that, in the 19th century certainly, only the individual could be the subject of
the dream. However, so Adorno argued, out of the individual’s dreams neither
the fetish character of the commodity nor the monuments could be read
immediately as reproductions. Therefore, so Adorno criticized, Benjamin had
brought in the collective consciousness. Adorno was afraid that in the pre-
sent conception of the collective consciousness or unconsciousness as it
appeared in the second design of the Arcade Project, it could hardly be dif-
ferentiated from that of Carl G. Jung, who had been a fascist, but who had,
unlike Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, or Mircea Eliade, given up fascism
after World War II ( Jung 1933, 1990, 1958; Benjamin 1978). In Adorno’s view,
the collective consciousness or unconsciousness was open to critique from
both sides. It could be criticized from the perspective of the social process as
it hypostatized archaic images, where dialectical ones were produced through
the commodity character, just not in an archaic collective ego, but in the alien-
ated bourgeois individuals (Adorno 1993; Benjamin 1978). In Adorno’s per-
spective, it was the task of the critical theorists to polarize and to dissolve
dialectically this consciousness in terms of society and individual, and not to
galvanize it as pictorial or figurative correlate of the commodity character.
According to Adorno, that in the dreaming collective there remained no dif-
ferences for the social classes, spoke clearly enough and should be a warning.
Mythical Thinking
According to Adorno, the mythical-archaic category of the Golden Age had
fateful consequences also for the commodity category (Marx 1961; Benjamin
1978). For Adorno, that was decisive, particularly in a social sense. If, so
Adorno argued, in the dialectical image of the Golden Age the decisive ambi-
guity, namely that in relationship to hell, was suppressed, then, instead, the
commodity became as the substance of the bourgeois age, hell as such, and
it was negated in a way which indeed may let it appear as truth, the imme-
diacy of the primordial condition. Thus, in Adorno’s view, the disenchantment
of the dialectical image lead right away into a broken mythical thinking and,
as Jung before, so here Klages announced himself as danger. For Adorno,
nowhere did Benjamin’s second design of the Arcades Project bring with it
more remedies than at this place. Here would be the central place for the
teaching about the collector, who liberated the things from the curse to be
useful in civil society. Here belonged, if Adorno understood it rightly, Hauss-
mann, whose class-consciousness initiated precisely through the completion
86 • Rudolf J. Siebert