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

Abstract

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. —sh

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

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...