| Global Storm treats Theodor Adorno's last completed work, the 1966 Negative Dialectics, as an invaluable toolbox of techniques, mediations and concepts capable of thinking through the cultural, political and social dynamics of multinational capitalism, all on the latter's own global turf. What Adorno provides which the structuralisms, post-structuralisms and postmodernisms do not is, in a nutshell, a theory of multinational capitalism. Adorno's notion of the constellation, the conceptual cast, and the indispensable role of critical and aesthetic theory in cognizing and transforming the total system are brought into contact with analyses of the media and consumer culture (ranging from Fredric Jameson's notion of postmodernism and late capitalism to Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the field and habitus, and to the theoretical traditions of post-structuralism and postmodernism), as well as ideologies of economic and cultural globalization (e.g. neoliberalism, the rise of information politics, world-systems theory and theories of the developmental state).;The first part of the dissertation examines the historical legacy of the Frankfurt School, analyzing Adorno's theory of the American Empire and the culture of monopoly capitalism. The second deals with Adorno's model-analyses of Kant, Hegel, and some future post-metaphysical space of cognition, each of which foreshadows the rise of a multinational juridical sphere, a post-American geopolitics, and a global aesthetic theory, respectively. The third applies Adorno's concepts to three distinct moments of multinational culture: the constellation of cybernetic ideology and multinational form in William Burroughs' three great Sixties novels (The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded , and Nova Express; the transition from autarkic to export-platform culture in three plays by East German playwright Heiner Mueller (Germania Death in Berlin, Life of Gundling Prussia's Friedrich Wilhelm Lessing's Sleep Dream Cry, The Hamletmachine); and the full-fledged globalism of the Information Age in William Gibson's Neuromancer. Together, these three authors build a constellation highlighting the transition from the zenith of the American Empire in the 1960s, to the rise of the export-platform economies and developmental states of the 1970s, finally to the emergence of the European Union and a rapidly integrating East Asian polity since the mid-1980s. |
