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The guiding premise of this thesis is that Adorno's concept of history offers a critical means for the philosophical comprehension of the historical present. It seeks to expound the concept of history that emerges from Adorno's thought with a view to articulating its criticality for our own time in the wake of subsequent theoretical attempts to conceptualise history. I argue that although Adorno never articulates a 'world history', his conception of the structure of the historical process, particularly in his later works, begins to offer a way of critiquing history in a global sense. The first part of the work examines the discrete yet interrelated philosophical methods that Adorno utilises to interpret history. The second part consists in a reconstruction of the concepts totality and '"negative" universal history'. This takes place through an examination of the interrelation between Adorno's sociological and philosophical thought and a consideration of the theoretical possibilities and limitations that derive from Adorno's construal of the negative universal in relation to postcolonial theory. The first chapter extracts from Dialectic of Enlightenment a theorisation of the formation of time-consciousness and sacrifice in the historical process. The second chapter contends that the significance of Adorno's development of the concept natural history rests on a reinterpretation of the nature-history and natural history-social history distinctions that allows for a critique of the ideological fallacy that derives from understandings of history in which history is viewed either as separate from nature, or collapsed into it entirely. The third chapter explores Adorno's re-working in Negative Dialectics of Hegel's tripartite division of the concept in Science of Logic and assesses its implications for the philosophical interpretation of history. Chapter four argues that Adorno's concept of the false social totality is underpinned by a conception of historical time in which the latter is constituted by heterogeneous, divergent temporalities that are unified in an ongoing process of totalisation. I claim that the historical process could lead to new configurations between subject and object and explore this in relation to the idea of the Gesamtsubjekt. Chapter five reconstructs Adorno's idea of '"negative" universal history' in the light of postcolonial theory. I argue that despite Adorno'sdisplacement of considerations of the world-historical in favour of an examination of society as a false totality, the idea of a '"negative" universal history' could be substantiated via a development of Adorno's concept and critique of integration.

This thesis is a philosophical criticism of physiotherapy ethics through the work of Theodor W. Adorno that adds to the growing literature on critical physiotherapy-a physiotherapy research field that draws on philosophy and critical social science. This is the first extended reading of Adorno in the context of physiotherapy and, more broadly, in healthcare. The thesis falls broadly within applied philosophy and ethics. My purpose is to reconfigure the understanding of theory and practice in physiotherapy ethics. I aim to answer the following: 1) How might the relationship between theory and practice be understood in physiotherapy? 2) How does Adorno's thinking help to clarify the relationship between theory and practice in physiotherapy? 3) How does the sort of understanding that emerges help to advance critical understanding of physiotherapy? The central ideas from Adorno's thinking that frame my argument are the following. First, Adorno's philosophy criticises objects 'immanently'-from within them rather than using external criteria. Second, Adorno criticises 'identity thinking'-the tendency to attach concepts to objects to categorise them-to emphasise the importance of the non-conceptual for rationality. Third, to open up rationality to the non-conceptual, Adorno uses the notion of 'constellations' to surround the object with concepts rather than simply attaching a definition to the object. Fourth, Adorno insists on the 'priority of the object': theory must begin with its object which mediates the response of philosophical practice. Finally, Adorno was an adamant critic of positivism. Chapter 1 frames the thesis by tracing Adorno's thinking about the relationship between theory and practice. Adorno argues that theory is a form of practice: theory must place its object as primary and aim at affecting change in a world that is antagonistic to its core. Theory must not prescribe the path to a better world but analyse why change for the better is not happening. Chapter 2 extends Chapter 1 to outline the idea of theory as practice for physiotherapy ethics and to defend theoretical analyses both against the notion of 'evidence-based ethics' and mistaken views of philosophical theory. Chapter 3 is a criticism of identity thinking in the claim that clarifying what the concept of 'person-centredness' is leads to the related practice becoming better. A direct path from clarified concept to practice is not guaranteed. Instead, I argue for placing 'person-centredness' in a constellation. Chapter 4 criticises immanently the four principles approach-a liberal theory of healthcare ethics that enjoys endorsement but has also been criticised widely. My criticism reveals that instead of placing the principle-abiding subject as primary, the priority of the object offers a basis for physiotherapy ethics. Chapter 5 focuses on Adorno's somatic philosophy and how physiotherapy ethics might be anchored in the body, its vulnerability and suffering.

This dissertation focuses on the intellectual history of a particular strand of European-Martiniquais political and philosophical writing on guilt between 1927 and 2007, combining archival work with intellectual historical analysis to reconceive the thinking of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Frantz Fanon, and Édouard Glissant. More specifically, I consider guilt and moral responsibility, using archival research to trace the unusual lineage of writing on moral responsibility that has lain unexamined in their work, and to undo scholarly misconceptions concerning their ethical and political theory. More broadly, my work suggests that in historically tracing this account of guilt and moral responsibility from Heidegger to Glissant, we might conceive a more grounded understanding of the relation of guilt to moral responsibility, in ways that allow us to rethink the moral illogic of certain democratic institutions, in particular certain Western penal structures. The first chapter offers an analysis of Heidegger, attempting via his engagement with Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse to rethink the nature of guilt, and the assumption that moral responsibility and guilt are intrinsically intertwined. By tracing Adorno's historically shaped position on guilt and its self-conscious relation to Heidegger, employing such sources as Adorno's unpublished 'Probleme' lectures and notes on Beckett, Heidegger's marginalia, and Marcuse and Heidegger's postwar letters, this section reexamines the nature of guilt as it stood in German debates of the 1920s through the 1960s. The dissertation then moves to a chapter on the reception in France of Heidegger's understanding of guilt between 1940 and 1961, centering on Merleau-Ponty's late adaptation of Heideggerian ontology. Engaging with such sources as Merleau-Ponty's manuscripts and schemata for his final, unfinished work, The Visible and the Invisible, and his notes from courses in the 1950s, this section suggests a particular understanding of moral ontogenesis that has not been read in Merleau-Ponty's late work on nothingness and the inhuman. In the last two chapters, the dissertation then turns to more recent interpretations of this strand of thinking on guilt in Martinique, Algeria, and the U.S. in the work of Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant. Analyzing such sources as Fanon's library and marginalia, his coursework with Merleau-Ponty at the University of Lyon, and his 'Society and Psychiatry' lectures at the University of Tunis, as well as Glissant's personal writings on both Heidegger and Fanon, I attempt to show the ways in which Fanon's and Glissant's accounts of criminality and their indirect ethical understandings of guilt torque Heidegger's work, offering a more grounded understanding of the relation of guilt to moral responsibility. In a final section I suggest that this understanding might help us restructure the moral logic that underlies Western penal structures, and their self-subversive relation to guilt.

This thesis explores the origin and expression of dialectical thought in the life and writings of the American modernist Laura Riding. Within a biographical framework, I trace the steps by which it became the defining characteristic of her poetic, literary and critical works. A few have noted Riding's dialectical manner; none have appreciated its centrality. This is the first detailed study. An introductory outline of the origin and definition of dialectic provides a working theoretical context for the study that follows. Riding was born Laura Reichenthal in New York City, 1901. Her father, a Jewish émigré, was a committed activist for the left and included Riding in his campaigning at a very young age, immersing and educating her in the political and philosophical radicalism thriving in New York's Jewish communities of the era. There she internalised the revolutionary dialectics that would inform her aesthetic practice. Breaking with her father in her teens, she abandoned politics for literature. As Laura Riding - the name she adopted in 1927 and with which her literary writings continue to be associated - she moved to London and began collaborating with Robert Graves, relocating with him to Majorca in 1929. Producing poetry, fiction, criticism and experimental philosophico-literary works, she became a formidable presence within European literary modernism. Many aspects of her work are dialectical. Paradox, inversion and negation are perennial textual features. Key events in her life were also experienced as dialectical. Her insistence upon 'death' as an inverted sigil of unmediated vitality points toward a negatively dialectical mode of thought. In this regard, the theories of Theodor W. Adorno prove invaluable. Adorno provides a unique lexicon of terms - 'constitutive subjectivity', 'administered world', 'true object' - with which to draw out Riding's dialectical subtleties. Reading them alongside Adorno's negatively dialectical theory of modernist art and aesthetic praxis, certain aspects of Riding's writings are illuminated and, in some respects, they correspond. After a suicide attempt in 1929, Riding's perspective changed. Before it, her point of view was positioned within institutionally determined 'reality', and 'truth' beyond it was adumbrated by dialectical means. Afterwards, she believed herself transfigured: the embodiment of immediate, consciously apprehended noumenal objectivity. But the written word remained recalcitrant toward her attempts to inscribe this newfound positive 'truth'. This frustration contributed to her abandonment of poetry at the end of the 1930s. Re-emerging in the 1960s as Laura (Riding) Jackson, her disavowal of poetry and exploration of 'truth-potential' in language utilised dialectical approaches derived from her earlier experiences and writings.

My dissertation is concerned with utopian thinking in Critical Theory. It examines the changing conceptions of radically different social orders held by the associates of the Frankfurt School. Its aim is to investigate utopian thinking as a theoretical tool of a system of thought that is oriented towards social transformation. To bring about social transformation was the explicit objective of the Frankfurt School. And yet, as my dissertation demonstrates, some of the key member of the Frankfurt School discarded precisely this utopian tool. This rejection of utopian thinking is one of the central – but also one of the most problematic – aspects of Critical Theory. It goes back to the writings of Marx himself and culminates in the works of Theodor W. Adorno, specifically in his ‘Utopieverbot’ (prohibition of envisaging a utopian society). I argue that this Utopieverbot facilitated the disappearance of utopian thinking in Critical Theory, and furthermore, that it brought this system of thought to a standstill. In addition to the dissolution of utopian thinking my dissertation examines also its potential resuscitation. The foremost defender of utopian thinking I investigate is Ernst Bloch, a critical theorist overshadowed by Adorno himself. Countering Adorno, Bloch posited utopian thinking not only as a possible but also as a necessary theoretical tool of Critical Theory. I argue that Bloch’s ideas can be valuable in resolving the aporia of utopian thinking in Critical Theory. While important in its own right, this aporia is highly significant due to the enormous influence it exerted on the death of utopia in Western political thought, which can be seen as one of the key factors contributing to the escalating social, political and economic regressions of our contemporary era. Understanding the reasons behind the emergence of death of utopia, as well as its possible resolutions, thus present questions that urgently need to be addressed.

This thesis explores the relationships between music, literature, aesthetics and politics in the novels of James Joyce, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and the poetry of Ezra Pound, to show the political relevance of how discourses of musical transcendence appear in these texts. These authors were notably political: Pound was involved with Italian fascism, Warner a Communist Marxist, while Joyce critics have been invested in claiming for him a liberal, humanist political position that is reflected in his writing. This allows me to analyse their engagement with music in light of their politics in order to make connections between aesthetics and politics through music in modernist literature. The texts analysed in this thesis are Joyce’s Chamber Music and Ulysses, Pound’s Cantos, his early essays and articles, and his musical theories ‘absolute rhythm’ and ‘Great Bass’, and finally Warner’s Mr Fortune’s Maggot, ‘The Music at Long Verney’, and The Corner That Held Them. I use a methodology, informed by the musicology and philosophy of T.W. Adorno, that moves between aesthetic and social approaches to music. I analyse the political significance of Joyce’s and Pound’s appropriation of musical forms as part of a radical departure from traditional aesthetic practices to articulate a newly modern subjectivity, and arrive at an analysis of Warner’s exploration of the tension between music as both transcendent aesthetic paradigm and material object with political meanings and functions. I argue that the extent to which writers and scholars continue to refer to discourses of musical transcendence as a way of exploring and representing humanity’s relationship with the world means that analyses of music’s social grounding, which can reject problems of signification and meaning, are not sufficient to explain the variety of functions music can fulfil in writing and in thought.

This thesis argues that Beckett's corpus is concerned with the fragile possibility of freedom as articulated by Adorno. As Chapter 1 demonstrates, this concern begins with an overt thematisation of freedom in Murphy and Eleutheria that ultimately leads to an impasse. In line with Adorno's claim that '[f]reedom can be defined in negation only', Chapters 2 to 5 proceed to illuminate the deeply negative expressions of freedom that pervade Beckett's post-war corpus. Chapter 2 explores the question of aesthetic freedom⎯a key preoccupation of Adorno's⎯in relation to Beckett's Novellas: if art is wholly determined by its socio-political context then it makes no sense to talk about freedom in relation to Beckett's work. This chapter considers the paradox whereby art simultaneously embodies the illusion of freedom and the freedom of illusion. Chapter 3 traces the connection between freedom and evil in The Lost Ones and Endgame, analysing the systematic network of social unfreedom revealed in the cylindrical world of the former, and through the oppressive weight of history in the latter. Recognizing the significance of the philosopher's critique of the Culture Industry, Chapter 4 takes some of Adorno's more nuanced texts as the basis for an exploration of Beckett's late media plays. It argues that the aesthetic incorporation of technology heralds liberatory possibilities in its radical reimagining of the role of technology as a mediator between subject and world. Finally, Chapter 5 considers the significance of Adorno's reconceptualisation of metaphysics in Beckett's late short prose, arguing that, while All Strange Away and Imagination Dead Imagine manifest the horror of absolute immanence, Company registers the transcending impulse of thought to free itself from the existing world. So, in Beckett's resolutely negative art as a whole, a provisional and ephemeral possibility of freedom is kept alive by his abstaining from any affirmation of the existent.

In this dissertation I want to show how the crisis of the project of modernity - apparent in some challenges we face today such as climate change and rising inequality in developed countries - may provide a chance to redefine the ways we think about musical practice. For this purpose I develop a theoretical framework that allows us to link what is at stake with music - the often conflicting needs, hopes and even fears that articulate musical experience today at both the individual and collective level - with what is at stake with modernity. This framework is based mainly on Hannah Arendt's phenomenology of human activities in The Human Condition and the implicit story of modernity it relies on. Arendt's account, itself an attempt to provide an explanation to and a way out of the existential threat to the project of modernity posed by totalitarianisms, establishes crucial distinctions between labour and work, on the one side, and between work and action and speech, on the other side. By re-situating music in the broader context of human activities and the evolution of their paradigms in modernity I want to articulate a perspective from which I will discuss issues related to the distinction between the productive and non-productive aspects of musical practice; the different kinds of musical experience; the limits of the subject-object model implicit in most versions of modern aesthetics and the necessity to expand the model to include the intersubjective dimension; and the extent to which what Lydia Goehr calls the 'work-concept' may be a principle regulating musical practice in post-industrial society.

The thesis has three objectives. First, to examine the relationship between reason and freedom, and their experience in modernity. Second, to employ Adorno's critical philosophy to address the problem of ideology from a contemporary perspective. Third, to suggest what a 'truth of the subject' can amount to: how can the experience of the subject be a source of claims to truth under the conditions of modernity? The thesis investigates forms of ideology undergirding postmodern politics and the socio-historical experience of 'instrumental' forms of rationality, such as the objective determination of experience by modern technology. Elements of Adorno's critique, such as his notion of the possibility of experience 'unreduced' by socially pervasive ideologies, are thereby introduced. The ideas of spontaneity, as related to the concept of freedom, and of causality, as related to the concept of ideology, are examined via Kant to show how contradictions between them can be reframed as a question of the epistemological relationship between nature and reason. The framework for a dialectical approach to experience is established via Adorno's criticisms of the limitations of epistemology in explaining mediation of social phenomena. The centrality of mediation to a critical rationality and critique of normativity is demonstrated concretely via the historical example of the Holocaust. Consequently, Adorno's theory of 'negative dialectics' is explained via and contra Hegel, in relation to his notion of non-identity between conceptual reflection and the objective world, and with regards to his "priority of the objective", which refuses to ground knowledge and experience in consciousness. In demonstrating tensions between objectivity of truth on one hand, and the subject as that which constitutes truth on the other, a theoretical model becomes available for the critique of contemporary socio-political issues. The thesis concludes as an account of the truth of the subject in the context of modernity.

This thesis provides an historical and theoretical account of Marcel Duchamp's position in the canon of avant-garde French painting. It argues that Duchamp's work responds to the epistemological conditions of its time, that Duchamp - unable to fully escape the trappings of the lyrical mode to which he is heir - makes work through an idiomatic language which is also a language that can be said to name the world, to participate in knowledge of it. As an inevitable by-product of this line of argument, it also proposes that painting, as a visual form (language), can no longer fulfil this task. The study therefore offers an account of the decline of European easel painting seen through the lens of the decline of traditional metaphysics as identified by Nietzsche, Adorno and Broch. The readymade is seen to occupy a unique place within this specifically European development. The study begins with an examination of the implications of the fin de siècle problem of language and of lyricism as expressed by Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Letter of Lord Chandos (1902). It then turns to Hermann Broch's interpretation of this work and his subsequent arguments concerning the relation of aesthetics and ethics. The thesis proceeds by analysing works by Manet, Cézanne, Picasso and Braque before moving onto an exploration of Duchamp's work, with particular attention paid to the 'invention' of the readymade as a response to the same set of problems faced by other visual artists of the time (and tradition). It proposes that the history of avant-garde French painting be seen more broadly as a history of lyricism (in its aesthetic and ethical function) and that Duchamp's work, far from operating outside of that tradition, exists within it and employs linguistic forms that are appropriate to both the epistemological and material conditions of his time. The study enacts the writing in of Duchamp from the perspective of the French tradition from which he emerged and not through the filter of the American 'avant-gardes' and speculative sexual-psychoanalytical models that followed.

This dissertation aims to show how the relationship between reification and music discloses problems in modern philosophy and critical musicology. In chapter one, I attempt to articulate the relationship between reification and music in order to put forward a vision for a non-reified engagement with musical praxis. Accordingly, I suggest that once we distance ourselves from theoretical attempts to characterise the object 'music' in analytic aesthetics, instead, seeking to make sense of concrete musical events within the varying contexts of our everyday practices, then music can be conceived as an inherently meaningful phenomena that discloses the worlds in which it is created, performed and received. The following two chapters explore problems surrounding the interpretation of musical praxis in relation to the world-disclosive vision of music offered in chapter one. By looking at the debates surrounding Richard Wagner's works, chapter two explains how interpretive difference is a hermeneutic problem, one which allows us to accept the musical work as something that can 'change in itself', thus dissolving a number of problems associated with classical conceptions of musical meaning. It is in the light of these traditional approaches to the issue of aesthetic meaning that the third chapter seeks to consider how the philosophy of music brings about the reification of musical praxis. By situating the philosophy of music in relation to the world-disclosive vision of musical engagement articulated in previous chapters, I demonstrate how musical meaning can be understood in the context of socially- and culturally-cultivated tacit norms and practices. Subsequently, following discussions of the philosophical problems surrounding the association between music and reification, the fourth chapter examines the relationship in the context of critical musicology. Specifically, I attempt to show how music analysis, in an age where 'postmodern' New Musicology has largely given way to a critical musicology that is willing to accept and work with aspects of its 'modernist' past, can be included within a world-disclosive conception of music. The issue remains, however, that although critical musicology attempts to understand music in the context of everyday practices, it has simultaneously opened itself up to the charge of having condoned relativism. It follows that chapter five seeks to address the ethical and political problems that arise in 'postmodern' musicology as a result of the pressures of cultural relativism. I argue that in order to avoid 'postmodernising' itself out of existence, critical musicology, if it is to continue to give the institutional go-ahead for the interactions between 'modernisms' and 'postmodernisms', must face up to the questions of intersubjective legitimacy which maintain it as an institution and which presuppose its very existence. By turning to trans-cultural and trans-historical basis of interpretive validity, the future of critical musicology becomes entangled in contemporary philosophical debates surrounding the emergence, maintenance and transcendence of socio-cultural norms.

This paper examines the interplay between the intellectual movements of enlightenment, the economic system of capitalism, and the manifestation of violent racist ideologies like antisemitism and anti-black racism. The core argument is that while the enlightenment ideals of reason, universality, and human dominance over nature inherently set the stage for categorizing and objectifying groups seen as deviating from the desired uniformity, the emergence of extreme racist violence like the Holocaust requires the additional factors of a failing capitalist economy and the rise of totalitarian governments. In the modern American context, racist thought persists in the more covert form of color-blindness. A rhetorical denial of racial categories that performatively pushes back against enlightenment. This aligns with Sartre's critique of how democratic society rationalizes racism through abstract ideals disconnected from lived experience. Ultimately, the security and productive roles provided by a well-functioning capitalist economy are vital for containing the violent manifestations of racist ideologies that theories of enlightenment perpetuate.

This thesis has four primary aims. Firstly, I develop an account of Adorno’s critique of Kant and Hegel’s philosophy. I argue that the role and structure of judgement is key to his critical analysis. Adorno's discussion of their metaphysics, epistemology revolves around an immanent critique of judgement. This critique reveals, in the dialectical sense, the irreducibility of the 'negative moment' within judgement. This critical exposition grounds the second aim of the thesis. Analysis of Kant and Hegel's philosophies enables us to discern a number of key concepts in Adorno's own thought, concepts which will help us to understand his notion of negativity. In particular, his dialectical critique produces a constellation of critical - or negative - dialectical concepts: conceptless [begriffslose], non-identity [Nichtidentität], mediation [Vermittlung]. The generation of these concepts and their elucidation provides the basis for the third aim: to give a textually viable and philosophically fruitful explanation of key commitments in Adorno’s negative dialectics. I argue that negative dialectics does not amount to a system, a standpoint, or even a set of principles. Rather, it is a critical activity. The commitments, which revolve around the constellation of concepts outlined above, indicate a critical sensitivity to the limits of epistemology and metaphysics and the problem that these limits pose for judgement. Finally, I develop the resources to answer Michael Rosen’s claim that Adorno’s rejection of Hegelian determinate negation leaves his dialectics without any dynamic force. Drawing upon aesthetics, we can better understand the dynamics of negative dialectics. Aesthetic engagement with artworks not only demonstrates an appropriate orientation of philosophy to material, it is also an appropriate medium through which we can gain a clearer understanding of the philosophical commitments elucidated above.

Rather than being located in a field of art that addresses genocide through assumptions connected with identity issues or activism, this thesis of an artist’s exploration of artistic response to genocide in post World War II art practice, is informed by the emerging field of genocide scholarship. Seeing a parallelism between the concerns of genocide scholars and artists who respond to genocide, this thesis is an interdisciplinary study of art positioned alongside the field of genocide scholarship, as theorised by scholars such as Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses. In addressing genocide through broader historical trends, periods and structures, it assumes that artists who respond to genocide share with genocide scholars a concern about genocide at a secondary level and share the potential to create illumination in the field. This thesis explores art practices that address genocide conceptually through structure and material. The central claim of this thesis is that recent and contemporary art practices, here discussed, show a concern to respond to genocide as an ethical response, and that they do so by engaging with the complexity of abstract issues such as complicity and agency. The initial analysis of Adorno’s discourse on ethics, as it relates to response in art, sets up a level of complexity for two further investigations that interrogate the discourses of victim representation and lens-based documents of genocide through ethics and agency. Together these provide an analytical framework for the project. Close readings informed by genocide scholarship, of art practices including those of Jimmie Durham and Francis Alÿs, take forward notions in the existing critical field. These readings yield not only the evidence that demonstrates a commitment to creating ethically based art through conceptually informed practice, in artists responding to genocide, but also the value of a cultural critique that is informed by genocide scholarship.

This thesis investigates the transatlantic manifestation of the debate regarding the aesthetics of commitment in the modernist literary and theatrical tradition. Within the debate theatre occupies a privileged position since (because of its two-fold roles both as theory and performance) it allows a critique both of performative conventions and methods and also a dialectical consideration of the audience’s socio-political consciousness. The debate, often referred to as form versus content – schematically re-written as ‘autonomy’ versus ‘commitment’ – and its transatlantic evaluation are central to modernist aesthetics, as they bring into question the established modes of perceiving and discussing the issue. A parallel close reading will reveal the closely related development of the European and the American traditions and evaluate their critical strengths and shortcomings. The first part of the thesis discusses the positions of Georg Lukács and Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin in tandem with those of the New York Intellectuals, especially as expressed in the latters’ writings in the Partisan Review. The second part extends this transatlantic dialogue through a consideration of the theatrical works of the New York Living Newspaper unit of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) in the USA and Bertolt Brecht’s vision of and relationship with ‘Americana’ as revealed through such plays as In the Jungle of Cities, Man Equals Man, St Joan of the Stockyards and the 1947 version of Galileo. The Federal Theatre and Brecht’s respective dramaturgies demonstrate differences in the articulation and application of the aesthetics of commitment and politics of engagement. A close reading of four plays by the Living Newspaper unit will not only reveal the influence of the Russian Blue Blouse groups and Meyerhold’s theatrical experimentations, but also how the unit’s playwrights and administration attempted to re-write this aesthetic. Hallie Flanagan (the director of FTP), recognising the limitations of Broadway and having sensed the audience’s need for a new kind of theatre, realised early on the importance of ‘translating’ the European aesthetics of commitment to conform with the American New Deal discourse. Brecht’s plays manifest not only the differences with respect to the European aesthetics of commitment, but also its highly complicated development. His American experiences revealed that the failings of the FTP’s attempt to establish a viable national theatre with a social agenda prohibited a more powerfully theatrical connection (theoretical and performative) between the two traditions. Both the European and the American modernist aesthetics are informed by Marxist cultural and literary theory, particularly by the writings centred on the political efficacy of a work of art with respect to its reception and its modes of production. The politico-aesthetic encounter of the Marxist tradition of engagement with a commitment to aesthetic formalism (often associated with the autonomy position) led to a confrontational and polemical rather than dialectical argumentation. However, this thesis maintains that the arguments were not simply articulated by theorists at opposing ends of the political spectrum. At the same time, Brecht and the Federal Theatre Project’s interest in the advancements of the European avant-garde and fascination with the notion of ‘Americana’ demonstrate the necessity to examine the issue of commitment in a more dialectical manner. While their notion of the aesthetics of commitment differed, this thesis argues for the necessity, not only of revisiting some of the fundamental premises regarding the role and function of this aesthetics in modernist political theatre, but also of reading the two traditions in conjunction.

One of the most consistent features of the diverse artistic movements that have flourished throughout the twentieth century has been their willingness to experiment in diverse genres and across alternative art forms. Avant-gardes such as Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, Futurism, Fluxus and Pop were composed not only of painters but also dramatists, musicians, actors, singers, dancers, sculptors, poets and architects. Their works represent a dramatic process of crossfertilization between the arts, resulting in an array of hybrid forms that defy conventional categorisation. This thesis investigates implications of this cross-disciplinary impulse and aims by doing so to open out a site in which to reassess both the manner in which the avant-gardes have been theorised and the impact their theorisation has had on contemporary aesthetics. In the first part of this study, I revisit the work of the most influential theorists of the avant-garde in order to ask what the term “avant-garde” has come to signify. I look at how different theories of the avant-garde and of modernism relate to one another as well as asking what effect these theories have had on attempts to evaluate the legacies of the avant-gardes. The work of Theodor Adorno provides a connective tissue throughout the thesis. In Chapter One, I use it to complicate Peter Bürger’s notion of the avant-garde as “anti-art” and to argue that the most pressing challenge that the avant-gardes announce is to think through the cross-disciplinarity that marks their work. In Chapter Two, I trace how painting has come to be considered as the paradigmatic modernist art form and how, as a result, the avant-garde has been read as a secondary, “literary” phenomenon to be grasped through its relation to painting. I argue that this constitutes a systematic devaluation of literature and has resulted in an “art historical” model of the avant-gardes which represses both their real radicality and implications of their work for these kinds of disciplinary structures. In the second part of this thesis, I explore works which examine and question the aesthetic hierarchies and notions of aesthetic autonomy that the theories of modernism and the avant-garde explored in the first part set up. In Chapter Three, I approach by way of two cross-disciplinary works which employ literature and visual art: Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box (1934) and Andy Warhol’s a; a novel (1968). Works such as these, which slip through the gaps between literary and art history, have, I argue, important implications for literary and visual aesthetics but are often overlooked in disciplinary histories. In my final chapter, I return to the theory of the avant-garde as it emerges in the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard. I examine how his work reconfigures Adorno’s aesthetics by performing the cross-disciplinary movement that it argues is characteristic of avant-garde art works. Tracing his “post-aesthetic” response to Duchamp and Warhol, I explore how Lyotard articulates a mode of practice that moves beyond the dichotomy of “art” and “antiart” and opens out a site in which the importance of the twentieth century avant-gardes is made visible. I conclude by briefly considering the implications of the avant-garde, as I have presented it in this thesis, for contemporary debates on the twenty-first century “digital avant-gardes” and recent writing on aesthetics.

The suffering that initially prompts ethical reflection is frequently forgotten in the generalised rational response of much contemporary International Relations theory. This thesis draws on Theodor W. Adorno and Gillian Rose to propose an alternative approach to suffering in world politics. Adorno argues suffering and trauma play a key role in the task of enlightening Enlightenment. They emphasise the concrete particularity of human existence in a way that is radically challenging to Enlightenment thought. Understanding suffering helps to drive a negative dialectics that preserves the non-identical (that which cannot be understood, manipulated or controlled by reason), holding it up against the instrumentalism and abstraction that have prevented Enlightenment thought from fulfilling its promise. Part One reviews contemporary approaches to international ethics in a way that draws out their affinity with the Enlightenment thought Adorno criticises. Despite their variety, liberal and Habermasian approaches to international ethics tend to be rational and problem-solving, to assume moral progress, to underestimate the importance of history and culture, and to neglect inner lives. They approach ethics in a way that pays too little attention to the social, historical, and cultural antecedents of suffering and therefore promotes solutions that, whilst in some ways inspiring, are too disconnected from the suffering they seek to address to be effective in practice. Part Two deepens the critique of modern ethics through an exposition of Adorno's work. It then draws on Adorno's conception of promise, Rose's writing on mourning and political risk, and a broader literature on ways of working through trauma to propose an alternative way of being in the world with ethical and political implications. I advocate a neo-Hegelian work of mourning, which deepens understanding of the complexities of violence and informs a difficult, tentative, anxiety-ridden taking of political risk in pursuit of a good enough justice.

This dissertation presents a collection of essays, musical compositions and program notes written between 2017 and 2023. To overcome the methodological and representational limitations the portfolio-based dissertation format poses, I present my musical compositions alongside essays and program notes, combining my musical and textual output into a single research product. Theodor W. Adorno’s 1928 essay on Franz Schubert, in which Adorno evokes a fictional landscape to stage and examine Schubert’s distinct compositional practice, serves as my starting point to explore landscape (and seascape) as both an object of study and a method of observation. The dialectical image, constructed in that essay via the physiognomy and narrative experience of the landscape, conceptually dramatizes a critical viewpoint. I consider the nature of this and other such images in their ‘historicity’ as theorized and developed throughout the critical and analytical practices of Adorno and Walter Benjamin. Critical to the Schubert Essay in particular is Adorno’s looking past the overly romanticized interpretations of the composer, and his insistence that the meaning of this music can only be revealed if we look past such interpretations and focus on its truth content, which appears only through its decay. In my project – which presents itself at once as a comparative reading and also as a series of micro-fantasies – unanswered, or indeed unarticulated questions, regarding narrative and indeterminacy are evoked in an act of authorial self-determination haunted principally by the musical specters of the nineteenth-century chamber music and orchestral repertoires. The depth and the limitations of nineteenth-century romantic imagination, its ambiguities and paradoxes between subject and object, between natural and supernatural, between ideal and material, between transparency and opacity, are further developed in my compositional work, as the themes of indeterminacy and complexity are explored through my approach to musical form and content. Direct and indirect quotations and glosses of historical musical materials, retrieved through a process analogous to the research of archival fragments, are woven into the fabric of each piece allowing me to engage with the Western classical music canon in a curious but kind manner where bonds are formed based on mutuality and empathy with this history. The veiling and unveiling process that Adorno identifies in Schubert’s music in which ‘the instant a material concretizes and becomes recognizable it has already disappeared’ is a process analogous to the one that Michel Serres describes when he writes, “Unveiling does not consist in removing an obstacle, taking away a decoration, drawing aside a blanket under which lies the naked thing, but in following patiently and with respectful diplomacy the delicate disposition of the veils, zones, neighboring spaces, the depth of the pile, the talweg of their seams and in displaying them when possible, like a peacock’s tail or a lace skirt.” It is through this process that these gleaned fragments and musical idioms are exposed in my music, rendered unrecognizable and always slightly out of reach, veiled in mist and enveloped clouds. Following from such a ‘delicate disposition,’ my approach to musical form uses “the Idiot’s formula,” as developed by Jalal Toufic in his reading of Dostoevsky, as its poetic principle. Toufic writes, drawing on Gilles Deleuze, that Dostoyevsky’s characters, who are constantly caught up in life-and-death emergencies, even while they are caught up in these intense moments know that there is a more urgent question, but they do not know what it is. This awareness is what stops them and makes them become disoriented. This is the Idiot’s formula. With this image in mind, I design musical forms through which each moment delivers this narrative tension, propelling the form forward, making each moment singular while preserving a sense of unity, yet also rendering this unity completely meaningless because the tension is an illusion, and the music is in fact going nowhere. The bigger formal question is left unarticulated. The compositions and essays presented in this dissertation render this dynamic, as it relates to nineteenth-century poetics, explicit through an approach to composition and writing as curatorial practice and a mode of rhizomatic organization in which each of my works portrays both an archive and its curator at once. My methodology reflects my dedication to embracing unresolved tensions, refusing to let the complexity thin out, and allowing for the coexistence of multiple perspectives and lines of thought.

Dialectic of Neoliberalism: The Shape of Debt is an academic dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment for a doctorate of philosophy degree. It applies Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics to neoliberal theory—particularly the classical liberal concepts of liberty and property as represented primarily by John Locke and Adam Smith—and uses this theoretical framework to analyze the current American student debt crisis. In the context of its historical precursors (classical dialectic, Hegelian dialectic, dialectical materialism) negative dialectics emerges as a tool that helps the subject recognize the existing hegemonic forces that influence any dialectic prior to its performance. It reveals the arbitrary nature of power structures—how they were built and can be undone—and the constellations that veil the power at play within them. When applied to neoliberalism, property, and debt, this method provides an approach to understanding the social, cultural, and economic influences that contribute to vast inequities observable in twenty-first century American society. The American student debt crisis is an example of an object of this inequity. Using original research from the University of Minnesota’s budget history, Dialectic of Neoliberalism: The Shape of Debt confirms that certain correlations exist between state allocations, tuition, and student loans at the University of Minnesota, in particular, and surmises that this phenomenon exists between many, if not most, similarly organized academic institutions and their state sponsors. Dialectic of Neoliberalism: The Shape of Debt further demonstrates how these correlations are often motivated by core neoliberal values that have risen to prominence in the politics, culture, and economics of mid-late twentieth and early twenty-first century American society. Dialectic of Neoliberalism: The Shape of Debt includes a dramatic exposition of a theory of debt that captures its physical brutality and psychological abuse, and exposes the perverse power dynamic that underlies debt relationships. This dialectic of debt reveals a power at play that imposes the most heinous physical tortures, psychological torments, and perverse applications of power itself in order to maintain class antagonisms. Using historical theories of debt put forth by David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari, this project reaches the ultimate conclusion that the shape of debt is rooted in a profound violence and desire to exert power and control over other human beings. This project further concludes that the shape of debt indicates one example of the ways in which human beings value capital and power over life and humanity itself. Last, Dialectic of Neoliberalism: The Shape of Debt introduces the concept of pathocentrism as a differentiated dialectic that illuminates hegemonic power dynamics by appealing to emotional discourses that reprioritize pathos in the context of typically logos-centered systems of power and discourse in Western society, culture, and economics. Pathos-centered discourses allow for the expressions of oppression to coexist alongside logically dominant discourses that attempt primarily to prove or disprove. The goal of pathocentrism is to eliminate anxiety on both sides of the dialectical equation by honoring the voices of the oppressed in public discourse.

Central to the comparison between language and music is what Theodor Adorno termed a “wordless syntax,” such that the elements of a work of art might be held in relation to one another, rather than fixed relative to a static hierarchical form. In music, this syntax creates a tension between the expressive, voice-like aspects of melody, and the abstract, syntactical structures of harmony. The use of linguistic material further complicates the musical syntax, as there are multiple competing hierarchical structures at play. As an alternative to the word “hierarchy” in relation to musical form, the composer James Tenney offered “holarchy” as a replacement which sets elements in relation to one another, rather than to a fixed structure. The friction and instability created by multiple syntactical systems and the material nature of the music generates what I call in this dissertation holarchic flux.In addition to a theoretical overview of holarchic flux and its relation to language and music, this essay outlines a novel algorithm for interval and chord rationalization, using Tenney’s metric of harmonic distance. This essay also describes a number of compositions of mine, including a solo voice work How to Get There From Here and ensemble compositions We remember not the word, but the sound of the word, and Terrain, with regard to the concepts of holarchic flux and musical syntax.

This thesis is an intellectual history of dialecticism and its use in the works of the Frankfurt School members, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Famously, these two men had a ferocious and polemical debate in the pages of Dissent Magazine in 1955-56. The Fromm-Marcuse Debate has since become almost the sole lens in which the intellectual differences and similarities between these men are analyzed. Through a comparative and historical analysis of their individual work, largely removed from the Dissent Debate, I offer a new interpretation of their conflict, their personal relationship, and a new perspective on critical theory and its relationship to political action. I argue that Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse's intellectual ideas are better juxtaposed through their interpretation of dialectics, rather than psychoanalysis, and that through this, they present us with starkly different prescriptions for individual and collective political engagement. Thus, both Fromm and Marcuse are outliers within the field of critical theory, and certainly within the Frankfurt School, even as their ideas remain in firm conflict with one another.

This thesis explores a shift in the treatment of musical pastoralism by several English composers in the 1920s. The pastoral, whether literary or musical, carries with it connotations of tranquility, nostalgia, and idealism. In the early twentieth century, many composers in England became interested in their nation’s folksong revival, resulting in a musical idiom that often translated the expected affective connotations of the pastoral into their compositions. On the surface, these connotations seen to suggest a mode of expression antithetical to the goals of musical modernism. However, after the First World War, the composers analyzed in this thesis began to reformulate the techniques associated with musical pastoralism. By using Theodor Adorno’s lateness discourse as an interpretive framework, the writer shows how Frank Bridge, Gustav Holst, and Ralph Vaughan Williams fracture the conventions of the pastoral mode after the war, divorcing them from their expected relationships with teleological formal structures. This post-war pastoralism, rather than resting comfortably in the conventional associations of the pastoral, instead expresses the fragmentation and alienation of the subject in modernity. This reveals a striking critical distance, a distrust of the pastoral’s previous meanings, and a robust (yet subtle) manifestation of aesthetic modernism.

In this dissertation, I ask the question: how is (and is not) the plant both subject and object of human rhetoric? In taking up the question, I explore an array of texts, artifacts, and encounters revealing “the plant” addressed as a vital object of subjective experience and as a subject of objective reflection. Following what Diane Davis and Michelle Ballif call “extrahuman rhetorical relations,” I demonstrate an orientation of struggle that holds the question open at its limit, by approaching iterations of “the plant” caught in motion. I apply a method drawn from Frankfurt School scholar Theodor W. Adorno’s invitation to apply negative dialectics—or immanent criticism—to everyday sites of personal encounter and interdisciplinary texts. I understand the dialectic features of human-plant relations in three chapters or figures studies. First, I examine the concept of “natural history” revealed in a site-specific experience at Red Rock State Park in California. Second, I look at the historic and contemporary texts that name a parasitic liana known as the Sipo-Matador. Third, I hear the sounding of European trees emanating through a vinyl copy of the 2012 art-album Years by Bartholomäus Traubeck. Approaching these figures in affirmative and negative modes, I argue that keeping the dialectic in motion instantiates a critical process—a reflection on reflective capacity—across multiple renderings of representation and structure. Writing and reading is an essential part of this process. In understanding thinking as a movement of mediation—a dramatic journey joining the dialectic across theoretical abstraction and lived reality—I reveal a multidimensional orientation to rhetorical criticism suited to hear the plant, addressed. My approach, I argue, keeps Adorno and the plant—both subjects and objects of this dissertation—close enough to touch while at bay enough to remain mysterious. I trace a malignant structure surrounding my encounter between the human and the plant—the Enlightenment in its dominating iterations—in relief as much as I hope to leave open creative reflection and vital critique.

This thesis brings together writings of the critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno, and asks questions about the nature of mechanics and robotics within contemporary music. This is primarily situated in a standing collaboration I have with the composer and instrument-inventor Bryan Jacobs, in which we have developed a series of mechanical clarinets. Through readings of Adorno's Philosophy of New Music, Stravinsky: A Dialectical Portrait, The Form of the Phonograph, and Vers un musique informelle, I explore what the act of composing is with regards to these instruments, and how formerly a singular locus of composition has become articulated across multiple material locations. I explore different aspects of musical "writing" within the ecology of these instruments and their performing practice, I unpack the implications of the reckoning between a subjective breath and mechanical operation, and a subsequent antinomy of organic/mechanic that these instruments and the emergent vocabulary around these instruments imply. This thesis closes with two compositions of my own, that through rigorous and simple processes actuated over the course of three hours, ask in their own right questions about the human body mediated through a compositional mechanics.

This dissertation argues that foundational works of the English Renaissance, most notably the later books of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, proleptically model a key ambiguity in modern aesthetic theory concerning the work of art’s relation to external reality. On the one hand, these texts lay claim to a vital social efficacy, inserting themselves unmistakably into contemporary public controversy and holding out the possibility that imaginative literature could bring about a reformation of political subjectivity more radical and lasting than other forms of expression. On the other hand, the texts also fail to set forth a positive political program that could be translated from aesthetic experience to social activity. Instead, they train readers in a mode of cautious and attentive critical reflection, an interpretive agency that Spenser and others regard as the necessary precondition for enlightened praxis, but that falls short of—and, in many respects, actively complicates and confounds—a politics in itself. Such a critical disposition thus maintains a pre- or proto-political character, in which artistic experience becomes the simultaneously enabling and disabling condition for reformative social action. The project thus seeks to complicate the longstanding insistence, in early modern literary criticism, on the directly political character of artistic experience. Associating Renaissance literature with immediate didactic and ideological aims, in contradistinction to the putatively de-politicizing tendencies of post-Enlightenment art and aesthetic theory, historicist scholarship in recent decades has perpetuated a reductive narrative about the relationship between the aesthetic and the Real, one that an earlier tradition of Kantian and Marxist philosophy treats with greater subtlety. This dissertation analyzes Renaissance literature from just such a perspective, making the case for the semi-autonomy of The Faerie Queene from within an Adornian framework, and stressing the profound but attenuated relationship between the literary and the extra-literary in the early modern period. Through fine-grained analysis of Spenser’s Legends of Justice and Courtesy, alongside a number of related texts, I argue that the political and historical content of The Faerie Queene—and, by extension, any literary work of sufficient formal complexity and extra-textual ambition—is accessible only through an attentive engagement with the text at the level of the individual word. Such an analytical process, moreover, becomes both the mechanism for training subjects in the critical judgment necessary for redeemed political action, as well as a mode of deliberative caution that re-directs the concentrated urgency required for such action back into the patient work of literary analysis.

This project seeks to critique the occupation of Palestine with the categories and methods of a critical theological aesthetics. The theological aesthetics employed here is critical because it develops Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic project: beauty is dialectical, historical, and, above all, negative. Beauty is negative as it is founded on renunciation: beauty renounces ugliness. Adorno’s project is advanced through an encounter with Christ. Christ, as witnessed on the Cross, is the absolute fulfillment of negative beauty: Christ, who is absolutely personal, material, and relational, renounces renunciation itself. This fulfillment of negative beauty demands engagement and participation: to follow Christ is to do beauty; it is to renounce ugliness in a beautiful way. The occupation of Palestine, especially revealed through the phenomenon of suicide bombing, stands as an unsettling and dark ugliness. Because the occupation is funded and supported by so-called Christian Zionists, it is an occupation that challenges that character of God. Because occupation works aesthetically to occupy flesh and relationship, it is an occupation that desacralizes the living image of God. This demands prompt renunciation and beatification.

This project looks at how the LGBTQ community uses the internet, both in positive and negative ways in terms of media production and community. I briefly give some background using the Frankfurt School scholars on media production and the disconnect it causes between culture and audience when art is produced for mass consumption and then resituate those arguments and put them in conversation with modern technology and theorists to show how imagined communities, specifically the LGBT community, can use the mass consumption of media to their advantage when they are the producers of said media. I analyze three different types of media, Grindr related pictures, Instagram, and YouTube for both positives and negatives and look at not only what the media does, but the context in which it was produced, what it was meant to do, and possible readings of the media. By allowing voices and points of view that would be marginalized through traditional means of media production to have their own space with a global audience these technologies serve as a delimiting, though sometimes dangerous space, for the LGBTQ community to gather, curry social capital, and connect with others who validate them.

This dissertation addresses how commodification as a seductive practice differs from commodification as a coercive practice, and why the distinction is ethically significant. Although commodification is often linked with technological progress, it has nonetheless been the focus of critiques which assert that many commodification practices can be considered coercive and, as such, are ethically suspect. Markedly less philosophical attention has been devoted to seductive practices which, despite their frequency of occurrence, are often overlooked or considered to be of little ethical concern. The thesis of this essay is that, in regard to commodification, the structural discrepancies between seduction and coercion are such that in widespread practice they yield different degrees of ethical ambiguity and without proper consideration this significant difference can remain undetected or ignored, thus establishing or perpetuating systems of unjust domination and oppression. I argue that a paradigm shift from coercion to seduction has occurred in widespread commodification practices, that seduction is just as worthy of serious ethical consideration as coercion, and that any ethical theory that fails to take seduction into account is lacking a critical element. Drawing on Theodor Adorno's aesthetic methodology as an approach to working with coercion and seduction within the framework of commodification, I begin by clarifying the main concepts of the argument and what is meant by the use of the term "critical" in this context. Next I present evidence for a paradigm shift in the systemic structure of commodification and argue for the need to recognize the ethical significance of seductive practices. I then apply the main argument to issues of freedom in contemporary bioethics by examining narratives pertaining to pharmaceutical development and sales. The aim of this dissertation is to show that by distinguishing between seduction and coercion as distinct modes of commodification, ethicists will have a stronger grasp on how commodification functions, its connection to oppressive frameworks, and the ways in which problematic practices can be resisted or overcome.

Adorno discerned a modern quality in the classical tradition, and by incorporating this tradition into his writings he implied that there is still contemporary relevance in the classical works of the past. Classical philosophy and literature not only provided source material for his theories, but it will be shown that there is more to learn about the multiple functions of Adorno's writings and his process of writing them. This study seeks to examine and interpret some of Adorno's major writings that incorporated classical ideas and figures in order to locate how this ancient tradition contributed to his formulation of critical social and political theory. There are interesting and relevant implications for politics and political philosophy to be drawn from the entwinement of Adorno's work with classical thought, and it is the goal of this study to illuminate some of these implications. By looking at how classical thought influenced Adorno's deliberative writing process, the purpose of his writings becomes clearer. Ultimately, this study finds that his frequent use of classical literature and philosophy forms a political gesture against the standardization and domination of thought in modernity.

"We must get rid of our superstitious valuation of text!" Antonin Artaud's disdain still echoes in an ongoing theoretical discussion: what role, if any, should writing be understood to play in theatrical performance? Current theater scholarship, in both German postdramatic theory and American drama studies, tends to promote a paradigm wherein actual performance inherently exceeds or surpasses any text it puts to use. Despite its great appeal, this model threatens to obscure the ways writing can, so to speak, produce its own theater: both by simulating the dimensions of theatrical experience and by constituting an alternative site that undermines the totality of performance's here-and-now. The modernist works analyzed here construct theater as a medium whose heightened exposure to the present provokes an equally heightened contestation of that present. In these texts, theatricality becomes a negative relation to the actual. More concerned with formal experimentation than with suspenseful storytelling, these works can benefit from the "postdramatic" critical framework that has developed in theater studies during the past two decades. Yet postdramatic discourse frequently identifies the postdramatic departure from storytelling with a liberation from the "dominance" of the script. Likewise, the postdramatic is often characterized as a theater where presence supplants representation. In order to challenge these assumptions, this dissertation returns to Peter Szondi's and Bertolt Brecht's critiques of drama. For these earlier theorists, drama itself relentlessly affirms the present; it thus becomes possible to reconceive the postdramatic as a theater that rejects presentness. Within such a theater, text acquires a heightened, not a diminished, importance. Directing us towards an "elsewhere" of poetic composition, and hence providing an intense sense of what is not present amidst performance, experimental playwriting constitutes a vital component of the postdramatic landscape. In order to conceptualize this development, I draw on Theodor W. Adorno's aesthetic theory. Although Adorno is rarely engaged as a resource for thinking about theater, his work provides a framework for understanding the written script as a negative, critical structure that resists the real-time event of performance. The first chapter of the dissertation introduces Adorno, Brecht, and Szondi as theoretical interlocutors, situating their work in relation to postdramatic discourse and the problematic status of the theater text. Having argued for a modernist theatrical tradition that is both postdramatic and highly literary, the study then traces this tradition through a series of modernist and contemporary works. A model of theater as distraction, rather than presentness, structures both the late fiction of Henry James and the landscape plays of Gertrude Stein. In Waiting for Godot, this negation of the present becomes dialectical: Samuel Beckett intensifies dramatic presence to the point of exhaustion, constructing theater as the utopian desire for that which is not yet present. In the last two chapters, I show how two contemporary American playwrights have adapted this modernist legacy. Suzan-Lori Parks finds ways to construct writing as a site of performance in its own right, alternative to the presence of the stage. Mac Wellman devises a text that consistently refuses the economy of communicative transaction, figuring a yet-unimagined mode of collectivity. Through close readings of their work, "Negative Theatrics" shows how all these writers enact a profoundly critical theatrics of the page.

This dissertation focuses on what art in general and poetry in particular can reveal about sociopolitical history, and on the possible significance of such knowledge or understanding for human subjectivity and ethical-political agency. Following Marxian-inflected theory my claim is that the assumption that poetry and the other arts do not differ, first from already-conceptualized, purpose-driven thought, and then from actual action, is not only dangerously delusional, but also ignores the most radical potential of poetry. Poetry is an imaginative construction that is felt to be as if it were already an objective truth, als ob, in Kant's terms, but is in fact something not yet actually proven to be objective. This in turn makes aesthetic experience imaginatively and affectively available to us without the conceptual constraints that delimit objectively-oriented thought and action in the real, empirical world itself. It is in this sense that art allows for the activation of subjectivity and agency not already known and stipulated. More specifically, this dissertation identifies the role that Jewish poets ascribed to modern Hebrew and Yiddish poetry from a perspective wrought through a rich engagement with German literary culture. I show how both Yiddish and Hebrew modernist poetry provides and records unique evidence of historical experience. This study also examines how and why modern Hebrew Israeli poetry is haunted by the possibility that the newly established state of Israel might be moving away catastrophically from the imperative to achieve a genuinely democratic configuration. Finally, it examines how and why this legacy of critical examination of the sociopolitical reality still suffuses the aesthetic vocations of Israeli poetry today. This project follows three main routes. The first is an exploration of the work of the Yiddish poet Moyshe-Leyb Halpern (1886-1932), read in light of its engagement with the poetry of Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), the poet Halpern admired most; the second is a comparative study of David Avidan's poetry, and to a lesser extent Natan Zach's, with the poetry and thought of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) and, through Brecht, Heine again; the third route is a study of the concept of poetry promoted by the American-born contemporary Israeli poet, Harold Schimmel (b.1935), in light of both Frankfurt School aesthetics and Halpern's poetics. The complex constellation of poetic works and histories that this dissertation undertakes reveals how poetry emerges out of self-other relations, and in what ways these dynamics facilitate an agency effect, that is, an agency that is never already established, but is always coming into being. It is this notion of felt-agency, I further show, that is vital for the establishment a non-violent public sphere, one that is urgently needed today.

What is the idea that "utopia" names? How can discourse represent that idea? Setting aside temporarily deeper problems with the idea of representation, and focusing on how a complex philosophical discourse might approach the problem of conveying or representing a large, only fairly precise, and important idea is the question of this dissertation. It ultimately answers that question obliquely, by focusing on the way the utopian discourse present in the work of three late 20th century philosophers, Theodor W. Adorno, Luce Irigaray, and Giorgio Agamben, addresses a subject position that can be named a "subject of possibility." How this subject of possibility might relate to the possibilities for transcendence located in the material world that is the stage for utopian imagination is another area of the study's investigation. The dissertation introduces the question with a look at the problems associated with utopia. It considers utopian discourse in select works of each of these thinkers, paying attention to dystopian context, identification of style and language, subject-object considerations, and the discursive treatment of space and time. In particular, it traces the theme of messianic expectation, in a loose secular sense, through this discourse. Finally, it links the way the messianic theme provides content to the idea of utopia present in this discourse. It claims that the messianic idea thematizes a materialist interpretation of transcendence and metaphysical experience that is developed in the work of each of these authors. That is, these authors locate the metaphysical moment necessary for the idea of utopia in the transcendent relation of the material subject to the subject of language and thought; in its concrete difference from that subject. This materialist moment provides a base for a non-representational and transformative approach to utopian imagination and perhaps even utopian practice, by linking the idea of "utopia" to a nonlinguistic understanding of the negation of suffering.

This study comprises a three-tiered interpretation of John Corigliano’s Etude Fantasy. First, the formal properties of the work are analyzed using set theory. Second, the work is analyzed using Byron Almén’s recent semiotic theory of musical narrative. Lastly, in a mode of critical reflection, the study critiques the narrative suggested by Almén’s theory and offers a revision employing the aesthetic theories of Theodor Adorno. Adorno’s aesthetics and philosophy of negative dialectics is based upon the notion of non-identity. For Adorno, both thought and music are fundamentally a movement (“Bewegung”) without coming to a false absolute. This movement precludes any achievement of static arrival or conclusion into a single, unified, positive conclusion. This study uses this notion of non-identity to critique and modify Almén’s theory of musical narrative and forms a musical narrative particular to the Etude Fantasy.

In this dissertation, I analyze the videogame as a way of approaching emerging forms of selfhood, as well as new models of technological innovation, economic activity, and artistic production, utilizing writings by theorists of visual culture, in particular Theodor W. Adorno. By evaluating the media phenomenon of the videogame, I assess the new ludic individual and elucidate the problems and possibilities that accompany her. I propose that games be played critically, not simply as expressions of culture or as products for consumption, but as objects through which we can think. In this way, games function much like artworks, as pieces of visual culture that allow us to explore different avenues of reflection. Games can be catalysts for deliberation on a variety of topics, from aesthetics to constructions of selfhood. Individuals often play the role of the gamer even without knowing it, due to the unavoidability of games on phones, computers, TV, etc. The individual as a gamer is active, but entrapped; she has choices, but they are from a menu; she has a purpose (or a quest), but its outcome is predetermined. My project is to scrutinize this tendency in order to explain how technologies have shaped us and, more importantly, how we can reclaim play for our benefit.

Since the development of widespread sound recording and distribution, the music industry has become increasingly consolidated among fewer companies. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno described how the commodifying forces of the music industry lead to a predictable formulaic music that lacks any critical approach to society in their groundbreaking book, first published in 1944, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972). Today, the patterns have not changed as there are now four major record labels known as the "Big Four" that produce commodified music with a business model that optimizes their profits at the expense of art, creativity and original style. Using the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) as its lobbying group and appointed vigilantly, the "Big Four" attempt to limit the access of independent artists and labels to music consumers. This thesis argues that in the process through which the music industry works to co-opt and commodify genres of music, the music is (de)politicized to appeal to a larger audience. While technological advances in digital media and the internet would seem to bring a decentralized (even democratized) structure that diverts the costly music distribution system allowing for more artists and labels to compete, the RIAA has acted to prevent these technologies from developing their greatest potential. First, I demonstrate how music is commodified and marketed towards consumers. The second part of this thesis uses hip hop as an example to demonstrate how the music industry co-opts a genre of music to sell to the largest number of consumers and in the process changes the political significance of that genre. Finally, I argue that the RIAA's attack on file-sharers in the name of copyright protection is a technique for the "Big Four" to stop competition from independent artists and labels.