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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,...