The Aesthetic Dimension of Representation

Critical Theory in the Present

Aesthetics has featured as a prominent topic in the history of German thought. In the twentieth century, scholars associated with the Frankfurt School of Marxist Aesthetics have generated analytical categories and concepts that are of particular value in at least two of the present contexts in literary studies: as the debate on aesthetics and politics is reanimated in academic circles and as emergent literatures prompt a reconsideration of the terms of modernity. In responding to political and economic developments with the potential for unprecedented impact on a global scale, Frankfurt School critics offered bold and intriguing interpretations of Marxist theory. Their effort to develop a critical theory of social life was founded in a fundamental commitment to “freedom without exploitation,” to use Marcuse’s phrase, and an exploration of what could be alongside what is (An Essay on Liberation 17). Even though their ideas can hardly be said to have formed a unity, in the writings of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse, aesthetics came to assume a particular significance.1 In setting their sights on the role of art in an era of commodification, Adorno, Marcuse, and Benjamin, the latter considered to be in the outer circle of the institute, are the figures most closely associated with the development of a philosophical aesthetics.2 Marxist critics such as Lucien Goldmann and Georg Lukács, whose initial challenges to Marxist orthodoxies were of signal importance to Frankfurt School Critical Theory, provide an obvious vintage for a debate on art and social reality. This study, however, focuses on theoretical positions that evince particular consideration of the formal aspects of art, and of art as an arena for utopian thinking, positions that were developed by Critical Theory in part in conversation with Lukácsian theories of reification (Verdinglichung) and critical realism, and in part in opposition to them.3

Frankfurt School Critical Theory, however, is a conflicted choice for a project that seeks to propose new directions in the reading of postcolonial literature. A Critical Theory based on the work of Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse is plurisonant, difficult, and unyielding of an easily recoverable aesthetic criteria. The attempt to cull a flexible glossary from their theories may incorrectly suggest the existence of these terms as readily portable. The work of Adorno and Benjamin, in fact, is notoriously difficult, variously interpreted, and hotly debated, and Marcuse’s The Aesthetic Dimension offers a dauntingly complex negotiation between Marxist aesthetics, realism, formalism, psychology, and utopian negation, with none of these ideas being susceptible to reductive formulae.

Their internal dissension raises further problems as the terms of their own criticism of each other threaten to overdetermine our responses to the original work by forcing us to take sides. The disagreements between these theorists do serve on occasion to clarify the other’s positions—as is sometimes the case in the Adorno–Benjamin dispute—but more commonly they serve to obfuscate the issues further because they were not always responding to the whole compendium of works now available to us, nor were they always operating within the same time frame. Benjamin committed suicide in 1940, Adorno died of a heart attack in 1969 before the completion of Aesthetic Theory, and Marcuse survived him by ten years on a different continent, completing The Aesthetic Dimension in 1978 shortly before his death. Their divergent career trajectories and experiences were not without consequence for the development of their theoretical positions. Nor did their shared affinity with the primary concerns of the Frankfurt School preclude violent disagreement and interpersonal intellectual conflicts.

Besides, although all these thinkers share the problem of intransigence in variant degrees, each of the theorists under consideration also offers unique problems: Adorno because of the difficulty in recovering a coherent “theory” from Aesthetic Theory4 or his other texts; Benjamin because of his expansively allusive breadth, inscrutable mysticism, constellational writing style, and elusive approaches to aesthetics; Marcuse because of his lapses into instrumentalism in theorizing aesthetics and his multiple positions on memory. The heresy of paraphrase takes on new meaning in the interpretation of Adorno as well as Benjamin, for both of whom the content of ideas was inextricable from the form of presentation. Benjamin actively cultivated ambivalence as an organizing principle, the “montage of opposites” serving to leave us with options rather than resolution, a symptom of the very crisis that the growth of global capitalism and mechanical reproduction were perpetrating. The paratactic style employed by both becomes, on occasion, an integral component of the philosophical subscription to nonhierarchical progression of ideas.5 The inevitable urge to paraphrase their complex ideas must necessarily be bridled by the premium these thinkers placed on style as an integral component of meaning.6 The extraction of quotations and ideas from the writings of these thinkers constitutes a species of domestication often rudely at odds with the philosophical underpinnings of their complex efforts. Moreover, what Said refers to as “a point of origin . . . a set of initial circumstances” of a theory or set of ideas cannot be summarily discounted in subsequent uses (The World, the Text, and the Critic 226–27).

Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse’s own readings of literature offer a critique deeply situated in particular historical contexts no longer available to us for simple comparison with the particular circumstances in which postcolonial literature is being written and interpreted. When they undertake an analysis of literary texts, Adorno and Benjamin focus on nineteenth-century and Modernist texts and aesthetics. To the extent, therefore, that these critics operate within a largely European frame of reference, the relevance of their ideas within a postcolonial context is not only unlikely to be readily apparent from their diverse views, it is likely to seem audacious.

Finally, one might ask, why invoke the very theorists most closely associated with the view that art was losing or had lost its critical capacity to question social norms and the economic institutions that were facilitating its production and influencing its form and content? All three thinkers bemoaned the decline in the negative function of art and remarked on the attenuation of autonomy in the world of commodity production. In his introductory essay on Benjamin in A Companion to Aesthetics, Donougho suggests that Benjamin “claimed, in effect, that art is at an end” (53). Benjamin’s pronouncements on the end of autonomous art would seem to have sounded its death knell quite definitively, as in the statement, “when the age of mechanical reproduction separated art from its basis in cult, the semblance of its autonomy disappeared forever” (Illuminations 226). In a summative characterization of the Frankfurt School position on the subject, autonomous art was indeed either in its terminal phase or threatened as never before.

Marcuse’s persistent belief that art is still the last refuge available in one-dimensional society and his publication of The Aesthetic Dimension in 1978—in which he makes his proclamations for the revolutionary potential of art despite his acute understanding of the extent to which artistic autonomy is increasingly obscured by late capitalism—are somewhat anomalous temporally and intellectually with the predominant tenor of the positions taken by the other two theorists. Although Marcuse’s discussion in The Aesthetic Dimension focuses on the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he envisions the category of “authentic” art as revolutionary, not only on the grounds of “a radical change in style and technique,” or in the sense of its being “written for the working class or for the ‘revolution,’” but for being “subversive of perception and understanding, an indictment of the established reality, the appearance of the image of liberation,” a potential that can hardly be confined to one era or one set of cultural texts (x–xii). In describing autonomy in these terms, Marcuse was also affirming his belief, one far more optimistic than either Adorno or Benjamin would have so frankly allowed, that “the horizon of history is still open” (73).

In general terms, the ideas of Adorno and Benjamin with regard to artistic autonomy and freedom are far more closely identified with the mainstream understanding of Frankfurt School Critical Theory than Marcuse’s somewhat more hopeful ones. Marcuse, however, no less than the others, was acutely sensitive to the enduring power of capitalism as a system that was continually restructuring itself. He, no less than the others, believed that capitalism reduced the masses to conformist consumerism and subjected the artist to the threats of the market system. His advocacy of revolution and his trust in art as an emancipatory activity, then, betray optimism uncharacteristic of the Frankfurt School. How, then, to justify a discussion on the value of literature drawing from disunified theory, often intransigent writings, and theorists who displayed an unprecedented understanding of the devastating impact of the advancing capitalist system on the very possibility of authentic art? Despite the obstacles and inevitable objections, there are good reasons for persisting.

In the first place, the particular synthesis of ideas made available in the work of these theorists in their response to the work of Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Lukács, among others, provides a thoroughly interdisciplinary framework from which to approach the question of aesthetics and politics. The residue of German philosophical thought and the theoretical musings of thoughtful critics such as Lukács lace the Critical Theory developed by the Frankfurt School thinkers discussed here, offering powerful ruminations on the interpenetrative weave of economics, sociopolitics, and art.7 The latter was granted an especially privileged place in their writings, despite, and indeed because of, their growing despair over the threats to its autonomy from the rise of monopoly capitalism and the phenomenon Adorno and Horkheimer were to describe as the “culture industry.”8

The aporias of realist aesthetic theory are forcefully exposed by the interventions of critics such as Adorno, as the terms of Marxist aesthetics are investigated and reformulated to account for new economic and historic developments. In their dedication to the principle of nonidentity thinking, which takes distinct forms in the writings of different theorists, they redefined the terms of revolutionary art well beyond the reflection theories so dear to conventional Marxist aesthetics. Their sometimes congruent, often conflicted, and ultimately disunified theoretical work thus nevertheless includes an intriguing set of terms for debate on culture, aesthetics, and the forces and relations of production. The heuristic value of the concepts of the culture industry, reification (pace Lukács), instrumental rationality, the rule of equivalence, nonidentity thinking, negative dialectics, aesthetic formalism, and utopian negation, to name but a few of the ideas developed in the work of the three writers, continues unabated in any discussion purporting to undertake an analysis of the artwork in global capitalism. Yet these must be seen as elements of rather than formulae for a postcolonial analysis of literature.

The philosophical claims made by these thinkers for artistic knowledge (“truth content” for Adorno), moreover, are particularly useful for a critique of postcolonial literature at a time when it is threatened dually by a market system that not only seeks to shape the text, but also threatens to straitjacket the responses to it. In dwelling on the contradictions and negative knowledge of art, Frankfurt School theorists broke new ground for a reconsideration of the relationship between subject and object, art and reality. In refusing the easy consolations of reconciliation and in distinguishing the knowledge of art from conceptual knowledge alongside the inherent imbrication of art with the real world, these theorists were casting these relationships in dialectical terms, even if they could not always agree among themselves or provide accessible definitions and conceptual clarity, or indeed a full assessment of art forms like jazz that were emerging in a vernacular engagement with modernity.

Each of the theorists considered in this study offers clusters of observation and insight that may not be reducible to clear-cut formulae, but pronounce for the aesthetic project a complexity of relationship between the aesthetic, political, personal, and collective that allows the critic to raise the question of the value of art without losing sight of its submission to the socioeconomic forces of the administered world. The demands of aesthetic and political accounting enjoined by the particular burden of postcolonial criticism endorse this special approach because it enables a simultaneous consideration of the relation of art to “the actual life-processes of society,” as Adorno puts it, and the capacity of authentic art “to distinguish itself from these processes” (Prisms 23). The Frankfurt School theorists discussed here provide some of the most useful vocabulary for exploring the question of the value of art with these strictures in mind. Their extraordinary efforts to conceptualize art as the privileged arena of alterity offer an undeniably potent means of recuperating postcolonial literature as recalcitrant even when administered. Without insisting on artistic autonomy—arguably a conceptual cul-de-sac in investigating the validity of artworks—the potential yield of an aesthetic probe of this impulse in the artwork is worth investigating if we wish to understand the artwork as meaningful from within as well as without.

Finally, in light of its claims to a global theory of culture and society, moreover, Critical Theory demands revaluation from a perspective it could not have foreseen, that of postcolonial experience and its cultural expressions, and of the capacity for aesthetic recalcitrance in the vernacular phases of the advance of global capital. If the specific historical circumstances they were presented with enabled their theoretical formulations, they were also hobbled by them. None of these thinkers, Marcuse perhaps excepted, was particularly concerned with non-Western cultures in their thinking about art and the social world; even Marcuse was more interested in non-Western politics than in its cultures. As Jay ruefully observes, Adorno remained “Eurocentric to the last,” never feeling “any real sympathy for American, let alone more ‘primitive’ forms of culture outside the West” (Adorno 120).9 Neither Adorno nor Benjamin devoted themselves to “a differential historical analysis of separate aesthetic forms, and their respective technical elements” (Bloch et al. 108). The intermingling of high and low, popular and avant-garde strands in the media with which they were both originally concerned was not foreseen by either, rendering their critiques of particular art forms open to reinterpretation and supplementation. Adorno’s now infamous inability to envisage the dynamics of form in the development of jazz stands as a useful caution to bear in mind as we attempt to recuperate from his work the terms for a new critical aesthetics for the study of postcolonial literature. A comparable appearance of carnivalesque, fantastic, and multicultural linguistic features in postcolonial and certain other types of literature allows for those prized features Adorno described as “atonality,” which we might revise in literary terms as Bakhtin’s “heteroglossia” or in particularly postcolonial terms as the disruption of “global English” and “vernacular aesthetics,” which might serve as the basis for investigating the revolutionary content of art anew, despite the ersatz end of autonomous art. The high/low culture divide that appears with regularity in the Frankfurt School theory of the culture industry cannot alone suffice for an adequate consideration of these elements, even if it continues to obtain in limited measure and with contemporary inflections.10 Nor indeed is it possible to accept the notion of a unified and centralized administering mechanism, one which might have obtained with much greater credibility in the context of American Fordism encountered by Adorno and Horkheimer when they were writing Dialectic of Enlightenment than it would in the fragmented and disorganized capitalism of today. Far more significant is the Frankfurt School thinkers’ general understanding of the ways in which both high and low culture, however defined, would come to bear the marks of reification associated with the development of capital, even if they escaped its administrations in rare moments.

Central to the formulation of its terms by the thinkers most closely associated with aesthetics and culture is the Frankfurt School theorists’ study and explanation of the development of cultural forms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Dismayed by the process of technological expansion and capital accumulation, these thinkers found themselves forced to assess the impact of advanced monopoly capitalism on the form, style, and aura of art as it was becoming modified and commodified by these developments. As such then, it was the collision of tradition and modernity under the ascendant—even triumphant—new economic order that prompted their observations. A reconsideration of this context in the present forcefully reveals both the value of their ideas for a critique of postcolonial artistic production and their ultimate inadequacy for explaining its variety or its multiple coordinates.

The march of global capitalism is now widely acknowledged as a worldwide phenomenon. If the encounter between different value systems and worldviews is an obsolete matter for the West—however arguably following Francis Fukuyama’s provocative thesis—it is far from irrelevant to the experience of many postcolonial societies who continue to be described, perhaps equally arguably, as “living in many centuries at once.”11 At the very least, there is no definitive sense in which this encounter is at an end for many societies more recently entering that phase of commodification that the Frankfurt School theorists have already assumed to be largely the case for Anglo American and other Western societies. It is not necessary to idealize the past or tradition to explore the ramifications of this encounter as a subject in many post-colonial texts, only to acknowledge that the hands of the clock turn at a variant pace within particular spatiocultural chronologies of the development of capital, that unevenness is part of the spread of global capitalism, and that the “modern” is a beast with many faces. Besides, the articulation between contradictory forces within modernity, forces that include an insistence of local identity in the face of the collapsing of space, for instance, has always been a part of its dialectical engagement with the paradigms it attempts to supercede. Tradition itself, it must be conceded, finds its expression largely in terms of what is becoming defined as “modern.” Indeed, Critical Theory’s emphasis on capital and the changing relations of production as the moving forces behind modernity facilitates rather than thwarts our attempts to place postcolonial literature within a phase that may be contrastive in some ways, but is nevertheless comparable in others to economic and cultural movements in Europe at the time of Critical Theory’s formulation. A trans-valuation of modernity as the progression of capital rather than as a “Western” or “European” phenomenon per se renders the ideas of Critical Theory immensely valuable for a current reckoning of the post-colonial artwork. The grounding of Critical Theory in a more or less clearly European framework, on the other hand, exposes its limitations for a postcolonial analysis even as its conceptual horizon accommodates it.

The notion of a single modernity has been long contested. It is not only the understanding of modernity as a phenomenon precipitated by a Western system of values that is being challenged today, but also the temporal/spatial scheme drawn from an exclusively Western understanding of modernity. Time, as the narrator of Rushdie’s Shame solemnly notes, “cannot be homogenized as easily as milk” (6). The very notion of modernity, of course, is also undergoing considerable revisions, as “Western” theories, such as Marxism, are themselves being considered within a more vernacular framework.12 To the extent that the “postcolonial” implies “Third World,” however euphemistically or obliquely, as I have attempted to demonstrate in the previous chapter, postcolonial modernities issue the most potent challenge to assumptions of synchronicity in the expansion of financial globalization as well as to the commonplace understanding of the staples of modernity. Placed within a force field (Kraftfeld for Adorno), the phenomenon of modernity— and its associated impact on cultural production—is being reconceptualized in postcolonial theory through the work of critics such as Dipesh Chakrabarty in terms of what Jay describes in his interpretation of the term as “a relational interplay of attractions and aversions that constitute . . . the dynamic, transmutational structure of a complex phenomenon” (Adorno 14). A central notion for the Frankfurt School theorists is one of “constellation” that signifies “a juxtaposed rather than integrated cluster of changing elements that resist reduction to a common denominator, essential core, or generative first principle” (Jay 14–15). It is not only that capitalist modernity clashing with its predecessorial form generates a confounding dissonance in the “later” sites of its development, but also that these sites conjugate its generative principles in their own logic, and that they are “later” only by a constricted standard that provides a less than flexible conceptual grid. The idea of modernity not merely as vernacular (usually another code for non-Western or Third World as historically retarded), but as essentially liquid might allow for a better understanding of postcolonial engagements with it. Liquid modernity suggests the idea of spread, but also unpredictability of shape, while also accommodating the possibility of multidirectional flows and a nonlinear scheme for understanding change. In thus implying a divorce from “the temporal structure of the statement, ‘first in the West, and then elsewhere,’” as Chakrabarty puts it, liquid modernity also permits us to develop literary models free from dogged adherence to a period-based progression of -isms (Provincializing Europe 6). To propose this is not so much to suggest the irrelevance of historical and economic developments as it is to seriously attempt a constellative understanding of elements that may not be reducible to overarching schemes.

Despite his acute awareness of the enveloping force of the culture industry, the promise of aesthetic truth lay, for Adorno, in the very mediation of art with advanced capitalism. Adorno and Marcuse were both able to grant that “artistic truth is still conserved by works which express the dissonant character of modern life” (Held 89). Adorno also insisted that the products of the culture industry could not be unproblematically conflated with works of art.13 In Aesthetic Theory, he was to argue that the destruction of aura and the deaestheticization (Entkunstung) in modern avant-garde art demonstrates the process of encoding auratic qualities from within in techniques and form.14 Given his resistance, moreover, to the subsumption of art in terms of the subject and to the problems of viewing cultural activities within reifying categories, it would seem that Adorno’s work not only retains its significance for critical projects, but that it carries ideas of particularly contemporary relevance for postcolonial studies in its protest against the false closures of periodization and categorical divides. Even were we not to draw from the Frankfurt School theorists themselves the materials for considering postcolonial literature within a disjunctive phase of the development of capital, we would be obliged to consider that along with the dubious fruits of modernity, death comes more slowly to the truth-telling capacity of art that has yet to conclude the important business of chronicling the encounter of culture with the potent new forces and epistemological structures encapsulated in the name of modernity. It would seem presumptuous, or counterproductive at the very least, to attempt a total theory of a totalizing phenomenon that is nevertheless still in process. The challenge in locating postcolonial literature within the theoretical apparatus selected here is that of historicizing aesthetic norms—indubitably the project of Critical Theory in the hands of all three theorists—without succumbing completely to a stageist view of cultural development.

In the grip of what we might call “the postcolonial modern,” the far reaches of the world now being drawn into the skein of global capital exert their own local sense of the tensions between space and place, calendrical and mystical time, tensions known to us as the classic conflicts associated with the march of modernity. Aesthetic responses to these tensions in contemporary postcolonial literature must certainly be located within the period-based divides of Western literary developments; they must also, however, be situated within the context of those areas whose conditions of alienation may well replicate those experienced by the advanced capitalist world but that also offer a profound supplement, if not a downright remediation, on account of their having been at the receiving end of the exertions of capital through colonialism and its aftermath and having been obliged to forge resistance not only in terms of opposition to capitalist modernity (as was the case in India, for instance, until the “economic liberalization” of the nineties) but also through an anticolonialism that would reformulate alternative relations to time and space through the very grid of the “modern.” The problem of justice, then, might be conceived by these societies (and their writers) in terms of “progressive” socialism (as again was the case in India, which pursued a Soviet socialist-style model for many years), in those of a refurbished humanism in the name of democracy, as well as in the aesthetic figuration of their own versions of an idealized and utopian “dream time” (an idealized “Ram Rajya” in India, for instance), or in the mode of utopian negation (so characteristic of the literature of the “mourning after” decolonization) that would fit less comfortably within linear schemes of progress.

If the global scope of capitalist modernity has emerged as a preoccupation of art and literature in mainstream postcolonialism, giving it its characteristic “transnational” and “postmodern” flavor, the field has also been identified with the project of social liberation, one usually identified more closely with realist and neorealist literary movements. The anxious divide between establishment First World postcolonialism and a postcolonial art more clearly committed to the struggle of the exploited masses in the postcolony constitutes one of the major fault lines in the field. Another silent breach, I am suggesting, has been widening steadily as the mainstream text is construed either as aesthetic pabulum or as void of a meaningful stance on social liberation, thus standing in danger of being ceded to conservative apolitical aesthetics, on the one hand, or to faux-liberal constituencies with a shallow sense of meaningful resistance, on the other. The criteria of exotic appeal or multicultural representativeness threaten to shape a restrictive context of reception in which the complex interplay of aesthetic formalism, utopian thinking, and the problem of justice feature but poorly, if at all. The mainstream postcolonial text is thus lauded too easily for its radical content or seen as irrelevant to the project of social liberation. The option of assessing literature’s stance toward justice within its aesthetic and formal order or indeed of investigating the very meaning of the idea of what constitutes justice stands in the via media between these choices.

Although a great deal of postcolonial writing as well as other cultural expression addresses the question of justice through the familiar genre of social realism and the model of communist equity, no less significant is the attempt of the postcolonial text that imagines justice through aesthetic modes more fictional than functional. As the promised utopias of humanism (under the mission civilisatrice of colonization), independence, self-governance, self-sufficiency (in production and consumption habits), socialism, globalization, and capitalism progressively fail the cause of liberation, neither particular changes in the relations and mode of production nor simplistic notions of modernity as a monolithic Western import have alone been able to explain failures in the postcolony. The postcolonial writer attempting to catalog “the dissonant character of modern life” is forced to confront the idea of emancipation as non-teleological and of temporality itself as ambivalent. The longing for the new that has endured in the work of so many writers from the colonies has taken various forms of expression that cannot be easily conflated with cultural developments that arise from a strong sense of passage from one era into the next in the West. That passage has been disjunctive at best for the rest.

As my readings of three canonical postcolonial literary texts will show, the exercise of art to respond to the changing (and uneven) relations of production and the meandering, digressive flow of liquid modernity is not typified by any particular set of literary strategies that mesh wholly with the categories (and by implication periods) of literary -isms. That capital is universal need not suggest that it produces predictable art forms everywhere. Nor are the stages of development from market to monopoly to consumer capitalism necessarily smoothly susceptible to periodization, even if “something really fundamental did change after 1945” (Jameson, “Discussion” 359). A foundational tenet of Marxist thought—that capital is a process and not a thing—need not imply a strictly developmental trajectory, except in broad strokes. Heir to various legacies and temporal logics, the postcolonial writer’s aesthetic choices may be profoundly historical, but that need not imply a rigidly temporal historicism. That is to say, it may well be true that aesthetic norms arise from the prevailing socioeconomic relations—this would certainly be the thrust of Frankfurt School Aesthetic Theory—but it must be recalled that theorists such as Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, and Lukács before them were trying to theorize a process they saw unfolding before them as the market seemed to gain almost total control of the cultural sphere. The fractal and disjunctive struggle for expression on a global scale that ensued in the aftermath of political decolonization is a phenomenon so profoundly processual that it can hardly be compressed into historical units of cultural development without considerable epistemological violence. What remains useful from the work of these theorists in a reading of postcolonial texts is their understanding that art was locked in a struggle with a rapidly changing market, that it could not escape commodification or its existence in a reified world, and that some artworks would respond to these conditions of alienation with moments of autonomy occasioned by their very administration. What cannot have been foreseen by them, however, is that the formal developments in these works would be administered not only by the global forces of developments in capital, but also by their unique histories of struggle with colonial mechanisms of regulation.

In considering the “inevitable pangs of bad conscience [that] must . . . accompany any attempt to capture Adorno in an introductory work . . . written in a language other than German,” Jay offers the consolation that “the effects of a text, desired or not, are part of its meaning”—a view also held, he notes, by Benjamin and Leo Lowenthal (Adorno 13). Although the privileging of meaning in terms of reception would have been anathema to Adorno, as I intend to demonstrate in a section of my discussion of the “consumption” of Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey, I would submit that the use of Adorno’s formulations and those of the other thinkers under consideration here, developed originally in the context of select realist and modernist texts from the European tradition, does not so much translate their meaning solely into terms of reception as it offers a tribute to their inexhaustibility and to the ongoing “effects” of their work in contemporary contexts. The necessary heresy involved in attempting to formulate a critical aesthetics for postcolonial studies from Critical Theory functions as a species of translation, of a bearing-across, from one context to another, with something gained, but something lost.15 To the extent, however, that the significance of their ideas cannot be confined either to the original texts or to their particular historical moment of production, the works of the Frankfurt School theorists on aesthetic theory become available to us as necessarily mediated by cultural, historical, and geographical gaps, but not entirely lost to us because of them. If anything, their endurance and their limitations together function to underscore the importance of the historical moment of this theory’s production and that which now inflects its use. By the same token, this enforced traveling of a theory situated in time and place must also oblige it to bear the brunt of experiences and expressions not originally imagined as integral to it.

In recent years, numerous studies have sought to put Frankfurt School Critical Theory in dialogue with post-structuralism, opening up further avenues for excavating their ideas for contemporary contexts.16 In their own work, Adorno and Benjamin’s shared interest in conceptual constellations, alongside their subscription to the integrity of the aesthetic object, and their commitment to interpretation from contemporary perspectives offer the most powerful argument for continuing deliberation on the status of art, now in the arena of postcolonial articulation. At the start of a new millennium, as the tyranny of the culture industry assumes global proportions and the proliferation of diverse sorts of cultural expression is being enabled by it, the question of the value of art is more urgent than ever. While the question, then, may be the same as that posed to the theorists who so devoted their thoughts to it, the answers may now be both similar and different.

Postcolonial Critical Aesthetics

Grounded in Critical Theory, this study proposes a postcolonial critical aesthetics not so much as a formula and recipe for all time (or for all postcolonial literary production), but as an approach cognizant of the following fundamental principles: Postcolonial literature is a part of the processes of an administered world (verwaltete Welt). Its place within the prevailing relations of production and the ongoing phase of capital development are entirely relevant to the critical purpose, as is its relationship to ideology. A postcolonial aesthetic theory divorced from the socioeconomic reality profits neither the aesthetic nor the political objectives of postcolonial literature. It is from within the placement of the literary text in the framing administrations of capital and practical disciplinarity, however, that its import and significance must be released through interpretation. A critical method that refuses to recognize literary impulse toward distinction from life processes perceives neither the market’s constitutive need for some modicum of artistic autonomy (the market also gives if it takes away!) nor the artwork’s compulsion toward its own order, the latter sometimes exceeding the author’s ideological raiments as well as the market’s determinations. This study thus enjoins attention to the following key issues: the aesthetic dimension of representation in postcolonial literature, its sensuous apprehension of reality variously conjugated through particularism and the individual consciousness, and its response to the project of social liberation (“utopia”). Yet this work can insist on this heuristic only on the grounds that these issues gain in significance precisely within a framework that acknowledges the conflictual and interpenetrative relation among the market, the text, and the author. Each of these exists as a historical category, even if the artwork claims the distinction of the aesthetic sphere.

In drawing from the terms of Critical Theory, therefore, this study insists upon the discrepancy in the sociohistorical conditions of post-colonial literature within the dominant paradigm of culture under late capitalism. As the vernacular expression of a new phase in the dialectic of modernity, postcolonial literature provides glimpses of the contradictions and unevenness of global social development. Arising within a variant historical context in which the progression of modernity coexists with what Amitav Ghosh describes as the alternative time scheme of “the fox-holes of history,” postcolonial literature fits, but uncomfortably so, in the dominant global chronology of late capitalism. The intervention of vernacular languages and contexts in the globally commodified works of postcolonial literature provide for a particular sort of the hitherto mentioned “atonality” that is productive as a basis for understanding its impulse toward recalcitrance. In other ways, too, the structure and figurative choices of postcolonial literature draw attention— but do not always command it—toward its formal negotiations with expected and authorized themes and the transmission through its formal organization of alternative apprehensions of the dialectic of modernity. Developing within multiple cultural and linguistic contexts, postcolonial literature is not only significant for its formal innovations of traditional forms; indeed, it is of value as “novel” because of them. These modes of nouveauté offer partial portraits of the operation of vernacular modernities even as they expose the ways in which sophisticated academic versions of the culture industry are able to take materials from “other” cultures and recode them as both traditional and new in the light of First World discovery. This tension between perceptions of the old and new also exposes a fundamental artistic alienation in the postcolonial work—a staple of authentic art for many of the Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School—as it continues to characterize the postcolonial writer “divided to the vein,” in Derek Walcott’s memorable phrase, by multiple sociocultural forces. As I elaborate in my readings of the works by Mistry, Rushdie, and Roy, it is possible to recuperate some of the features of its resistance to instrumental rationality from the excessively administered world in which they exist, even if the ideally autonomous art that “has renounced consumption” is no longer possible (Adorno, “On the Fetish Character” 31). Adherence to claims about autonomy or a “pure” intelligence native to the autotelic text is neither defensible nor particularly profitable in the assessment of post-colonial literature. The idea of “native intelligence” thus necessarily functions as double coded within these multiple contexts that foil even as they marginally retain the conditions of artistic resistance to the logic of equivalence.

To suggest the broad function of cataloging the interregnum of capital development for postcolonial literature, then, is not to remove it from its context of production within the academic versions of the culture industry in the First World academy. The postcolonial work, particularly of the cosmopolitan variety, is separated with difficulty from the fate of art as such in the age of advanced monopoly capitalism. Although the writers considered in this study do not meet the criterion of “mass” culture, it would be impossible to argue that the ideology of the culture industry is without impact on the postcolonial text—in terms of its origins, form, content, and function. Indeed, the anglophone post-colonial novel is an unabashedly elitist construction from the vantage point of the Third World where a majority of the population would be alienated not only by virtue of language but also by the fundamental lack of literacy. A very particular version of the culture industry is being proposed here, as it obtains under the conditions of the emergence of postcolonial studies as a First World discipline. Writers and texts that accede to the canon under the banner of postcolonial and minority literature are already assumed to have cleaved to certain requirements that would ensure their inclusion. Even if the novels considered in this study are not demotic works of art, they are nevertheless “popular” within large segments of the academy and sometimes among public readership as well. What I am laboring to make explicit is the principle of the culture industry as it operates within the supposedly elite arena of university and academic culture, producing formulae consistent with the ideology of a culture industry that engages in “incessant ‘speculation about its [art’s] efficacy’” and is dominated by a preoccupation with its exchange value (Held 91; Adorno, “On the Fetish Character” 40–41). This process of conversion of artistic truth into currency in the postcolonial aftermath is predictable in its capacity as a commodity among commodities. The contradictions of capitalism and culture thus render the idea of artistic intelligence profoundly ambivalent.

How then is one to release the submerged intelligence of literature from the tangled weave of art and socioeconomics? In Critical Theory, artistic alienation and nonidentity serve as the most useful guiding lights for this task. Adorno’s surprising solution to the problem of the intimacy of art with the conditions of its production—its collusion and collision with its dynamic and evolving processes—derives from Marx’s own recognition of the need to strip the halos that surround art while retaining for it the capacity to imagine the desires and needs repressed in conventional reason. Marx’s critique of rationality implicitly faults its irrationality and its failure to unite reason with the principles of freedom, justice, and happiness. Adorno’s notion of true nature and true reason also reinforce this reconciliation, even if he nevertheless concedes that this is a failed project in most art. It is in the tension between art and politics that we are encouraged to look for the truth-content of art, for therein lies the ideal of freedom and fullness that is lost to sight in the world of work and power.

In the discussion that follows, I will necessarily ignore the undeniable differences among the three thinkers, seeking instead those convergences that stem from their common subscription to the truths of Marxism and their suspicion of its orthodoxies. In their own distinct ways, the critics under consideration here were drawn to the Marxist ideal of the whole man and the uses of art in measuring the fullness and emptiness of life. Human suffering, art’s relation to this suffering, the protest of the particular in artistic representation, art’s formal mediations, and its elusive portrayal of utopia are recurrent themes in the aesthetics of the Critical Theorists. Like Benjamin before him and Marcuse who continued to develop his theories after him, Adorno saw history as the history of human suffering. Many of the thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School educe their theories from this fundamental scheme in approaching art, one derived largely from Marx. Marx’s belief that “the objectification of the human essence, both theoretically and practically, is necessary in order to humanize man’s senses, and also to create the human senses corresponding to all the wealth of human and natural being” issues a central role to the aesthetic faculties in the assessment of human social development (Early Writings 162). Man’s relationship to nature and the rooting of sense perception and experience in nature were central to Marx’s understanding of the emancipation of man. “Man lives from nature,” he claimed, “i.e. nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature” (127). Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse’s acute understanding of the alienation of modern life stems from their shared subscription to Marx’s contention that “every self-estrangement of man from himself and nature is manifested in the relationship he sets up between other men and himself and nature” (130). Nature assumes a central place in these thinkers’ conception of the potential for human liberation. Their critique of domination outlines its threefold manifestations: in the domination of physical nature, that of man by man, and, finally, in the subjugation of human nature itself. Adorno claims that “art corrects the domination of nature as the domination of an other” (Aesthetic Theory 113).

Adorno’s thinking about mimesis and aesthetic comportment owes a great deal to Benjamin’s early work on language as well as to the shared sense of all three thinkers that art recalls what has been repressed by reified consciousness and sundered from nature. Marcuse’s insistence upon the principle of “harmony” and the “truth” of art and his understanding of artistic mimesis betray a similar commitment, even if these views are expressed in terms rather less philosophical. To neglect the artwork’s ideal of harmony and nature and its particular conjugation of universal desires beyond exchange society, then, is to discount its very novelty. For Adorno, art “reminds us of . . . an objectivity freed from the categorial structure. This is the source of art’s rationality, its character as knowledge” (Aesthetic Theory 330). It is in the ability to cull from nature that which is not merely empirically known, and in the “capacity to perceive more in things than they are” through a “gaze under which the given is transformed into an image” that the potential for a “humanized nature” reside (330).

In his discussion of “Frankfurt School Marxism and the Ethical Meaning of Art,” Norman Fischer suggests that the two traditions associated with Marxist aesthetics that do not confine their analysis to social realism are those of “utopian negation” and “aesthetic formalism” (362). Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse are the theorists most readily linked with these theoretical developments in aesthetics. Adorno’s general pronouncements on the diminishing possibility of autonomous art, indeed autonomous thought, under conditions of reification and the near identity of ideology and reality appear to coexist with his insistence on the signal importance of retaining this capacity under the most hostile of conditions, in a phrase, after Auschwitz. The preservation of the utopian moment is significant in the work of all three writers considered in this study, regardless of how differently it is articulated. The very crisis of overaccumulation must paradoxically produce a turn toward aesthetics in the middle of rampant confusion. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno claims that “the making of every authentic work contradicts the pronunciamento that no more can be made” (251). In the final reckoning, the aesthetic dimension was a “humanizing force whose power was to be expanded in an alienated society”, a potential that Marx himself had earlier located in works of literature (Nägele 208).17

As an object freighted with the power of representation, the post-colonial text is enmeshed within larger social desires that are driven by the primacy of the epistemic subject and its affirmation of identity between subject and object. Rey Chow likens “the new ‘desire for our others’” that emerges in postcoloniality with “the same positive, projectional symptoms of fascism” that grow from “a longing for a transparent, idealized image and identifying submission to such an image” (44–45). The function of the postcolonial as “limit-text, the Anti-West” (Bhabha, “The Other Question” 73) and of the colonized as Manichean other (JanMohamed, Manichean Aesthetics) are topics that have been explored by many a postcolonial critic. As Asha Varadharajan notes, however, “the recognition of incommensurability has not prevented the proliferation of Procrustean beds in which bodies are simultaneously identified and othered” (23). The principle of commodification and reification is not without consequence for critical practices caught up in its driving urge to identity equivalence and exchange value. Driven by the logic of exchange value, this evaluative process can effect a misleading transference of its own logic onto the literary text perceived exclusively as commodity.

The ethical import of resisting this transference resides not so much in a subsequent transparent agenda for politics as it does in the very process of an aesthetic negotiation that allows the otherness of the art object to lie just a little beyond the task of transparent interpretation. To inhabit—epistemologically—the topos of the reader through the trope of native informancy is to foreclose on the text’s otherness as aesthetic object. A dialectical aesthetics that does not turn particulars into mere examples or concepts such as “postcolonial” into dominant and mystifying generalities struggles to retain the integrity of the object without losing the capacity to engage with it in its particularity. From this particularity, a sense of the universal may well be grown, but that is hardly a predictable consequence. The sacredness of the text is here allied with what Eagleton describes as the “equally ‘sacred’ pursuits of critique and commentary, in which a language similarly unleashed from intention into its material fullness may catch in its net of mutual resonances some of the ‘idea,’ the pattern of diverse significations of the text it studies” (Walter Benjamin 117). Within a dialectical model of negations, the possibility of recalcitrance and truth-content can be conceived without altering or relinquishing the primary context that dominates in the cluster of elements that comprise the phenomenon of the rise of postcolonial studies as a First World “practical” discipline.

From the standpoint of this model, criticism “involves an ‘aesthetic’ responsiveness to the particularity of its object alien to . . . dominative rationality” (Eagleton, Walter Benjamin 117). To perform this act as a sacred vocation is not to act as “the object’s obedient ghost,” but to act like something of its agent in submitting to its logic and conceding its otherness prior to subjective interpretation. In this scheme, it is not only the artwork that must be accorded the integrity of the object as epistemic entity, but also its own object of “knowing” what it seeks to represent. “The real,” as Eagleton points out, “is by necessity empirically imperceptible, concealing itself in the phenomenal categories . . . it offers spontaneously for inspection. . . . It is not merely that certain aspects of the real are illuminated and others obscured; it is rather that the presence of the real is a presence constituted by its absences, and vice versa” (Criticism and Ideology 69). The principle of nonidentity thinking not only grants to art its own mode of producing reality, but it also acknowledges the integrity of the object in a world given to conceiving of the other in terms of the self. Dialectical thinking is not without political import; if anything, in its insistence on the integrity of the object, it is about the content of the political and its failure to transcend the limitations of instrumental reason. It may be necessary at this juncture to point out that it is important for Adorno that the ideal of identity not be discarded as the repository of a potential utopia, only that the transparent “correspondence of the thing-in-itself to its concept” be recognized as “hubris” (Negative Dialectics 149).

In the theories of Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse, art is fundamentally other to what we generally think of as reality. Operating within the realm of alterity, the aesthetic object obliges us to confront the limits of representation and the fallacy of readings that seek to subsume and consume the text in the subject’s projectional fantasies. Models of cognition usually operate within the code of identity or adequation of concept to thing, defining “identity as the correspondence of the thing-in-itself to its concept” (Adorno, Negative Dialectics 149). The nonidentity principle elaborated by various thinkers of the Frankfurt School exposes the futility of grasping the nonconceptual through conceptual means, emphasizing instead the excess that lies beyond this grasp. As Held explains in his introduction to the term,

The falseness of the claims of identity thinking can be revealed by negative dialectics, the thinking that explores non-identity. Negative dialectics assesses the relation between concept and object, between the set of properties implied by the concept and the object’s actuality. . . . Non-identity thinking employs language, through the construction of “constellations” of concepts, as a connotative or indicative device. Thus specific sides of objects are revealed which are inaccessible to identity thinking and the dogmatic application of classificatory schema. (215)

Representation puts in question that which is represented, rather than resolving its contradictions. In a perhaps inadequate analogy with Adorno’s view of the object as never “wholly known,” the artwork as an epistemic object and its own ostensible object of representation both confront the limits of objective knowledge (Negative Dialectics 14). In granting the primacy of the object, critical aesthetics obliges us to instate alterity as beyond instrumental reason and thus beyond the limiting terms of exchange value in a world of commodities. For Adorno, in particular, “art is a property of the object, the artwork, and not the subject (nor indeed the reception of the work)” (Buhler 166). In recalling us to the integrity of the artwork as inexhaustible object, Adorno does not discount the force of historical emplacement or the impact of this force on both form and content. In Adorno’s terms, as Buhler explains,

the social dimension is something that analysis or interpretation reads out of how content is sedimented in the artwork as form, not something to be read into the artwork from outside. Social context, even the study of reception, may indeed be important research questions, but they do not bear on the question of what constitutes art in the emphatic sense. (166–67)

The idea of value, which is integral to a consideration of art in the real world, has most often been translated in the postcolonial context in terms of market and commodification.18 While these notions of value and realpolitik are obviously tremendously significant when considering the version of postcoloniality that has been mobilized for examination in metropolitan discussions, Native Intelligence insists on a restoration of value to postcolonial literature on grounds of its aesthetic identity as an object among objects, and as an object Ding-an-sich capable of also suggesting the limit of reificatory thought.

Adorno draws his understanding of the complex modes of artistic truth-content as coexistent with its socially relational identity from a Marxist formulation of the double character of art. On the one hand, Marx insists that “although our time of scientific and technical revolution calls for an ever-increasing measure of teamwork, the work of a scholar, a writer, or an artist is not directly bound up with other people and may actually suffer from direct social intervention.” At the same time, however, he declares: “Yet such work presupposes a community with others; it draws on the experience of others, it is essentially a form of social activity despite all its autonomy” (Early Writings 157). In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno emphasizes this point by focusing on the otherness of art as integral to its inherent logic:

Art perceived strictly aesthetically is art aesthetically misperceived. Only when art’s other is sensed as a primary layer in the experience of art does it become possible to sublimate this layer, to dissolve the thematic bonds, without the autonomy of the artwork becoming a matter of indifference. (6)

In its conflicted relation with the world beyond, art imitates itself, copying not the world as it finds it, but that which becomes under the laws of aesthetic mimesis. In a ringing declaration on the potential of art to transform that of which it is a semblance, Adorno declares:

Art is semblance even at its highest peaks; but its semblance, the irresistible part of it, is given to it by what is not semblance. . . . No light falls on men and things without reflecting transcendence. Indelible from the resistance to the fungible world of barter is the resistance of the eye that does not want the colors of the world to fade. Semblance is a promise of nonsemblance. (Negative Dialectics 404–5)

As the Frankfurt School theorists argue, art’s relation with the empirical world is a conflicted and complex one. Adorno explains that

Art negates the categorical determinations stamped on the empirical world and yet harbors what is empirically existing in its own substance. If art opposes the empirical through the element of form—and the mediation of form and content is not to be grasped without their differentiation—the mediation is to be sought in the recognition of aesthetic form as sedimented content. (5)

The structure of “autonomimesis” allows art to resist the totalism of dominative reason as it retains a fluid openness in the relation of subject to object, one in which it illustrates the principle of assimilating to rather than absorbing the other. Adorno’s meditation on beauty in Aesthetic Theory further elaborates on its connection with nonidentity thinking. In his critique of Kantian aesthetics, Adorno conceives of beauty as a historical category that is deeply mediated rather than simply available to us as a “natural” phenomenon; as a trace of the nonidentical and of alterity, beauty is allied to art in that both require an assimilation to the object. The impossibility of determining and assigning to art a specific function underscores this relationship of nonidentity.

Those who would argue, as Goldmann does, that the embeddedness of art and the artist in the real world fetter their capacity for any meaningful transcendence must be answered by a consideration of the various factors that contribute to art’s productive alienation from the res. If artistic transcendence is a fiction, neither is its embeddedness so complete that we do not recognize the ways in which it differs from life-processes in its impulse toward transformative mimesis. Without denying the artist’s prior definition by a given zeitgeist, it is nevertheless possible to submit the artistic artifact as distinctive from its determinations by virtue of two further considerations: its eccentric form and its inherent instability. In the Frankfurt School’s much revised version of Marxist aesthetics, the formal virtues of the artwork assume the burden of alienation in dialogue with its content. Artistic alienation, the mainstay of art’s freedom, is affiliated with the embodiment of content in form:

“Aesthetic form” means the total of qualities (harmony, rhythm, contrast) which make an oeuvre a self-contained whole, with a structure and order of its own (the style). By virtue of these qualities the work of art transforms the order prevailing in reality. This transformation is “illusion,” but an illusion which gives the contents represented a meaning and a function different from those they have in the prevailing universe of discourse. (Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt 81).

Marcuse’s meditations on form and artistic mimesis, admittedly more crudely formulated than Adorno or Benjamin’s, nevertheless capture a common impulse to understand the artwork from within. The content of art, subjected to creative processes of formalization, obtains its unique significance within the logic of the work as a whole for all three thinkers. In the aesthetic dimension, language, form, organization, and the artwork’s impulse to autonomy become the engines driving the mimetic faculty to imitate a reality incommensurate with the repressive laws of equivalence:

Although the content of an artwork may indeed tell the story, depict the image, or convey the perceptions of a particular historical class, the aesthetic form—the totality of qualities that make the work a self-contained whole set off from the external reality—universalizes and thereby transforms and transcends this content. (Katz 182)

The alchemic transformation of the particularities of the real through the workings of the artistic alembic effects the first of these removals from life as we know it, making meaning at once more simple and more complex. The proliferation of possibilities unleashed through this transformative process return us to a revaluation of the real through a useful ambiguity that frees the imagination for the contemplation of another purpose. The desire to be free of dominative rationality is betrayed through the logic of aesthetic form and through the unique modes of ambiguity enfolded into the artwork’s internal regime.

Yet another removal of art from the world of instrumental reason results from the unyoking of definitive meaning from auctorial intent. Subjective intention and the text’s exchange value in the economy of representation are both inadequate grids for understanding the literary text. Adorno submits that “the content of a work of art begins precisely where the author’s intention stops; the intention is extinguished in the content” (Notes to Literature 13). The intricate weave of form and content, intention and its articulation, the market and its inevitable loopholes make of interpretation a daunting task.

One might recall at this juncture that the act of interpretation etymologically implies not only elucidation but translation and, therefore, an inevitable loss of the original. The encryption of conception into form introduces a phantom intention, yet another loss of the original even before the work is set before us. In more than one sense, then, the poetic is always beyond us. In “The Task of the Translator,” Benjamin ascribes an almost sacerdotal function to poetry (Illuminations). As sacred text, the scriptive field is not available for a transparent reading that would reduce its ritual ceremoniality to a serviceable interpretation. Wielding Occam’s razor, Benjamin strips away all pretension to these violent extractions and reduces the critical act to its true purpose: that of meditation on art’s intrinsic identity and its pregnant potential for signification. As I understand it, it is with this critical stance in mind that he pronounces the well-known dictum, “No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener” (78). Benjamin’s messianism has been much criticized, in his treatment of both literature and history. It is not necessary to enter into that debate here, save to note that in insisting on the sacred inscrutability of the text he allows us to ponder the implications of translation/interpretation as failures—but useful failures—by definition. It is not so much the status of the postcolonial literary work as “intentional object” (Krieger’s phrase, 97) that emerges in this understanding as its capacity for surplus and ultimately irreducible signification.

Benjamin’s views on language are seminal to an understanding of his views on the sacred inscrutability of the text. As Lunn notes, “in his first important article, ‘On Language as such and the Language of Men’ (1916), Benjamin developed the symbolist insistence that language communicates itself and not subjective or intersubjective meaning or mental pictures of objects” (173). Greatly influenced by his learning in Jewish mystical sources, Benjamin was to write in 1913:

I have never been able to do research and to think in any way other than, if I may so put it, in a theological sense—namely, in accordance with the Talmudic teaching of the forty-nine levels of meaning in the Torah. (Briefe, vol. 2, 524)

As his own constellative and paratactic writing style also suggests, Benjamin’s hermeneutic stance was developed on the understanding that the significance of meaning was to be released by a reverential reading that paid due attention to the text’s capacity for plurisignification. Benjamin’s concept of ambiguous language and Adorno’s insistence on formal mediation and the nonidentity between subject and object, differently conceived and developed, nevertheless offer productive avenues for exploring the artwork’s capacity—in certain moments—to resist identity with the world of instrumental reason and administered reality.

In the context of the highly politicized field of postcolonial studies, I have suggested that all “truly” postcolonial texts are freighted with great and particular expectations. Within this matrix, the empire does not write, it writes back to an implied reader who is in eager expectation of its recriminations and its transformative message. There is, as it were, a brisk market for this sort of literature in the metropolitan world that has made clear its need for new information and pleasures as well as for new formulae for ethical action. This circumstance and the associated phenomena of commodification and “selling out” have occasioned considerable comment, demonstrating a not unworthy concern with the embeddedness of art in the real. The particular modes of resistance and transformation available to it have received far less attention because of the assumption that the text is either so far removed from real life as to disable the possibility for meaningful responses to it or so deeply immersed in it (and in the market) as to cloud its promise completely. Distance from life would seem by definition to thwart an engagement with it, but immersion in its deep and treacherous waters would never permit sight of the necessary bank. Adorno and Benjamin both suggest critical stances for negotiating the question of artistic freedom, without surrendering an understanding of art’s determinations by its socioeconomic and political context. Moreover, as Fischer points out, the work of Herbert Marcuse in The Aesthetic Dimension provides a partial blueprint for a powerful rapprochement between poesis and praxis and between the autonomy of art and its worldly tether. This putatively contradictory reconciliation is expressed by Marcuse, a thinker acutely aware of the ability of late capitalism to muffle opposition, in such paradoxes as the following, which proposes that art “is inevitably part of that which is, and only as part of that which is does it speak out against that which is” (Aesthetic Dimension 41). Marcuse’s concept of “transforming mimesis” encapsulates the tense relation between the poetic and the real, the latter term favoring and endorsing the imbrication of art within the real and the former insisting on its unique capacity for transcending through transformation.

Those who would deny this particular attribute of art’s separation from life might consider that it is not the poetic alone that removes itself from the usual course of things; ethical action is also distinguished by the desire for this dismissal of business as usual and the quest for alternatives that may well be limited by worldly considerations but strain to transcend them through all strategies available to it. The limitations of art as a spur to ethical action might also therefore be evaluated in light of the very embeddedness in the real that purportedly renders it of value. For Adorno, it is precisely the aesthetic distance of art from the real world that permits art to yield its promise of nonrepresentational integrity through innovations in its formal composition. The truth-content of art, therefore, is its ability to signal a future true society rather than a pseudoreflection of its shape from the given reality. Although Critical Theory has been accused of failing to achieve the unity of theory and praxis that is central to the Marxist project, several nuanced defenses of their aesthetic theory have sought to elaborate its unique provision of a dialectical rationale that mobilizes art’s truth-content against its more transparent social content (gesellschaftlicher Gehalt). Adorno paradoxically and dramatically states that “in so far as a social function may be predicated of works of art, it is the function of having no function” (Aesthetic Theory 336–37). Although the import of Marcuse’s pronouncements is somewhat contradicted by his insistence on the “political function” of art, declared on the opening page of his preface to The Aesthetic Dimension, elsewhere in the work he recuperates “political potential” as the operative term (emphasis mine). This aside, it would seem that the function of art is located by these thinkers in its purposeless purposiveness, a contradictory formation that reformulates its political relevance in terms of import rather than impact, while also illuminating the multiple facets of praxis as itself paradoxical.19

The final segment of this discussion on a conceptual grid for post-colonial aesthetics is dedicated to an examination of the category of utopia and its relation to the larger question of the “purpose” of art. In Marcuse’s work, nonidentity thinking combines with the associated concept of “transformative preservation,” which isolates for our examination the powerful role of memory in the workings of art, a concept also important in Benjamin and Adorno’s work.20 In fact, in locating the power of art in memory, Marcuse evinces his visible debt to Benjamin’s forceful ideas on memory and remembrance both in the realm of the literary and in the historical.21 The histoire-history vinculum, so flamboyantly explored in such postcolonial writers as Salman Rushdie, is of obvious relevance for the postcolonial project. The exercise of memory is a staple in postcolonial literature in various forms: memory in migration or exile, of a colonial past that must be commemorated, of a forged precolonial past that must be retrieved in however fragmented a way through acts of imagination. Memory as the engine of a transforming utopian vision, however, has not featured prominently in the criticism of postcolonial works. This function of memory has been elaborated in all three of the theorists under consideration here. Memory, the capacity for remembrance, and remembrance itself, the act of invoking the past from the oblivion to which it is always doomed, are the two modes of Marcuse’s “transformative preservation.”“The authentic utopia,” Marcuse submits, “is grounded in recollection” (Aesthetic Dimension 73). In Marcuse’s view, the script for the future is sought in the dustbins of history, as in Benjamin’s own formulations in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (Illuminations). It is not onward progress and evolution that will lead to the moment of revolution, but the backward glance and a willful leap into a dimly glimpsed but promising juncture in the fading past. Marcuse phrases this sentiment thus:

If the remembrance of things past would become a motive power for the struggle for changing the world, the struggle would be waged for a revolution hitherto suppressed in the previous historical revolution. (The Aesthetic Dimension 73)

As Jay has observed, in Marcuse’s work memory and remembrance are inextricably connected with “the identification of essence with the past as well as with the future” (“Anamnestic Totalization” 3). Marcuse’s adherence to Marxism allowed him this perspective, linked as it is with the powerful notion of dereification, a sort of remembering of “the human origins of the social world that had been mystified under capitalism as a kind of ‘second nature’” (5). Jay suggests that Adorno’s phrase, “every reification is a forgetting,” which Marcuse may not have known of firsthand from Adorno’s letter to Benjamin but may have encountered later, is nevertheless a central issue informing Marcuse’s concept of memory (“Anamnestic Totalization”).

Seizing for art a distinctive capacity for staging a struggle against the numbing operation of instrumental reason, Marcuse concludes The Aesthetic Dimension thus:

Art fights reification by making the petrified world speak, sing, perhaps dance. Forgetting past suffering and past joy alleviates life under a repressive reality principle. In contrast, remembrance spurs the drive for the conquest of suffering and the permanence of joy. (73)

For Marcuse, “on a primary level, art is recollection” (Counterrevolution and Revolt 99). From the perspective of the future the present is also the past in waiting. One might then submit that the recounting of a present as if remembered (the novel form, which dominates in representations of postcolonial literature, is predicated on the notion of things already past) can also serve something of the same function. In Marcuse’s account, “What has become form in the work of art has happened: it is recalled, re-presented. The mimesis translates reality into memory” (The Aesthetic Dimension 67). The prospect thus revealed is beautiful because it is utopia either by negation or implication or both, and/or because it is attended by a design that promises aesthetic pleasures, and/or because it consorts with the future by exhuming and preserving something that may or may not have existed in the past. The gratification that society always defers is thus made available in the artistic object that is constructed by the language of promised fulfillment. Herein lies the content of Marcuse’s notion of “transforming preservation.”

The notion of beauty with its obvious relation to form is thus of considerable significance in Marcuse’s critical theory. For Marcuse, the function of sociopolitical transformation is closely tied to the expectation of beauty and his insistence on pleasure and its destructive repression by society. In his theory, “the aesthetic dimension” is that “transcendent realm of art and sensuousness in which are enforced none but the non-repressive ‘laws of beauty’ (Marx)” (Katz 177). Marcuse’s theories about the potential of art to gratify and bring pleasure raise inevitable questions about cognitive empirical experience and our limited ability to render this pleasure measurable. Marcuse’s contention, however, is that the aesthetic, by virtue of its capacity for bringing pleasure through remembrance of past joy, is thereby ascribed a propensity without necessarily being saddled with purpose. His arguments about the importance of beauty and pleasure in art, developed from an inflected reading of Freud’s “On the Psychic Mechanism of Forgetfulness” and “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,” reveal his strong belief that “the promise of future happiness embodied in art was dialectically related to its retention of past instances of joy and fulfillment” (Jay, Amanestic Totalization 7). The conception of a vordeutende Erinnerung (anticipatory recollection) performs a dialog between past and present as the awakening of forgotten truths that may yet be realized. Among these are “guiltless pleasure, sustained happiness, the harmony of sensuousness and reason, subjective fantasy and objective reality, nature and civilization” that “are preserved within and against the antagonistic world of work and power in the ‘aesthetic dimension’” (Katz 169).

Although Marcuse insists in Counterrevolution and Revolt that recollection “is not remembrance of a Golden Past (which never existed), of childhood innocence, primitive man, et cetera” (70), he elsewhere insists on “the memory of happiness that once was” (Five Lectures 29) and “the past experience of happiness which spurns the desire for its conscious re-creation” (Eros 19). Jay argues that Marcuse’s defense of Freud’s archaic heritage as holding “symbolic value” betrays “a myth of original wholeness, of perfect presence, of a ‘re-membering’ of what had been dismembered, whose roots, if in memory at all, were in remembered desire rather than remembered fulfillment” (“Anamnestic Totalization” 10–11). As Marcuse notes in an unpublished manuscript, artistic alienation is the engine of remembrance: “alienation may provide the art-ificial [sic] basis for the remembrance of freedom in the totality of oppression” (quoted in Katz 164). As far as a critical aesthetics for postcolonial literature is concerned, Marcuse’s theory of memory gains in critical force when joined with his remarks on nonidentity thinking in art, enabling us to conceive of memory not in terms of anamnesis or simple recovery of past instances of fulfillment, but as Gedächtnis, or remembrance as the longing for a better future, an idea more fully developed by Adorno.

Adorno’s position on remembrance is somewhat clearer since he refuses to engage in speculation about an actual golden age that must be regained, as Marcuse is sometimes tempted to in his ruminations. As Adorno explains, “Ever since Plato’s doctrine of anamnesis the not-yet existing has been dreamed of in remembrance, which alone concretizes utopia without betraying it into existence. Remembrance remains bound up with semblance: for even in the past the dream was not a reality” (Aesthetic Theory 132). In Adorno’s work, Gedächtnis came to hold the sense of “the reverential recollection of an object always prior to the remembering subject” (Jay, Adorno 68). In his view, “the object of art’s longing, the reality of what is not, is metamorphosed in art as remembrance. We must observe that “art lays claim to being unable to lie, and thus it is compelled to lie” (Aesthetic Theory 132). The utopic is thus a potential drawn from the broken promise of the past rather than from the past as such. The artwork’s silence in the face of the unknowableness of utopia suggests its revolt against the existing order of rationality. Art imitates what does not, like utopia, yet exist, a notion itself driven by a subscription (like Benjamin’s, and perhaps Marcuse’s as well) to the Jewish prohibition on envisioning paradise. What is uncovered in the work of all these theorists who can be so different in their particular approaches and commitments is the idea of the aesthetic adventure as a critical interest in an otherwise instrumental world.

The critical questions that emerge for a postcolonial analysis from the thinking of Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse may be posed thus: How does aesthetic form inform the political import of the texts under consideration? How are the narrative of the modern and the problem of reification composed in the texts under consideration? How does the text alter conventional notions of mimesis? And finally, to repeat the question raised in the introduction, what “Third World” nonaligned with conventional rationality and identity thinking might be thus conjured in it? The holes and walls in these texts, their limits and constraints, are meaningful in a scheme that does take the nature of utopia or that of political activity for granted. The self-canceling mode of representation in all three of the texts bears something of the import, if not of utopian thinking, then at least of the importance of reconceiving the burden of representation as a task with dimensions that are political as well as cognitive and figurative. Beyond the scheme of the obviously good and evil, from some unexpected conjunction of events in the past and present, in the confusion and aporia produced by conditions of totality, is a possibility that may lie in waiting for discovery. The work of the artist remains the exercise of memory and recollection, of an imagination albeit tethered to and limited by the reality principle and the willingness to engage in a thoughtful, patient sort of arbitrage. The discovery of their import is that of the critic. Without neglecting their saturation by their ideological conditions of production, one might see that the texts’ existence in a real world of work and power places them in that system of totality that is itself a precondition for this potential. If this cannot be cause for celebration, it can nevertheless teach us the importance of renewing the yearning for a world in which things might be other than they are in ways we must forever struggle to imagine.