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

elationships that they believed to have obtained between things and aesthetic objects like
tragedy, trauerspiel, and modernist allegorical expression more broadly. We may still find
that allegory is best comprehended as any aesthetic tool, any thing that can hint towards
the ambivalent position of the presentation and critique of power; in special, for
Benjamin, this methodological ambivalence was aimed at those unfortunate uses of
language that would appropriate and make untouchable the very natural historical forces
he was concerned to let speak and from which intent his linguistic theory was spun.
Allegory, for Benjamin, was designed to produce a new form of anamnesis for the end of
returning to commoditized titles their proper man-made names. Theirs, Benjamin and
Adorno‟s, in this sense, was primarily a debate over just what it is that the language of
boutique marketplace culturalism appropriates and transforms. Benjamin felt that words
had the power to change the very things they named when arranged or collaged;
juxtaposition, citation, and commentary had the power to critically disambiguate. For
Benjamin, the philosophical tract was the highest form in which this critique could be
carried out. Adorno, half in agreement and half in seeming incredulity, offered a different
understanding about what the allegorical power of language made apparent. Adorno
asserted that language was an effective agent of representation only inasmuch as it
respected the powers of both nature and history to present the truth of a thing‟s essential
transitoriness, another way of affirming the non-identity of things. For Adorno, this truth
came, via allegory, to be represented as a concept of that transitoriness that precedes a
thing‟s named existence. Their debate was not over allegorical technique inasmuch as it
was minimally concerned to define the best form for its deployment. Unlike Benjamin,
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