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

Adorno favored the range and a-thematic expansion that an essay provided for allegorical
criticism.
Allegory was a term that was, at first, used by Benjamin to describe the specific
formal condition that distinguished the métier of the German baroque trauerspiel from its
classically influenced cousin in the German tragedy. Benjamin‟s thesis was that
trauerspiel and tragedy used fundamentally different substances to inform their content.
The trauerspiel was inclined towards using real historical details to advance its intricate
plots, while tragedy relied on universal truths congealed in mythical narratives from an
archaic past age of heroes to explain collective historical changes. For Benjamin this
meant that the chief aesthetic tool in the trauerspiel writer‟s toolbox could not be a
symbol. This is because symbols effect the meaning of the works that they participate in
by their universalizing truth-making auratic powers. Rather than rely on the implied
manifestation of an historical reality in the object-hood of a symbol, the trauerspiel
deployed allegory. The difference between an allegory and a symbol – allegory is usually
thought to be something like a continuous “extended metaphor” – actually implied an
entirely new mode of communication for Benjamin.
In some critical apprehensions of Benjamin‟s work this new mode becomes
translated into its very own medium. Two statements from the trauerspiel study
demonstrate why this is so: “[a]llegory is not a playful illustrative technique, but a form
of expression, just as speech is expression, and, indeed, just as writing is”; also: “allegory
is not convention of expression, but expression of convention” (OGT 162, 175). The
insight that allegory is its own medium, like speech or writing, alive with its very own
essential difference from other mediums (immediacy is to speech (Ong) as
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