ABSTRACT
Art, in its turn, embarked on the Sisyphean task of seeking mimetic forms of resemblance and affiliative listening that once belonged to magic, but this time, in a world already dominated by equivalences, and thus, by self-eroding clichés about bourgeois science, technology, and the other world of magical indigeneity. To invoke one last time the Dialectic of Enlightenment , Adorno and Horkheimer narrate the relation of art to science as the divided forms of human consciousness, where both originated in the pre-modern unity of a magical world to then fall out with each other, and the world itself. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno argues that while this is, in fact, the actuality of capital’s universal drive, as it moves across the very inequities in cultural and economic accumulation that it creates, it need not be the only way forward. The temporal stretch of Adorno’s passage, encompassing “telluric” and orbital time into the micro-figure of little islands of human waste, is stirring.
