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

Steven Helmling 

<c) 2003 
PMC 14.1 

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1. Fredric Jameson years ago characterized Adorno's chief critical
device or method as the "historical trope" (Marxism and Form 3-59),
so it shouldn't strike anyone as a novel claim that Adorno's
"constellation" displays affinities with other now-familiar devices
of modernist art and literature--Eisensteinian montage, cubist
collage, the Joycean "epiphany," the Poundian "ideogram." The young
Adorno presumably first encountered the word's relevant usages when
he read Benjamin's Trauerspiel in the late 1920s; however that may
be, the word recurs in his work throughout his career, from "The
Actuality of Philosophy" (1931) to the late pieces collected in
Critical Models. Its connotations are diverse and often
conflicting, and one could make an interesting study of such
tellingly divergent uses, as well as an interesting speculation of
the rarity of Adorno's own second-level reflections on the word.1
The present study, however, attempts nothing so comprehensive.2 I
want in this paper to unpack some of the implications of
constellation as a critical practice and elicit their tension or
contradiction (a word not necessarily a vitiation in Adorno's
usage, and in many contexts a term of high praise) with the overall
program, derived from Hegel, that Adorno regularly calls "immanent
critique." To that end, I will consider constellation in relation
to Walter Benjamin's "dialectical image," with which it has obvious
but also qualified affinities, to the Gestalt psychology of
Wolfgang Köhler, from which Adorno would have been anxious to
distinguish it, and to the epic device of "parataxis" as Adorno
commends Hölderlin's use of it. I will end by bringing the issues
that emerge to bear on the 1944 Dialectic of Enlightenment,
co-authored with Max Horkheimer, and the curiously agitated stasis
"motivating" its thematic of Western Civilization's "progress" and
"regress." 



ADORNO AND BENJAMIN 

2. It is in his "Portrait of Walter Benjamin" that Adorno speaks
most suggestively and, for his own practice, most revealingly,
about the theory, the practice, and the effect, of Benjamin's
dialectical image: 


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)

3. 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)

4. 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


5. It is this subversive evocation of the ideology of nature from
within, "immanently," that makes Benjamin's "Denkbild" or "thought
image" (and, I am of course arguing, Adorno's constellation as
well) a dialectical image: 


[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)

6. 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)

7. 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. 


8. "Dialectics at a standstill" is, then, not only the ideological
condition 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 a
standstill--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" (Arcades
463). Here again we observe the commutativity of the ideological
ethos and the critical method. To link all this--not only ethos and
method, but program as well--with dialectical image suggests
another, related, contradiction latent in Adorno's practice that
can tell us much about his motives and his meanings. Since Hegel,
the project, or desire, of broaching the "new" in the domain of
Spirit has regularly generated figurations of loosening or
liquifying formations inherited from the past that have "hardened"
or "frozen" and thus become rigid and imprisoning. Hegel himself
spoke of philosophy's task in such terms, of "freeing determinate
thoughts from their fixity" (Hegel 20); compare this with Hegel's
frequent formula that thought "sets in motion" thought-objects,
former "certainties," that had been stalled. Adorno likewise
typically figures reification as a process of freezing, hardening,
or congealing, and the critical process, by contrast, as one of
softening, reliquifying, and so on, as we have already seen in the
quotation above praising Benjamin's attempt to "awaken congealed
life in petrified objects" (Prisms 233). The task of immanent
critique, as Adorno puts it elsewhere, is that "congealed"
ideological thought "must be reliquified, its validity traced, in
repetition" (Negative 97). Above we saw what I called a motivated
ambiguation of culture and nature; here we have a cognate move, in
that 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 to
recover what is valid in ideological congealments as to undo what
is false. 


9. Thus conceived, immanent critique might seem, itself, an
ambiguously narrative process putting the forward motion of renewal
in tension with the cyclical or static entrapments of repetition.
But the ambiguity above, whereby narrative devolves into
standstill, into impasse, into image, has its analogous playing-out
in the reversal whereby figurations of critical, anti-ideological
reliquification are displaced by their very opposite: by imageries
of petrification, hardening, freezing, rigidifying, even killing.
In the following passage, for example, Adorno's discussion of
Benjamin's dialectical image generates, not for the first time (we
have 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 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)

10. 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)

11. 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. 


12. In his 1959 lectures on Kant, Adorno calls for a hermeneutic
that, by entering the (objective) "force field" of a writer's or a
text's problematic, allows the interpreter to "go beyond the
immediate meaning on the page" (Kant's 80). The Medusa image,
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 to
petrify anyone who looks at her is defeated by Perseus, who
contrives to approach her without looking, and at the crucial
face-to-face moment, holds up to her a highly polished mirror.
Medusa, seeing her own image, is herself turned to stone, and
Perseus then decapitates her. He keeps her severed head, however,
and in further adventures, he uses it as a weapon--a fright object
with which to petrify new enemies. Adorno licenses us, I suggest,
to read "Benjamin's medusa-gaze" as having the power to do to
ideology something like what Perseus's mirror does to Medusa
herself, as well as to do what Perseus uses Medusa's severed head
to do to further adversaries. This image, of Medusa's petrifying
power turned against itself and then appropriated for further use
against 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 the
suffering 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 image
de-narrativizes the implicitly temporal or narrative course, from
"repeat" to "reliquify," of immanent critique. We might say the
Medusa gaze of the dialectical image freezes the temporality of
immanent critique into a frozen, static, petrified image. But we
can also play this construction the other way, reversing its
direction, to reinsert the dialectical image back into the story by
assigning it a particular "moment" in the narrative. If immanent
critique is meant to reliquify an antecedent hardening, then the
Medusa-gaze would seem to belong to the prequel of the story: the
moment of its object's petrification would seem to be the
indispensable narrative precondition for the repetition and
reliquification to follow. But Adorno evokes the Medusa myth in a
context that suggests an even more surprising narrative for the
Medusa moment to be assigned its place in. In the passage in
question, Adorno resorts to the Medusa-image in the context of
Benjamin's treatment of some contemporary neo-Kantian efforts to
make common cause with "ontology"; whether he is talking about
Heidegger himself here I am uncertain, but the point would seem to
be that Benjamin's Medusa-gaze "froze" this nascent ideology in
advance 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 is
prospective, not retrospective, which is to say it is petrification
for the first time, not as repetition. To adapt Ernst Bloch, there
is (of course) a "not yet" of ideology as well as of
utopia--between which could be inserted, as a mediation, the "not
yet" of (immanent) critique itself as Benjamin projects it in the
very last sentence of his book on Baudelaire: "with the upheaval of
the market economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the
bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled" (Charles
Baudelaire 176). 



ADORNO VERSUS BENJAMIN 

14. I have so far expounded Adorno's sense of constellation and
critique by way of Adorno's remarks on Benjamin's dialectical
image--a way of proceeding that has obscured their differences.
Benjamin's critical practice is strongly marked, as is Adorno's, by
the work of Freud, though a Freud mediated by the Surrealists
rather than, as for Adorno, by Nietzsche. We may risk the
generalization that the Surrealist program was to inhabit the
madness of the culture, to re-enact it from within, less (directly)
to critique it, than to exhibit it--to insert themselves into the
Freudian drama, we might say, in the role not of ego, but of id, on
the evident premise that the ego, whatever its for-or-against
posture toward the world, cannot be as "naturally" or as
"immediately" transgressive as the id. The practice of the
Surrealists typically embraced what Adorno would have regarded as
an irrationalist faith that the real madness was reason, and
unreason its only antidote or purge, if not quite its salvation or
its utopian alternative. Benjamin seems to regard such a resort to
madness with some ambivalence--almost as something like a desire
unhappily forbidden him by reason of that obdurately quotidian
sanity from which all his brilliance and all his bile were
powerless to deliver him. Some such longing, or nostalgia, seems to
me symptomatized in Benjamin's sense of the world as a pallid,
petrified, undead, fundamentally irrational waking dream, and the
resistless 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 dead
and with death itself; you might say that in his work critique is
playing possum--one of his most famous quotations, indeed, avows
that critique itself long since left the land of the living. 


15. Adorno was moved by the pathos of all this in the life and
death of his friend, and I would bet that he had Benjamin in mind
in section V of the Anti-Semitism chapter of Dialectic of
Enlightenment, in which the modern subject's protective "mimesis"
of the reified surrounding world is imaged as a feigned death
entailing all too literally the spiritual consequences of the real
thing. Adorno's animated, even febrile critical style could never
be 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 what
would seem to be the irresistible bait of assimilating the
"repeat/reliquify" course of immanent critique altogether to the
Freudian "compulsion to repeat" (best known from section III of
Beyond the Pleasure Principle [1920]), and to Freud's ingenious
technique of appropriating that compulsion, in eliciting the
patient's own transferential resistances, to the healing labor of
the analysis.4 Adorno was wary of any assimilation of his own
project to psychoanalysis (the closest he comes, and it is not very
close, is his late lecture "The Meaning of Working Through the
Past" [Critical Models 89-103]); and his work holds itself much
more aloof from Freud than that of such colleagues as Max
Horkheimer, 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 Frankfurt
School. Adorno has his own distinctively critical "unhappy
consciousness," an "after-Auschwitz" moral askesis that, to say it
again, long pre-dated the news of Auschwitz itself--but this is a
vibrant, highly cathected affect, quite different from that of the
"saturnine" or "melancholy" Benjamin, which looks, indeed, rather
like the resigned, "stoic" ataraxia that Adorno so frequently
diagnoses as among the more desperate symptoms of the despair
engendered by our supposedly empowered, post-Enlightenment,
"administered world." 



GESTALT 

16. These tensions between Adorno's doubts concerning Benjamin's
practice of the dialectical image--and their implications for the
sort of work Adorno wants performed, what problems he wants
addressed, in his developing practice of constellation--may be
illuminated here by a consideration of Adorno's wariness of the
Gestalt psychology of Wolfgang Köhler. As we will see, Adorno
treats Gestalt theory as ideology--constellation, we might say, in
reverse. Adorno sounds caveats about Gestalt theory in his 1931
inaugural lecture, "The Actuality of Philosophy" (Adorno Reader
31-32); a quarter century later, he makes almost a kind of satire
of Husserlian "intentionality" fidgeting in the unwelcome embrace
of Gestalt psychology (Against Epistemology 158-62). Pertinent here
is Adorno's discussion of Kant's "unity of apperception," the
ground on which, Adorno forcefully argues, Kant's "subjective" and
"objective" sustain each other. For Adorno compares Kant's
conception--that is, he juxtaposes it heuristically, or one might
even say, he "constellates" it--with Gestalt theory (Kant's
100-01). Adorno is writing here in the late 1950s, at a time when
artists and poets often seized on Gestalt theory as a validation of
avant-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-purpose
explanation, of "pattern recognition" (as Gestalt was frequently
anglicized) as a key to all manner of novel, putatively "modern,"
styles of consciousness. In this passage, Adorno's discussion
projects Gestalt as the ideological problem rather than its
critical solution: like Kant's "unity of apperception," the
functioning of Gestalt is "unconsciously synthetic," thus effecting
(false, familiarized, familiarizing) reconciliations or
integrations of experiential fragmentariness.5 By these lights,
Gestalt is an instance or model, indeed an epitome, of ideology as
such: reflex and reinforcer of the habitual familiarizations, the
ideological conditionings, the false reconciliations or "imaginary
solutions to real contradictions" of the historically and
culturally given. 


17. But I am eliciting these implications of Adorno's reservations
about Gestalt because what they imply is what Adorno leaves unsaid
here, 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, already
familiarized, ideological arrays or Gestalts [for example, Critical
Models 138, 260]; my usage henceforth will connote "constellation"
in the sense Adorno valorizes, as a device with the potential to be
turned, in somewhat the manner of the Brechtian V-effect, against
such familiarizations (though just this dissident potential, of
course, is what mid-century avant-gardists were seizing on in
Gestalt). And as we'll see, the word's "antithetical" reversals of
meaning are themselves indices of the "dialectical"-ness of
Adorno's immanent critique. We might say that these "antithetical"
meanings--"constellation" as unconscious ideological synthesis
versus "constellation" as consciousness-raising estrangement;
"constellation" as object of critique, or as subject of it--are
themselves a kind of constellation implying or encoding, concealing
or de-familiarizing a narrative, that of the classic Enlightenment
project summarized by Freud in the formula, "making the unconscious
conscious." Adorno may "repeat" an over-familiar constellation and
then reliquify (or, Medusa-like, petrify) its "congelations"; or he
may present an unfamiliar and even shocking juxtaposition, whose
estrangement is to provoke a new and heightened consciousness of
the ideological condition in which we are entrapped. The historical
image that results, ideological and critical all at once,
appropriates the critical force we saw Adorno ascribing to the
Benjaminian dialectical image, turning it, immanently, to
estranging or defamiliarizing, sc. critical or (Hegel) "negative"
purposes. 



MEDIATION 

18. Most ideologically consequential in Adorno's critique of
Gestalt--consequential, I mean, for our thinking about
constellation--is the issue of mediation. According to Kant's
"unity of apperception," Husserl's "intentionality," and Gestalt
theory alike, it is the mind that synthesizes or integrates
disjunct 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, the
fragments themselves, "stand in need of mediation" (Kant's 100)--a
complexly ideological indictment, but suffice it for now to say
that in Adorno, "mediation" connotes dialectical
self-consciousness, awareness of the negative, of contradiction, of
non-identity, and of the "labor of conceptualization." Enthusiasts
of Gestalt theory counted it in the theory's favor that it seemed
to propose or promote a view of experience as "immediate," a
specifically positivist or "nominalist" naďveté or ideological
mystification--one might even say, "Gestalt"--that Adorno
consistently meant to combat. Yet versions of this (to Adorno,
naďve) quest for "immediate experience" are pervasive throughout
the early twentieth-century "modernist" arts, from the scruffiest
anarchists of Dada and Surrealism to that most stiffly proper of
reactionaries, T. S. Eliot. It would seem to be implicit in
Adorno's own frequent motif of "shock" as a way to awaken numbed
perception, and it is clearly the program enacted in such modernist
devices as montage, collage, and ideogram, devices mobilized by
their authors expressly to suppress and subvert received habits of
synthesizing, modulating, contriving transitions--in short,
mediating--between the typically incongruous or dissonant elements
they contrived to bring together. Like these modernist devices, in
short, the constellation at the very least looks as if it is
dispensing with mediation--which in the context of the
left-to-Stalinist intellectual culture of the 1930s and 1940s was
tantamount 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 an
affront to such "dialectical" political orthodoxy. His own practice
was meant, in emulation of the great modernists he consistently
advocated against the socialist realist alarums of Georg Lukács, to
repudiate orthodox dialectical materialism ("diamat," in the
neologizing party-speak Adorno so loathed) as a reified dogmatic
system. In the Lukácsean optic, Adorno's practice of the
constellation, assembling disjunct elements in (seemingly)
unmediated array, would seem as decadent as cubist collage,
Eisensteinian montage, Poundian ideogram, or Joycean
stream-of-consciousness. It would seem "idealist," "subjective,"
"decadent"--"immediate" not only in the proscribed sense of
un-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 Marx
and Lenin both, it would have seemed "un-dialectical." (See, for
example, Lukács's essays "Realism in the Balance" and "The Ideology
of Modernism.") Lukács's prose retains the composure of the
platform debater; Adorno more characteristically vents
exasperation, rejoining that Lukács, "the certified dialectician,"
himself argues "most undialectically" in, for example, dismissing
Freud and Nietzsche as irrationalists and therefore "fascists pure
and simple." 


[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). 

20. 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. 


21. In Lukács, tellingly, the adjective "dialectical" often
modifies the word "unity": dialectic thus sustains a procedure for
unifying or integrating disjunct and/or incommensurable things. In
other words, for Lukács the point of dialectic should be to produce
unity in phenomena and in settings where, presumably, it needs
producing. Adorno's sense is virtually the opposite, that the aim
of dialectic should be to expose the contradictions that
ideological appearance has falsely reconciled: to produce or expose
disunity, contradiction, non-identity. Constellation serves this
end by bringing diverse phenomena together and forcing their
consideration together. The disjunction between the constellated
items is very much the point. To Lukács, the gaps and disjunctions
would be evidence of a failure to have done the dialectical work
that is the sine qua non of critical activity--to put it another
way, 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 Barthes
used to say [for example, S/Z 3]). For Adorno, the point of
mediation would be to render, even "exaggerate," the disjunctions,
the contradictions that, for Lukács, they should unify. To Lukács,
Adorno's constellation would exemplify the same spurious and "sick"
immediacy on offer in Beckett, Kafka, Freud and the other
"decadent" modernists Lukács deplored: a mere "symptom" rather than
a critical "negation" of the degenerate bourgeois cultural
surround. 


22. Adorno's immanent critique, by contrast, stipulates that
critique cannot hold itself above (or "outside") the predicaments
on which it aspires to offer critical comment. Since critique
cannot help but participate in the culture's "symptomatics," it had
best own this liability, and make of it, to the extent possible, a
quickening instantiation of the challenge to be met, the problem to
be addressed, thereby amplifying critique's potential for
dramatizing critical effort and ambition--"the labor and the
suffering of the negative"--as such. Adorno agrees with Lukács in
reprehending false or naďve "immediacy," but his "constellational"
view of mediation gives him a very different take on the evidence
from Lukács's. I don't pretend always to understand why Adorno
approves one work or artist--or indeed, theorist (for example,
Freud, Nietzsche, Weber)--as dialectical and mediated, and damns
another as deficient in these qualities; and to the objection that
Adorno is "merely" making heavy philosophical weather of his
personal tastes, I at least would not always be able to muster a
very cogent reply. But worth mention here is the move that we might
call, borrowing one of Adorno's own most suggestive rubrics,
"Dialectic In Spite of Itself" (Against Epistemology 49-50), by
which Adorno often manages to recuperate (or "rescue") his critical
targets from his own critiques of them.6 But whereas Lukács casts
these matters in terms of decadence and disease--his "Healthy or
Sick Art?" only makes explicit a metaphorics pervasive in his
work--Adorno stages the issue rather in terms of ideological
appearance, "magic," and "myth." An especially pertinent instance
for 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 to
Benjamin's surprise, Adorno reacted unfavorably: "motifs are
assembled but they are not elaborated"; Benjamin's materials, his
trouvées, sit nakedly on the page, un-"mediated" by "theory"; the
ideological result is that Benjamin's "ascetic refusal of
interpretation only serves to transport [the subject matter] into a
realm quite opposed to asceticism: a realm where history and magic
oscillate [...]." 


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)

23. 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). 


24. So I have risked the lengthy quotation above because its
diffuse suggestiveness implies the scope of the tension between
Benjamin's critical practice of the dialectical image, especially
in the Passagen-Werk, and Adorno's of the constellation. Benjamin
cites or quotes particular faits divers, one at a time, each
standing distinct in its surround of white space on the page--even
typographically, 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 it
could also serve as a figure for it as well; his famously boundless
paragraphs constellate diverse materials so diffusely as to ground
or "theorize" or mediate them together--albeit, again, that the
ground is contradiction rather than unity. Adorno tends, also, to
"constellate" higher-brow materials than Benjamin--Hegel and
Beethoven 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
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 Benjamin
for their utopian "redemption."8 This difference resonates with
Adorno's "mandarin" fastidiousness, as well as with his greater
circumspection--almost, as he says himself, a
Bilderverbot--regarding the utopian (see Buck-Morss, 90-95); it's
arguable that the dissent from Benjamin above helped confirm Adorno
in these penchants. 


25. But most consequential for our theme here (the contrast between
Benjamin's critical practice and Adorno's) is the issue I
characterized above in terms of kinesis versus stasis. Benjamin's
isolated atoms of social/historical fact, cited seriatim on the
page, organized under generalizing rubrics into "Convolutes," we
may take as dialectical image of the pall under which the bourgeois
world has, as if in the gaze of some Medusa more baleful than
Benjamin, frozen into paralysis. By contrast, Adorno's immanent
critique, though it eschews narrative, can fairly be called
kinetic: the sentences rush headlong, never faltering before
difficulties more "responsible" critics would find daunting, and
ready at every turn to embrace always heavier burdens of difficulty
and challenge. Reading Adorno, you never cease to be surprised at,
however you may grow accustomed to, the way a given sentence might
lunge off in a new direction, extending (distending) itself to
encompass further elements and all the problems they will bring in
their train. And yet, as I have said, this kinesis of Adorno's,
however entoiled in the temporality of its own process of working
through (Durcharbeit), the temporality of its own writing and
being-read, is never itself narrative: whatever else he is, Adorno
is never a storyteller.9 When Adorno advises Benjamin (above) that
"the materialist determination of cultural traits is only possible
if it is mediated through the total social process," mediation
itself sounds like an ineluctably kinetic activity or process, and
the movement (my resort to the word is deliberate) between isolated
particular and totality--as, at other moments in Adorno, between
particular and universal, intuition and concept, matter and idea,
content and form--suggests a universe in perpetual and turbulent
flux, however stalled or arrested the dialectic that should be
ceaselessly dislocating its apparently fixed and static ideological
impasses. Adorno suggests something of this contradiction between
kinesis and stasis in a much later formulation: "the concept of the
mediated [...] always presupposes something immediate running
through these mediations and captured by them" (Introduction to
Sociology 109). The immediate is both "running through" and
"captured by" the mediations. 



PARATAXIS 

26. We are navigating, or "mediating," between the stasis of image
and the kinesis of narrative, and I want to adduce here a further
motif in which these preoccupations find yet another way of
overlapping: the "epic" device of parataxis, which lends its name
to the title of Adorno's late essay on Hölderlin. Parataxis is a
rhetorical device in which narrative units--narratemes?--follow one
another linked only by the conjunction "and," thus evading or
subverting more complex structures or grammars of narrative co- or
subordination (cause and effect, antecedent and consequence, main
event and subsidiary, and the like). Traditionally, parataxis was
taken to be (and poets emulated it as) an artifice, a feature of
the noble epic style; only in the twentieth century have
classicists like Eric Havelock seen it as evidence of a kind of
consciousness or mentalité preceding the advent of literacy. I am
sure the latter view, as a way to link texts and consciousness in
something like a "materialist" way, would have interested Adorno so
much that his non-consideration of it in his essay is a sign that
the suggestion hadn't reached his ears.10 In any case, "Parataxis:
On Hölderlin's Late Poetry" (Notes 2: 109-49) praises parataxis,
Hölderlin's anyway, for evading the usual (sc. reified,
familiarized, domesticated) ways of making sense. Hölderlin's
parataxes, Adorno writes, are "artificial disturbances that evade
the logical hierarchy of a subordinating syntax," and in
particular, "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 something
like what constellation is meant to do with the diverse fragments
it constellates: presents them in an ensemble undomesticated by the
familiar thought-syntax, the habituated grammars, the ideological
presuppositions, that familiarize the new, converting it, in the
very process of presenting it, into the same, the old, the already
known--the, as it were, pre-reified. Hölderlin's poetry "searches
for a linguistic form that would escape the dictates of spirit's
own synthesizing principle" (Notes 2: 131)--that is, it strives to
overcome the very liabilities of the mind's own drive to grasp what
it perceives. 


27. Parataxis thus might seem a solvent, a way of de-composing what
"spirit's own synthesizing principle" too unthinkingly composes or
synthesizes.11 The evident motive is to mobilize the particular
fragmentary contents against the larger synthesizing form(s). But
Adorno insists that Hölderlin's parataxis achieves not merely an
abolition of form, an escape from it, but something like a kind of
emancipation (not to say redemption) of form itself. And of course,
to the extent that Hölderlin's parataxis is itself a form, this is
an emancipation not conferred on form from above or outside, but
form's own self-emancipation; hence what Adorno calls "the agency
of form" (Notes 2: 114). Hölderlin's parataxis "puts explication
without deduction in the place of a so-called train of thought.
This gives form its primacy over content, even the intellectual
content" (Notes 2: 131-2). Set free from the "deductive" regimen of
a "so-called train of thought," the unfoldment ("explication") of
the matter can enact itself "immanently," according to its own
imperatives rather than to those of an external, syllogistic logic.
So far from vanishing, form here rather achieves itself in
allowing, being the vehicle for, new potentialities by which the
particular contents find their expression. Thus does form become
itself a content, content itself a kind of form, and all
concretely, thus sublating the classic antinomies (form/content,
idea/matter, abstract/concrete, universal/particular) that are the
pitfalls common to philosophy and the aesthetic under the regime of
"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 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)

28. 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." 


29. This issue of "larger structures," of parataxis on the
large-scale level of form, returns us to the issue of
temporality--Hölderlin, Beethoven, and Hegel (and, of course,
Adorno) are all practitioners of forms a hearer or reader must
experience in time--and thus of possibilities of kinesis within or
by way of the structures their form achieves. "The transformation
of language [in Hölderlin's parataxis] into a serial order whose
elements are linked differently than in the judgment is musiclike"
(Notes 2: 131)--so that parataxis pushes referential language in
the direction of non-referential meaning; moreover, terms like
"serial" and "musiclike" restore "temporality" to the stasis of
constellation. ("Serial" here doubtless connotes
Schoenberg-and-after, rather than Sartre's "seriality," although
the latter conjuncture, not to say "constellation," is suggestive
as well.) Adorno frequently implies that the temporality of music,
and of written texts, whether "creative" or "critical," amounts to
a sort of quasi- or crypto-narrative trajectory in which the
hearer/reader is challenged to participate.12 In the "Parataxis"
essay, although Adorno's focus is on the lyric, narrative in
Hölderlin appears (under the sign of the "epic"; see the discussion
of Hölderlin's relation to Pindar [Notes 2: 132-34]) as another
impulse working against "the logical hierarchy of a subordinating
syntax": 


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)

30. 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)



THE "DIALECTIC" OF DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT 

31. I want to end by sketching the ways that the themes we have
been agitating are evoked or enacted to peculiar effect in
Dialectic of Enlightenment. With Lutz Niethammer's acerbic mot in
mind, that moderns of Adorno's sort exemplify a "will to
powerlessness" (138-42), I will risk adapting Adorno's formula
above. 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-ŕ-vis the
crises of the mid-twentieth century to protest the non- or indeed
anti-dialectical cast of Enlightenment thought, that dehumanizing,
instrumentalized empiricism whose mastery of nature is gained only
at the cost of nature-ifying, reifying, reducing to thing-like
reflex, human being, human existence itself. Kinesis/stasis,
narrative/non-narrative, mediated/un-mediated, parataxis/synthesis,
dialectical/mythical--"our" particular subcultural penchant is to
see these pairs as binaries. But we won't get the hang of Adorno's
"dialectical" practice unless we cultivate the power of seeing
these pairs rather as terms demarking the coordinates of particular
conflicted 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, suggest
black/white distinctions. The polemical energy of Adorno's practice
can seem to drive or be driven by such stark contrasts, but my own
experience learning to read Adorno has been that his black and his
white are best taken as exaggerations of grey--the point being that
what he advocates and what he reprehends can overlap in unexpected
ways. For one instance, we may cite the "antithetical" tangle
imposed on immanent critique (repeat/reliquify) by the
Medusa-effect (repeat/petrify). Likewise, Adorno's often surprising
generosity to, even recuperations of, figures one had assumed would
be bętes noirs--Kierkegaard, say, or Spengler, or even Richard
Wagner.13 And hence, in the exposition above, the contrast with
Lukács (which highlights the liability of Adorno's constellational
critical "negation" to appear as mere ideological "symptom"); and
even closer to the quick, Adorno's own discomfort with the extreme
of Benjamin's apparently "unmediated" practice of "motifs assembled
but not elaborated." The cut between "image" and "dialectical
image," 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, between
all the other binaries just cited--is sufficiently fine as not
merely to allow, but actually to "motivate," some confusion between
the opposed, and supposedly clearly distinguishable, terms. 


32. This, I take it, can appear, even to a mere amateur of
philosophy like myself, as a major contradiction (of the bad sort)
for Adorno as a philosopher. His assault on "identity"-thinking
depends 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 principle
complaints with dialectic as usual--as practiced by historicizing
heirs of the Hegelian legacy, whether left (Lukács) or right
(Croce)--is that it can unwittingly accede to a logic of
substitution that winds up affirming the "exchange/equivalence"
habitus of Enlightenment, then it's notable that Adorno's negative
dialectic can in certain lights appear to deliver itself to the
same terminus. Perhaps the most troublesome instance is Adorno's
"deconstruction" (if the anachronism may be permitted) of
nature/history in "The Idea of Natural History" (1931)--and I take
it as some index of the trouble that Adorno never reprinted this
essay in his lifetime. But however that may be philosophically, it
is Adorno's practice as writer that I want to illuminate here--and
in that arena, the problem is one that Adorno's immanent critique
undertakes not to solve, or to make disappear, but precisely, to
display, to expose, which must mean, to suffer, and in that special
sense to "perform," to make happen, to "repeat" and (to the extent
possible) "reliquify," in the writing itself. Critique must refuse
the hubris of supposing it can escape, or has escaped, has risen
above, its ideological condition. As knowingly as Milton's Satan in
hell (and compare Goethe's Mephistopheles), critique must always
avow, "Why this is ideology, nor am I out of it." The point of
Adorno's immanent critique is not to exempt his own critical
practice from the liabilities of the dominant ideology, but
precisely to attest ideology's ubiquity and power by enacting in
the writing itself (his own) critique's implication--even (his own)
critique's implication--in the very predicaments (his own) critique
aims to address, protest, elucidate, redeem. 


33. To bring the foregoing themes together will, I hope, be to
suggest their use for a better reading of Adorno. The
demonstration-text is Dialectic of Enlightenment, on the premise
that in our academic subculture this is the most read and, because
most read by novices, least understood of Adorno's texts. But:
"Adorno's text"? What of Max Horkheimer, whose name appears first
on the title page, and to whom Adorno always ceded priority? Well,
in practice, all commentary I know of treats Dialectic of
Enlightenment "as if" Adorno were its author, and the few attempts
I've seen to parse Adorno's contributions from Horkheimer's seem
perfunctory (see Noerr 219-24) or (perhaps appropriately) shy of
specifics (Wiggershaus 177-91, 314-50). Here I'll take as a
methodological fiction or premise the authors' own professions that
their equal collaboration moots any attempt to untangle their
respective contributions. The 1969 "Preface" insists that the
"vital principle of the Dialectic is the tension between the two
intellectual temperaments conjoined in writing it" (ix); and I will
offer the speculation that what was crucial in Horkheimer's input
was his penchant for arguing by way of historical narrative, which
gives Dialectic of Enlightenment its narrative shape and its
quasi-narrative energy. By contrast, Adorno's critical practice
eschews narrative; hence the "vital principle," the "intellectual
tension" I've just insinuated between the book's overtly narrative
organization (a smaller-scale rescript of Hegel's Phenomenology,
orchestrating a variant of Hegel's trajectory from Greco-Roman
antiquity to "Enlightenment" and the present day), and its
"motivatedly" static (or "regressive") "image" of Western history
(or "progress"). It is precisely this tension, precisely this
problematic or contradiction, it seems to me, that has made
Dialectic of Enlightenment, for the past generation, the preeminent
text in "critical theory" by either Adorno or Horkheimer--a claim,
I think, that should valorize Horkheimer's large (and too-much
discounted) importance in the composition of Dialectic of
Enlightenment. 


34. But "authorship" issues aside, my point here is that the
reflections above on constellation and mediation (and so on) shed
light on what I recall, from my own "novice" first reading(s) of
Dialectic of Enlightenment, as the most baffling of the problems
and "difficulties" it presented for me. The book's narrative
organization was readily legible as an ironic reversal of the
Hegelian narrative--the story of Geist not as triumphal progress to
an Enlightened Absolute, but as ghastly "regression" to a nightmare
of violence ("humanity, instead of entering into a truly human
condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism" [xi]; "The
curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression" [36]).
And the fate of narrative in modernist literature had prepared me
for a story whose thematic burden of failure and waste was enacted
formally in the failure of the narrative to achieve not only any
putative thematic telos, but the telos of narrativity itself. The
thornier problem for me was the book's organization around binary
pairs that defied my every presupposition concerning how an
avowedly, and programmatically, historicizing and dialectical
presentation would or should proceed. Odysseus/bourgeois, for
example, or myth/Enlightenment: both of these oppositions seemed to
collapse large and crucial historical differences, to homogenize
them 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 aligned
pairs were not from different historical periods, but
contemporaneous, for example, Kant and de Sade, or Hitler and
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 of
self-preservation; to vandalize Enlightenment's self-constituting
difference from the (mythical, archaic) past; to elicit the unowned
foundational commonalities between the categorical imperative and
de Sade's monstrous naturalism of the boudoir, or between
anti-Semitism and the culture industry: I could read in all this a
complex of protest and dissent and exposé--even, despite the
extremity of the subject matter and the plangency of the affect,
something at moments oddly like satire--but not, within the terms
of what I took "critical theory" to be aiming at, a strategy of
dialectical critique. 


35. To such dilemmas, Benjamin's (and Adorno's) formula of
"dialectic at a standstill" offers something of a key, as does the
ambiguous response or antidote--mimesis, or critique? repetition,
or reliquification? symptom, or negation?--of the "dialectical
image." Let me cite here a passage on "Mythical Content" from
Adorno's book on Kierkegaard that anticipates much of the
elaboration--or homogenization--in Dialectic of Enlightenment, of
the binary of "myth" versus "history" (or "dialectic"), as well as
implying 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 might
suppose, borrows some of the charge implicated in a, so to speak,
"ontology at a standstill"--and it is part of Adorno's dissent from
Kierkegaard that he would elaborate such a blocked or arrested
ontology not as Adorno or Benjamin would a "dialectic at a
standstill": that is, as a defeat, a catastrophe, a reification, a
congealment, a steady-state repetition or cycle of the old and the
same. 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 special
interest 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; 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). 

36. "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 (naďve)
"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). 


37. "Dialectics at a standstill," in both these senses (as
ideological condition to be protested, and as critical "effect" to
be achieved) is a formula especially apposite to Dialectic of
Enlightenment.14 The narrative (or anti-narrative) of Dialectic of
Enlightenment enacts the failure of the Enlightenment's own "grand
narrative" to achieve its announced, programmatic (narrative) telos
of change and progress; and it indicts not only bourgeois
Enlightenment positivism's refusal of dialectic, but also (and much
more daringly) the Soviet world's official Marxist-Leninist
fetishization of dialectic as an orthodoxy, as equally deluded
miscarriers or unwitting betrayers of dialectic (conceived as "the
engine of history") itself. To that end the "appearance" (in the
aesthetic sense [German Schein]) of non- or anti-"dialectical"
pairs like Odysseus/bourgeois, or myth/Enlightenment, presents
something 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"] of
historical dialectic and mythical nature." This "appearance" of
"indifferentiation" (sc. "identity") of dialectic and myth enacts
what Horkheimer and Adorno regard as Enlightenment's fatal
ideological false consciousness, its sacrifice of qualitative to
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 protests
and would redeem. The case I'm making here could be thought of as a
version of Adorno's "dialectical despite itself," which underlies
his 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's
tragedy/Socrates and Übermensch/priest, or Freud's Eros/Thanatos,
or the antinomies of instinct and "vicissitude" that in the late
work on Moses and elsewhere seem to force on Freud a
quasi-Lamarckian view of the heritability of acquired
characteristics. Equally exemplary would be the great works of
modernist music and literature with all their techniques of seeming
"im-mediation" or "de-mediation": works that attempt to escape
outworn habits of mediation, to conjure an atmospherics or
nostalgia of immediacy, and achieve thereby a kind of re-mediation
(new mediations) that it is no mere word-play to hope might also be
remedy. 


38. The loosening of old mediations and the forging of new ones in
modernism involved techniques of juxtaposition, of suppressing
transitions (preeminently narrative ones), of foregoing explanatory
motives for questioning ones--and it is among these modernist
devices and motivations that Adorno's constellation belongs.
Michael Cahn, in what remains to my mind the richest and shrewdest
essay on these matters, observes that Adorno's aesthetic theory is
not merely a theory of the aesthetic, but a theory that is
aesthetic; he clinched the point by adducing the analogy of
"critical theory" (42)--which is to suggest as well the senses in
which Adorno's aesthetic is critical, and (the premise of this
essay) the extent to which Adorno's critical practice involves
issues usually referred to the aesthetic. It's in something of that
spirit that I have attempted here to explore Adorno's
constellation, not as a philosophic concept, nor even as an element
or index of a critical method, but as part of a writing practice
that I think Adorno's readers should be readier than they have been
to take as a kind of modernist poetics of critique--a poetics
realizing itself as much in performance as in "theory." In the
critical practice of constellation, Adorno enacts a critique of the
extant critical (dialectical, historicizing) practices of his own
day, a critique analogous to that performed in modernist artistic
practices. Adorno's practice is as radical a departure from that
of, say, Georg Lukács as Beckett (one of Adorno's chief exemplars
of the modern) is from Lukács's standard-bearer for realism,
Balzac. Indeed, Adorno's defense of Beckett against Lukács may be
thought especially suggestive, given Beckett's gift for narratives
whose point is the failure of anything to happen, whose meaning (as
Adorno observes in "Trying to Understand Endgame") is
meaninglessness itself--a meaninglessness, Adorno would say, whose
falsity Beckett enables us to reappropriate for truth. Some such
result, event, or effect is the gesture of the dialectic of
Dialectic of Enlightenment. 



Department of English
University of Delaware
helmling@udel.edu 




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Notes 

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

2. There are many treatments more systematic than mine. Still
indispensable on this, as on so much else about Adorno, is
Buck-Morss; on constellation see especially 90-110. (Buck-Morss
notes Adorno's reservations about "constellation" as a term
connoting astrology [254n54]). More recently, see Jameson, Late
Marxism 54-60; Jameson also assimilates constellation to "model"
(68); and if I opened by evoking Eisenstein and Pound, Jameson
observes that the affinity of constellation with Althusser's
conjuncture makes Adorno "Althusserian avant la lettre" (244).
Nicholson treats constellation under the broader rubric of
"configurational form" (passim, but especially 103-36)--a useful
reminder that the thematics of constellation can often attach to
such cognate terms as "configuration," "complex," even "ensemble"
or "juxtaposition." Also useful on Adorno's aesthetics, though
without 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 consider
Adorno'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 theme
of the false coherence of "system" and the necessity, in critique,
of allowing the unintegrated, unintegratable loose ends of "the
damaged life" to stand as reproach or "bad conscience" to all
mystifying reconciliations. 

6. For example, from Kierkegaard in Kierkegaard: Construction of
the Aesthetic passim, from Kant in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
(125), and from Freud and Weber in Introduction to Sociology (113,
123). 

7. He is citing Freud's Abhub der Erscheinungswelt (Adorno Reader
32). 

8. Adorno most movingly sounds this motif in his 1930 essay on
"Mahler Today": see especially Essays on Music 605, where Mahler's
project sounds strikingly like Benjamin's; and cf. 608, where
Adorno contrasts Mahler and Schoenberg in ways that suggest an
analogy with his sense of the differences between Benjamin and
himself. 


9. Here is another contention with Lukács--see the latter's
"Narrate or Describe?"--that resumes most of what is at stake in
their 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 which
Adorno at about this same time characterized what he acknowledged
as a career-long concern (Negative 144-6; see also Buck-Morss
233n3). 

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

13. See the closing pages of In Search of Wagner (1952) or, an even
more 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 the
audience rather than on "the matter in hand." I apologize for my
resort to it here, but the shifts by which I might have attempted
to 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 can
hope that Adorno would at least countenance my usage as, again,
attestation of the ideological predicaments of critique itself as
composition, i.e., as "a kind of writing"--and also, of course, as
a kind of reading. 


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