Adorno after Socialism

Writing on the eve of communism’s collapse in Eastern Europe, Fredric Jameson “proposed Adorno as a dialectical model for the 1990s.” For a decade in which freedom for many meant individuality and difference, fragmentation and fluidity, critics argued Jameson’s proposal missed the mark. After all, as he admits, “Adorno’s life work stands and falls with the concept of totality.” And moreover, at history’s purported end, what use is dialectical thought?Recent events, however, make clear that the twentieth century’s defining struggles—and those to which Adorno was most sensitive—continue to shape political discourse well into the twenty-first. As the far-right consolidates power through xenophobic rhetoric and socialist ideals gain traction once again, our contemporary moment bears uneasy likeness to Adorno’s. Testing Jameson’s assertion, this paper considers whether Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory can offer a critical model that accounts for the complexities of East European art in the years after socialism and in our troubled neoliberal epoch. To this end, I examine why certain artists continued to investigate the region’s history of socialism immediately after its collapse, and as others happily put these burdens to rest. I ask how Adorno’s posthumous work, so concerned with art’s guilt and embeddedness in the world, can help elucidate the broader significance of this artistic response. Rather than valorizing artists as dissidents in opposition to political power, what value is there in artists who make themselves answerable to history’s most transformative moments? What critical and political alternatives might this approach make viable for art today?