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

• Published in: Postmodern culture Vol. 14; no. 1
• Main Author: Helmling, Steven
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.09.2003
• Subjects: Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (1903-1969); Essays; Eye movements; Horkheimer, Max (1895-1973); Human relations; Ideology; Parataxis; Philosophy; Psychology; Theme
• ISSN: 1053-1920; 1053-1920
• DOI: 10.1353/pmc.2003.0036

This essay considers Adorno's theory and practice of "constellation," most centrally in relations both of influence and of tension with Walter Benjamin's practice of the "dialectical image." In later years, Adorno frequently ascribed to Benjamin's practice a "Medusa-gaze" that effectively petrified, or (telling ambivalence) exposed the always-already-petrified reification, of its ideological object; in this way, Benjamin's work aimed to evoke the baffled or arrested progress of modernity that he famously evoked in the phrase "dialectics at a standstill." This was a thematic Adorno prolonged, but from very early on, Adorno had misgivings about the effect of stasis that Benjamin's dialectical image as much reinforced as critiqued. The essay looks closely at various of Adorno's formulations about Benjamin as well as about such related matters as "immanent critique," Gestalt psychology, and Hölderlin's practice of "parataxis," to elicit the tensions in Adorno's thinking, over the course of his career, about the critical or dialectical mimesis necessarily obtaining between critique and its object (the representation of the object, the representation of the overcoming of the object). A particular focus here is narrative, a standard property of the type(s) of critique that Adorno meant to refuse; Adorno's "debate" with Lukàcs here appears as embodying the transition from "realism" to "modernism" that was the debate's ostensible theme. The essay closes with reflections on failed progress, or progress reverting to regress. Benjamin's "dialectics at a standstill" could be the apt formula, but also the fate from which Adorno and Horkheimer so desperately hope to redeem Enlightenment.