While critical commentary on Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944... more While critical commentary on Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) has been various and divided, few have questioned its seismic importance for the development of Western Marxism. Strangely though, in view both of the recognized importance of this text and the expanding contemporary appreciation of Adorno’s work, Dialectic of Enlightenment has regularly generated negative commentary and critical animosity. In view of this critical context, the aim of this paper is not to mount a global defense of Dialectic of Enlightenment, but rather to reconstruct certain parameters of the book that are missed in the common criticism that Horkheimer and Adorno relinquish the project of enlightenment and lapse into indeterminate ahistorical generalization. I argue that the mutation in Marxist thought in Dialectic of Enlightenment, to be properly understood, needs to be seen as intrinsically involved with the particular linguistic turn developed in this text. The revised project of enlightenment it elaborates hinges on a reflection on the language of the epic and the novel and a series of textual operations that are central to this reflection: reporting, description, stylization, parody, reading. In this this way Dialectic of Enlightenment anticipates Adorno’s later thinking about and through the language of the epic and the novel, which plays a fundamental if generally underappreciated role in his work. These textual operations become intrinsic to a revised conception of what it means to think historically, to imagine historical difference and progression, in the wake of the purported ruin of systems of enlightenment thought, after the demise of any margin of critical difference offered by cultural criticism and artistic reflection, and after the foundering of the revolutionary aspirations of the European left. This reconception of enlightenment thought in Dialectic of Enlightenment follows from the claim that intrinsic social contradiction is no longer operative as a driver of historical development, and a corresponding recognition that forms of thought predicated on negation and contradiction have lost their critical purchase. Where received modes of Marxist and Hegelian dialectic may have been appropriate for an ostensibly liberal phase of capitalism, in which social contradictions propel historical development, in the ruins of this historical phase, thought is challenged to develop modes that integrate the manifest irrationality of its social context. This paper attempts to describe certain of these modes in its account of various textual operations developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment, operations that contribute to this text’s reimagining of what thought might look like in the middle of the twentieth century.
It is an often told story: the period of modernism corresponds to an exhaustion of nineteenth-cen... more It is an often told story: the period of modernism corresponds to an exhaustion of nineteenth-century models of narrative development, temporal progression, and historical continuity. In contradistinction to such models, modernism in literature and culture more generally has been associated with temporal interruption, immobilization, or spatial form. As exemplary of this tendency of modernist culture, one might cite Stephane Mallarme's Preface to "Un Coup de des" (1895), which states "Everything happens by a shortcut, hypothetically; storytelling [le recit] is avoided" (105), or Walter Benjamin's unfinished Arcades Project: "history decays into images, not into stories" (476). Developing from this broad picture, critical descriptions of the novel in this period see modernist fiction as marking the obsolescence of nineteenth-century developmental forms, most prominently the Bildungsroman,1 and accounts of Beckett's fiction have echoed this alignment of literary modernism. In Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel, Patrick Bixby writes, "Beckett rewrites the plot of the Bildungsroman so that narrative is directed less toward successful individual development and social assimilation than toward the cancellation of these terms, which are written even further into dissolution and disintegration" (8).2Jed Esty has recently provided a critical counter-narrative, arguing that modernist fiction, and in particular the modernist "meta- bildungsroman," develops a critical perspective on nineteenth-century developmental thought and its literary forms, even as it retains elements of them: "one way to conceptualize the historical specificity of modernism itself, in fact, is to locate it at the dialectical switchpoint between residual nineteenth-century narratives of global development and emergent twentieth-century critiques of universalist and evolutionary thought" (35). This intervention usefully places on the critical agenda the question of how to account for modernism's ongoing engagement with diachronic forms, departing from (or calling for a more nuanced account of) the critical narrative of modernism as antidevelopmental, or invested in spatial or imagistic models. But a lingering problem here is the motivation for modernist fiction's involvement with this strand of nineteenth-century thought. Esty's principal response to this question is that the ideology of developmental historicism retains its purchase more generally in culture, economics, and politics, and the modernist anti-developmental metabildungsroman registers this situation. One danger here, however, is the reduction of inherited developmental forms to the status of ideology or false consciousness.3An alternative approach is to foreground that such forms are not just ideological, but also involve normative or emancipatory impulses, both in their nineteenth-century and modernist versions, and this move opens up another avenue to address the problem of why developmental paradigms retain their currency for modernism. Pursuing this line of thought, the central claim in the following reading of Beckett and Theodor Adorno is that modernist narrative might be construed as ambiguously perpetuating normative impulses that structure nineteenthcentury developmental thought and the novel form - for an accommodation between the subjective organization of experience and the boundlessness of capitalist modernity, between meaningful forms and modernity's denial of such forms. To say this much is not to make a claim for a stable mechanism of subject formation, or to presume a critical autonomy or distance for cultural forms. Rather, an underlying proposition of my discussion is that the literary reflections of Beckett and Adorno proceed through the reification, or what Adorno calls "neutralization," of cultural forms. For this strain of modernism, the possibility of aesthetic autonomy and critical distance becomes a problem inscribed within the language and interpretive dilemmas of these texts. …
This paper argues that the conception of music as intrinsically other than phe-nomena or represen... more This paper argues that the conception of music as intrinsically other than phe-nomena or representation that Beckett derives from his reading of Schopenhauer and Proust centrally informs his undermining of the reconciliatory capacities of literary form. Beckett's insistence on this idea of music in ...
Reading the Postwar Future: Textual Turning Points from 1944, Edited by Kirrily Freeman and John Munro, 2019
While critical commentary on Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944... more While critical commentary on Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) has been various and divided, few have questioned its seismic importance for the development of Western Marxism. Strangely though, in view both of the recognized importance of this text and the expanding contemporary appreciation of Adorno’s work, Dialectic of Enlightenment has regularly generated negative commentary and critical animosity. In view of this critical context, the aim of this paper is not to mount a global defense of Dialectic of Enlightenment, but rather to reconstruct certain parameters of the book that are missed in the common criticism that Horkheimer and Adorno relinquish the project of enlightenment and lapse into indeterminate ahistorical generalization. I argue that the mutation in Marxist thought in Dialectic of Enlightenment, to be properly understood, needs to be seen as intrinsically involved with the particular linguistic turn developed in this text. The revised project of enlightenment it elaborates hinges on a reflection on the language of the epic and the novel and a series of textual operations that are central to this reflection: reporting, description, stylization, parody, reading. In this this way Dialectic of Enlightenment anticipates Adorno’s later thinking about and through the language of the epic and the novel, which plays a fundamental if generally underappreciated role in his work. These textual operations become intrinsic to a revised conception of what it means to think historically, to imagine historical difference and progression, in the wake of the purported ruin of systems of enlightenment thought, after the demise of any margin of critical difference offered by cultural criticism and artistic reflection, and after the foundering of the revolutionary aspirations of the European left. This reconception of enlightenment thought in Dialectic of Enlightenment follows from the claim that intrinsic social contradiction is no longer operative as a driver of historical development, and a corresponding recognition that forms of thought predicated on negation and contradiction have lost their critical purchase. Where received modes of Marxist and Hegelian dialectic may have been appropriate for an ostensibly liberal phase of capitalism, in which social contradictions propel historical development, in the ruins of this historical phase, thought is challenged to develop modes that integrate the manifest irrationality of its social context. This paper attempts to describe certain of these modes in its account of various textual operations developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment, operations that contribute to this text’s reimagining of what thought might look like in the middle of the twentieth century.
Philosophy in the Condition of Modernism, Edited by Ana Falcato and Antonio Cardiello , 2018
This paper argues that thinking through the problem of apparently excessive or purposeless descri... more This paper argues that thinking through the problem of apparently excessive or purposeless description in the epic and the novel provides a path for Marxist literary theory to negotiate perceived impasses of philosophy. More specifically, I claim that Theodor Adorno’s distinctive approach to epic and novelistic language allows him to gesture beyond the scenario of the absent totality and representational failure that has oriented much recent critical work on modernism. The paper thus frames Adorno’s reflections on epic and novelistic language as intrinsic to a linguistic reorientation of philosophy that implicitly responds to Georg Lukács’s seminal account of the antinomies of bourgeoise thought. Certain underlying motivations of this strand of Adorno’s work come into focus once we register its connections with Walter Benjamin’s linguistic turn. As with Benjamin’s linguistic reorientation of philosophy, Adorno’s account of epic and novelistic language is invested in developing a more expansive understanding of knowledge and experience—that is, beyond the overly circumscribed conception of knowledge and experience that undergirds accounts of the absent totality descending from Lukács.
The Contemporaneity of Modernism: Literature, Media, Culture , 2016
At a juncture in which art and culture are saturated with the forces of commodificat... more At a juncture in which art and culture are saturated with the forces of commodification, this book argues that problems, forms, and positions that defined modernism are crucially relevant to the condition of contemporary art and culture. The volume is attuned to the central concerns of recent scholarship on modernism and contemporary culture: the problems of aesthetic autonomy and the specific role of art in preserving a critical standpoint for cultural production; the relationship between politics and the category of the aesthetic; the problems of temporality and contemporaneity; literary transnationalism; and the questions of medium and medium specificity. Ranging across art forms, mediums, disciplines, and geographical locations, essays address the foundational questions that fuse modernism and the contemporary moment: What is art? What is the relation between art and the economy? How do art and technology interpenetrate and trans- form each other? What is modernism’s logic of time and contemporaneity, and how might it speak to the problem of thinking genuine novelty, or the possibility of an alternative to the current stage of neoliberal capitalism? What is modernism, and what is its history? The book is thus committed to revising our understanding of what modernism was in its earlier instantiations, and in accounting for the current moment, addressing the problems raised by modernism’s afterlives and reverberations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The volume includes essays that consider literature, sociology, philosophy, visual art, music, architecture, digital culture, tele- vision, and other artistic media. It synthesizes the most recent thinking on modernism and contemporary culture and presents a compelling case for what happens to literature, art, and culture in the wake of the exhaustion of postmodernism. This book will be of interest to those studying literature, visual art, media studies, architecture, literary theory, modernism, and twentieth-century and contemporary culture more generally.
This essay argues that Theodor Adorno's reflections on the novel form respond to a problem that i... more This essay argues that Theodor Adorno's reflections on the novel form respond to a problem that is focused in his commentaries on the cinema: how to develop forms of aesthetic rationality at a historical moment in which medium-specific aesthetic reflection may be obsolete. Adorno's commentaries on novelistic and filmic language register this historical situation of art. At the same time, this line of thought serves a crucial underlying interest of Adorno's aesthetic theory-to maintain art's thought of uneven development, its vanishing distinction from the technological forms of its social context. FULL TEXT In The Language of New Media (2001), Lev Manovich calls attention to an oddity in the development of computer-generated images in film. These images, in films such as Terminator 2 (1991) and Jurassic Park (1993), initially appeared "too perfect" or "too real." In order to appear like photographic images, the computer graphics of these films needed to be "degraded": "their perfection had to be diluted to match the imperfection of film's graininess" (201-02). This effect was achieved, for example, by reducing the resolution of the computer-generated images or softening their edges through computer-generated algorithms, procedures that allowed the images to blend with film footage. The unwelcome excessive detail and sharpness of computer-generated images, and the attempt to overcome this quality, suggest an ambiguous regression in technical development, a movement that proceeds in opposing directions simultaneously, forward and backward: at once a technological advancement and an apparent regression to the "imperfection" or lack of technical mastery that marked an earlier stage of development. Framed in these terms, this moment echoes an earlier juncture in the history of thinking about film, one that also involved a discrepancy between the demands of cinematic work and the contemporary state of technological advancement. In his 1966 commentary "Transparencies on Film," Theodor Adorno notes the particular situation of cinema at the moment he is writing, in which "awkward and unprofessional cinema" may play a certain role: While in autonomous art anything lagging behind the already established technical standard does not rate, vis-à-vis the culture industry-whose standard excludes everything but the predigested and the already integrated, just as the cosmetic trade eliminates facial wrinkles-works which have not completely mastered their technique, conveying as a result something consolingly uncontrolled and accidental, have a liberating quality. (199) Adorno's interest in film aesthetics is usually associated with his attempt to think about cinematic construction or montage, which would run counter to the semblance of mimetic immediacy in the filmic medium. In the passage cited above, however, we get a different scenario: the construction of film as art is apparently seen as involving not an imminent progress or mastery of cinematic technique, but rather a relaxing or deterioration of such technique.
This article situates Beckett's trilogy in relationship to theoretical explorations of the role o... more This article situates Beckett's trilogy in relationship to theoretical explorations of the role of biographical and autobiographical form in the history of the novel and literary modernism. While modernist literature has been read as marking the collapse of nineteenth-century models of narrative development, the work of Beckett and Theodor Adorno suggests an alternative scenario, according to which modernism becomes invested in iterative modes of diachronic form that perpetuate the normative aspirations of nineteenth-century developmental thought.
While critical commentary on Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944... more While critical commentary on Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) has been various and divided, few have questioned its seismic importance for the development of Western Marxism. Strangely though, in view both of the recognized importance of this text and the expanding contemporary appreciation of Adorno’s work, Dialectic of Enlightenment has regularly generated negative commentary and critical animosity. In view of this critical context, the aim of this paper is not to mount a global defense of Dialectic of Enlightenment, but rather to reconstruct certain parameters of the book that are missed in the common criticism that Horkheimer and Adorno relinquish the project of enlightenment and lapse into indeterminate ahistorical generalization. I argue that the mutation in Marxist thought in Dialectic of Enlightenment, to be properly understood, needs to be seen as intrinsically involved with the particular linguistic turn developed in this text. The revised project of enlightenment it elaborates hinges on a reflection on the language of the epic and the novel and a series of textual operations that are central to this reflection: reporting, description, stylization, parody, reading. In this this way Dialectic of Enlightenment anticipates Adorno’s later thinking about and through the language of the epic and the novel, which plays a fundamental if generally underappreciated role in his work. These textual operations become intrinsic to a revised conception of what it means to think historically, to imagine historical difference and progression, in the wake of the purported ruin of systems of enlightenment thought, after the demise of any margin of critical difference offered by cultural criticism and artistic reflection, and after the foundering of the revolutionary aspirations of the European left. This reconception of enlightenment thought in Dialectic of Enlightenment follows from the claim that intrinsic social contradiction is no longer operative as a driver of historical development, and a corresponding recognition that forms of thought predicated on negation and contradiction have lost their critical purchase. Where received modes of Marxist and Hegelian dialectic may have been appropriate for an ostensibly liberal phase of capitalism, in which social contradictions propel historical development, in the ruins of this historical phase, thought is challenged to develop modes that integrate the manifest irrationality of its social context. This paper attempts to describe certain of these modes in its account of various textual operations developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment, operations that contribute to this text’s reimagining of what thought might look like in the middle of the twentieth century.
It is an often told story: the period of modernism corresponds to an exhaustion of nineteenth-cen... more It is an often told story: the period of modernism corresponds to an exhaustion of nineteenth-century models of narrative development, temporal progression, and historical continuity. In contradistinction to such models, modernism in literature and culture more generally has been associated with temporal interruption, immobilization, or spatial form. As exemplary of this tendency of modernist culture, one might cite Stephane Mallarme's Preface to "Un Coup de des" (1895), which states "Everything happens by a shortcut, hypothetically; storytelling [le recit] is avoided" (105), or Walter Benjamin's unfinished Arcades Project: "history decays into images, not into stories" (476). Developing from this broad picture, critical descriptions of the novel in this period see modernist fiction as marking the obsolescence of nineteenth-century developmental forms, most prominently the Bildungsroman,1 and accounts of Beckett's fiction have echoed this alignment of literary modernism. In Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel, Patrick Bixby writes, "Beckett rewrites the plot of the Bildungsroman so that narrative is directed less toward successful individual development and social assimilation than toward the cancellation of these terms, which are written even further into dissolution and disintegration" (8).2Jed Esty has recently provided a critical counter-narrative, arguing that modernist fiction, and in particular the modernist "meta- bildungsroman," develops a critical perspective on nineteenth-century developmental thought and its literary forms, even as it retains elements of them: "one way to conceptualize the historical specificity of modernism itself, in fact, is to locate it at the dialectical switchpoint between residual nineteenth-century narratives of global development and emergent twentieth-century critiques of universalist and evolutionary thought" (35). This intervention usefully places on the critical agenda the question of how to account for modernism's ongoing engagement with diachronic forms, departing from (or calling for a more nuanced account of) the critical narrative of modernism as antidevelopmental, or invested in spatial or imagistic models. But a lingering problem here is the motivation for modernist fiction's involvement with this strand of nineteenth-century thought. Esty's principal response to this question is that the ideology of developmental historicism retains its purchase more generally in culture, economics, and politics, and the modernist anti-developmental metabildungsroman registers this situation. One danger here, however, is the reduction of inherited developmental forms to the status of ideology or false consciousness.3An alternative approach is to foreground that such forms are not just ideological, but also involve normative or emancipatory impulses, both in their nineteenth-century and modernist versions, and this move opens up another avenue to address the problem of why developmental paradigms retain their currency for modernism. Pursuing this line of thought, the central claim in the following reading of Beckett and Theodor Adorno is that modernist narrative might be construed as ambiguously perpetuating normative impulses that structure nineteenthcentury developmental thought and the novel form - for an accommodation between the subjective organization of experience and the boundlessness of capitalist modernity, between meaningful forms and modernity's denial of such forms. To say this much is not to make a claim for a stable mechanism of subject formation, or to presume a critical autonomy or distance for cultural forms. Rather, an underlying proposition of my discussion is that the literary reflections of Beckett and Adorno proceed through the reification, or what Adorno calls "neutralization," of cultural forms. For this strain of modernism, the possibility of aesthetic autonomy and critical distance becomes a problem inscribed within the language and interpretive dilemmas of these texts. …
This paper argues that the conception of music as intrinsically other than phe-nomena or represen... more This paper argues that the conception of music as intrinsically other than phe-nomena or representation that Beckett derives from his reading of Schopenhauer and Proust centrally informs his undermining of the reconciliatory capacities of literary form. Beckett's insistence on this idea of music in ...
Reading the Postwar Future: Textual Turning Points from 1944, Edited by Kirrily Freeman and John Munro, 2019
While critical commentary on Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944... more While critical commentary on Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) has been various and divided, few have questioned its seismic importance for the development of Western Marxism. Strangely though, in view both of the recognized importance of this text and the expanding contemporary appreciation of Adorno’s work, Dialectic of Enlightenment has regularly generated negative commentary and critical animosity. In view of this critical context, the aim of this paper is not to mount a global defense of Dialectic of Enlightenment, but rather to reconstruct certain parameters of the book that are missed in the common criticism that Horkheimer and Adorno relinquish the project of enlightenment and lapse into indeterminate ahistorical generalization. I argue that the mutation in Marxist thought in Dialectic of Enlightenment, to be properly understood, needs to be seen as intrinsically involved with the particular linguistic turn developed in this text. The revised project of enlightenment it elaborates hinges on a reflection on the language of the epic and the novel and a series of textual operations that are central to this reflection: reporting, description, stylization, parody, reading. In this this way Dialectic of Enlightenment anticipates Adorno’s later thinking about and through the language of the epic and the novel, which plays a fundamental if generally underappreciated role in his work. These textual operations become intrinsic to a revised conception of what it means to think historically, to imagine historical difference and progression, in the wake of the purported ruin of systems of enlightenment thought, after the demise of any margin of critical difference offered by cultural criticism and artistic reflection, and after the foundering of the revolutionary aspirations of the European left. This reconception of enlightenment thought in Dialectic of Enlightenment follows from the claim that intrinsic social contradiction is no longer operative as a driver of historical development, and a corresponding recognition that forms of thought predicated on negation and contradiction have lost their critical purchase. Where received modes of Marxist and Hegelian dialectic may have been appropriate for an ostensibly liberal phase of capitalism, in which social contradictions propel historical development, in the ruins of this historical phase, thought is challenged to develop modes that integrate the manifest irrationality of its social context. This paper attempts to describe certain of these modes in its account of various textual operations developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment, operations that contribute to this text’s reimagining of what thought might look like in the middle of the twentieth century.
Philosophy in the Condition of Modernism, Edited by Ana Falcato and Antonio Cardiello , 2018
This paper argues that thinking through the problem of apparently excessive or purposeless descri... more This paper argues that thinking through the problem of apparently excessive or purposeless description in the epic and the novel provides a path for Marxist literary theory to negotiate perceived impasses of philosophy. More specifically, I claim that Theodor Adorno’s distinctive approach to epic and novelistic language allows him to gesture beyond the scenario of the absent totality and representational failure that has oriented much recent critical work on modernism. The paper thus frames Adorno’s reflections on epic and novelistic language as intrinsic to a linguistic reorientation of philosophy that implicitly responds to Georg Lukács’s seminal account of the antinomies of bourgeoise thought. Certain underlying motivations of this strand of Adorno’s work come into focus once we register its connections with Walter Benjamin’s linguistic turn. As with Benjamin’s linguistic reorientation of philosophy, Adorno’s account of epic and novelistic language is invested in developing a more expansive understanding of knowledge and experience—that is, beyond the overly circumscribed conception of knowledge and experience that undergirds accounts of the absent totality descending from Lukács.
The Contemporaneity of Modernism: Literature, Media, Culture , 2016
At a juncture in which art and culture are saturated with the forces of commodificat... more At a juncture in which art and culture are saturated with the forces of commodification, this book argues that problems, forms, and positions that defined modernism are crucially relevant to the condition of contemporary art and culture. The volume is attuned to the central concerns of recent scholarship on modernism and contemporary culture: the problems of aesthetic autonomy and the specific role of art in preserving a critical standpoint for cultural production; the relationship between politics and the category of the aesthetic; the problems of temporality and contemporaneity; literary transnationalism; and the questions of medium and medium specificity. Ranging across art forms, mediums, disciplines, and geographical locations, essays address the foundational questions that fuse modernism and the contemporary moment: What is art? What is the relation between art and the economy? How do art and technology interpenetrate and trans- form each other? What is modernism’s logic of time and contemporaneity, and how might it speak to the problem of thinking genuine novelty, or the possibility of an alternative to the current stage of neoliberal capitalism? What is modernism, and what is its history? The book is thus committed to revising our understanding of what modernism was in its earlier instantiations, and in accounting for the current moment, addressing the problems raised by modernism’s afterlives and reverberations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The volume includes essays that consider literature, sociology, philosophy, visual art, music, architecture, digital culture, tele- vision, and other artistic media. It synthesizes the most recent thinking on modernism and contemporary culture and presents a compelling case for what happens to literature, art, and culture in the wake of the exhaustion of postmodernism. This book will be of interest to those studying literature, visual art, media studies, architecture, literary theory, modernism, and twentieth-century and contemporary culture more generally.
This essay argues that Theodor Adorno's reflections on the novel form respond to a problem that i... more This essay argues that Theodor Adorno's reflections on the novel form respond to a problem that is focused in his commentaries on the cinema: how to develop forms of aesthetic rationality at a historical moment in which medium-specific aesthetic reflection may be obsolete. Adorno's commentaries on novelistic and filmic language register this historical situation of art. At the same time, this line of thought serves a crucial underlying interest of Adorno's aesthetic theory-to maintain art's thought of uneven development, its vanishing distinction from the technological forms of its social context. FULL TEXT In The Language of New Media (2001), Lev Manovich calls attention to an oddity in the development of computer-generated images in film. These images, in films such as Terminator 2 (1991) and Jurassic Park (1993), initially appeared "too perfect" or "too real." In order to appear like photographic images, the computer graphics of these films needed to be "degraded": "their perfection had to be diluted to match the imperfection of film's graininess" (201-02). This effect was achieved, for example, by reducing the resolution of the computer-generated images or softening their edges through computer-generated algorithms, procedures that allowed the images to blend with film footage. The unwelcome excessive detail and sharpness of computer-generated images, and the attempt to overcome this quality, suggest an ambiguous regression in technical development, a movement that proceeds in opposing directions simultaneously, forward and backward: at once a technological advancement and an apparent regression to the "imperfection" or lack of technical mastery that marked an earlier stage of development. Framed in these terms, this moment echoes an earlier juncture in the history of thinking about film, one that also involved a discrepancy between the demands of cinematic work and the contemporary state of technological advancement. In his 1966 commentary "Transparencies on Film," Theodor Adorno notes the particular situation of cinema at the moment he is writing, in which "awkward and unprofessional cinema" may play a certain role: While in autonomous art anything lagging behind the already established technical standard does not rate, vis-à-vis the culture industry-whose standard excludes everything but the predigested and the already integrated, just as the cosmetic trade eliminates facial wrinkles-works which have not completely mastered their technique, conveying as a result something consolingly uncontrolled and accidental, have a liberating quality. (199) Adorno's interest in film aesthetics is usually associated with his attempt to think about cinematic construction or montage, which would run counter to the semblance of mimetic immediacy in the filmic medium. In the passage cited above, however, we get a different scenario: the construction of film as art is apparently seen as involving not an imminent progress or mastery of cinematic technique, but rather a relaxing or deterioration of such technique.
This article situates Beckett's trilogy in relationship to theoretical explorations of the role o... more This article situates Beckett's trilogy in relationship to theoretical explorations of the role of biographical and autobiographical form in the history of the novel and literary modernism. While modernist literature has been read as marking the collapse of nineteenth-century models of narrative development, the work of Beckett and Theodor Adorno suggests an alternative scenario, according to which modernism becomes invested in iterative modes of diachronic form that perpetuate the normative aspirations of nineteenth-century developmental thought.
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