TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

interrogation of that two-word theory – names and titles – that constitutes the under-
sense, or hyponoia, in Benjamin and Adorno‟s parlays with modern allegorical
expression. A contest, of sorts, can be said to have occurred between Benjamin and
Adorno over just what the category of “allegory” should mean and how it was to relate to
natural history. This contest occurred before allegory would become the central
problematic through which contemporary Critical Theory would come to understand the
collective energies of these, their foundational instigators. This chapter turns to the early
days in which this contest appeared to demonstrate how the substance of an allegorical
criticism, “natural history,” was variously construed by Benjamin and Adorno. In so
doing this chapter demonstrates how the role of fate within the constellation of ideas
attending upon natural history in Benjamin‟s thought, was transformed by Adorno into
the transitoriness that lies at the core of his “negative dialectic,” the term he gives to the
sum of the allegorical processes that produce natural history. Necessarily, this is, also, to
lobby for a different approach to the significance of Benjamin and Adorno‟s work, as it
looks closely at just what culturally derived explanations of textual authority meant, as
their collective understanding of allegory separates itself from its traditional definition,
grappling with modernist practices where the “devising of figurative words,” “arbitrary
coinings,” and “formed archaisms” was commonplace (OGT 55).
That is, their contest depended upon different ontological beliefs about what
natural history was; where Benjamin could assert that the arbitrariness of the bourgeois
Sign/ Title was really only ever a recalcitrant disguise for the “formed expression of the
real content” of the unleashed forces of natural history, Adorno would argue that natural
history was dialectical, transitory, and the very truth of the non-identity of things with
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