Abstract

It is customary to begin essays of this kind with an arresting quotation from an eminent source, a practice that both displays the author's ostensible erudition and coverdy betrays his need to draw on an external authority to support the argument he is about to make. In order to remain true to this time-honored convention, I have chosen as my opening text for today the following passage from Theodor Adorno's Negative Dialectics, written in 1966: “All culture after Auschwitz, including its urgent critique, is garbage. In restoring itself after the things that happened without resistance in its own countryside, culture has turned entirely into the ideology it had been potentially — had been ever since it presumed, in opposition to material existence, to inspire that existence with the light denied it by the separation of the mind from manual labor.