What Would Be Different: Figures of Possibility in Adorno by Iain Macdonald

Author:Iain Macdonald [Macdonald, Iain]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781503610644
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2019-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

ADORNO, BENJAMIN, AND WHAT WOULD BE DIFFERENT

Everything in the process of becoming, possibility, necessarily contains a moment of abstractness as compared to the existent, violations of which will not go unpunished. There is no shortage of concretion, differentiation in that which is and has been. For that reason, differentiation has something a priori conservative about it, and all differentiation takes place within an experience that in a certain way sanctions that of which it is an experience. . . . But can one sacrifice differentiatedness? In so doing, does one not give up on the potential for something better in the midst of what exists, without that potential ever having realized itself? Is the rupture between possibility and actuality absolute?

—Adorno1

The gaslight that streams down upon the paving stones throws an equivocal light on this double ground.

—Benjamin2

Idleness and the Ought

In the 1939 exposé of the Arcades Project, Benjamin says of the nineteenth century that “it was incapable of responding to the new technological possibilities with a new social order.”3 It was, however, capable of producing an astonishing number of images that indirectly present this impasse while evoking the virtuosity of technological progress: arcades, boulevards, railroads, gas lighting, the use of iron in construction, and so on. This impasse also leaves its traces on figures such as the collector, the gambler, and the flaneur.

Such “dialectical images” are images of a historical dialectic that has come to a standstill, as Benjamin famously says.4 To put the issue in Hegelian terms—contra Hegel, for whom the dialectic is “unhalting”5—the dialectic comes to a standstill because the moment of the confrontation of what was in itself and what was for itself was missed: a concrete historical possibility of liberation was unable to disentangle itself from the defective way in which we represented it to ourselves and, therefore, from the way it played itself out. History did not produce what it could or ought to have produced. Accordingly, Benjaminian historiography is not concerned with presenting historical facts disinterestedly; it is an attempt to “rescue” what lies latent in dialectical images from oblivion and from the collective inhibitions that each one represents in its own particular manner. This rescue relies upon an ambiguity in history. Phenomena are not merely rescued from oblivion “but also from the catastrophe that so often characterizes how phenomena are handed down to us, their ‘enshrinement as heritage.’—They are saved through the exposition of the fissure within them.”6

If the phenomena of history are fissured or ambiguous, as Benjamin puts it, the reason is that history itself is equivocal, both “alluring and threatening.”7 Such ambiguities were always central to Benjamin’s thought, of course. Here, the “fissure” that marks the dialectical image is the scar of the ongoing violence done to hope, but it is also, and for the same reason, the trace of that hope as constant and real, albeit as depicted in the instant of its disappointment and recuperation by the status quo. This is history as “primal history” (Urgeschichte, at least as

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