monotonously selfsame being, and in thus binding us to what is, to the purely 'given', blinds us to the truth that 'what is, is more than it is'. ²⁹ In contrast with much post-structuralist thinking, however, Adorno neither uncritically celebrates the notion of difference nor unequivocally denounces the principle of identity. For all its paranoid anxiety, the identity principle carries with it a frail hope that one day true reconciliation will come about; and a world of pure differences would be indistinguishable from one of pure identities. The idea of Utopia travels beyond both conceptions: it would be, instead, a 'togetherness in diversity'. ³⁰ The aim of socialism is to liberate the rich diversity of sensuous use value from the metaphysical prison-house of exchange value -- to emancipate history from the specious equivalences imposed upon it by ideology and commodity production. 'Reconciliation', Adorno writes, 'would release the non-identical, would rid it of coercion, including spiritualized coercion; it would open the road to the multiplicity of different things and strip dialectics of its power over them. ³¹

How this is to come about, however, is not easy to see. For the critique of capitalist society demands the use of analytic reason; and such reason would seem for Adorno, at least in some of his moods intrinsically oppressive and reificatory. Indeed, logic itself, which Marx once described as a 'currency of the mind', is a kind of generalized barter or false equalization of concepts analogous to the exchanges of the marketplace. A dominative rationality, then, can be unlocked only with concepts already irredeemably contaminated by it; and this proposition itself, since it obeys the rules of analytic reason, must already be on the side of dominion. In Dialectic of Enlightenment ( 1947), co-authored by Adorno and his colleague Max Horkheimer, reason has become inherently violent and manipulative, riding roughshod over the sensuous particularities of Nature and the body. Simply to think is to be guiltily complicit with ideological domination; yet to surrender instrumental thought altogether would be to lapse into barbarous irrationalism.

The identity principle strives to suppress all contradiction, and for Adorno this process has been brought to perfection in the reified, bureaucratized, administered world of advanced capitalism. Much the same bleak vision is projected by Adorno's Frankfurt School colleague Herbert Marcuse, in his One-Dimensional Man ( 1964). Ideology, in short, is a 'totalitarian' system which has managed and processed all social conflict out of existence. It is not only that this thesis would come as something of a surprise to those who actually run the Western system; it is also that it parodies the whole notion of ideology itself. The Frankfurt School of Marxism, several of whose members were

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