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Constellation and Critique: Adorno's Constellation, Benjamin's

Dialectical Image

Steven Helmling


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frozen or obsolete elements of civilization, to everything in it

devoid of domestic vitality [...]. The French word for still-life,nature morte, could be written above the portals of hisphilosophical dungeons. The Hegelian concept of "second nature," asthe reification of estranged human relations, and also the Marxiancategory of "commodity fetishism" occupy key positions inBenjamin's work. He is driven not merely to awaken congealed life

in petrified objects--as in allegory--but also to scrutinize livingthings so that they present themselves as ancient, "ur-historical"and abruptly release their significance. Philosophy appropriatesthe fetishism of commodities for itself: everything mustmetamorphose into a thing in order to break the catastrophic spellof things. Benjamin's thought is so saturated with culture as itsnatural object that it swears loyalty to reification instead offlatly rejecting it [...] the glance of his philosophy is Medusan.(Prisms 233)

3. For us, there is peril in this assimilation of culture tonature, which we regard as the classic ruse of ideology. Ourantidote, from Lvi-Strauss and Barthes, is to dissolve the

category of nature entirely into culture--to "flatly reject," ineffect, to deny our critical practice any resort to, the categoryof nature at all. But for Adorno, the ruse itself is the firstthing critique must grapple with--and it must do so "immanently,"that is, from the inside: critique must suffer the ruse ofideology, and even in a sense reproduce it from within, in the verycourse of the attempt to unmask it and undo its power. Hence theuse, for Adorno and for Benjamin, of a critical device that permitsjust what our usual practice forbids, namely, a patience of, ortolerance for, transaction between categories (for example,nature/culture) that other styles of "external" critique woulddisjoin. An "external" critical practice insistently seeks toseparate culture and nature, to fortify or sharpen or harden theputative antithesis between them, to (as it were) dis-ambiguate the

mystifying conflation by recourse to which ideology sanctifiescultural/historical contingencies as natural necessities. Bycontrast, the practice of Benjamin and Adorno might here be thoughtof as a "motivated" re-ambiguation that again allows culture andnature access to each other in ways that can be critical of thebinary from "inside," ways impossible for any "external"construction of them as mutually exclusive. As Adorno elsewhereputs it:

For [Benjamin] what is historically concrete becomes image--thearchetypal image of nature as of what is beyond nature--andconversely nature becomes the figure of something historical.

(Notes 2: 226)

4. Hence it is a good thing, an opening to critical insight ratherthan an ideological lapse, that "in Benjamin the historical itselflooks as though it were nature" (Notes 2: 226), or, even moreprovocatively, that Benjamin's work "swears loyalty to reificationinstead of flatly rejecting it" (Prisms 233).3

5. It is this subversive evocation of the ideology of nature from


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within, "immanently," that makes Benjamin's "Denkbild" or "thought

image" (and, I am of course arguing, Adorno's constellation aswell) a dialectical image:

[Benjamin] was right to call the images of his philosophydialectical [...] the plan of his book on the Paris Arcades

envisaged a panorama of dialectical images as well as their theory.The concept of dialectical image was intended objectively, notpsychologically: the representation of the modern as the new, thepast, and the eternally invariant in one would have become both thecentral philosophical theme and the central dialectical image.(Notes 2: 226-7)

6. The language here leaves room for some unclarity. The"representation of the modern as the new, the past, and theeternally invariant in one" would, presumably, be ideological--theworld's own self-representation--and hence a fit "object"("philosophical theme") for ideological expos by way of thedialectical image. But the unclarity allows also the suggestion

that the representation is itself the theme and the (dialectical)image. Hold this ambiguity--cognate with our culture/natureproblem--in mind; we will recur to it throughout. For now, thepassage implicates in the "dialectic" that the dialectical imageachieves or allows not only nature/culture, but also "theory" and"image"--another categorical binary often operative, and often lessconsciously, than culture/nature, in critical practice. In Hegel,"picture-thinking" is quite specifically a pre- orproto-philosophical kind of consciousness--although survivals of itpersist into the age, the consciousness, the practices ofphilosophy itself. More conventionally, though--by something like aHegelian methodological fiction--it belongs to earlier phases ofthe unfolding story of the World-Spirit, in which the advent oftheory or philosophy is itself an important milestone. And this

evocation of the World-story reminds us, too, that for Hegel, thedialectic was ineluctably a temporal process, which is to sayconceptualizable only in or as narrative. Image, by contrast, isspatial and atemporal--and to that extent a dialectical image wouldseem to be a kind of paradox. Yet what makes the "representation ofthe modern as the new, the past, and the eternally invariant inone" ideological is that it has already collapsed the narrativeimplicit in the given terms (modern, new, the past) into thenon-narrative stasis of an "eternally invariant" condition. Hencethe interest, when Adorno insists,

there are good reasons why [Benjamin's] is a dialectic of images

rather than a dialectic of progress and continuity, a "dialecticsat a standstill"--a name, incidentally, he found without knowingthat Kierkegaard's melancholy had long since conjured it up.(Notes 2: 228)

7. Thus can a Marxist critique recuperate, "immanently," thearch-bourgeois Kierkegaard, as himself an immanent sufferer,exemplar, critic and diagnostician of all the superstitions andhumors ("melancholy") that compound the bourgeois ideology andLebenswelt. But more to the present point is that the critical


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practice of Adorno generally presents what might seem the paradox

or contradiction of an insistently historicizing program, realizedin a critical practice that is virtually never motivated byhistorical argument in the form of historical narrative. Hence therelevance of the formula "dialectics at a standstill," which hasbecome almost a slogan for Western Marxists and others for whom theforward momentum of nineteenth-century progressive (liberal) and/or

revolutionary (Marxist) narratives of eventual (of course,diversely) happy endings have stalled in the steady-state nightmareof the twentieth century, where, as Adorno and Horkheimer starklyput it, "mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition,is sinking into a new kind of barbarism" (xi). For a world at suchan impasse, "dialectics at a standstill"--a non-narrativedialectic--is the only kind of dialectic that answers to ourcondition.

8. "Dialectics at a standstill" is, then, not only the ideologicalcondition to be contested, but also the contestation's method.Indeed, the passage from Benjamin's Passagen-Werk from which the

phrase comes makes just this point: "dialectics at astandstill--this is the quintessence of the method" (Arcades 865);elsewhere, quite simply, "image is dialectics at a standstill";and, "only dialectical images are genuinely historical" (Arcades463). Here again we observe the commutativity of the ideologicalethos and the critical method. To link all this--not only ethos andmethod, but program as well--with dialectical image suggestsanother, related, contradiction latent in Adorno's practice thatcan tell us much about his motives and his meanings. Since Hegel,the project, or desire, of broaching the "new" in the domain ofSpirit has regularly generated figurations of loosening orliquifying formations inherited from the past that have "hardened"or "frozen" and thus become rigid and imprisoning. Hegel himselfspoke of philosophy's task in such terms, of "freeing determinate

thoughts from their fixity" (Hegel 20); compare this with Hegel'sfrequent formula that thought "sets in motion" thought-objects,former "certainties," that had been stalled. Adorno likewisetypically figures reification as a process of freezing, hardening,or congealing, and the critical process, by contrast, as one ofsoftening, reliquifying, and so on, as we have already seen in thequotation above praising Benjamin's attempt to "awaken congealedlife in petrified objects" (Prisms 233). The task of immanentcritique, as Adorno puts it elsewhere, is that "congealed"ideological thought "must be reliquified, its validity traced, inrepetition" (Negative 97). Above we saw what I called a motivatedambiguation of culture and nature; here we have a cognate move, inthat to "reliquify" so as to release or engender the new must

entail a "repetition" of that which had been "congealed." Also,regarding "its validity traced": immanent critique seeks as much torecover what is valid in ideological congealments as to undo whatis false.

9. Thus conceived, immanent critique might seem, itself, anambiguously narrative process putting the forward motion of renewalin tension with the cyclical or static entrapments of repetition.But the ambiguity above, whereby narrative devolves into


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standstill, into impasse, into image, has its analogous playing-out

in the reversal whereby figurations of critical, anti-ideologicalreliquification are displaced by their very opposite: by imageriesof petrification, hardening, freezing, rigidifying, even killing.In the following passage, for example, Adorno's discussion ofBenjamin's dialectical image generates, not for the first time (wehave already seen it above in the passage from Prisms) the

balefully minatory image of Medusa.

Benjamin's medusa-like gaze [...] turns its object to stone [...].[It] froze [its object] to a kind of ontology [sc. hypostatization,reification, fetish] from the start [...]. This [...] was thespirit in which [Benjamin] restructured every element of culturethat he encountered, as if the form of his intellectualorganization and the melancholy with which his nature conceived theidea of something beyond nature, of reconciliation, necessarilyendowed everything he took up with a deathly shimmer. (Notes 2:228)

10. Here, it would seem, the "gaze" of the critic does to itsobject just what immanent critique and other projects of"dereification" aim to un-do: hardens it, turns it to stone, turnsit into a thing. (A resort to etymology here seems worthwhile:"thing" in Latin is res, the root of "re-ification; in Greek,"thing" is ontos, the root of "onto-logy," another "thing," so tospeak, that Benjamin's "medusa-gaze" turns its object into--boththe thing, we might say, and its ideological theorization byHeidegger; hence "ontology" as figure here for what Adornovariously calls "reification," "hypostatization," "fetishization.")Indeed, the critic's gaze does something very suggestive of killingthe object, depriving it of life--besides Medusa's own lethal powerof petrification, such is the suggestion of "endowing" it "with adeathly shimmer." In context, it is following this passage that the

"dialectics at a standstill" passage appears--so there is a pointedconnection between, or constellation of, the theme above ofnon-narrative stasis and the point here about death. In Benjamin's

micrological method [...] the historical movement halts and becomessedimented in the image. One understands Benjamin correctly if onesenses behind each of his sentences the conversion of extremeanimation into something static, in fact the static conception ofmovement itself. (Notes 2: 228)

11. Here, again, the critic "immanently" repeats, even suffers, thestasis of our modern ideological condition in a way to perform

("repeat") that very condition--the "moment" of the processcaptured in the Medusa-image being that in which the critic enactsthe "repetition" of that congealed, petrified condition, not (yet)its reliquification.

12. In his 1959 lectures on Kant, Adorno calls for a hermeneuticthat, by entering the (objective) "force field" of a writer's or atext's problematic, allows the interpreter to "go beyond theimmediate meaning on the page" (Kant's 80). The Medusa image,


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fraught as it is with what Freud would call "antithetical" motifs,

emboldens me to give this a try. In the myth, the Medusa's power topetrify anyone who looks at her is defeated by Perseus, whocontrives to approach her without looking, and at the crucialface-to-face moment, holds up to her a highly polished mirror.Medusa, seeing her own image, is herself turned to stone, andPerseus then decapitates her. He keeps her severed head, however,

and in further adventures, he uses it as a weapon--a fright objectwith which to petrify new enemies. Adorno licenses us, I suggest,to read "Benjamin's medusa-gaze" as having the power to do toideology something like what Perseus's mirror does to Medusaherself, as well as to do what Perseus uses Medusa's severed headto do to further adversaries. This image, of Medusa's petrifyingpower turned against itself and then appropriated for further useagainst other threats, suggests something of the reflexiveness, the"antithetical" character, that is, the capacity for "dialectical"reversals, as well as something of the ordeal, "the labour and thesuffering of the negative," incumbent on the (hero-) critic,encoded in Adorno's project of immanent critique.

13. I have been arguing, in effect, that the dialectical imagede-narrativizes the implicitly temporal or narrative course, from"repeat" to "reliquify," of immanent critique. We might say theMedusa gaze of the dialectical image freezes the temporality ofimmanent critique into a frozen, static, petrified image. But wecan also play this construction the other way, reversing itsdirection, to reinsert the dialectical image back into the story byassigning it a particular "moment" in the narrative. If immanentcritique is meant to reliquify an antecedent hardening, then theMedusa-gaze would seem to belong to the prequel of the story: themoment of its object's petrification would seem to be theindispensable narrative precondition for the repetition andreliquification to follow. But Adorno evokes the Medusa myth in a

context that suggests an even more surprising narrative for theMedusa moment to be assigned its place in. In the passage inquestion, Adorno resorts to the Medusa-image in the context ofBenjamin's treatment of some contemporary neo-Kantian efforts tomake common cause with "ontology"; whether he is talking aboutHeidegger himself here I am uncertain, but the point would seem tobe that Benjamin's Medusa-gaze "froze" this nascent ideology inadvance of its own hardening: that its action, in other words,projected or anticipated before the fact what still, at the time,lay in the future. The petrification it operates in such a case isprospective, not retrospective, which is to say it is petrificationfor the first time, not as repetition. To adapt Ernst Bloch, thereis (of course) a "not yet" of ideology as well as of

utopia--between which could be inserted, as a mediation, the "notyet" of (immanent) critique itself as Benjamin projects it in thevery last sentence of his book on Baudelaire: "with the upheaval ofthe market economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of thebourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled" (CharlesBaudelaire 176).

ADORNO VERSUS BENJAMIN


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14. I have so far expounded Adorno's sense of constellation andcritique by way of Adorno's remarks on Benjamin's dialecticalimage--a way of proceeding that has obscured their differences.Benjamin's critical practice is strongly marked, as is Adorno's, bythe work of Freud, though a Freud mediated by the Surrealistsrather than, as for Adorno, by Nietzsche. We may risk the

generalization that the Surrealist program was to inhabit themadness of the culture, to re-enact it from within, less (directly)to critique it, than to exhibit it--to insert themselves into theFreudian drama, we might say, in the role not of ego, but of id, onthe evident premise that the ego, whatever its for-or-againstposture toward the world, cannot be as "naturally" or as"immediately" transgressive as the id. The practice of theSurrealists typically embraced what Adorno would have regarded asan irrationalist faith that the real madness was reason, andunreason its only antidote or purge, if not quite its salvation orits utopian alternative. Benjamin seems to regard such a resort tomadness with some ambivalence--almost as something like a desireunhappily forbidden him by reason of that obdurately quotidian

sanity from which all his brilliance and all his bile werepowerless to deliver him. Some such longing, or nostalgia, seems tome symptomatized in Benjamin's sense of the world as a pallid,petrified, undead, fundamentally irrational waking dream, and theresistless momentum by which this "phantasmagoria" passes into"allegory" in all the diffuse senses Benjamin lent that word.Benjamin plays with a morbid-seeming identification with the deadand with death itself; you might say that in his work critique isplaying possum--one of his most famous quotations, indeed, avowsthat critique itself long since left the land of the living.

15. Adorno was moved by the pathos of all this in the life anddeath of his friend, and I would bet that he had Benjamin in mind

in section V of the Anti-Semitism chapter of Dialectic ofEnlightenment, in which the modern subject's protective "mimesis"of the reified surrounding world is imaged as a feigned deathentailing all too literally the spiritual consequences of the realthing. Adorno's animated, even febrile critical style could neverbe confused with Benjamin's passive-aggressive, mock-compliant"melancholy." As for Freud, Adorno took him very seriously indeed,as one who rationalized the irrational, but he never rose to whatwould seem to be the irresistible bait of assimilating the"repeat/reliquify" course of immanent critique altogether to theFreudian "compulsion to repeat" (best known from section III ofBeyond the Pleasure Principle [1920]), and to Freud's ingenioustechnique of appropriating that compulsion, in eliciting the

patient's own transferential resistances, to the healing labor ofthe analysis.4 Adorno was wary of any assimilation of his ownproject to psychoanalysis (the closest he comes, and it is not veryclose, is his late lecture "The Meaning of Working Through thePast" [Critical Models 89-103]); and his work holds itself muchmore aloof from Freud than that of such colleagues as MaxHorkheimer, Erich Fromm, or Herbert Marcuse, let alone Benjamin,whose methexis in Freud brings him closer to the Joyce of the"Circe" episode than to the practice of any member of the FrankfurtSchool. Adorno has his own distinctively critical "unhappy


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consciousness," an "after-Auschwitz" moral askesis that, to say it

again, long pre-dated the news of Auschwitz itself--but this is avibrant, highly cathected affect, quite different from that of the"saturnine" or "melancholy" Benjamin, which looks, indeed, ratherlike the resigned, "stoic" ataraxia that Adorno so frequentlydiagnoses as among the more desperate symptoms of the despairengendered by our supposedly empowered, post-Enlightenment,

"administered world."

GESTALT

16. These tensions between Adorno's doubts concerning Benjamin'spractice of the dialectical image--and their implications for thesort of work Adorno wants performed, what problems he wantsaddressed, in his developing practice of constellation--may beilluminated here by a consideration of Adorno's wariness of theGestalt psychology of Wolfgang Khler. As we will see, Adornotreats Gestalt theory as ideology--constellation, we might say, in

reverse. Adorno sounds caveats about Gestalt theory in his 1931inaugural lecture, "The Actuality of Philosophy" (Adorno Reader31-32); a quarter century later, he makes almost a kind of satireof Husserlian "intentionality" fidgeting in the unwelcome embraceof Gestalt psychology (Against Epistemology 158-62). Pertinent hereis Adorno's discussion of Kant's "unity of apperception," theground on which, Adorno forcefully argues, Kant's "subjective" and"objective" sustain each other. For Adorno compares Kant'sconception--that is, he juxtaposes it heuristically, or one mighteven say, he "constellates" it--with Gestalt theory (Kant's100-01). Adorno is writing here in the late 1950s, at a time whenartists and poets often seized on Gestalt theory as a validation ofavant-garde practices of the quick cut, the elision of transitions,and so on; other kinds of inquirers, too--Marshall McLuhan comes to

mind--made a sort of ideology, or shorthand, all-purposeexplanation, of "pattern recognition" (as Gestalt was frequentlyanglicized) as a key to all manner of novel, putatively "modern,"styles of consciousness. In this passage, Adorno's discussionprojects Gestalt as the ideological problem rather than itscritical solution: like Kant's "unity of apperception," thefunctioning of Gestalt is "unconsciously synthetic," thus effecting(false, familiarized, familiarizing) reconciliations orintegrations of experiential fragmentariness.5 By these lights,Gestalt is an instance or model, indeed an epitome, of ideology assuch: reflex and reinforcer of the habitual familiarizations, theideological conditionings, the false reconciliations or "imaginarysolutions to real contradictions" of the historically and

culturally given.

17. But I am eliciting these implications of Adorno's reservationsabout Gestalt because what they imply is what Adorno leaves unsaidhere, namely the contrast with his ambitions for the constellation.I should caution here that Adorno sometimes uses the word"constellation" to designate historically given, that is, alreadyfamiliarized, ideological arrays or Gestalts [for example, CriticalModels 138, 260]; my usage henceforth will connote "constellation"


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in the sense Adorno valorizes, as a device with the potential to be

turned, in somewhat the manner of the Brechtian V-effect, againstsuch familiarizations (though just this dissident potential, ofcourse, is what mid-century avant-gardists were seizing on inGestalt). And as we'll see, the word's "antithetical" reversals ofmeaning are themselves indices of the "dialectical"-ness ofAdorno's immanent critique. We might say that these "antithetical"

meanings--"constellation" as unconscious ideological synthesisversus "constellation" as consciousness-raising estrangement;"constellation" as object of critique, or as subject of it--arethemselves a kind of constellation implying or encoding, concealingor de-familiarizing a narrative, that of the classic Enlightenmentproject summarized by Freud in the formula, "making the unconsciousconscious." Adorno may "repeat" an over-familiar constellation andthen reliquify (or, Medusa-like, petrify) its "congelations"; or hemay present an unfamiliar and even shocking juxtaposition, whoseestrangement is to provoke a new and heightened consciousness ofthe ideological condition in which we are entrapped. The historicalimage that results, ideological and critical all at once,appropriates the critical force we saw Adorno ascribing to the

Benjaminian dialectical image, turning it, immanently, toestranging or defamiliarizing, sc. critical or (Hegel) "negative"purposes.

MEDIATION

18. Most ideologically consequential in Adorno's critique ofGestalt--consequential, I mean, for our thinking aboutconstellation--is the issue of mediation. According to Kant's"unity of apperception," Husserl's "intentionality," and Gestalttheory alike, it is the mind that synthesizes or integratesdisjunct bits of sense-data into a coherent whole or pattern; and

as we have seen, this synthesis, under whatever name or construct,looks to Adorno like a virtual model of the operations of ideology.Adorno urges that such ideological Gestalt-components, the"fragmentariness" that Gestalt synthesizes, or, indeed, thefragments themselves, "stand in need of mediation" (Kant's 100)--acomplexly ideological indictment, but suffice it for now to saythat in Adorno, "mediation" connotes dialecticalself-consciousness, awareness of the negative, of contradiction, ofnon-identity, and of the "labor of conceptualization." Enthusiastsof Gestalt theory counted it in the theory's favor that it seemedto propose or promote a view of experience as "immediate," aspecifically positivist or "nominalist" navet or ideologicalmystification--one might even say, "Gestalt"--that Adorno

consistently meant to combat. Yet versions of this (to Adorno,nave) quest for "immediate experience" are pervasive throughoutthe early twentieth-century "modernist" arts, from the scruffiestanarchists of Dada and Surrealism to that most stiffly proper ofreactionaries, T. S. Eliot. It would seem to be implicit inAdorno's own frequent motif of "shock" as a way to awaken numbedperception, and it is clearly the program enacted in such modernistdevices as montage, collage, and ideogram, devices mobilized bytheir authors expressly to suppress and subvert received habits ofsynthesizing, modulating, contriving transitions--in short,


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mediating--between the typically incongruous or dissonant elements

they contrived to bring together. Like these modernist devices, inshort, the constellation at the very least looks as if it isdispensing with mediation--which in the context of theleft-to-Stalinist intellectual culture of the 1930s and 1940s wastantamount to dispensing with "dialectic" itself.

19. Here we see just one among a complex of "overdetermining"factors that motivated Adorno's modernism to stage itself as anaffront to such "dialectical" political orthodoxy. His own practicewas meant, in emulation of the great modernists he consistentlyadvocated against the socialist realist alarums of Georg Lukcs, torepudiate orthodox dialectical materialism ("diamat," in theneologizing party-speak Adorno so loathed) as a reified dogmaticsystem. In the Lukcsean optic, Adorno's practice of theconstellation, assembling disjunct elements in (seemingly)unmediated array, would seem as decadent as cubist collage,Eisensteinian montage, Poundian ideogram, or Joyceanstream-of-consciousness. It would seem "idealist," "subjective,"

"decadent"--"immediate" not only in the proscribed sense ofun-mediated (philosophically impossible) but im- or de-mediating(politically and philosophically delusional, i.e., ideological).Most pertinently, and in terms deriving from the authority of Marxand Lenin both, it would have seemed "un-dialectical." (See, forexample, Lukcs's essays "Realism in the Balance" and "The Ideologyof Modernism.") Lukcs's prose retains the composure of theplatform debater; Adorno more characteristically ventsexasperation, rejoining that Lukcs, "the certified dialectician,"himself argues "most undialectically" in, for example, dismissingFreud and Nietzsche as irrationalists and therefore "fascists pureand simple."

[Lukcs] even managed to speak of Nietzsche's "more than ordinaryability" in the tone of a provincial Wilhelminian schoolmaster.Under the guise of an ostensibly radical critique of society hesmuggled back the most pitiful clichs of the conformism to whichthat critique had once been directed. (Notes 1: 217).

20. If Lukcs denounced modernist "im-mediation" as "undialectical"and "sick," Adorno here agitates (at age 55, and with Stalin fiveyears in the grave) a vehemence that revives all the indignation ofhis avant-garde youth against the "provincial" moldy-fig-ism thatprefers a false unity, an "extorted reconciliation," to anunflinching evocation of all the contradiction and falsehood of ourcondition.

21. In Lukcs, tellingly, the adjective "dialectical" oftenmodifies the word "unity": dialectic thus sustains a procedure forunifying or integrating disjunct and/or incommensurable things. Inother words, for Lukcs the point of dialectic should be to produceunity in phenomena and in settings where, presumably, it needsproducing. Adorno's sense is virtually the opposite, that the aimof dialectic should be to expose the contradictions thatideological appearance has falsely reconciled: to produce or expose


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disunity, contradiction, non-identity. Constellation serves this

end by bringing diverse phenomena together and forcing theirconsideration together. The disjunction between the constellateditems is very much the point. To Lukcs, the gaps and disjunctionswould be evidence of a failure to have done the dialectical workthat is the sine qua non of critical activity--to put it anotherway, a failure of "mediation." To Adorno, mediation that fills in

the gaps between the disjuncta would be ideological, homogenizing,causing the disjuncta to "lose their difference" (as Roland Barthesused to say [for example, S/Z 3]). For Adorno, the point ofmediation would be to render, even "exaggerate," the disjunctions,the contradictions that, for Lukcs, they should unify. To Lukcs,Adorno's constellation would exemplify the same spurious and "sick"immediacy on offer in Beckett, Kafka, Freud and the other"decadent" modernists Lukcs deplored: a mere "symptom" rather thana critical "negation" of the degenerate bourgeois culturalsurround.

22. Adorno's immanent critique, by contrast, stipulates that

critique cannot hold itself above (or "outside") the predicamentson which it aspires to offer critical comment. Since critiquecannot help but participate in the culture's "symptomatics," it hadbest own this liability, and make of it, to the extent possible, aquickening instantiation of the challenge to be met, the problem tobe addressed, thereby amplifying critique's potential fordramatizing critical effort and ambition--"the labor and thesuffering of the negative"--as such. Adorno agrees with Lukcs inreprehending false or nave "immediacy," but his "constellational"view of mediation gives him a very different take on the evidencefrom Lukcs's. I don't pretend always to understand why Adornoapproves one work or artist--or indeed, theorist (for example,Freud, Nietzsche, Weber)--as dialectical and mediated, and damnsanother as deficient in these qualities; and to the objection that

Adorno is "merely" making heavy philosophical weather of hispersonal tastes, I at least would not always be able to muster avery cogent reply. But worth mention here is the move that we mightcall, borrowing one of Adorno's own most suggestive rubrics,"Dialectic In Spite of Itself" (Against Epistemology 49-50), bywhich Adorno often manages to recuperate (or "rescue") his criticaltargets from his own critiques of them.6 But whereas Lukcs caststhese matters in terms of decadence and disease--his "Healthy orSick Art?" only makes explicit a metaphorics pervasive in hiswork--Adorno stages the issue rather in terms of ideologicalappearance, "magic," and "myth." An especially pertinent instancefor our purposes is Adorno's exchange with Benjamin over an excerpt(on Baudelaire) of the Arcades Project that Benjamin submitted for

publication in the Frankfurt School journal in 1938. Much toBenjamin's surprise, Adorno reacted unfavorably: "motifs areassembled but they are not elaborated"; Benjamin's materials, histrouves, sit nakedly on the page, un-"mediated" by "theory"; theideological result is that Benjamin's "ascetic refusal ofinterpretation only serves to transport [the subject matter] into arealm quite opposed to asceticism: a realm where history and magicoscillate [...]."


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Unless I am very much mistaken [writes Adorno to Benjamin], your

dialectic is lacking in one thing: mediation. You show a prevailingtendency to relate the pragmatic contents of Baudelaire's workdirectly and immediately to adjacent features in the social historyand [...] economic features of the time. [...] you substitutemetaphorical expressions for categorical ones [...] [so that] oneof the most powerful ideas in your study seems to be presented as a

mere as-if [...]. I regard it as methodologically inappropriate togive conspicuous individual features from the realm of thesuperstructure a "materialist" turn by relating them immediately,and perhaps even causally, to certain corresponding features of thesubstructure. The materialist determination of cultural traits isonly possible if it is mediated through the total social process[...] [such] immediate--and I would almost say again"anthropological"--materialism harbours a profoundly romanticelement [...]. The mediation which I miss, and find obscured bymaterialistic-historical evocation, is simply the theory which yourstudy has omitted [...] the theological motif of calling things bytheir names tends to switch into the wide-eyed presentation of merefacts. [...] one could say that your study is located at the

crossroads of magic and positivism. The spot is bewitched. Onlytheory could break this spell--your own resolute and salutarilyspeculative theory. It is simply the claim of this theory that Ibring against you here. (Complete Correspondence 281-3)

23. Adorno's objections here are not altogether dissimilar from thesorts of complaints Lukcs vented about modernism, which at firstmay seem merely ironic, but it is more usefully taken as index ofthe fineness of the line Adorno means immanent critique to walk inits highwire ambition both to "repeat" the ideological "symptom"and to reliquify it in a critical negation. Hence the sting in thetail, the potential dialectical backfire, in Adorno's homage,already quoted, to the effect that "Benjamin's thought is sosaturated with culture as its natural object that it swears loyalty

to reification instead of flatly rejecting it. [...] the glance ofhis philosophy is Medusan" (Prisms 233).

24. So I have risked the lengthy quotation above because itsdiffuse suggestiveness implies the scope of the tension betweenBenjamin's critical practice of the dialectical image, especiallyin the Passagen-Werk, and Adorno's of the constellation. Benjamincites or quotes particular faits divers, one at a time, eachstanding distinct in its surround of white space on the page--eventypographically, a dialectical image, one might say, of that"separation" or "chorismos," the ideological entailment of"analytic" (bourgeois) philosophical method from Plato to Kant and

beyond, that the Hegelian Adorno protests throughout his career.Constellation is of course the vehicle of Adorno's protest, but itcould also serve as a figure for it as well; his famously boundlessparagraphs constellate diverse materials so diffusely as to groundor "theorize" or mediate them together--albeit, again, that theground is contradiction rather than unity. Adorno tends, also, to"constellate" higher-brow materials than Benjamin--Hegel andBeethoven rather than, say, century-old department store brochures:in his 1931 inaugural lecture, "The Actuality of Philosophy,"Adorno sounds the "materialist" motif of the philosophical


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worthiness of "the refuse of the physical world";7 but Adorno

nowhere incorporates such materials in his writing as Benjamin did,let alone to programmatize, even to yearn, so overtly as Benjaminfor their utopian "redemption."8 This difference resonates withAdorno's "mandarin" fastidiousness, as well as with his greatercircumspection--almost, as he says himself, aBilderverbot--regarding the utopian (see Buck-Morss, 90-95); it's

arguable that the dissent from Benjamin above helped confirm Adornoin these penchants.

25. But most consequential for our theme here (the contrast betweenBenjamin's critical practice and Adorno's) is the issue Icharacterized above in terms of kinesis versus stasis. Benjamin'sisolated atoms of social/historical fact, cited seriatim on thepage, organized under generalizing rubrics into "Convolutes," wemay take as dialectical image of the pall under which the bourgeoisworld has, as if in the gaze of some Medusa more baleful thanBenjamin, frozen into paralysis. By contrast, Adorno's immanentcritique, though it eschews narrative, can fairly be called

kinetic: the sentences rush headlong, never faltering beforedifficulties more "responsible" critics would find daunting, andready at every turn to embrace always heavier burdens of difficultyand challenge. Reading Adorno, you never cease to be surprised at,however you may grow accustomed to, the way a given sentence mightlunge off in a new direction, extending (distending) itself toencompass further elements and all the problems they will bring intheir train. And yet, as I have said, this kinesis of Adorno's,however entoiled in the temporality of its own process of workingthrough (Durcharbeit), the temporality of its own writing andbeing-read, is never itself narrative: whatever else he is, Adornois never a storyteller.9 When Adorno advises Benjamin (above) that"the materialist determination of cultural traits is only possibleif it is mediated through the total social process," mediation

itself sounds like an ineluctably kinetic activity or process, andthe movement (my resort to the word is deliberate) between isolatedparticular and totality--as, at other moments in Adorno, betweenparticular and universal, intuition and concept, matter and idea,content and form--suggests a universe in perpetual and turbulentflux, however stalled or arrested the dialectic that should beceaselessly dislocating its apparently fixed and static ideologicalimpasses. Adorno suggests something of this contradiction betweenkinesis and stasis in a much later formulation: "the concept of themediated [...] always presupposes something immediate runningthrough these mediations and captured by them" (Introduction toSociology 109). The immediate is both "running through" and"captured by" the mediations.

PARATAXIS

26. We are navigating, or "mediating," between the stasis of imageand the kinesis of narrative, and I want to adduce here a furthermotif in which these preoccupations find yet another way ofoverlapping: the "epic" device of parataxis, which lends its nameto the title of Adorno's late essay on Hlderlin. Parataxis is a


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rhetorical device in which narrative units--narratemes?--follow one

another linked only by the conjunction "and," thus evading orsubverting more complex structures or grammars of narrative co- orsubordination (cause and effect, antecedent and consequence, mainevent and subsidiary, and the like). Traditionally, parataxis wastaken to be (and poets emulated it as) an artifice, a feature ofthe noble epic style; only in the twentieth century have

classicists like Eric Havelock seen it as evidence of a kind ofconsciousness or mentalit preceding the advent of literacy. I amsure the latter view, as a way to link texts and consciousness insomething like a "materialist" way, would have interested Adorno somuch that his non-consideration of it in his essay is a sign thatthe suggestion hadn't reached his ears.10 In any case, "Parataxis:On Hlderlin's Late Poetry" (Notes 2: 109-49) praises parataxis,Hlderlin's anyway, for evading the usual (sc. reified,familiarized, domesticated) ways of making sense. Hlderlin'sparataxes, Adorno writes, are "artificial disturbances that evadethe logical hierarchy of a subordinating syntax," and inparticular, "the judgment" and "the propositional form" (Notes 2:131-2). I don't think it an impermissible stretch to suggest that

Adorno values parataxis as doing with narrative monads somethinglike what constellation is meant to do with the diverse fragmentsit constellates: presents them in an ensemble undomesticated by thefamiliar thought-syntax, the habituated grammars, the ideologicalpresuppositions, that familiarize the new, converting it, in thevery process of presenting it, into the same, the old, the alreadyknown--the, as it were, pre-reified. Hlderlin's poetry "searchesfor a linguistic form that would escape the dictates of spirit'sown synthesizing principle" (Notes 2: 131)--that is, it strives toovercome the very liabilities of the mind's own drive to grasp whatit perceives.

27. Parataxis thus might seem a solvent, a way of de-composing what

"spirit's own synthesizing principle" too unthinkingly composes orsynthesizes.11 The evident motive is to mobilize the particularfragmentary contents against the larger synthesizing form(s). ButAdorno insists that Hlderlin's parataxis achieves not merely anabolition of form, an escape from it, but something like a kind ofemancipation (not to say redemption) of form itself. And of course,to the extent that Hlderlin's parataxis is itself a form, this isan emancipation not conferred on form from above or outside, butform's own self-emancipation; hence what Adorno calls "the agencyof form" (Notes 2: 114). Hlderlin's parataxis "puts explicationwithout deduction in the place of a so-called train of thought.This gives form its primacy over content, even the intellectualcontent" (Notes 2: 131-2). Set free from the "deductive" regimen of

a "so-called train of thought," the unfoldment ("explication") ofthe matter can enact itself "immanently," according to its ownimperatives rather than to those of an external, syllogistic logic.So far from vanishing, form here rather achieves itself inallowing, being the vehicle for, new potentialities by which theparticular contents find their expression. Thus does form becomeitself a content, content itself a kind of form, and allconcretely, thus sublating the classic antinomies (form/content,idea/matter, abstract/concrete, universal/particular) that are thepitfalls common to philosophy and the aesthetic under the regime of


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"spirit's own synthesizing principle." Hence (and readers familiar

with Adorno's Beethoven-olatry will recognize the argument here):

It is not only the micrological forms of serial transition in anarrow sense [...] that we must think of as parataxis. As in music,the tendency takes over larger structures. In Hlderlin there are

forms that could as a whole be called paratactical in the broadersense [...]. In a manner reminiscent of Hegel, mediation of thevulgar kind, a middle element standing outside the moments it is toconnect, is eliminated as being external and inessential, somethingthat occurs frequently in Beethoven's late style; this not least ofall gives Hlderlin's late poetry its anticlassicistic quality, itsrebellion against harmony. What is lined up in sequence,unconnected, is as harsh as it is flowing. The mediation is setwithin what is mediated instead of bridging it. (Notes 2: 132-33)

28. Note the recapitulation of our points above about mediation.But of larger consequence here is that Hlderlin, Beethoven, andHegel are arrayed in constellation as practitioners of this

immanent kind of composition (a "technique of seriation" Adornocalls it [Notes 2: 135]) in which the local, the particular "takesover larger structures," producing forms that are "paratactical inthe broader sense."

29. This issue of "larger structures," of parataxis on thelarge-scale level of form, returns us to the issue oftemporality--Hlderlin, Beethoven, and Hegel (and, of course,Adorno) are all practitioners of forms a hearer or reader mustexperience in time--and thus of possibilities of kinesis within orby way of the structures their form achieves. "The transformationof language [in Hlderlin's parataxis] into a serial order whoseelements are linked differently than in the judgment is musiclike"

(Notes 2: 131)--so that parataxis pushes referential language inthe direction of non-referential meaning; moreover, terms like"serial" and "musiclike" restore "temporality" to the stasis ofconstellation. ("Serial" here doubtless connotesSchoenberg-and-after, rather than Sartre's "seriality," althoughthe latter conjuncture, not to say "constellation," is suggestiveas well.) Adorno frequently implies that the temporality of music,and of written texts, whether "creative" or "critical," amounts toa sort of quasi- or crypto-narrative trajectory in which thehearer/reader is challenged to participate.12 In the "Parataxis"essay, although Adorno's focus is on the lyric, narrative inHlderlin appears (under the sign of the "epic"; see the discussionof Hlderlin's relation to Pindar [Notes 2: 132-34]) as another

impulse working against "the logical hierarchy of a subordinatingsyntax":

The narrative tendency in the poem strives downward into theprelogical medium and wants to drift along with the flow of time.The Logos had worked against the slippery quality of narrative[...] the self-reflection of Hlderlin's late poetry, in contrast,evokes it. Here too it converges in a most amazing way with thetexture of Hegel's prose, which, in paradoxical contradiction to


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his systematic intent, in its form increasingly evades the

constraints of construction the more it surrenders withoutreservation to the program of "simply looking on" outlined in theintroduction to the Phenomenology and the more logic becomeshistory for it. (Notes 2: 134)

30. Here the animus since Plato between poetry and philosophy is

"sublated"; moreover, Adorno presents the sublation itself asevent, that is to say, as narrative. The redemptive or utopianpromise is made more explicit in a passage reprising all thesethemes:

The logic of tightly bounded periods [i.e., the opposite of"parataxis"], each moving rigorously on to the next, ischaracterized by precisely that compulsive and violent quality forwhich poetry is to provide healing and which Hlderlin's poetryunambiguously negates. Linguistic synthesis contradicts whatHlderlin wants to express in language [...]. [Hlderlin] began byattacking syntax syntactically, in the spirit of the dialectic

[...] In the same way, Hegel used the power of logic to protestagainst logic. (Notes 2: 135-36)

THE "DIALECTIC" OF DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT

31. I want to end by sketching the ways that the themes we havebeen agitating are evoked or enacted to peculiar effect inDialectic of Enlightenment. With Lutz Niethammer's acerbic mot inmind, that moderns of Adorno's sort exemplify a "will topowerlessness" (138-42), I will risk adapting Adorno's formulaabove. If "Hegel used the power of logic to protest against logic"(Notes 2: 135-36), the Dialectic of Enlightenment uses a "mimesis"

of the powerlessness of Enlightenment positivism vis--vis thecrises of the mid-twentieth century to protest the non- or indeedanti-dialectical cast of Enlightenment thought, that dehumanizing,instrumentalized empiricism whose mastery of nature is gained onlyat the cost of nature-ifying, reifying, reducing to thing-likereflex, human being, human existence itself. Kinesis/stasis,narrative/non-narrative, mediated/un-mediated, parataxis/synthesis,dialectical/mythical--"our" particular subcultural penchant is tosee these pairs as binaries. But we won't get the hang of Adorno's"dialectical" practice unless we cultivate the power of seeingthese pairs rather as terms demarking the coordinates of particularconflicted problem-points, or (Adorno's own frequent figure)force-fields within which the energies of certain contradictions

pulse and clash. In our critical practice, oppositional binaries,the two terms separated by the crisp marker of the slash, suggestblack/white distinctions. The polemical energy of Adorno's practicecan seem to drive or be driven by such stark contrasts, but my ownexperience learning to read Adorno has been that his black and hiswhite are best taken as exaggerations of grey--the point being thatwhat he advocates and what he reprehends can overlap in unexpectedways. For one instance, we may cite the "antithetical" tangleimposed on immanent critique (repeat/reliquify) by theMedusa-effect (repeat/petrify). Likewise, Adorno's often surprising


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generosity to, even recuperations of, figures one had assumed would

be btes noirs--Kierkegaard, say, or Spengler, or even RichardWagner.13 And hence, in the exposition above, the contrast withLukcs (which highlights the liability of Adorno's constellationalcritical "negation" to appear as mere ideological "symptom"); andeven closer to the quick, Adorno's own discomfort with the extremeof Benjamin's apparently "unmediated" practice of "motifs assembled

but not elaborated." The cut between "image" and "dialecticalimage," between (to use a more Adorno-identified term) "mimesis"and what we might, by analogy with Benjamin's coinage, call"dialectical mimesis"--and in like manner the cut, indeed, betweenall the other binaries just cited--is sufficiently fine as notmerely to allow, but actually to "motivate," some confusion betweenthe opposed, and supposedly clearly distinguishable, terms.

32. This, I take it, can appear, even to a mere amateur ofphilosophy like myself, as a major contradiction (of the bad sort)for Adorno as a philosopher. His assault on "identity"-thinkingdepends on practices of dialectic and mediation that can seem to

undo the garden-variety kinds of non-identity or "difference"encoded in binaries like those above. If one of Adorno's principlecomplaints with dialectic as usual--as practiced by historicizingheirs of the Hegelian legacy, whether left (Lukcs) or right(Croce)--is that it can unwittingly accede to a logic ofsubstitution that winds up affirming the "exchange/equivalence"habitus of Enlightenment, then it's notable that Adorno's negativedialectic can in certain lights appear to deliver itself to thesame terminus. Perhaps the most troublesome instance is Adorno's"deconstruction" (if the anachronism may be permitted) ofnature/history in "The Idea of Natural History" (1931)--and I takeit as some index of the trouble that Adorno never reprinted thisessay in his lifetime. But however that may be philosophically, itis Adorno's practice as writer that I want to illuminate here--and

in that arena, the problem is one that Adorno's immanent critiqueundertakes not to solve, or to make disappear, but precisely, todisplay, to expose, which must mean, to suffer, and in that specialsense to "perform," to make happen, to "repeat" and (to the extentpossible) "reliquify," in the writing itself. Critique must refusethe hubris of supposing it can escape, or has escaped, has risenabove, its ideological condition. As knowingly as Milton's Satan inhell (and compare Goethe's Mephistopheles), critique must alwaysavow, "Why this is ideology, nor am I out of it." The point ofAdorno's immanent critique is not to exempt his own criticalpractice from the liabilities of the dominant ideology, butprecisely to attest ideology's ubiquity and power by enacting inthe writing itself (his own) critique's implication--even (his own)

critique's implication--in the very predicaments (his own) critiqueaims to address, protest, elucidate, redeem.

33. To bring the foregoing themes together will, I hope, be tosuggest their use for a better reading of Adorno. Thedemonstration-text is Dialectic of Enlightenment, on the premisethat in our academic subculture this is the most read and, becausemost read by novices, least understood of Adorno's texts. But:"Adorno's text"? What of Max Horkheimer, whose name appears first


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on the title page, and to whom Adorno always ceded priority? Well,

in practice, all commentary I know of treats Dialectic ofEnlightenment "as if" Adorno were its author, and the few attemptsI've seen to parse Adorno's contributions from Horkheimer's seemperfunctory (see Noerr 219-24) or (perhaps appropriately) shy ofspecifics (Wiggershaus 177-91, 314-50). Here I'll take as amethodological fiction or premise the authors' own professions that

their equal collaboration moots any attempt to untangle theirrespective contributions. The 1969 "Preface" insists that the"vital principle of the Dialectic is the tension between the twointellectual temperaments conjoined in writing it" (ix); and I willoffer the speculation that what was crucial in Horkheimer's inputwas his penchant for arguing by way of historical narrative, whichgives Dialectic of Enlightenment its narrative shape and itsquasi-narrative energy. By contrast, Adorno's critical practiceeschews narrative; hence the "vital principle," the "intellectualtension" I've just insinuated between the book's overtly narrativeorganization (a smaller-scale rescript of Hegel's Phenomenology,orchestrating a variant of Hegel's trajectory from Greco-Romanantiquity to "Enlightenment" and the present day), and its

"motivatedly" static (or "regressive") "image" of Western history(or "progress"). It is precisely this tension, precisely thisproblematic or contradiction, it seems to me, that has madeDialectic of Enlightenment, for the past generation, the preeminenttext in "critical theory" by either Adorno or Horkheimer--a claim,I think, that should valorize Horkheimer's large (and too-muchdiscounted) importance in the composition of Dialectic ofEnlightenment.

34. But "authorship" issues aside, my point here is that thereflections above on constellation and mediation (and so on) shedlight on what I recall, from my own "novice" first reading(s) ofDialectic of Enlightenment, as the most baffling of the problems

and "difficulties" it presented for me. The book's narrativeorganization was readily legible as an ironic reversal of theHegelian narrative--the story of Geist not as triumphal progress toan Enlightened Absolute, but as ghastly "regression" to a nightmareof violence ("humanity, instead of entering into a truly humancondition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism" [xi]; "Thecurse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression" [36]).And the fate of narrative in modernist literature had prepared mefor a story whose thematic burden of failure and waste was enactedformally in the failure of the narrative to achieve not only anyputative thematic telos, but the telos of narrativity itself. Thethornier problem for me was the book's organization around binarypairs that defied my every presupposition concerning how an

avowedly, and programmatically, historicizing and dialecticalpresentation would or should proceed. Odysseus/bourgeois, forexample, or myth/Enlightenment: both of these oppositions seemed tocollapse large and crucial historical differences, to homogenizethem by, in effect, de-temporalizing or dehistoricizing them--as if"bourgeois," or "myth," or "Enlightenment" indeed, were names for"essentialized" or "essentializing," trans-historical archetypes,permanent and immutable. And likewise for binaries whose alignedpairs were not from different historical periods, butcontemporaneous, for example, Kant and de Sade, or Hitler and


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Hollywood. To expose as "bourgeois" classical philology's

idealization of Homer's "universal" hero, as well as to root"modern" bourgeois values in the archaic ("heroic") violences ofself-preservation; to vandalize Enlightenment's self-constitutingdifference from the (mythical, archaic) past; to elicit the unownedfoundational commonalities between the categorical imperative andde Sade's monstrous naturalism of the boudoir, or between

anti-Semitism and the culture industry: I could read in all this acomplex of protest and dissent and expos--even, despite theextremity of the subject matter and the plangency of the affect,something at moments oddly like satire--but not, within the termsof what I took "critical theory" to be aiming at, a strategy ofdialectical critique.

35. To such dilemmas, Benjamin's (and Adorno's) formula of"dialectic at a standstill" offers something of a key, as does theambiguous response or antidote--mimesis, or critique? repetition,or reliquification? symptom, or negation?--of the "dialecticalimage." Let me cite here a passage on "Mythical Content" from

Adorno's book on Kierkegaard that anticipates much of theelaboration--or homogenization--in Dialectic of Enlightenment, ofthe binary of "myth" versus "history" (or "dialectic"), as well asimplying the grounds of Adorno's lifelong dissent from that"fundamental ontology" in which Kierkegaard's "blocked ontology"(Kierkegaard 57) was so implicated. "Blocked ontology," we mightsuppose, borrows some of the charge implicated in a, so to speak,"ontology at a standstill"--and it is part of Adorno's dissent fromKierkegaard that he would elaborate such a blocked or arrestedontology not as Adorno or Benjamin would a "dialectic at astandstill": that is, as a defeat, a catastrophe, a reification, acongealment, a steady-state repetition or cycle of the old and thesame. On the contrary, in Kierkegaard's idealization such"standstill" appears as "sublime object," a desideratum or

Tantalus-fruit at once spiritual, philosophical, and polemical.Consider the following passage, whose crucial term for us is"image," associated here with "myth," i.e., with eternalizing,reifying, essentializing (mis)uses of thought--which is why specialinterest attaches to the appearance here of the important modifier,the dialectical image (emphasis added):

Dialectic comes to a stop in the image and cites the mythical; inthe historically most recent as the distant past: nature asproto-history. For this reason the images, which [...] bringdialectic and myth to the point of indifferentiation, are truly"antediluvian fossils." They may be called dialectical images, to

use Benjamin's expression, whose compelling definition of"allegory" also holds true for Kierkegaard's allegorical intentionas a configuration [sc. "constellation"] of historical dialecticand mythical nature. According to this definition "in allegory theobserver is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history, apetrified primordial landscape" (Kierkegaard 54; the Benjamin isquoted from Origin 166).

36. "Dialectic comes to a stop"--as in "dialectic at a standstill"(compare the theme later in the book of "Intermittence"


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[Kierkegaard 100-02], a condition in which dialectic falters,

becomes a stop-and-start affair)--"and cites the mythical," the actof "citation" here apparently implying some self-consciouslycritical deployment of the given, ideological image, in quotationmarks, as it were; or, on the analogy of the speech-actdistinction, as (self-conscious) "mention" rather than (nave)"use"--with the (Hegelian, and, many will complain, idealist)

implication that the difference makes for some "critical" or"negative" consequence. Crucial here is that the"indifferentiation" of myth/dialectic seems, in the transit betweenthe quoted passage's second sentence and the third, to appear firstas an ideological effect of the "image," then as a critical effectof the "dialectical image." And, as sign, vehicle, "motivation" ofsuch "indifferentiation" is the implicit Medusa motif, hereappearing in something like an inverted or (Freud) displaced form:the "facies hippocratica" is Benjamin's image in the Trauerspiel ofunhappy consciousness, an image drawn from Hippocrates'sphysiognomics (see Hullot-Kentor's note, Kierkegaard 151-2): avisage like the anguished mask of tragedy, or perhaps better, likethe face of Medusa's victim, struck by the horror of a "petrified

primordial landscape." Here the thing seen is stone, while the faceof the viewer, seeing it, is animated to horror, whereas in theMedusa-motif, the vitality is all Medusa's, upon seeing whom it isthe viewer who turns to stone--but the tangle of "antithetical"motifs leaves in place the horror of petrifaction, and thusunderscores the extremities of ambivalence in Adorno's ascriptionof a "Medusa-gaze" to Benjamin as critic, or indeed to critiqueitself. Hence the analogously "antithetical" (or "dialectical")wobble in Adorno's own usage as regards "dialectics at astandstill," which sometimes figures as an ideological conditioncritique and art protest, at other times as a "result" thatcritique and art are praised for achieving--the latter apparentlyas critical (or "dialectical") "mimesis" of the former (see, forexample, Beethoven 16; Philosophy of Modern Music 124).

37. "Dialectics at a standstill," in both these senses (asideological condition to be protested, and as critical "effect" tobe achieved) is a formula especially apposite to Dialectic ofEnlightenment.14 The narrative (or anti-narrative) of Dialectic ofEnlightenment enacts the failure of the Enlightenment's own "grandnarrative" to achieve its announced, programmatic (narrative) telosof change and progress; and it indicts not only bourgeoisEnlightenment positivism's refusal of dialectic, but also (and muchmore daringly) the Soviet world's official Marxist-Leninistfetishization of dialectic as an orthodoxy, as equally deludedmiscarriers or unwitting betrayers of dialectic (conceived as "the

engine of history") itself. To that end the "appearance" (in theaesthetic sense [German Schein]) of non- or anti-"dialectical"pairs like Odysseus/bourgeois, or myth/Enlightenment, presentssomething like a dialectical image aiming, with critical force, to"bring dialectic and myth to the point of indifferentiation"--or an"allegory" presenting a "configuration [sc. "constellation"] ofhistorical dialectic and mythical nature." This "appearance" of"indifferentiation" (sc. "identity") of dialectic and myth enactswhat Horkheimer and Adorno regard as Enlightenment's fatalideological false consciousness, its sacrifice of qualitative to


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quantitative ("identity" or "equivalence/exchange") thinking--and

enacts it, in "appearance," from "inside," i.e., "immanently,"taking upon itself the full ideological burden of what it protestsand would redeem. The case I'm making here could be thought of as aversion of Adorno's "dialectical despite itself," which underlieshis enthusiasm for thinkers avowedly critical of or indifferent to"dialectic"; I mean that Adorno's seemingly static and

essentialized binaries display an affinity with (say) Nietzsche'stragedy/Socrates and bermensch/priest, or Freud's Eros/Thanatos,or the antinomies of instinct and "vicissitude" that in the latework on Moses and elsewhere seem to force on Freud aquasi-Lamarckian view of the heritability of acquiredcharacteristics. Equally exemplary would be the great works ofmodernist music and literature with all their techniques of seeming"im-mediation" or "de-mediation": works that attempt to escapeoutworn habits of mediation, to conjure an atmospherics ornostalgia of immediacy, and achieve thereby a kind of re-mediation(new mediations) that it is no mere word-play to hope might also beremedy.

38. The loosening of old mediations and the forging of new ones inmodernism involved techniques of juxtaposition, of suppressingtransitions (preeminently narrative ones), of foregoing explanatorymotives for questioning ones--and it is among these modernistdevices and motivations that Adorno's constellation belongs.Michael Cahn, in what remains to my mind the richest and shrewdestessay on these matters, observes that Adorno's aesthetic theory isnot merely a theory of the aesthetic, but a theory that isaesthetic; he clinched the point by adducing the analogy of"critical theory" (42)--which is to suggest as well the senses inwhich Adorno's aesthetic is critical, and (the premise of thisessay) the extent to which Adorno's critical practice involvesissues usually referred to the aesthetic. It's in something of that

spirit that I have attempted here to explore Adorno'sconstellation, not as a philosophic concept, nor even as an elementor index of a critical method, but as part of a writing practicethat I think Adorno's readers should be readier than they have beento take as a kind of modernist poetics of critique--a poeticsrealizing itself as much in performance as in "theory." In thecritical practice of constellation, Adorno enacts a critique of theextant critical (dialectical, historicizing) practices of his ownday, a critique analogous to that performed in modernist artisticpractices. Adorno's practice is as radical a departure from thatof, say, Georg Lukcs as Beckett (one of Adorno's chief exemplarsof the modern) is from Lukcs's standard-bearer for realism,Balzac. Indeed, Adorno's defense of Beckett against Lukcs may be

thought especially suggestive, given Beckett's gift for narrativeswhose point is the failure of anything to happen, whose meaning (asAdorno observes in "Trying to Understand Endgame") ismeaninglessness itself--a meaninglessness, Adorno would say, whosefalsity Beckett enables us to reappropriate for truth. Some suchresult, event, or effect is the gesture of the dialectic ofDialectic of Enlightenment.


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Department of English

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Copyright (c) 2003 Steven Helmling NOTE: Readers may use portionsof this work in accordance with the Fair Use provisions of U.S.copyright law. In addition, subscribers and members of subscribedinstitutions may use the entire work for any internal noncommercialpurpose but, other than one copy sent by email, print, or fax toone person at another location for that individual's personal use,distribution of this article outside of a subscribed institutionwithout express written permission from either the author or theJohns Hopkins University Press is expressly forbidden.

Notes

1. In perhaps the most suggestive of these, Adorno links it withMax Weber's "ideal type," a characterization stressing itsheuristic potential (Negative Dialectics 164-66).

2. There are many treatments more systematic than mine. Stillindispensable on this, as on so much else about Adorno, isBuck-Morss; on constellation see especially 90-110. (Buck-Morssnotes Adorno's reservations about "constellation" as a termconnoting astrology [254n54]). More recently, see Jameson, LateMarxism 54-60; Jameson also assimilates constellation to "model"(68); and if I opened by evoking Eisenstein and Pound, Jamesonobserves that the affinity of constellation with Althusser'sconjuncture makes Adorno "Althusserian avant la lettre" (244).

Nicholson treats constellation under the broader rubric of"configurational form" (passim, but especially 103-36)--a usefulreminder that the thematics of constellation can often attach tosuch cognate terms as "configuration," "complex," even "ensemble"or "juxtaposition." Also useful on Adorno's aesthetics, thoughwithout specific reference to constellation, are Wolin 62-79;Bernstein 188-224, esp. 206; and Paddison 21-64, especially 35-7.

3. A full discussion of these issues would need to considerAdorno's 1932 essay, "The Idea of Natural History"--and also,perhaps, his decision against republishing it.

4. On this last, see Freud's 1914 paper on technique,

"Recollection, Repetition, and Working Through."

5. The motif of the fragment here touches on Adorno's chronic themeof the false coherence of "system" and the necessity, in critique,of allowing the unintegrated, unintegratable loose ends of "thedamaged life" to stand as reproach or "bad conscience" to allmystifying reconciliations.

6. For example, from Kierkegaard in Kierkegaard: Construction ofthe Aesthetic passim, from Kant in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason


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(125), and from Freud and Weber in Introduction to Sociology (113,

123).

7. He is citing Freud's Abhub der Erscheinungswelt (Adorno Reader32).

8. Adorno most movingly sounds this motif in his 1930 essay on

"Mahler Today": see especially Essays on Music 605, where Mahler'sproject sounds strikingly like Benjamin's; and cf. 608, whereAdorno contrasts Mahler and Schoenberg in ways that suggest ananalogy with his sense of the differences between Benjamin andhimself.

9. Here is another contention with Lukcs--see the latter's"Narrate or Describe?"--that resumes most of what is at stake intheir conflicting positions on realism versus modernism.

10. Both "Parataxis" and Havelock's Preface to Plato date from

1963, so Havelock's argument cannot have affected Adorno's essay,but I find no evidence that Adorno came across it later, either:too bad--I am sure it would have interested him keenly.

11. Compare the formula of "the logic of disintegration" by whichAdorno at about this same time characterized what he acknowledgedas a career-long concern (Negative 144-6; see also Buck-Morss233n3).

12. For his most extended workout on these problems, see "Vers UneMusique Informelle," in Quasi Una Fantasia, especially 294-301.

13. See the closing pages of In Search of Wagner (1952) or, an evenmore striking example, the 1963 essay on "Wagner's Relevance for

Today" (Essays on Music 584-602).

14. Let me own here that Adorno reprehends all rhetoric of"effect"; for him it connotes composition with an eye on theaudience rather than on "the matter in hand." I apologize for myresort to it here, but the shifts by which I might have attemptedto do without it were more trouble than they were worth--and I am,after all, discussing the book from the position of a reader. I canhope that Adorno would at least countenance my usage as, again,attestation of the ideological predicaments of critique itself ascomposition, i.e., as "a kind of writing"--and also, of course, asa kind of reading.

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