ABSTRACT

In Negative Dialectics, Theodor Adorno maps out one of the central questions in Frankfurt School critical thought. In fact, it is not just “mapped out” as such but looked squarely in the face. It is perhaps the most difficult, most mysterious and most alluring question in the vast body of Frankfurt criticism. Variants of this question appear wherever one cares to searchrecurring, refracting, echoing, haunting. Like each of Thomas Pynchon’s six novels, it is a question indelibly marked by both the catastrophic destruction of Europe during World War Two and the rise of the “postindustrial” consumer society that follows.3 More obliquely, but of equal importance for my purposes here, it is also a question that testifies to the “death” of the historical avant-garde art forms,4 to the absorption of avant-garde art into an all-pervasive “culture industry”5 or what is now generally understood as the globalized mass media. It is a question that signposts the outer limits of Frankfurt critical thinking but at the same time ensures the ongoing legacy of the dialectics project, even at the point of its exhaustion. All of these issues will become clearer over the course of this introduction and, I hope, over the course of this study as a whole. Together, they cohere into a kind of temporary structure, a launch pad, a crossroads, a place of departure and return. For now though, still painting in very broad strokes, here comes that Big Question.