216 Part III: Emigration Years
standstill. This standstill is utopia and the dialectical image, therefore,
dream image. Such an image is afforded by the commodity per se:
as fetish.’^12
Once Adorno had worked his way through these and other, occasion-
ally enigmatic, statements in the exposé early in July, he wrote down his
criticisms and reservations during August 1935 while he was holidaying
in the Black Forest. In this letter, which has become known as the
Hornberg letter, his tone remained as friendly as ever, but he never-
theless found fault with the way in which Benjamin had introduced
the idea of the dialectical image, namely as the reflection of commodity
fetishism in the collective consciousness. Adorno insisted that the
fetishism of the commodity, i.e., the phenomenon that social relations
between people are experienced as relations between things, is ‘not a
fact of consciousness’, ‘but dialectical in character in the eminent sense
that it produces consciousness. But, if so, then neither consciousness nor
unconsciousness can simply replicate it as a dream.’ Even more sharply,
he rejected the way in which Benjamin had adapted the concept of the
collective consciousness for his own purposes. This ‘idea... was invented
to distract attention from true objectivity, and from alienated subjectiv-
ity as its correlate.’^13
We can see how much store Adorno set by clarifying the concept of
the commodity in line with the economic meaning that Marx had given
to it from the fact that he had homed in on this sore point in his very
first preliminary comment on the exposé on 5 June. The concept of the
commodity was ‘too generally expressed’ by Benjamin ‘if it is supposed
to disclose something specific about the character of the nineteenth
century; and it is not really enough to define the category in purely
technological terms – in terms of “fabrication”, say.’^14 Nor did Adorno
spare Benjamin in his explanation of the way in which the old and the
new interpenetrate. To link ‘the archaic’ with ‘the classless society’ was
‘undialectical’. It must be remembered that, ‘as illusion and phantasma-
goria, the newest is itself the old.’ ‘Thus the category in which the
archaic fuses with the modern seems to me more like a catastrophe than
a Golden Age.’^15 Adorno did not share Benjamin’s speculative idea
that mankind would wake to a future history as soon as the economic
foundations of the nineteenth century had been swept away. Thus
Adorno did not hold back in his criticism of the exposé which Benjamin
had revised several times, but did not publish during his lifetime in
either its French or its German-language version.^16
Adorno was no less blunt in his criticism of another of his friend’s
essays. This was ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Repro-
ducibility’, which, together with the studies of Baudelaire, was intended
to form part of the future Arcades Project. The essay on ‘The Work of
Art’ was one Benjamin had completed in the course of these last months^17
when Adorno had been working on his jazz essay and on the seven
contributions to the book on Alban Berg. This suggests that Benjamin