Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324 brill.

nl/hima

Dialectical Realism and Radical Commitments:

Brecht and Adorno on Representing Capitalism

Gene Ray
Geneva University of Art and Design
gray@fastmail.fm

Abstract
Bertolt Brecht and Theodor W. Adorno stand for opposing modes and stances within an artistic
modernism oriented toward radical social transformation. In his 1962 essay Commitment,
Adorno advanced a biting critique of Brechts work and artistic position. Adornos arguments
have often been dismissed but, surprisingly, are seldom closely engaged with. This paper assesses
these two approaches that have been so central to twentieth-century debates in aesthetics:
Brechts dialectical realism and Adornos sublime or dissonant modernism. It provides what still
has been missing: a close reading and immanent critique of Adornos case against Brecht. And it
claries one methodological blind spot of Adornos formalist conceptualisation of autonomy: he
fails to provide the detailed analysis of context that his own dialectical method immanently calls
for. The paper shows how and why Brechts dialectical realism holds up under Adornos attack,
and draws conclusions for contemporary artistic practice.

Keywords
Theodor W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Marxist aesthetics, realism, modernism, the sublime,
political theatre

In twentieth-century debates over the intersections of art and radical politics,

Bertolt Brecht and Theodor W. Adorno stand for opposing productive modes
and stances within artistic modernism.1 Brechts works were aimed at
stimulating processes of radical learning, within specic contexts of social
struggle. He based his practice on the possibility of re-functioning and
radicalising institutions and reception-situations. In this, he took arts relative
autonomy for granted, but refused to fetishise that autonomy or let it become
reied into an impassable separation from life. Adorno, in contrast, made the
categorical separation from life the basis of arts political truth-content. In its

1. I thank Steve Corcoran, Steve Edwards, Anna Papaeti and Dmitry Vilensky for their
helpful responses to drafts of this essay, which revises Ray 2010.
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI: 10.1163/156920610X533306
4 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324

structural position in society, art is contradictory: artworks are relatively

autonomous, but, at the same time, are social facts bearing the marks of the
dominant social outside.2 Paradoxically, only by insisting on their formal
non-identity with this outside can artworks stand rm against the misery of
the given.3
Adornos critique of Brecht, developed most fully in the 1962 radio-talk
and essay Engagement, is notorious enough.4 Its conclusions are dicult to
swallow: Brecht ends up as an apologist for Stalinist terror and the false
reconciliations of really-existing socialism, and his works are pronounced
politically untrue.5 These damning judgements are more often dismissed than
seriously confronted; perhaps surprisingly, they still have not been convincingly
answered with the care and rigour they demand.6 That is unfortunate, because
the confrontation of these two positions claries issues and problems that
remain centrally relevant to politicised art and to the urgent project of leftist
renewal. This is especially true with regard to the problem of artistically
representing capitalist social reality.
This essay reconstructs Brechts and Adornos positions, in order to clarify
what is at stake in the confrontation between them. It aims to provide what
has so far been missing: a detailed immanent critique of Adornos case against
Brecht. The argument I unfold here proceeds in three parts. In the rst, I
characterise Brechts committed approach to representing social reality as
dialectical realism.7 In the second, I reread Adornos critique of Brecht, and,
in the third, I consider Adornos counter-models. My conclusions are, rst,
that Adornos critique fails to demonstrate the political untruth of Brechts
work. As will be shown, Adorno does not provide the close attention to context
that his own method immanently requires; consequently, he fails to take into
account the shifting conjuncture of struggle that gives Brechts work its

2. Arts double character as both autonomous and fait social announces itself unfailingly from
the zone of its autonomy. Adorno 1997, p. 5, and 1998a, p. 16. In this and subsequent citations
from Adorno, Brecht and Max Horkheimer, I have modied the published English translation.
3. The argument is formulated concisely in the opening paragraph of Adorno 1997, pp. 12,
and 1998a, pp. 911; standing rm [Standhalten] is thereafter a codeword by which Adorno
invokes this argument, for example in Adorno 1997, p. 40, and Adorno 1998a, p. 66.
4. Adorno 1992a and 1998b. Commitment is the standard translation of the essays title
(Engagement in the original). I use both here, treating them as a semantic pair and opting for
the one that resonates most estrangingly in any given sentence.
5. Adorno 1992a, p. 84, and 1998b, p. 419.
6. The ad hominem aspect of Adornos attack on Brecht is easily dismissed; the critique of
Brechts works is more serious. Jameson 1998 can be read as a general answer to Adorno, but
Jameson does not provide any close engagement with the substance of Adornos arguments.
7. Brecht uses the phrase the new dialectical realism in an important letter to Eric Bentley,
written from Santa Monica in August 1946, reprinted in Brecht 1990, p. 412.
 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324 5

political force. Second, Adornos discussion of Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka

and Arnold Schoenberg in this connection does not convincingly establish a
generalised political truth-eect for their works, and therefore does not
establish them as counter-models to Brecht. In any case, the truth-eect
Adorno claims for Beckett is not one that is oriented toward a radical political
practice aiming at a passage out of capitalism. Brechts works have their
weaknesses, and Adorno has incisively exposed some of them. But Brechts
dialectical realism is open and provisional enough to turn the specic defects
of particular works into productive discussion and debate. As a model of
committed paedagogical-artistic practice, it holds up to Adornos categorical
attack.

I. Brechts dialectical realism

There are many roads to Athens.

B. Brecht

Brechts representations of capitalism are often rough sketches or snapshots

of the background-processes against which radical learning takes place.
Arguably, the learning process itself is almost always the main object
represented. Capitalism including fascism, one of its exceptional state- and
rgime-forms appears as the immense pressure of misery forcing the
exploited to think.8 In discovering the social causes of their misery, they
discover themselves, as changed, changing and changeable humanity. Seeing
the world opened up to time and history in this way, Brecht was sure, inspires
the exploited to think for themselves and ght back.
As Fredric Jameson rightly points out, critical approaches to Brecht need to
periodise his production carefully, and situate each theatre-piece and other
forms of writing within the context of struggles and social convulsions in
which he worked.9 Minimally, we can distinguish between Germany before
the Nazi-takeover, the stations of exile through the period of fascism and war,
and the years at the Berliner Ensemble after his return to a divided Germany.
Within this rough division, moreover, every work and collaboration takes
form as a specic intervention into a specic social force-eld.

8. Brecht 1967a, p. 1051, and 1992, p. 83.

9. Jameson 1998, p. 17. The ten monadic chronologies that Jameson proposes are stimulating
and do justice to the complex historical layering of Brecht as such. They are more than we
need here, however, to minimally establish the practice and model of dialectical realism the
actual object, that is, which confronts Adornos modernism.
6 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324

Notably, the great experiments of committed didactic theatre and lm were

produced in the three or four years just prior to 1933, a period of acute social
misery and urgent partisan struggle. In addition to the crisis in Germany
itself, where massive unemployment and the split in the German Left were
eectively exploited by the Nazis and their backers, there was the additional
problem, new and dicult, of evaluating developments in the Soviet Union
under Stalin namely the pressures of socialism in one country within a
capitalist global order, the persecution of the old Bolsheviks in opposition,
and the emergence, from 1929 on, of a leadership-cult enforced by terror. In
the stresses of these few years, Brecht and Hanns Eisler collaborated on
The Measures Taken and The Mother, the two most important of the learning-
plays, and Kuhle Wampe, the lm with Slatan Dudow; from these years as well
came Saint Joan of the Stockyards, the collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann
that is, arguably, Brechts most direct representation of capitalism as a nexus of
forces and processes.
Brechts theoretical production has to be periodised and situated in the
same way. The major treatments of epic or non-Aristotelian theatre, developed
in the pre-Nazi German period in the wake of The Threepenny Opera, show
Brecht opening his way to a fully committed and politicised theatre. The
encounter with Mei Lan-Fang, Sergei Tretiakov and others in Moscow in
1935, combined with the loss of his own apparatus and public, spurs the
development of Verfremdung, or estrangement, as an organising artistic
category, from 1936 on, as well as his reconsideration of the relation between
critical thinking, feelings and pleasure in the Work Journals and Messingkauf
Dialogues. These would be worked out more formally in the Short Organon for
Theatre, written in Zurich in 1948, just before his return to Germany, and
would become the working programme for the Berliner Ensemble. The retorts
to Georg Lukcs and others over the meaning of realism, which Brecht chose
to hold back from publication, were worked up from the insecurities of exile
in Denmark on the eve of war in 1938, well after Zhdanovist socialist realism
had become ocial Comintern-doctrine. Around this same time, Brecht
learned that Tretiakov and Carola Neher, among others close to his own artistic
positions, had been accused and disappeared in Stalins purges.
But, having registered the dierences in these moments, I now work back
in the other direction, and go from the particular back to the general. For,
beyond the shifts in emphasis and focus, some abiding and properly Brechtian
artistic principles are derivable. These can be brought together under the sign
of realism, in the precise and exible sense in which Brecht developed this
category. For reasons I now make clear, dialectical is the best term with which
to qualify Brechts notion.
 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324 7

In the polemics over realism, Brecht had to defend his earlier innovations
against charges of formalism and against a rigid and restricted conception of
realism based on models from the bourgeois tradition. His strategy, then, was
to broaden the category by demolishing simplistic separations of form and
content and by exposing the narrowness and rigidity of criteria derived
exclusively from particular historical forms in this case, from the bourgeois
novels favoured by Lukcs. Brecht writes:

Keeping before our eyes the people who are struggling and transforming reality,
we must not cling to tried rules for story-telling, venerable precedents from
literature, eternal aesthetic laws. We must not abstract the one and only realism
from certain existing works, but shall use all means, old and new, tried and
untried, deriving from art and deriving from other sources, in order to put reality
into peoples hands as something to be mastered.10

Since there are many ways to represent reality as material to be mastered, as a

nexus to be grasped and changed, it is important, Brecht goes on, to encourage
artists to explore all means available in seeking eective combinations of form
and content:

For time ows on, and if it did not it would bode ill for those who do not sit at
golden tables. Methods exhaust themselves, stimuli fail. New problems surface
and call for new means. Reality changes; to represent it, the mode of representation
must change as well. Nothing comes from nothing; the new comes out of the old,
but that is just what makes it new.11

In contrast to ocial versions of socialist realism, then, the realism Brecht calls
for is precise in aim, but exible, even experimental, in means and method. It
aims at representations of reality that are workable, operable, practicable
helpfully applicable to transformative practice and permanently open to
correction and revision.
What makes them workable is that they are de-reifying: they show society,
not as a static and naturalised fate or second nature, but as a eld of forces and
processes in motion, unfolding in time, subject to development. The individual
appears in such representations not just as a psychological subject, but also as
a nexus or ensemble of social relations that are historical and therefore
changeable. The name for this mode of radical thinking, this critical stance or
Haltung oriented toward transformative practice, is, of course, dialectics.

10. Brecht 1967g, p. 325, and 1992, p. 109.

11. Brecht 1967g, p. 327, and 1992, p. 110.
8 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324

Brechts exible realism is dialectical, in this radical, Marxist sense. The rst
test of dialectical realism is whether or not, in context, it produces this eect
of de-reication or estrangement. Verfremdung is, then, the general category
for all the diverse artistic techniques for producing this eect, which, in turn,
becomes a moment in a larger process of radical learning. These artistic
principles what I now call dialectical realism can be actualised today,
provided that artists mark the distance between Brechts time and our own and
aim their interventions at the struggles and crises that constitute the
contemporary conjuncture.

II. Re-reading Adornos Commitment

Better no more art at all than Socialist Realism.

T.W. Adorno

In Engagement, Adorno makes two kinds of arguments against Brecht. The

rst is structural or categorical: it unfolds from Adornos analysis of arts double
character. Arts autonomy, or dierence from life, is what constitutes it in the
rst place; art cannot renounce this autonomy without at the same time
undoing itself as art. The second kind of argument is immanent: Adorno makes
specic criticisms of Brechts works based on Brechts own political criteria. If
one takes Brecht at his word and makes politics the criterion of his engaged
theatre, Adorno concludes, then by this criterion his theatre proves to be
untrue [unwahr].12
How are the two kinds of arguments articulated? The mediating pivot that
joins them is an implicit distinction between artistic and theoretical
representations. Artistic representations are assessed as aesthetic instances of
non-identity, but theoretical representations have to meet the rigours of a
dierent kind of testing. Brecht chose to be governed by the criteria of
committed theory rather than those of autonomous art; in eect, he turned
Marxist theory into his formal artistic principle. For Adorno, adequate
theoretical representations of social reality have to dig out the essence of
social processes that is, their deepest logic and tendencies, what Marx called
their law of motion or movement.13 Adorno invokes Hegel to make this

12. Adorno 1992a, p. 84, and 1998b, p. 419.

13. It is the ultimate aim of his Critique of Political Economy, Marx writes famously in the
1867 preface, to reveal the economic law of motion [Bewegungsgesetz] of modern society. Marx
1977, p. 92.
 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324 9

point. Hegels Logic taught that essence must appear, he notes.14 In other
words, essence must take concrete, determinate form in time and place. To
represent the social essence in a form other than the one in which it actually
appears in history is to represent something dierent. If, in order to construct a
memorable parable, amusing satire or eective piece of agitation, a committed
writer or artist attempts to slip essence into a dierent form, Adorno concludes,
then this is a falsifying representation that is politically untrue, even if it is
produced in the name of a true cause. Why? Because the process of aesthetic
reduction short-circuits the chain of mediations that joins essence and the
social facts that are its specic appearance-form.15 Brecht wants to foster
critical spectatorship, but the imperatives of partisan struggle lead him to
render reality as something less complex and threatening than it is. The theory
that submits to such imperatives ends by teaching submission. For Adorno,
this is most clear when Brecht glories the Party without mediations16 or
degrades himself as a eulogist of agreement.17 Ultimately, this is not just
Brechts failure, Adorno argues; it is a structural problem with all committed
art that renounces its autonomy in order to instrumentalise itself politically.
Art can only do poorly what theory already does better, and dishonesty about
this becomes political untruth. Art that accepts its autonomous status only
has to answer to local aesthetic criteria and earns the medal of political truth
by insisting on its dierence from praxis and real life. But, because Brechts
art is bad theory, Adorno contends, especially given Brechts position, it
therefore fails as art as well. Adornos specic criticisms of Brechts works are
underwritten by the structural-categorical argument, but try to demonstrate it
through an immanent immersion in particular works: by showing how
particular works fail as theory and recoil into dishonesty and untruth, Adorno
also aims to show the impossibility of art merging with theory under the sign
of commitment.
This is the gist of Adornos critique of Brecht. It can be tested by directing
critical questions toward any of its three levels: the structural argument, the
specic criticisms, or the notion of theory on which the whole case turns.

14. Das Wesen erscheinen mu. Adorno 1992a, pp. 845, and 1998b, p. 419. The dialectical
point, from the Doctrine of Essence, is that essence must appear as something other than itself;
that is, as a dialectical unity with a determinate appearance-form. Adorno is citing Hegel 1969,
p. 479.
15. The process of aesthetic reduction [Brecht] undertakes for the sake of political truth cuts
truth o and leads it on a parade. Truth requires countless mediations, which Brecht disdains.
Adorno 1992a, p. 82, and 1998b, p. 416.
16. Adorno 1992a, p. 82, and 1998b, p. 415.
17. Adorno 1992a, p. 86, and 1998b, p. 421. Adorno alludes here to The Measures Taken.
10 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324

i) The structural-categorical argument

I accept the premise of Adornos structural argument, but not the proof he
derives from it. Art under capitalism does have this double character: both
relatively autonomous and social fact. Politically, art is this contradiction
produced from an extracted social surplus: it exists only by sharing in the
general social guilt, and yet bears a radical promise of happiness that stubbornly
exceeds its saturation by exchange-value. Art is relatively autonomous, because
every artwork, despite its autonomy, remains a specic appearance of the social
essence; the master-logics of capitalist processes always leave scars traceable in
the dialectic of form and content. Moreover, art is relatively autonomous
because, despite the autonomy of specic artworks, the production and
reception of art as a whole has armative and stabilising social functions: the
compensatory virtual utopia of art captures and neutralises rebellious energies,
fostering resignation, accommodationism and conformity in real life.18 And,
because the reception of art, even leaving ownership-issues aside, still presumes
a privileged access to leisure-time, education and dominant class-culture, it
also functions as a system of social distinctions that supports class-society.19
For all these reasons, it is appropriate to speak of the capitalist art-system, as
well as culture-industry although Adorno does not go this far. The crux is
this: within these institutionalised social functions, there is still enough relative
autonomy for an artwork to assume a critical stance, even a radically critical
stance. But, and here is where I part from Adorno, such a stance actualises
itself in the form of an intervention in specic moments and situations. The
critical force and political truth-content of a work can only appear and have
eects within the openings and constraints of specic contexts or conjunctures.
This Adorno tends not to admit. From arts contradictory double character, he
concludes that artists either accept autonomy as such, or reject it full stop.
Any compromise of autonomy at all becomes equivalent to total surrender.
This does not follow, and the example of Brecht suces to demonstrate why.
Whatever Brecht may have said, in practice he never gave up an operative
relative autonomy; there was never any absolute renunciation of autonomy.
Thus, the categorical argument on its own is not a serious disqualication of
Brechts art. I will develop this point below.

18. Marcuse 1968 established the terms of this functionalist dialectic.

19. This is the aspect analysed in Bourdieu 1984.
 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324 11

ii) What form of theory?

Before addressing some of Adornos specic criticisms, I want to question the
conception of theory Adorno invokes against Brecht. Is he here invoking
radical-critical theory, as Max Horkheimer elaborated it in his programmatic
1937 essay, or is it, in fact, something more like that traditional theory
bourgeois or liberal theory which Horkheimer rejected? Traditional theory
sees its task narrowly as the production of knowledge in a form that is neutral
with regard to social conict. Accordingly, it enforces a strict separation of
facts and values. Critical theory, in contrast, has understood that in a class-
society constituted by relations of exploitation and domination, pure
knowledge is an illusion. All theory is committed, knowingly or not.20
Adorno certainly took over this Frankfurt-Institute position and, we know,
polemicised energetically against the positivist heirs of Max Weber. But, here,
he forgets that commitment to the real struggle to change the world is precisely
what dierentiates a radical-dialectical critical theory from armative (or
non-critical) and liberal (or non-radical) forms of theory. Frankfurt critical
theory positioned itself outside party-discipline, but this was not in order to
avoid the struggle for classless society. And Horkheimer makes this point
unmistakably in his 1937 essay just as the Moscow Trials were beginning
and in the year after the new Soviet Constitution had cynically declared
socialism to be an accomplished fact. After duly noting the tensions inherent
in a critical theory that mirrors neither the existing consciousness of the
exploited nor the slogans and policies of their party-vanguard, Horkheimer
nevertheless makes clear that it is the practical orientation toward the struggle
for the future that sets it apart from theory as a reied, ideological category:
[The critical theorists] profession is the struggle to which his thinking belongs,
not the thinking that considers itself independent and separable from that

20. See Horkheimer 2002a. The role and responsibility of science expressed in Galileos great
mea culpa speech (Scene 14 in the post-Hiroshima versions: Brecht 1967d, pp. 133941, and
Brecht 1994, pp. 1079) draws very near to the position Horkheimer marks out in 1937:
committed, but outside church- (read: market- and party-) discipline. Arguably, Brechts
formulations of this problematic in the Short Organon are less radical in its critique of science.
There, Brecht having resumed the battle for a theatre worthy of the scientic age, the techno-
domination of nature inherent in the bourgeois-scientic project goes uncriticised. However,
Brechts enlistment there of Galileo, Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer for an aesthetics of the
exact sciences that makes room for the beauty and pleasure of experimental research is blown up,
perhaps intentionally, by the explosive naming of Hiroshima in Section 16, several pages on.
Brecht 1967c, pp. 6689, and 1992, p. 184.
12 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324

struggle.21 This struggle is imposed on theory by the social antagonisms

structured into productive relations under capitalism.22
I quote Horkheimers own words, underscoring their repetition of the term
struggle, because this is precisely what Adorno loses sight of or disavows, in
the psychoanalytical sense in his 1962 essay.23 Although he is criticising
works written for a real and shifting conjuncture of struggle, he elides the
concrete situations to which Brechts works respond. The slippage comes in
the move from the empirical defects of Brechts representations to their
ostensible political untruth. Truth and untruth social and political
Wahrheit and Unwahrheit in the Marxist-Hegelian sense in which Adorno
used these terms are relational categories, actually situational evaluations
made with regard to the aim of global emancipation, classless society, what
Adorno packed into the codeword reconciliation.24 Whatever really or
potentially contributes to the process of realising classless society is true, in this
sense; whatever blocks, sets back or endangers this process is untrue.25
But, given the ruses of reason and ironies of history, assessing truth-content
is dicult work. And the reversals and paradoxes of the revolutionary process,
experienced as the dilemmas of disciplined militant praxis, surely constitute
one of Brechts abiding themes. Who ghts for communism, as the control-
choir in The Measures Taken puts it, must speak the truth and not speak the
truth, as the struggle demands.26 If a falsied or weaponised representation
contributes eectively to the revolutionary process, because it answers to an
urgent need in a context of struggle, then, false or not, it becomes politically
true. What needs might these be? All that contributes to morale and sustains a

21. Horkheimer 2002a, p. 270, and 2002b, p. 216. Or, again, Horkheimer 2002a, p. 272,
and 2002b, p. 219: The theory that in contrast drives on the transformation of the social whole
has for now the eect of intensifying the struggle to which it is bound.
22. Disputes over the politics of the Frankfurt Institute at other moments (or the degree of
its commitment to a Marxist or Marxian critique of capitalism, and so on) need not bog us down
here. At this critical moment of 1937, struggle means class-struggle, and Horkheimers
positioning of Frankfurt critical theory commits it to the side of the working class. Frankfurt-
antifascism is not liberal.
23. I register the gap between 1937 and 1962 in passing; a full accounting of it, which would
require analysis of the Cold-War and West-German contexts, is beyond what I can do here, but
would obviously bear on the question of Adornos own commitments.
24. To be strict, reconciliation for Adorno would go beyond classless society, as usually
conceived, for it would also have to include the liberation of nature, internal and external.
However, this supplement is interpreted, it certainly includes the passage out of capitalism that
classless society entails.
25. Hereafter, when truth and untruth (and its cognates) appear in italics, it is to indicate
this special usage and underscores its dierence from others based on an allegedly value-neutral
correspondence-theory of truth.
26. Brecht 1967e, p. 638, and 2001a, p. 13.
 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324 13

struggle through dicult moments, for example all that inspires tenacity
and resilience, and staves o resignation and despair. Are we, then, slipping
into the abyss of apologetics for terror? We are, at least, in waters deep and
murky, and any evaluation in this direction is instantly contestable. Still, the
paradox holds: sometimes, doing bad contributes to the good, while sometimes
doing good leads to the bad. Or, in the form we are considering: artful lies and
ctions can sometimes serve the truth. It does depend on the situation. About
these kinds of problems, to paraphrase Marx, clarity only begins post festum.

iii) The level of specic criticisms

If we grant this, then an artworks truth-content can be evaluated only on the
basis of a rigorous, detailed analysis of its context and eects. Adorno does not
provide this kind of analysis. Let us take his criticisms of The Resistible Rise of
Arturo Ui. They are, on rst reading, well and cogently made. As a representation
of German fascism, Brechts satire of Hitler is indeed problematic. In place of
a conspiracy of the highly placed and powerful, Adorno writes,

we have a silly gangster organisation, the Cauliower Trust. The true horror of
fascism is conjured away; it is no longer something incubated in the concentration
of social power, but is accidental, like misfortunes and crimes.27

In other words, Ui misses rather than claries the essence of fascism as a

product of capitalist social logics. In so far as it re-packages this essence in a
form that makes it unrecognisable, Brechts comic parable is a falsifying
representation. Moreover, the strategy of satire and humour Brecht uses to
deate Hitler and ridicule the Nazi-leaders only trivialises both the social
forces backing the Nazis and the enormous powers of violence and terror
gathering behind the social contradictions of Weimar. But let us accept these
points. Must we then also accept Adornos summary judgement, that Ui is
politically untrue? No, for this evaluation does not necessarily follow.
Brecht and his collaborator Margarete Sten completed Ui in Finland in
April of 1941, but it was never staged or published in his lifetime a fact
Adorno fails even to acknowledge in his 1962 critique. In early 1941, Hitlers
war-machine was everywhere triumphant. Its eventual defeat could in no way
be taken for granted, then, as it could be after the belated entry of the
Americans and turning of Stalingrad in early 1943. In this light, Ui is not so
easily dismissed. Arguably, in that dark moment, this satire might have
contributed something. However, had Ui been written and staged ten years

27. Adorno 1992a, p. 83, and 1998b, p. 417.

14 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324

earlier, in 1931, then Adornos criticisms would carry more weight. At that
moment, a representation of fascism that is falsifying in the ways Adorno
pointed out would also have been politically untrue, for the underestimation
of the Nazis and lack of clarity about the social forces behind them could have
had catastrophic consequences for praxis: precisely this kind of confusion
contributed to the Nazis rise to power. A sober and accurate estimation of
fascism would have claried the urgent need for a united front between
Communists and Social Democrats to bridge the split in the German Left.
Obviously, no single artistic representation can be held responsible for the
poverty and defects of political consciousness at that crucial moment. But,
possibly, if enough eyes had been opened, the Nazi-takeover might have
been averted.
However, to go beyond such an assertion and actually demonstrate the
political untruth of a given representation, it would be necessary to establish a
minimally accurate baseline against which the representation in question
could be assessed. Then it would be necessary to demonstrate how the defects
of this representation actually damaged the antifascist struggle in the moments
of a specic and unfolding situation. This Adorno does not try to do. With
good reason: to do so would itself require a feat of historical representation.
For what constitutes the essence of both German fascism and fascism per se is
still a hotly debated question especially since it touches upon the relation
between fascism and capitalism and the role of anti-Semitism. And, even
within the tradition of critical Marxism, divergent theories of fascism are
continuously being revised and corrected in light of ongoing research.28 But,
let us take it a few steps further. Assuming we can condently establish what
social forces and processes combined to produce particular forms of fascism,
we would still need to mark the dierence between our reected retrospection
and the eorts of those who had to grasp fascism from within that moment of
struggle and crisis. Representations produced under such pressures can only
be adequate in the most provisional way; to treat them as denitive would
itself be a falsifying distortion. Retrospective evaluations of Brechts works
would require a detailed discussion of both the actual social reality that forms
the context of those works and the representations of that reality available
at the time.
Strategy entails representations that interpret reality. For the working class
on the defensive, the struggle against the Nazis was above all a strategic
problem of alliances.29 A practical unication of working-class parties and

28. A moment in this process is documented in Dobowski and Wallimann (eds.) 1989.
29. As has been amply demonstrated in autopsies of the Lefts strategic failures during those
years. See, for example, Poulantzas 1979 and Claudin 1975. Of the analyses of fascism produced
 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324 15

organisations should therefore have been the priority. If we accept that a united
front between the Social Democrats of the SPD and Communists of the KPD
would have been the necessary, not to say sucient, condition of blocking the
Nazis, then we would have a criterion: representations of fascism that foreclosed
the possibility of a united front, after events had claried the urgent need for
it, would be both false and untrue. But the exact point at which this urgency
became clear, or should have become clear, would be dicult to establish. It
could probably be shown that the ocial position of the Third International
from 1928 until 1935 was both false and untrue in precisely this way. Moreover,
certain defects of the Comintern-position could probably be tracked back to
the strategic realignments compelled by the Stalinist doctrine of socialism in
one country. The strict subordination of the parties to the imperatives of
Soviet foreign policy certainly distorted political analysis and strategy during
these years,30 and it is there, in those distortions, where the false can be seen to
become the untrue, in Adornos sense.
But we cannot implicate Brecht in this, by simply identifying his
representations with ocial Stalinist ones at least, not without much more
evidence and argumentation than Adorno provides. Adorno seems to assume,
on the basis of The Measures Taken, that Brecht gloried the Party blindly and
uncritically, and that there is no distance at all between his positions and
representations and the Partys. Adorno certainly does not demonstrate this,
and I doubt that it could be demonstrated, even for works produced in the
early 1930s, when Brecht was closest to the KPD. When we immerse in the
particulars, as Adorno insists we do, and work to dig out the truth and untruth
entangled in the social ow of time, then the rigours of empirical testing cut
both ways. What has been claried is that each of Brechts anti-Nazi works
from Roundheads and Peakheads, nearing completion just as the Nazis came to
power, to Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, written in 1937, Ui of 1941, and
Schweyk in the Second World War, written mainly in 1943 each has to be
evaluated carefully in light of unfolding events and the urgent eort to
comprehend them. They need, that is, to be assessed as specic interventions in
specic situations.

on the Left from within that moment, Trotsky 1971 is probably the most incisive treatment of
these fatal missteps and faulty interpretations. Without doubt, it would have been extremely
dicult to overcome the historical mistrust and hostility between the SPD and KPD.
Nevertheless, that, and no less, is what the conjuncture objectively demanded.
30. As Claudin 1975 documents copiously. Obviously, this is not to imply that SPD-analyses
and responses to Nazism were any less disastrous.
16 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324

A Fairytale of Horror
Roundheads and Peakheads, begun in 1931, would have been a better choice
than Ui for Adornos critical attentions. A stage-manuscript of this horror-
parable was circulating by the end of 1932. When he left Germany the day
after the Reichstag burned, Brecht took with him the proofs of a revised
version subtitled Rich and Empire Go Gladly Together. In exile, he revised it
again, with Sten and Eisler; versions in Russian and English were published
in Moscow in 1936 and 1937, and a German edition was brought out in
London by the Malik Verlag in 1938.31 It was rst staged, with Eislers music,
in Copenhagen in 1936. Unlike Ui, then, the genesis of Roundheads and
Peakheads reaches back before the Nazi-takeover and, as a representation
of fascism, presumably bears more directly the traces of class-struggle in its
pre-1933 conjuncture.
The epic parable focuses on the Nazi-displacement of class-antagonism into
race-antagonism. This displacement consists of a recoding that invests
ideological meanings in arbitrary physical attributes, destroying solidarities
and producing realignments among groups in class-struggle. The shape of the
head becomes the marker of standing in the new rgime; those with the wrong
head-shape, purportedly evidence of foreign origins and an abject spirit, will
be dispossessed and exterminated. The work depicts the susceptibility of the
impoverished peasantry and Mittelstand the petty-bourgeois shop-owners,
small producers and salaried employees to this ideology. The Pachtherren, the
estate-owners, give Iberin-Hitler dictatorial powers because he alone can
repress the rebellious renters and crush their communist Sickle League; at the
same time, they think they can manage and exploit Iberins racial turn.
Roundheads and Peakheads began as an adaptation of Shakespeares Measure for
Measure. The Verfremdungseekt of the parable derives, in large part, from the
combination of a feudal setting and elevated poetic diction with contemporary
scenes and language: in the streets of the old city, Iberins Huas or SS talk in
Nazi-jargon and Umgangssprache. However, the feudal setting is also a source
of the main defects of the work. The altered balance of social forces and state-
crisis that conditioned the Nazi-takeover is inadequately represented. The
Junker estate-owners are depicted, but they were only one class making up the
dominant power-bloc in Weimar the other, the grande bourgeoisie, is absent.
And with it, so is the master-logic of capital-accumulation. The antagonism
between rural landlords and tenants cannot simply stand in for that between

31. Die Rundkpfe und die Spitzkpfe, oder Reich und Reich gesellt sich gern: Ein Greuelmrchen.
For the German, I have used the London Malik version reprinted in Brecht 1967f; for the
English, I have preferred N. Goold-Verschoyles 1937 translation, reprinted in Brecht 1966.
 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324 17

capital and waged labour. The sickle is there, but the hammer is missing;
the workers and their unions and parties are absent. As a result, the real
political problem of the German Left and the working-class movement at that
moment how to overcome the SPD/KPD split and form a united front
cannot emerge.32 This is, indeed, a serious fault of the work in its conjuncture,
and I doubt that allowances for the distantiations of the parable-form would
succeed in extricating it from this criticism.
In light of Adornos battery of arguments concerning the exigencies imposed
on art after Auschwitz, an additional defect must be registered. At the
beginning of the work, Brecht eectively ngers the genocidal threat of Nazi
blood-and-soil ideology. In Scene Two, an Iberin militiaman reads it aloud
from a newspaper: Iberin says expressly that his single aim is: extermination
of the Peakheads, wherever they are nesting!33 By the end, however, this racist
aspect has become a discardable, merely opportunistic factor. The Peakhead-
landlords are able to restore themselves to power, and the class-antagonism is
now projected outward in a war of expansion. In retrospect, at least, this
reects a fatal underestimation of the Nazi-investment in anti-Semitism. To
sum up, my reading does not so much prove the political untruth of Roundheads
and Peakheads as it shows how far truth and untruth remain entangled in it.
The critical task is to do the untangling, not to issue a crude retrospective
condemnation of the playwright.

Adornos critique of Brecht: conclusions

All this points to a problem in the critical method Adorno develops from his
structural analysis of arts double character. Any artwork that takes a critical
stance against capitalism necessarily does so from a position of at least relative
autonomy vis--vis the dominant social totality: otherwise, such a stance
would not be possible at all. But, because Adorno does not admit that radically
committed art under capitalism entails an operative relative autonomy rather
than an utter renunciation of all autonomy, he relieves himself of the need to
investigate context and conjuncture in a more than abstract and passing way.

32. When it does nally appear, in the peat-bog soldiers, episode of Fear and Misery of the
Third Reich, added to the work in 1945 (Scene 4 in Brecht 1967b, and 2009), it is, of course, too
late. There the retrospective lesson is: the united front that went unmade in the streets and
factories was realised impotently in the concentration-camps under the gaze of the SS.
33. Ausrottung der Spitzkpfe, wo immer sie nisten! Brecht 1966, p. 186, and 1967f,
p. 929. Tom Kuhns rendering (To ush out the Ziks, wherever theyre hiding!) misses the strongly
dehumanising resonance of the German. Wipe out comes closer to the sense of ausrottung, but
in combination with nesting [nisten], we have the rhetoric of pest-control, right out of Hitlers
speeches. Kuhns translation is in Brecht 2001b, p. 20.
18 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324

If the social outside always shows up within artistic form, as its polemical a
priori,34 then this structural constant cannot by itself be the basis for
dierentiation and assessment. This alone should point us back to the outside,
to specic eects in actual reception-situations, but Adorno declines to make
this move. He supports his conception of dissonant modernism with a formalist
tendency to discount context. But this tendency leads him to treat
representations as if each one were denitive meant to stand for all time,
rather than to intervene in specic situations. If there is a use by date, Adorno
does not notice. In the case of his critique of Brecht, this tendency becomes a
destructive avoidance. To conclude: dialectical immersion in particular works
entails a simultaneous immersion in the social contexts for which they were produced.
The dialectical point, to which Adorno should be held, is that works do not
stand alone: the work is the work together with its context. Evaluations of the
quality of Brechts representations and the net-balance of their truth-content
cannot simply be carried out categorically. Nor do specic criticisms alone
suce to render a summary judgement, without seriously taking into account
the real context of struggle. If this is right, then Adorno has failed to back up
his judgement of Brecht in anything like an adequate way.

III. Of the radical sublime

Not even the dead will be safe from the enemy if he wins.
W. Benjamin

The essay Engagement is also one of the places where Adorno revisits his
1951 assertion that after Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric.35 Elaborating
this claim, he advances Samuel Beckett as the artistic counter-model to Jean-
Paul Sartre and Brecht. Without getting into all the issues and problems
opened up by this after-Auschwitz formula, I at least need to insist that
Adorno is pointing here to the catastrophic character of capitalist modernity
as a whole. The catastrophe is the whole dialectic of enlightenment and
domination as it has unfolded and continues to unfold in the late-capitalist
era of culture-industry and administered integrations. To Adornos Auschwitz,
we need to add Hiroshima.36 These two events are the test-pieces which

34. Adorno 1992a, p. 77, and 1998b, p. 410. Or again, Adorno 1992a, p. 92, and 1998b,
p. 428: The eect-complex [Wirkungszusammenhang] is not the principle that governs
autonomous art; this principle is in their very structure [ihr Gefge bei sich selbst].
35. Adorno 1976, p. 31, and 1992b, p. 34.
36. This paragraph and the one that follows summarise a case I argue more fully in Ray 2005
 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324 19

conrm that the catastrophe is not somewhere in the future, still to be avoided,
but has already taken place and is continuing, in the sense that the global
social process that produced them continues to churn on. More specically,
they demonstrate what administered state-violence is now materially capable
of. All this conrms that social reality, unfolding as history, has killed o the
myth of automatic progress. The future of humanity in any form, let alone
emancipated ones, is from now on open to doubt, and can no longer be taken
for granted. And this has consequences for the representation of social reality.
Crucially, these genocidal techno-administrative powers were developed in
a specic global conjuncture of class-struggle: they are products of defeats
suered by the exploited, and from now on are aimed at the exploited, as the
weapons of state-terror. It does not follow that the revolutionary process is
dead or that humanity will never reach classless society. But it does mean that,
on the side of the exploited, the political and cultural forms of class-struggle
have to process and reect these new realities. The old postures, images and
marching music that asserted the advent of classless society as imminent,
inevitable or otherwise automatic have been falsied by history, in a very
precise sense. Auschwitz and Hiroshima are two events of qualitative genocidal
violence that cannot be folded back into any redemptive narrative of progress.
The potentials they announce enter history as irredeemable moments that
explode toxically in every direction. Revolutionary theory and practice now
must take this into account: the qualitative event that arrives to reorder
everything is not necessarily progressive. The Novum, or radically new, now
appears as the ambiguous Angelus novus the machine-angel or angel of
history that announces either a leap toward emancipation or else an absolute
ruination more terrible than any momentary defeat.37 Which one, none can

and 2009a. The critical conjunction of Auschwitz and Hiroshima remains controversial indeed,
taboo in some academic circles, but, in these texts, I show why they must be grasped together:
in dierent ways, each realises a qualitatively new power of genocidal violence. Together, both
transformations of quantity into quality are the material basis of a new logic of global-systemic
enforcement.
37. I use Novum here, as well as the more usual event, to invoke the use of this term in
Jameson 1998, pp. 125, 127 and 1758. Adorno brings in Walter Benjamins Angelus novus, the
machine angel at the end of 1992a, p. 94, and 1998b, p. 430. Jameson, ne as his book on
Brecht is, elides the catastrophe exactly at this point. What Benjamin and Adorno clarify for us
is that welcoming the new as such, as Brecht perhaps wished to, is now a dubious risk, for its
arrival may be the straight gate to self-rescue or utter obliteration; after 1945, it has objectively
changed from a symbol of political truth and progress to a problem and enigma. This change is
strongly intimated, though not elaborated, at the end of Brechts post-Hiroshima Galileo (Brecht
1967d and 1994).
20 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324

know beforehand. Now, any representation of contemporary social reality

must also comprehend these products and meanings of capitalist modernity.38
For Adorno, the catastrophe of capitalist modernity in this larger sense can
only be evoked in art indirectly, through the oblique dissonance of negative
representations. Becketts Endgame becomes for him the main model. This, I
have argued at length elsewhere, is Adornos rewriting of the sublime.39 Sublime
representations do not have to be empirically accurate renderings of social
processes. They merely have to stand rm in their autonomous dierence from
the given, Adorno claims, and they will function as formal mirrors of the
social outside, whether they want to or not. Perhaps. And, perhaps, as Luke
White has argued cogently, a work like Damien Hirsts infamous platinum-
and-diamond skull is a sublime representation of capitalism along these lines.40
Perhaps we can even, with enough ingenuity and goodwill, get from there to
the critique of capitalism as we would need to, if we would set free the
political truth locked up in the sublime. But, in general, it is clear that sublime
representations of the social given and especially those evoking the
catastrophic aspect of social relations and processes are not likely to inspire
a struggle-oriented political practice. The sublime hits and overwhelms us, but
nothing more or specic necessarily follows from this hit. If there is a likely
political response to an enjoyable encounter with the semblance of terror, then
it is probably resignation or prudent quietude. If sublime hits are linked to a
radically critical receptive process it is by no means certain that they will be,
but if they are then representations of this kind may help us by grounding our
critical reections bodily, in the feelings and sinews, as it were. Where this
happens, it means that sublime feelings have been successfully translated into
critical consciousness.

38. Thus, it is no longer enough merely to represent capitalism per se, as if Auschwitz and
Hiroshima had not taken place, for these events clarify tendencies and potentials that belong to the
essence of capitalism as it has actually developed in time. We need to follow up seriously on
Thompson 1980 and Kovel 1983: weapons of mass-destruction have to be grasped not as things,
but as social processes. My point has been that, as potentially terminal leaps in the powers of
enforcement, these processes in turn change the state-form and the modes of capitalist social
control. The so-called war on terror, with its politics of fear and emergency, is the contemporary
appearance-form of these processes that have become tendencies. There remains much work to be
done in thinking through the enforcement-functions of state-terror, grounded in the fatal merger
of science, state and war-machine. I make a beginning in Ray 2009b. And this problem of genocidal
powers of enforcement is, of course, now converging with another fruit of the techno-domination
of nature: processes of ecocide and climate-change that threaten biospheric collapse.
39. Ray 2005 and 2009a.
40. White 2009.
 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324 21

This is how Adorno thought we might respond to Beckett: an aesthetic

experience that, triggering and passing through emphatic anxiety, gives bodily
support to a radical stance against all forms of false reconciliation. This seems
to be the only kind of hit or eect [Wirkung] Adorno was willing to endorse.
Here is the passage where he makes the case for this sublime way of representing
post-Auschwitz capitalism. The paradox, that for the impulse of committed
art to be fullled, art has to give up all commitment to the world, is, he
writes:

based on an extremely simple experience [Erfahrung]: Kafkas prose and Becketts

plays and his truly monstrous novel, The Unnamable, produce an eect [Wirkung]
in comparison to which ocial works of committed art look like childs play;
they arouse the anxiety [Angst] that existentialism only talks about. In taking
apart illusion, they explode art from inside, whereas proclaimed commitment
subjugates art from outside, and therefore in a merely illusory way. Their
implacability compels the change in behaviour that committed works merely
demand. Anyone over whom Kafkas wheels have passed has lost all sense of peace
with the world, as well the possibility of being satised with the judgement that
the world is going badly: the moment of conrmation within the resigned
observation of evils superior power has been eaten away.41

Such an experience actualises, at the level of form, the Verfremdungseekt that

Brecht tried to install at the level of content or message. Maybe. This is, rst
of all, Adornos testimony about his own responses; the rest is extrapolation
dressed in categories. Let us assume these responses really can be generalised.
But, in that case, what really is the politics of all these Beckett and Kafka
readers? How many battalions are they? Will their labour produce four moons
to light the night-sky? My crude point is that the stance that appreciates
standing rm against false reconciliation is dierent from the stance seeking a
practice to restart a blocked revolutionary process. Or, in a more contemporary
idiom: these are dierent subjectivities. It is the latter stance or subjectivity
that dialectical realism on the Brechtian model would today aim to support
and foster. Not to say that the sublime is therefore worthless and should be
thrown away. We can have our Brecht and read our Beckett too. It is only
Adornos strident insistence on posing a choice between two irreconcilable
positions that justies some sarcasm.

41. Adorno 1992a, p. 90, and 1998b, p. 426.

22 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324

IV. Conclusion

If a problem can be claried, the solutions are emerging.

Anonymous paraphrase of a Marxian classic

Adornos case against Brecht, then, comes down to this: art must not try to do
what theory already does better, and, in any case, preaching to the converted
does not win anyone for the revolution. For the reasons given, Adornos
preference for the sublime anxieties of uncommitted art should not scare us
away from Brecht or contemporary forms of dialectical realism. If it is the
immense pressure of misery itself that forces us to think, what we think still
needs to pass through our reections and representations. Any artistic
representation of social reality that provokes or fosters radical learning is a
contribution to emancipation. In certain contexts, and given an adequate
critical reception, sublime works and images may have this eect. Committed
works of dialectical realism are likely to be more helpful. We cannot expect
that any single representation, however ambitious and monumental, will give
us the essence of social appearance with exhaustive perfection, as Alexander
Kluges nine-and-a-half hour gloss on Eisensteins unmade lm of Capital
should remind us.42 Such totalising nality is in any case antithetical to Brechts
conception of an open, exible and provisional dialectical realism. But, if the
pressures of crisis and war, mega-slums and absolute poverty, climate-change
and ecological degradation lead us to try again to organise a passage beyond
the master-logic of capital-accumulation, then we will need artistic as well as
theoretical representations of social reality. The more representations the
better, then, so long as they are dialectical so long as they dissolve social facts
into processes and the logics driving them. This kind of radical realism will
always contribute to that Great Learning by which alone we can make our
collective leap.

References
Adorno, Theodor W. 1976 [1951], Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, in Prismen, Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp.
1992a [1962], Commitment, in Notes to Literature, Volume 2, translated by Shierry
Weber Nicholsen, New York: Columbia University Press.
1992b [1949], Cultural Criticism and Society, in Prisms, translated by Samuel and
Shierry Weber, Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.

42. Kluge 2008.

 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324 23

1997, Aesthetic Theory, edited and translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis,

University of Minnesota Press.
1998a [1970], sthetische Theorie, edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp.
1998b [1962], Engagement, in Noten zur Literatur, Volume 3, Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp.
Bourdieu, Pierre 1984 [1979], Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, translated
by Richard Nice, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.
Brecht, Bertolt 1966 [1937], Roundheads and Peakheads, in Jungle of the City and Other Plays,
edited by Eric Bentley and translated by N. Goold-Verschoyle et al., New York: Grove.
1967a [1938], Anmerkungen zur Mutter, in Gesammelte Werke, Volume 17, edited by
Werner Hecht et al., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
1967b [1948], Furcht und Eland des Dritten Reiches, in Gesammelte Werke, Volume 3,
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
1967c [1948], Kleines Organon fr das Theater, in Gesammelte Werke, Volume 16,
Frankfurt an Main: Suhrkamp.
1967d [1955], Leben des Galilei, in Gesammelte Werke, Volume 3, Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp.
1967e [1931], Die Manahme in Gesammelte Werke, Volume 2, Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp.
1967f [1938], Die Rundkpfe und die Spitzkpfe, in Gesammelte Werke, Volume 3, Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp.
1967g [1958], Volkstmlichkeit und Realismus, in Gesammelte Werke, Volume 19,
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
1990, Letters, edited by John Willet and translated by Ralph Manheim, New York:
Routledge.
1992 [1964], Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, edited and translated by
John Willet, New York: Hill and Wang.
1994 [1980], Life of Galileo, translated by John Willet, New York: Arcade.
2001a [1977], The Measures Taken and Other Lehrstcke, translated by Carl Mueller et al.,
New York: Arcade.
2001b, Round Heads and Pointed Heads, in Collected Plays, Volume 4, edited by Tom
Kuhn and John Willet and translated by Tom Kuhn et al., London, Methuen.
2009 [1983], Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, translated by John Willet, London, Methuen.
Claudin, Fernando 1975 [1970], The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform,
translated by Brian Pearce and Francis MacDonagh, London: Penguin.
Dobowski, Michael N. and Isidor Wallimann (eds.) 1989, Radical Perspectives on the Rise of
Fascism in Germany 19191945, New York: Monthly Review Press.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1969 [1832], Science of Logic, translated by A.V. Miller, New
York: Humanity Books.
Horkheimer, Max 2002a [1937], Traditionelle und kritische Theorie, Zeitschrift fr
Sozialforschung, 6, 2: 24594.
2002b, Traditional and Critical Theory, in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, translated by
Matthew J. OConnell et al., New York: Continuum.
Jameson, Fredric 1998, Brecht and Method, London: Verso.
Kluge, Alexander 2008, Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike: Marx-Eisenstein-Das Kapital
[DVD], Suhrkamp.
Kovel, Joel 1983, Against the State of Nuclear Terror, Boston: South End Press.
Marcuse, Herbert 1968 [1937], The Armative Character of Culture, in Negations: Essays in
Critical Theory, translated by Jeremy Shapiro, Boston: Beacon Press.
24 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324

Marx, Karl 1977 [1867], Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, translated by Ben
Fowkes, New York, Vintage.
Poulantzas, Nicos 1979 [1970], Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem
of Fascism, translated by Judith White, London: Verso.
Ray, Gene 2005, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory: From Auschwitz to Hiroshima
to September 11, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
2009a, Hits: From Trauma and the Sublime to Radical Critique, Third Text, 23, 2: 13549.
2009b, Terror, Sublime, History: Notes on the Politics of Fear, in The Sublime Now,
edited by Luke White and Claire Pajaczkowska, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing.
2010, Radical Learning and Dialectical Realism: Brecht and Adorno on Representing
Capitalism, Left Curve, 34: 1121.
Thompson, Edward P. 1980, Notes on Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilization, New Left
Review, I, 121: 331.
Trotsky, Leon 1971 [19303], The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, New York: Pathnder.
White, Luke 2009, Damien Hirsts Diamond Skull and the Capitalist Sublime, in The Sublime
Now, edited by Claire Pajaczkowska and Luke White, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing.
Copyright of Historical Materialism is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be
copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written
permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.