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

To define the dialectical terms of each, nature and history, then: nature has a
positive, materialist pole. This pole is concrete and exists as that which is mortal and
transitory, the substance upon which the material of labour and corporeal bodies is
expended. It also has a negative pole. Nature, in this negative pole, is the world that has
not yet been incorporated into history through the penetration of man‘s reason: ―In this
sense, nature was ‗the mythical…that which is eternally there…as the fateful construction
of pre-given being.‘ This was nature‘s static side, perpetuated by the unchanging rituals
of the people who submitted to its domination‖ (Buck-Morss 54). History also has
positive and negative values for Adorno. Positively, history can be known as the dialectic
of social practices; it is the mode of transmitted social behaviours in which the
qualitatively new can be recognized as emerging. Negatively, history has meant the long
story of the same, clothed in circumstantial difference: ―it merely statically reproduced
the conditions and relations of class rather than establishing a qualitatively new order‖
(Buck-Morss 54).
Buck-Morss describes how Martin Heidegger‘s existentialism was that which
Adorno‘s work on natural history was actually aimed at upsetting. Heidegger‘s positing
of ―nature‖ and ―history‖ as terms within the ontological category of ―Dasein‖ erased the
double character that Adorno‘s dialectical definitions were careful to find. With that loss
of the dialectic in Heidegger‘s thought so went the opportunity for negative critique. The
fallacy in Heidegger‘s thought that especially rankled for Adorno was that:
Either social conditions were affirmed as ―natural‖ without regard
for their historical becoming, or the actual historical process was
affirmed as essential; hence the irrational material suffering of
which history was composed was either dismissed as mere
contingency (Hegel) or ontologized as essential in itself
(Heidegger). (Buck-Morss 54)
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