The [Benjaminian] essay as form consists in the ability to regard historical moments, manifestations of the objective spirit, "culture," as though they were natural. Benjamin could do this as no one else. The totality of this thought is characterized by what may be called "natural history." He was drawn to the petrified, 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 his philosophical dungeons. The Hegelian concept of "second nature," as the reification of estranged human relations, and also the Marxian category of "commodity fetishism" occupy key positions in Benjamin's work. He is driven not merely to awaken congealed life in petrified objects--as in allegory--but also to scrutinize living things so that they present themselves as ancient, "ur-historical" and abruptly release their significance. Philosophy appropriates the fetishism of commodities for itself: everything must metamorphose into a thing in order to break the catastrophic spell of things. Benjamin's thought is so saturated with culture as its natural object that it swears loyalty to reification instead of flatly rejecting it [...] the glance of his philosophy is Medusan. (Prisms 233)

For us, there is peril in this assimilation of culture to nature, which we regard as the classic ruse of ideology. Our antidote, from Lévi-Strauss and Barthes, is to dissolve the category of nature entirely into culture--to "flatly reject," in effect, to deny our critical practice any resort to, the category of nature at all. But for Adorno, the ruse itself is the first thing critique must grapple with--and it must do so "immanently," that is, from the inside: critique must suffer the ruse of ideology, and even in a sense reproduce it from within, in the very course of the attempt to unmask it and undo its power. Hence the use, for Adorno and for Benjamin, of a critical device that permits just what our usual practice forbids, namely, a patience of, or tolerance for, transaction between categories (for example, nature/culture) that other styles of "external" critique would disjoin. An "external" critical practice insistently seeks to separate culture and nature, to fortify or sharpen or harden the putative antithesis between them, to (as it were) dis-ambiguate the mystifying conflation by recourse to which ideology sanctifies cultural/historical contingencies as natural necessities. By contrast, the practice of Benjamin and Adorno might here be thought of as a "motivated" re-ambiguation that again allows culture and nature access to each other in ways that can be critical of the binary from "inside," ways impossible for any "external" construction of them as mutually exclusive. As Adorno elsewhere puts it:

For [Benjamin] what is historically concrete becomes image--the archetypal image of nature as of what is beyond nature--and conversely nature becomes the figure of something historical. (Notes 2: 226)

Hence it is a good thing, an opening to critical insight rather than an ideological lapse, that "in Benjamin the historical itself looks as though it were nature" (Notes 2: 226), or, even more provocatively, that Benjamin's work "swears loyalty to reification instead of flatly rejecting it" (Prisms 233).[3]

[Benjamin] was right to call the images of his philosophy dialectical [...] 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, not psychologically: the representation of the modern as the new, the past, and the eternally invariant in one would have become both the central philosophical theme and the central dialectical image. (Notes 2: 226-7)

The language here leaves room for some unclarity. The "representation of the modern as the new, the past, and the eternally invariant in one" would, presumably, be ideological--the world's own self-representation--and hence a fit "object" ("philosophical theme") for ideological exposé by way of the dialectical 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/nature problem--in mind; we will recur to it throughout. For now, the passage implicates in the "dialectic" that the dialectical image achieves or allows not only nature/culture, but also "theory" and "image"--another categorical binary often operative, and often less consciously, than culture/nature, in critical practice. In Hegel, "picture-thinking" is quite specifically a pre- or proto-philosophical kind of consciousness--although survivals of it persist into the age, the consciousness, the practices of philosophy itself. More conventionally, though--by something like a Hegelian methodological fiction--it belongs to earlier phases of the unfolding story of the World-Spirit, in which the advent of theory or philosophy is itself an important milestone. And this evocation of the World-story reminds us, too, that for Hegel, the dialectic was ineluctably a temporal process, which is to say conceptualizable only in or as narrative. Image, by contrast, is spatial and atemporal--and to that extent a dialectical image would seem to be a kind of paradox. Yet what makes the "representation of the modern as the new, the past, and the eternally invariant in one" ideological is that it has already collapsed the narrative implicit in the given terms (modern, new, the past) into the non-narrative stasis of an "eternally invariant" condition. Hence the 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 "dialectics at a standstill"--a name, incidentally, he found without knowing that Kierkegaard's melancholy had long since conjured it up. (Notes 2: 228)

Thus can a Marxist critique recuperate, "immanently," the arch-bourgeois Kierkegaard, as himself an immanent sufferer, exemplar, critic and diagnostician of all the superstitions and humors ("melancholy") that compound the bourgeois ideology and Lebenswelt. But more to the present point is that the critical practice of Adorno generally presents what might seem the paradox or contradiction of an insistently historicizing program, realized in a critical practice that is virtually never motivated by historical argument in the form of historical narrative. Hence the relevance of the formula "dialectics at a standstill," which has become almost a slogan for Western Marxists and others for whom the forward momentum of nineteenth-century progressive (liberal) and/or revolutionary (Marxist) narratives of eventual (of course, diversely) happy endings have stalled in the steady-state nightmare of the twentieth century, where, as Adorno and Horkheimer starkly put it, "mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism" (xi). For a world at such an impasse, "dialectics at a standstill"--a non-narrative dialectic--is the only kind of dialectic that answers to our condition.

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 the spirit in which [Benjamin] restructured every element of culture that he encountered, as if the form of his intellectual organization and the melancholy with which his nature conceived the idea of something beyond nature, of reconciliation, necessarily endowed everything he took up with a deathly shimmer. (Notes 2: 228)

Here, it would seem, the "gaze" of the critic does to its object just what immanent critique and other projects of "dereification" aim to un-do: hardens it, turns it to stone, turns it 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 to speak, that Benjamin's "medusa-gaze" turns its object into--both the thing, we might say, and its ideological theorization by Heidegger; hence "ontology" as figure here for what Adorno variously calls "reification," "hypostatization," "fetishization.") Indeed, the critic's gaze does something very suggestive of killing the object, depriving it of life--besides Medusa's own lethal power of petrification, such is the suggestion of "endowing" it "with a deathly shimmer." In context, it is following this passage that the "dialectics at a standstill" passage appears--so there is a pointed connection between, or constellation of, the theme above of non-narrative stasis and the point here about death. In Benjamin's

micrological method [...] the historical movement halts and becomes sedimented in the image. One understands Benjamin correctly if one senses behind each of his sentences the conversion of extreme animation into something static, in fact the static conception of movement itself. (Notes 2: 228)

Here, again, the critic "immanently" repeats, even suffers, the stasis of our modern ideological condition in a way to perform ("repeat") that very condition--the "moment" of the process captured in the Medusa-image being that in which the critic enacts the "repetition" of that congealed, petrified condition, not (yet) its reliquification.

[Lukács] even managed to speak of Nietzsche's "more than ordinary ability" in the tone of a provincial Wilhelminian schoolmaster. Under the guise of an ostensibly radical critique of society he smuggled back the most pitiful clichés of the conformism to which that critique had once been directed. (Notes 1: 217).

If Lukács denounced modernist "im-mediation" as "undialectical" and "sick," Adorno here agitates (at age 55, and with Stalin five years in the grave) a vehemence that revives all the indignation of his avant-garde youth against the "provincial" moldy-fig-ism that prefers a false unity, an "extorted reconciliation," to an unflinching evocation of all the contradiction and falsehood of our condition.

Unless I am very much mistaken [writes Adorno to Benjamin], your dialectic is lacking in one thing: mediation. You show a prevailing tendency to relate the pragmatic contents of Baudelaire's work directly and immediately to adjacent features in the social history and [...] economic features of the time. [...] you substitute metaphorical expressions for categorical ones [...] [so that] one of the most powerful ideas in your study seems to be presented as a mere as-if [...]. I regard it as methodologically inappropriate to give conspicuous individual features from the realm of the superstructure a "materialist" turn by relating them immediately, and perhaps even causally, to certain corresponding features of the substructure. The materialist determination of cultural traits is only possible if it is mediated through the total social process [...] [such] immediate--and I would almost say again "anthropological"--materialism harbours a profoundly romantic element [...]. The mediation which I miss, and find obscured by materialistic-historical evocation, is simply the theory which your study has omitted [...] the theological motif of calling things by their names tends to switch into the wide-eyed presentation of mere facts. [...] one could say that your study is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism. The spot is bewitched. Only theory could break this spell--your own resolute and salutarily speculative theory. It is simply the claim of this theory that I bring against you here. (Complete Correspondence 281-3)

Adorno's objections here are not altogether dissimilar from the sorts of complaints Lukács vented about modernism, which at first may seem merely ironic, but it is more usefully taken as index of the fineness of the line Adorno means immanent critique to walk in its highwire ambition both to "repeat" the ideological "symptom" and to reliquify it in a critical negation. Hence the sting in the tail, the potential dialectical backfire, in Adorno's homage, already quoted, to the effect that "Benjamin's thought is so saturated with culture as its natural object that it swears loyalty to reification instead of flatly rejecting it. [...] the glance of his philosophy is Medusan" (Prisms 233).

It is not only the micrological forms of serial transition in a narrow sense [...] that we must think of as parataxis. As in music, the tendency takes over larger structures. In Hölderlin there are forms that could as a whole be called paratactical in the broader sense [...]. In a manner reminiscent of Hegel, mediation of the vulgar kind, a middle element standing outside the moments it is to connect, is eliminated as being external and inessential, something that occurs frequently in Beethoven's late style; this not least of all gives Hölderlin's late poetry its anticlassicistic quality, its rebellion against harmony. What is lined up in sequence, unconnected, is as harsh as it is flowing. The mediation is set within what is mediated instead of bridging it. (Notes 2: 132-33)

Note the recapitulation of our points above about mediation. But of larger consequence here is that Hölderlin, Beethoven, and Hegel are arrayed in constellation as practitioners of this immanent kind of composition (a "technique of seriation" Adorno calls it [Notes 2: 135]) in which the local, the particular "takes over larger structures," producing forms that are "paratactical in the broader sense."

The narrative tendency in the poem strives downward into the prelogical 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 Hölderlin's late poetry, in contrast, evokes it. Here too it converges in a most amazing way with the texture of Hegel's prose, which, in paradoxical contradiction to his systematic intent, in its form increasingly evades the constraints of construction the more it surrenders without reservation to the program of "simply looking on" outlined in the introduction to the Phenomenology and the more logic becomes history for it. (Notes 2: 134)

Here the animus since Plato between poetry and philosophy is "sublated"; moreover, Adorno presents the sublation itself as event, that is to say, as narrative. The redemptive or utopian promise is made more explicit in a passage reprising all these themes:

The logic of tightly bounded periods [i.e., the opposite of "parataxis"], each moving rigorously on to the next, is characterized by precisely that compulsive and violent quality for which poetry is to provide healing and which Hölderlin's poetry unambiguously negates. Linguistic synthesis contradicts what Hölderlin wants to express in language [...]. [Hölderlin] began by attacking syntax syntactically, in the spirit of the dialectic [...] In the same way, Hegel used the power of logic to protest against logic. (Notes 2: 135-36)

Dialectic comes to a stop in the image and cites the mythical; in the historically most recent as the distant past: nature as proto-history. For this reason the images, which [...] bring dialectic 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 intention as a configuration [sc. "constellation"] of historical dialectic and mythical nature. According to this definition "in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history, a petrified primordial landscape" (Kierkegaard 54; the Benjamin is quoted from Origin 166).

"Dialectic comes to a stop"--as in "dialectic at a standstill" (compare the theme later in the book of "Intermittence" [Kierkegaard 100-02], a condition in which dialectic falters, becomes a stop-and-start affair)--"and cites the mythical," the act of "citation" here apparently implying some self-consciously critical deployment of the given, ideological image, in quotation marks, as it were; or, on the analogy of the speech-act distinction, as (self-conscious) "mention" rather than (naïve) "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 between the quoted passage's second sentence and the third, to appear first as an ideological effect of the "image," then as a critical effect of the "dialectical image." And, as sign, vehicle, "motivation" of such "indifferentiation" is the implicit Medusa motif, here appearing in something like an inverted or (Freud) displaced form: the "facies hippocratica" is Benjamin's image in the Trauerspiel of unhappy consciousness, an image drawn from Hippocrates's physiognomics (see Hullot-Kentor's note, Kierkegaard 151-2): a visage like the anguished mask of tragedy, or perhaps better, like the face of Medusa's victim, struck by the horror of a "petrified primordial landscape." Here the thing seen is stone, while the face of the viewer, seeing it, is animated to horror, whereas in the Medusa-motif, the vitality is all Medusa's, upon seeing whom it is the viewer who turns to stone--but the tangle of "antithetical" motifs leaves in place the horror of petrifaction, and thus underscores the extremities of ambivalence in Adorno's ascription of a "Medusa-gaze" to Benjamin as critic, or indeed to critique itself. Hence the analogously "antithetical" (or "dialectical") wobble in Adorno's own usage as regards "dialectics at a standstill," which sometimes figures as an ideological condition critique and art protest, at other times as a "result" that critique and art are praised for achieving--the latter apparently as critical (or "dialectical") "mimesis" of the former (see, for example, Beethoven 16; Philosophy of Modern Music 124).