition that it does not represent it. Badiou's 'subtractive' approach to ontology and Rancière's redefinition of the modern aesthetic break with representation, however, suggest that there is nothing to express beyond the veil of representation. Instead, representation can only be counteracted by the occurrence of surplus representations that subvert the principles of the dominant regime of representation. The essay provides an understanding of this shift by reversing the Leibnizian conceptual metaphor Adorno used to describe the modern artwork. Unlike 'windowless monads', whose seclusion from the world enables them to convey an ontological truth, artworks as 'monadless windows' reframe the parameters of what is perceived as reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers Theodor W. Adorno's thesis of the 'liquidation of the individual' as a contribution to the critique of political economy insofar as it links structural economic imperatives of the capitalist order to transformations of consciousness and human conduct. For Adorno, such 'liquidation' amounts to not only the superfluity of bourgeois individuality as an anthropological type but also to the objective superfluity of actually living individuals. I develop Adorno's argument that the 'form and organization of labor' in capitalism produces these forms of superfluity by turning to Marx's critique of value with an emphasis on the logic of 'socially necessary labor-time.' My argument is that as long as society is enthralled to the ongoing self-valorization of value (i.e. capital), social reproduction makes 'socially necessary' the superfluity of individuality as well as actually-living human individuals. In short, the anthropological decomposition of the bourgeois individual and the generation of 'surplus populations' are expressions of the same contradiction: the necessity and superfluity of labor in capitalism. After illustrating some current expressions of this contradiction evident in the global 'crisis of work' – including the displacement and transformation of labor by automation and the massive growth of the 'global slums' – I suggest that further analysis of the temporal contradictions of the law of value evinces the conditions of an emancipated individual in a post-work society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adorno thought that substantive change was not just desirable but also possible. He also offered ideas about what positive change might look like on the basis of his determinate negation of damaged life. This paper begins by exploring Adorno’s ideas about possibility and determinate negation. It also discusses his views about the sort of changes that might be made. Given Adorno’s ideas about the possibility of change, the paper ends by challenging Fabian Freyenhagen’s reading of Adorno (in Adorno’s Practical Philosophy) as a methodological, epistemic, and substantive negativist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines an experimental genre of philosophical writing known as the Denkbild (‘thought-image’) practiced by members of the Frankfurt School to show how it is resurrected in the Augmented Reality installation of the artist-scholar Caitlin Fisher. It argues that Circle (2012) renews the Frankfurt School’s project of reaching to art to find a way for critical theory to bring about ‘a transformation of consciousness that could become a transformation of reality’. However, as a material and virtual artifact that produces a unique circuit of exchange, the digital artwork is able to provide a sharper picture of that reality, positing community as the context and goal of philosophical thinking. Through a complex sculpting of its form, content, and image of its own thoughts, Fisher’s Denkbild strives to create a fluid, ‘disconnected and non-binding’ form capable of building what Adorno described as a ‘shared philosophy from the standpoint of subjective experience’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Max Weber’s music writings (including his unfinished ‘Music Study’) have always mesmerized readers but their importance for analysing music as a cultural domain has only started to be acknowledged. This paper focuses on Weber’s approach to the inner ‘developmental momentum’ of the music domain through his study of the particular tension that pervaded Western harmonic music. By showing how composers, performers, instrument manufacturers, art recipients and the instruments themselves had to grapple with such tension, Weber was able to give an account of the inward connection to an art sphere and its structuring effects, whilst also bringing social, economic and technological factors to bear. In the current debate on the desirable ways for a renewed sociology of culture to develop, Weber’s music writings present us with a path at once precarious and bold, an account of inner connections and outer relations, which, against Weber himself, also provides bases for aesthetic judgement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The menace of pessimism in early critical theory is often criticized for being antithetical to Marxism’s emancipatory vision and/or implicitly conservative, a position memorably illustrated in Lukács’ appraisal of Adorno as a resident of Schopenhauer’s “Grand Hotel Abyss,” where one enjoys a nihilistically detached yet aesthetically pleasurable stay without mounting any real challenges to the miseries of the real world. This stance, reworked in numerous assessments of the first-generation Frankfurt School, presupposes that radicalism and pessimism are antagonistic positions. By rethinking early critical theory in light of discussions of “nonideal” alternatives to the ideal theories of liberal egalitarian thinkers, I argue that the Frankfurt School salvaged the prospects of emancipation precisely due to their view from the “Grand Hotel Abyss.” Through their gloomy reply to Marx in nonideal conditions, the Frankfurt School’s negative views paradoxically preserved the possibility for historical alternatives and serve two functions for social theory today: (1) to help bring the causes of injustice to consciousness and (2) to preserve a messianic hope. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The recent engagement with ‘post-secular’ thought has been especially pronounced within the critical tradition, in which messianic eschatology has been variously rehabilitated or reaffirmed. Amongst others, the thought of Theodor W. Adorno has recently been enlisted in this endeavour, culminating in a synthesis of critical theory and Jewish Gnosticism. This article argues that such a reading not only misrepresents Adorno’s thought, but also misses its critical contribution. In contrast to the project of revivifying the messianic in order to save critical theory from aimless nihilism, Adorno’s eschatology, inherited through a critical dialogue with Hegel, Marx and Benjamin, is a negative imprint, devoid of the theism, teleology and promises of salvation that characterise and secure other appropriations of the eschatological tradition. To recognise the originality and potency of Adorno’s critical reworking of eschatology, I argue, we must understand the theological role played by Auschwitz throughout his writings. Adorno constructs a constellation in which Auschwitz is the eschaton, the horrific fulfilment of the promise of history. In doing so, he reconfigures the ethical impulse of the critical tradition: critical theory derives its purpose and urgency not from the promise of a better world, but from the horror of the present one. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Even though its focus on emancipation purposefully intends to build upon the intellectual legacy of the Frankfurt School, critical security studies has thus far only interpreted the Frankfurt tradition in a circumscribed manner. That is to say, it selectively drew on some concepts from critical theory that are most associated with Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth. However, as a result of this emphasis, Booth and Wyn Jones – the original proponents of critical security studies – give too little attention to thinkers such as Theodor W. Adorno. This article demonstrates that a re-engagement with Adorno’s work not only provides a more complete appraisal of the Frankfurt School’s thought, but also might reinvigorate critical security studies as a ‘critical’ approach to security. It proposes that such a result can be achieved by employing Adorno’s ethics of resistance and through the development of the philosophical construct of a constellation of security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ziege’s book focuses primarily on the two main empirical studies carried out by Max Horkheimer’s Institute of Social Research during its exile in the United States in the 1940s: a relatively unknown and never-published study of anti-Semitism among American workers and the much better known, five-volume Studies in Prejudice. Ziege poses and successfully answers the question of why the Institute began to focus more on empirical studies and anti-Semitism in the 1940s. Her thorough archival research illuminates as never before the Institute’s relations to the main organizations that funded its ambitious empirical projects during this time: the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Labor Committee. She also provides the richest existing account of how the experience of American exile affected the Institute’s theoretical premises and empirical work. By distinguishing between the Institute’s ‘esoteric’ theoretical assumptions, which maintained a large degree of continuity with its earlier work, and a willingness to work at the ‘exoteric’ level with many scholars who didn’t share these assumptions, Ziege explains how the Institute made certain concessions to mainstream American academic culture without ever abandoning the radical intentions of Critical Theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Certain of Kant’s political essays suggest that the project of socio-political emancipation should be seen as a process of working ourselves out of affective attachments to pathological social relations. This aspect of Kant’s thinking is read through Marx’s materialist notion of commodity fetishism, which provides a paradigmatic approach to understanding the ways in which concrete forms of sociality either thwart or facilitate the process of emancipation. It is then suggested that Freud’s notion of the work of mourning can help to clarify the possibility of breaking with the fixated attachments that contribute to our own domination. In this light, the author considers the respective accounts of the relationship between Freudian theory and Kantian cosmopolitanism given by Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler in light of Theodor Adorno’s materialist account of working-through the past. Reading Freud with Adorno offers a more coherent clarification of the concrete conditions of possibility of cosmopolitanism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article employs music to describe the dynamics of Central European identity at the turn of the 20th century. Conceptually, the analysis is based on the notion of cultural resonance and the distinction between political territories, which isolate identity, and cultural landscapes which let it escape. This theoretical understanding is derived from the acoustic philosophy and musical practice of two Central European composers, Leoš Janáček and Béla Bartók. Exemplified here is artistic ‘extra-territorial’ identity, which is indeed how Theodor Adorno at one point referred to the ‘peripheral’ sound coming from the region. This process of identity construction amplifies paradoxical middle spaces, which Jean Luc Nancy describes evocatively as a cultural mêlée. The vitality of cultural resonance is fuelled by this primary contact with mundane reality and the ‘navigational hesitation’ underpinning identity and its many trajectories. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The concept of autonomy has had a central place in the German aesthetic tradition since the eighteenth century, specifically, after Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment. Although Kant denied that aesthetic judgments yield cognitive truth, aesthetic judgments are autonomous in that they do not rely on or presuppose a concern with the object's purpose, utility, or even its actual existence. For Theodor Adorno, the autonomy of art lies in the work of art, in its production, not specifically in the aesthetic judgments of the subject. This article shows that by shifting autonomy from aesthetic judgments to art production, Adorno effectively makes art the reservoir for human freedom. Although this point is often eluded to in Adorno scholarship by individuals such as Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart, it is often passed over without additional explanation and discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article describes the central role played by conceptions of truth in critical IR scholarship. Two broad positions are identified. Firstly, despite their differences, Critical Theorists and post-structuralists understand truth in intersubjective terms, and its political significance as arising from its relationship to the norms and practices constitutive of political reality. In contrast, Critical Realists understand truth in terms of the cognitive relationship of subjects with an independent objective reality, and its significance as arising from the importance of accurate knowledge of that reality. The article suggests that each of these positions blocks the legitimate insights of the other. It argues that a way out of the resultant impasse can be found in Theodor Adorno’s theory of truth, in which a concern with the primacy of the objective is coupled with an insistence on the connection between truth and human needs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the cultural meanings of recent revivals in Yiddish music in the USA and central Europe. It does this with reference to Adorno’s critique of lyrical celebration of the past as a means of forgetting. It examines the criticisms that recent ‘Jewish’ cultural revivals are kitsch forms of unreflective nostalgia and considers the complexity of meanings here. It then explores the ways in which klezmer might be an aural form of memory and suggests that revivals can represent gateways into personal and collective engagement with the past. It further argues that experimental hybrid forms of new klezmer potentially open new spaces of remembrance and expressions of Jewish identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzing Eros and Civilization, in this article I argue that Marcuse is incapable of offering an account of the empirical dynamics that may lead to the social change he envisions, and that his appeal to the benefits of automatism is blind to its negative effects. I then claim that Marcuse's vision of the good life as centered on libidinal self-realization, if actualized, would threaten the freedom of individuals and potentially undermine their sense of self-integrity. Comparing Marcuse's position with that of Adorno, I argue that the former fails to take temporality and transience properly into account. Unlike Adorno, Marcuse has no genuine appreciation of the need for mourning. Instead, Marcuse's concept of primary narcissism, which is meant to represent the gist of his utopian vision, leads him to recommend an essentially melancholic position. I finally argue that political action requires a stronger ego-formation than what Marcuse's conception allows for. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Culture is considered as a key term in anthropology, now in critical mode, and to be worked through powerful tropes that lead to issues in politics, interpretation, translation, stereotype and racism. Anthropology is described as a cultural system itself, with a large supporting institutional apparatus, not unlike the culture industry as critiqued by Adorno and the Frankfurt School. The high mass culture/high culture distinction is considered and some distortions explained (away). Street culture and culture as (development) resource are evaluated, leading to an assessment of culture as souvenirs, trinkets and the ephemera of tourism as a modern commodity fetish. How this measures up to political struggles is again considered in the light of work by critics such as Fanon and those engaged with anti-imperialist struggles worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I re-examine Adorno's and Horkheimer's account of the disenchantment of nature in Dialectic of Enlightenment. I argue that they identify disenchantment as a historical process whereby we have come to find natural things meaningless and completely intelligible. However, Adorno and Horkheimer believe that modernity not only rests on disenchantment but also tends to re-enchant nature, because it encourages us to think that its institutions derive from, and are anticipated and prefigured by, nature. I argue that Adorno's Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory show how constellations and artworks generate an alternative form of re-enchantment which is critical of modernity and its domination of nature. This form of re-enchantment finds natural beings to be mysteriously meaningful because they embody histories of immeasurable suffering. This experience engenders guilt and antipathy to human domination over nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The automobile as an object of consumption, carrying meanings and identities, has evolved through three ages during the 20th century, each characterized by a peculiar cultural logic. In the age of class distinction, the car served as a status symbol of the sort theorized by Pierre Bourdieu. It marked out differences between classes, while simultaneously misrecognizing and legitimating their origins. In the age of mass individuality, the car was a reified consumer commodity, as postulated by the theory of the Frankfurt School. It served to obscure qualitative class differences underneath the illusion of mass individuality, in which consumers varied by the quantity of desired automotive traits they could afford. In the age of subcultural difference, the car expressed the different identities of lifestyle groups in a leveled and pluralized consumer culture, as theorized by postmodernism. The extension of the cultural logic of each of these automotive ages ultimately contradicted its configuration, and pushed the car forward to the next age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay engages in a comparative analysis of Theodor W. Adorno and Hannah Arendt. It does so by situating both thinkers in terms of their respective Auseinandersetzungen with the fundamental ontology of Martin Heidegger. While Heidegger seeks to engage in a Destruktion of the opposition between time and being, Adorno and Arendt seek to understand this relation critically in terms of the concept of 'natural history'. For both, a reading of Kant's Third Critique becomes the indispensable means by which it is possible to locate a path pointing beyond the chiasmic structure of natural history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I identify specific historical trajectories that are directly contingent upon the deployment and use of new media, but that are actually hidden by a focus on the purely technological. They are: the increasingly abstract and alienated nature of economic value; the subsumption of all labour – material and intellectual – under systemic capital; and the convergence of formerly distinct spheres of analysis – the spheres of production, circulation and consumption. This article examines the implications of the knowledge economy from an historical materialist perspective. I synthesize the systemic views of Marx (1846 [1972], 1875 [1972], 1970, 1973, 1976, 1978, 1981), Adorno (1951 [1974], 1964 [1973], 1991), Horkheimer and Adorno (1947 [1998]), Jarvis (1998) and Bourdieu (1991, 1998) to argue for a language-focused approach to new media research and suggest aspects of Marxist thought which might be useful in researching emergent socio-technical domains. I also identify specific categories in the Marxist tradition which may no longer be analytically useful for researching the effects of new media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A critical retrospective of 'The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas' Radio Addresses' sheds new light on an often underplayed tension in Adorno's thought concerning the capacity of mass culture to express resistance against domination. In 'Thomas' Adorno moved beyond denouncing mass culture as 'culture industry' by approach ing early Christian right radio in a manner consistent (initially) with his defense of the autonomous dimension of culture in general. At the same time, 'Thomas' accomplished groundwork for the culture industry theory, and this theory ultimately guided the study's conclusions. This critique confirms Adorno's ambivalence regarding the negative capabilities of mass culture while suggesting a new way to analyze the contemporary Christian right. This approach, which I illustrate, draws upon both the culture industry theory and a modified version of Adorno's method of immanent, dialectical criticism to identify ideological elements as well as moments of resistance in Christian right radio today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Habermas' claim to provide a critique of reification by means other than marxian ones requires him to transpose not only meaningful freedom, but also a dialectical view of social becoming, into terms com patible with linguistically mediated intersubjectivity. In order to remain critical of reification as colonization, he thus finds himself committed to the view that colonization is the outcome of the development of two perma nent and competing principles of sociation. Compelled to draw upon the resources both of the dialectical tradition and of transcendental pragmat ics, the theory of communicative action is thereby constrained to remain both quasi-dialectical and quasi-transcendental. This founding gesture generates, in turn, at least two unavoidable aporias. The first can be under stood as a radical and structural deficit for critical judgement concerning the interplay among the decentered cognitive value spheres. The second is an inversion of the apparent claim of accessing a 'reason beyond reason' of which he accuses Horkheimer and Adorno. It shows up in the logical and epistemological problems surrounding the relation between performative contradiction and the status of his theory. Taken together, these theories signal that the theory of communicative action, rather than amounting to a transcendence of earlier approaches to reification, is simply a parallel, but one which becomes less than fully two-dimensional. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Adorno and Benjamin offer us an aesthetic concept, that of aura. The analysis of this has tended to circumnavigate the concept, that is, it has examined the historical dimension to aura, or turned to the texts of Adorno and Benjamin with a view to finding discrepancies between their theses. However, the important conceptual detail has not been explored with suf ficient rigour. My question is a simple one: what is aura? How do we piece together its various features such as 'a feeling of distance', 'pointing beyond a work's givenness' and 'a capacity to look back'? I provide a more in-depth and thoroughgoing analysis of these qualities and their interrelation than has so far been offered. I also argue for the relevance of aura to modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]