Debates with Benjamin, Sohn-Rethel and Kracauer 215social and theological categories’.^4 Adorno suspected that restricting
the Arcades Project to a sociological analysis represented a concession
to Horkheimer’s expectations and those of the institute, on which
Benjamin depended financially. In his letter to Benjamin in May 1935
Adorno had insisted: ‘I regard your work on the “arcades” as the centre
not merely of your own philosophy, but as the decisive philosophical
word which must find utterance today; as a chef d’oeuvre like no other,
and as so decisive in every sense... that any weakening of the innermost
claims of this work, and any consequent repudiation of its own peculiar
categories, would strike me as catastrophic.’^5 The categories with which
to interpret such social phenomena as the arcade or the department
store can be gleaned only from the immanent analysis of the material,
not through the adoption of pre-given categories. There was a danger,
he maintained, that ‘the Marxian concepts would prove to be too abstract
and isolated from one another, functioning merely as dei ex machina.’^6
Adorno frankly admitted that he had discovered this defect in his own
work. Perhaps he was thinking of his early essay ‘On the Social Situation
of Music’, which was grounded in part in the orthodox Marxian scheme
of superstructure and base. Now, he said, he was convinced that ‘we
hold on all the more effectively to the real, the more thoroughly and
consistently we remain true to the aesthetic origins, and that we only
become merely aesthetic when we deny the latter.’^7
In the beginning of June, Adorno first obtained the draft of the exposé
of the Arcades Project which Benjamin had written at Pollock’s instiga-
tion. His reaction was somewhat reserved. This exposé contained an
overview in six brief sections of the themes and subjects that Benjamin
wished to explore in the new book he was planning. This was his first
attempt to bring some order into countless quotations and reflective
commentaries that he had been collecting for years. As he himself
remarked, his point of reference was the Marxian category of the ‘fetish
character of the commodity’.^8 He now regarded this as the key con-
cept with which to decode the effects of the capitalist economy – ‘the
enthronement of the commodity’^9 – on traditional culture. Benjamin
planned to analyse the commodity regarded as exchange value at the
site at which commodities were revered as fetishes: the shop windows in
the arcades and the temples of the Parisian department stores. He wished
to make clear that in these places the exchange values of the commodity
were elevated into cultural goods. The description of the ‘phantasmagoria
which a person enters in order to be distracted’^10 was what Benjamin
wanted to elaborate in his philosophy of history of the collective wish
image. In wish images like these the collective sought ‘both to overcome
and to transfigure the immaturity of the social product and the in-
adequacies of the social organization of production.’^11 Precisely because
they both overcame and transfigured, Benjamin thought of these wish
images as dialectical. Ambiguity, which is in general the mark of the
epoch, ‘is the manifest imaging of dialectic, the law of dialectics at a