image was not to be put into the consciousness. To the contrary, through the
dialectical construction the dream would have to be externalized and the
immanence of consciousness would itself have to be understood as a con-
stellation of the social reality. It would have to be understood, so to speak,
as the astronomical phase, in which hell travels through humanity. Only, so
it appeared to Adorno, the star-map of such travel would be able to open up
the view on history as the primordial history of the 19th, and the 20th, and –
we may add – the 21st centuries.
The Oldest and the Newest
Adorno wanted to formulate this same objection against Benjamin’s new
design of his Arcade Project once more, but from the extremely opposite point
(Benjamin 1978, 1983, 1977). According to Adorno, Benjamin had constructed
in his new design, in the sense of the immanent conception of the dialecti-
cal image, the relationship of the oldest and the newest, which had already
had a central position in the first design, as one of the utopian relationship
to alternative Future III – the classless society (Marx 1961; Benjamin 1978).
Thereby, so Adorno argued, the archaic became a complementary added thing
instead of being the “newest” itself. Thus, it was de-dialecticized. At the same
time, so Adorno criticized, Benjamin dated – likewise undialectically – the
classless image back into the mythos, where it had come from in the first
place as theological semantic and semiotic potential, instead of making it here
truly transparent as hell-phantasmagoria. Thus, it appeared to Adorno, that
the category, under which the archaic arose in modernity, was much less the
Golden Age than the catastrophe. That, precisely, was for Adorno the cata-
strophe, that things went on in antagonistic civil society as they did – namely
in the direction of alternative Future I and II. According to Adorno, the most
recent past represented itself always as if it had been annihilated through
catastrophes.
Disenchantment
If, so Adorno argued in his famous Hornberg letter, the disenchantment of
the dialectical image as dream, as Benjamin used it in the second design of
his Arcades Project, psychologized it, then it fell precisely thereby victim to
the magic and spell of the bourgeois psychology (Benjamin 1985; 1978). Adorno
asked, who was the subject of the dream? He answered himself by saying
Toward a Dialectical Sociology of Religion • 85