ABSTRACT
At the heart of Adorno’s critique of popular culture is his insistence on linking truth-value in culture to a particular mode of response in the face of what he and others perceive as the crisis of modernity. The alienation that divides subject from object can only be overcome, according to this view, by preserving the dynamic and expressive connection between the two. The identity of individual and society was central to bourgeois ideology in the early nineteenth century. The expressive link between ‘subject and object’, ‘individual and society’, was presupposed and reflected in the very structuration of art works – the structuration of a Balzac novel or a Beethoven symphony. The advent of monopoly capitalism had shattered the illusion that this positive link was real, that the individual could truly see her life reflected in the larger social reality. The resulting alienation provoked the reactions of what we now call the modernist avant-garde.
