Edward Bond and the Aesthetics of Resistance

Abstract

For more than five decades, Edward Bond (born 1934) has produced dramatic and critical work that is socially committed and, as Peter Billingham has recently argued, characterised by an ‘interrogative, radically self-reflexive, muscular poetic materialism’ (Billingham, Edward Bond 1). Bond is interested in theatre as a medium that has the power to create images of a liberated subjectivity, which on the surface echoes Adorno’s vision of art as a potential placeholder for non-coercive individual expression in the commodified world. However, Bond’s answer to the problem of modern culture is ultimately a radical intensification of enlightenment thought, whereas Adorno remained critical of a universalisation of the logic of reason. The concept of enlightenment is of crucial importance to both Bond and Adorno, and will be examined in what follows.