Index Card 4: Adjacentism

WB:

In the performance of the clown, there is an obvious reference to the economy. In his abrupt movements he imitates both the machines which push the material and the economic boom which pushes the merchandise..

Adorno to WB:

Throughout your texts there is a tendency to relate the pragmatic contents of Baudelaire's work directly to adjacent features in the social history of the time, preferably economic features. I have in mind the passage about the duty on wine, certain statements about the barricades, or the above mentioned passage about the arcades. I feel this artificiality wherever you put things in metaphorical rather than categorical terms.

This tendency is named 'adjacentism'. But it is a tendency which needs to be understood not as faulty conceptual thought (eg insufficient mediation etc), but as something like a surrealist technique, a way of administering to thought a sudden jolt through the abrupt 'montage' of superstructural and infrastructural levels. Benjamin does not posit a causal link between these two levels. He leaves the connection open. The hinge joining the two phenomenon together is the silence of a connection as yet unnameable by theory.