Monday, November 19, 2007

Walter Benjamin's Dialectic: Holding the tension

From Mike, on Joyful Knowing

Exert from Benjamin, German Idealism and Dialectic

Dialectic is an amazing force precisely because it holds things in indeterminate contradiction through its effort to determine them. This holding together, this arresting and immobilizing that takes place through the negative work of dialectic (the work of the dialectic to not arrest, to mobilize, or to bring forth total-mobilization) is the most forceful element of dialectic. Why? It does not lend itself to the objectification of capitalism, fascism, any of the organizing political-economic structures that reduce the world to what Heidegger rightly calls (also against Jünger) a "world picture:" a world of images fully determined by technology.


Read the rest HERE

"...precisely because it holds things in indeterminate contradiction"

Why I cannot identify Tata's Formalist/Realist problem in either convention, and even less, expect to find release from arrested ideological representations of the Real by rejecting one set of conventions in favor of others.

This has been the running thread through ten of my last dozen posts.

The best critic knows how to hold the tension. To be precise, but neither this nor that.

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