Dafuer habe ich keine Zeit. When the global bourgeoisie is not preaching the virtues of anorexia to the starving, they practice the privatized socialism of an infinite credit expansion, in the realm of theory as much as in the stupendous 1990s bailouts of Eastern Europe and the Pacific Rim. Theory in its broadest sense is by no means an elite activity, but is something even the humblest sports journalist and the late night talk show take the greatest pleasure in producing, and is deeply rooted in the mundane necessity of manufacturing, stocking, shipping, selling, choosing and consuming an ever more variegated and complex palette of products on the marketplace. That Adorno's aesthetic horizons were largely delimited to the Central European modernisms, from Kafka and Webern to Klee and Brecht, was due neither to theoretical cupidity nor reactionary anti-Americanism, but to the objective underdevelopment of German capitalism and its corresponding consumer culture in relation to the British and later American metropoles. In the Central European context, Adorno was an amazing and intransigent cultural radical, whose unyielding refusal to countenance the barbarities of the Eastern bloc or to swallow the no less destructive commercialism of the West offers a powerful and still-relevant model of global solidarity for our own day.
American culture is at issue in a second and no less important way.
In short, America in the era of the Wall Street Bubble provides the social theorist with that most valuable of all tropes, an index of positively Victorian decadence by which to measure the transformations of the world-system. To that end, Negative Dialectics will be treated as a toolbox of techniques and strategies by which multinational capital is to be thought through not just as form, but as a new and historically unique content as well. All this will then feed into a series of models of multinational cultural, political and economic praxis, ranging from early postmodernism to the full-fledged globalism of the Information Age, using William Burroughs' three great Sixties novels, three plays from the Seventies from the late, great East German playwright Heiner Mueller, and finally William Gibson's early Eighties masterpiece Neuromancer as primary texts. Notes 1 . In addition to his journalistic and sociological interventions, Adorno took great care to fine-tune his radio broadcasts to his audience.