The primacy of the object : Adorno versus cultural studies

The restorative aspect of Jewish messianism placed immense significance on the role of language as the medium of truth or redemption, making knowledge both esoteric and allegorical .As in the Cabbala, a special emphasis is placed on certain images and texts that retain, in fragmentary form, deposits of the divine glory of the original unbroken unity of God's creation. The intellectual practice implied by intellectual Messianism uncouples knowledge from power in a way that disdains the usual range of political stances and in fact makes them impossible to take up. In Benjamin's famous ninth thesis on the philosophy of history, the angel of history, face turned to the past, sees a single catastrophe where we see a chain of cause and effect; "the angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed", writes Benjamin, but the storm blowing out of paradise makes this impossible. Benjamin's messianism-his apocalyptic, pre-political vision of the world made whole-rejects the evolutionary programmes of quotidian politics and hankers after the spontaneous and violent eruption of the apocalyptic moment, which in an instant changes everything. Benjamin's disdain for social democratic politics, which he blamed for the rise of Nazism, is apparent in the figure of his backwards-facing angel, who sees only catastrophe in what we call progress. In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", Benjamin calls for the politicization of communist art to combat the fascist aestheticization of politics. While there is merit to the argument that art must yield its claim to autonomy and politicize itself in the face of the Nazi jackboot, it is Benjamin's scorn for quotidian politics that forces him to this extreme position. Such an argument, as Adorno wrote to Benjamin, is incapable of distinguishing communist art from fascist propaganda. The rejection of quotidian politics implicit in intellectual messianism ultimately lies behind the confused politics of much contemporary Theory. While the Frankfurt School inherited aspects of intellectual messianism it did not do so uncritically. The difference may not strike us as of any great moment, especially as the resignation that inspired the embrace of revolutionary politics by Benjamin, Bloch and Lukacs merely inspired melancholy observation in Adorno and Horkheimer. Adorno's notion of art's residually utopian power, however, clarifies the space of politics later obscured in poststructuralism and its textualist understanding of a seamless discursive universe ruled by the subterranean gods of normalization and social construction.