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

new‖ emerges: ―it is a movement that does not play itself out in mere identity, mere
reproduction of what has always been, but rather one in which the new occurs, it is a
movement that gains its true character through what appears in it as new‖ (―Natural
History‖ 253). Adorno‘s immediate concern in his 1932 Kant society lecture, given this
vexed understanding of history, is to try to characterize exactly what constitutes the
―natural‖ in the concept of natural history. If history, in its concrete form, cleaves
towards what phenomenology promises – that meaning is only nominal, that it might be
nothing more than the interpretation of the existing in itself, post res, without proof, and
as that which is ―new,‖ then nature is that movement in which that very ―newness‖
appears. It would be grossly wrongheaded to assert that nature and history share an
identity in Adorno‘s thinking. It should be sufficient to know that Adorno rejects both
ontological and phenomenological understandings of nature and history for his distaste of
Heidegger‘s mélange of these two kinds of philosophy in what he, Adorno, terms ―neo-
ontology.‖ Instead, Adorno argues that ―[n]atural history is not a synthesis of natural and
historical methods, but a change in perspective‖ (261). That change in perspective
includes Adorno‘s rethinking the role of fate in Benjamin‘s understanding.
Susan Buck-Morss explains that this change in perspective comes about in the
assumption that nature and history are not collapsible terms that give up priority and
advantage to either a phenomenological or an ontological thesis. Instead, nature and
history are critical points within an allegorical structure that is based upon their intra- and
inter- tensions. ―Nature provided the key for exposing the nonidentity between the
concept of history (as a regulative idea) and historical reality, just as history provided the
key for demythifying nature‖ (Origins of Negative Dialectics 49). Buck-Morss sees in
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