Dramatic conflict overcomes time by condensing past and future into the present instant

Evidence

Conflict was the means by which time was overcome through sustaining intra-temporal tension within the work. Conflict concentrates past and future in the present. Ibsen’s dramaturgy expressed this with the formula: the measure of conflict is the power of the past in the present as the threat of the future. In the very idea of drama the interconnection of intra-temporal moments becomes so condensed and the relationships between them so comprehensively articulated that the mere passage of time takes on form and shape as a powerful configuration of meaningful relationships on the level of conflict before ultimately finding resolution. The temporality of absolute drama would be the instant which reveals itself in a flash from the crystallization of all the temporal relationships within the action. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 118

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines what ‘conflict’ does in great bourgeois art — the temporal-meaning mechanism Adorno will contrast against conflictless mass culture. This is the core definitional move the reader needs to apply Adorno’s analysis.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s stated test case: any post-Adorno work must be checked for whether it still sustains intra-temporal conflict or has slid into conflictless succession. Directly usable as the analytical lever. — connects to: Freedom can objectify its own past, rupturing temporal continuity with the instant; Enlightenment’s fixed temporal order aims to neutralize the past’s power over the present. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 48; Thinking the future beyond ‘what is to come’ dissolves time as ordered moments — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 210 (+5 more)