CONTRADICTION, CRITIQUE, AND DIALECTIC IN ADORNO A ...

as a whole (this is what I have called the determining role of the principle of exchange).
Since he takes it that the social totality mediates every single element of social life,
Adorno holds that ignoring the psychological manipulation that brings the individual into
virtual identity (albeit a pathological identity) with the social order results inevitably in a
misunderstanding of society and, even worse, in ideology—for instance, in Benjamin’s
support of Bolshevik Russia. This coercive identity in which the totality and the
individual come to relate to each other in advanced capitalism requires in Adorno’s view
a dialectical approach, and it is precisely the dialectical deficit in Benjamin’s philosophy
that Adorno criticizes and which sets them apart.
Since Adorno holds that every social phenomena and object of analysis must be
read in light of its total mediation by the social systematic totality, the social-materialist
strand in his thought needs to be connected to the natural-historical strand with a
dialectics of suspicion. Benjamin’s different view of the social conditions and the sort of
critical analysis that they call for results in a different, undialectical relation between the
two critical strands, which, as we have seen, he simply juxtaposes with each other. This
takes us to the second main point of divergence in their views that I identified above.
During the thirties, Benjamin’s interpretation of natural history became
characterized more and more by an unmediated juxtaposition of social-materialist
elements, on the one hand, and archaic elements that are read as anticipating and already
containing modernity in them and that are deployed for a critical understanding of the
present, on the other. But Benjamin juxtaposed these elements without explicit
theoretical reflection on their relation. Whereas Benjamin thought that this method
would result in a sudden image that strikes the reader in a moment of illumination, an
430