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

Fate becomes a term that Benjamin invests with the special qualities of virtuality,
uncertain, ultimately, of this determination, but providing a sense of its identity in the
trauerspiel‘s experiments with catachresis and formed archaism. Taboo, on this score, is
all that fate is unable to articulate as that which is unnatural within natural history.
Adorno will contest these terms, as we have seen, most particularly upon the
identity of Benjamin‘s understanding of fate. It was this term, as the force of nature
within history that Adorno would view as retaining a winsome and pensive existential
undecidability. Adorno was convinced that the dialectical core of natural history
depended upon its ephemeral transitoriness, the ―real‖ being ineluctably a nonce category
open to its eventual service within the boutiques of post-modernism, refined but not
reduced in its stupefying responsibility there. Fate, nature, the ―real,‖ Adorno writes in
his essay on natural history: ―will turn out to be not meaningful but meaningless‖ (255);
or, more pointedly, and coming just upon his selective appropriation of Benjamin‘s
passive claims that nature is ―transience,‖ he overturns both Benjamin‘s philological
separation of tragedy from trauerspiel and Benjamin‘s linguistic theory when he
overlooks the accent on virtuality in the construction of natural history: ―[T]he mythology
that underlies tragedy is in every sense dialectical because it includes the subjugation of
the guilty man to nature at the same time that it develops out of itself the reconciliation of
this fate: man raises himself up out of his fate as man‖ (267). The loss to Adorno in his
thinking about fate as that which is to be transcended is that it disallows in some
fundamental way the kind of virtuality Benjamin tried to describe as modernist
allegorical expression and which Pound practiced as the signature poetic move in
modernist poetry. The outcome of Adorno‘s orientation towards the real is that names
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