Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2014

Vol. 28, No. 6, 876884, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2014.941328

Uses of the dialectical image: Adorno, surrealism, Breton, Benjamin

Darren Jorgensen*
Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts, University of Western Australia, Perth,
Australia
Contemporary interpretations of Walter Benjamins concept of the dialectical image
tend to substitute object images, such as photographs, for subjective ones. In his own
time, Benjamins contemporaries Theodor Adorno and Andre Breton were suspicious
of the role that objective images played in commodity capitalism. Adornos Frankfurt
School Marxism and Bretons Marxist surrealism illustrate the way that subjective
images can be mobilized to think through the totality of capitalism rather than its
products. This essay argues against the confusion of the dialectical image and its
method with commodities.

The most influential of Walter Benjamins writings is The Work of Art in the Age of
Reproduction (1968), which is reproduced for undergraduate course readers and cited ad
infinitum in humanities journals. What makes the essay so pertinent to contemporary readers is
that it proposes a future history that never came to pass, but that appears as if it should have.
The future is one in which the idea of a unique, authentic work of art has been erased by
reproductive technologies. Yet as Benjamin scholars have pointed out, the very opposite has
taken place, as original works of art have acquired value within a culture of reproduction
(Buck-Morss 1992; Weber 1996). The historical moment at which this became visible was
during the 1960s, when, to use one example of many from this decade, Andy Warhol
foregrounded the irony of reproduced images that were nonetheless originals. Benjamins
essay, first translated into English in the 1960s, has come to be fetishized for its retro-futurism,
but its message today is a conservative one. For it is used to theorize reproductive rather than
revolutionary culture. Benjamin composed The Work of Art essay while undertaking a
much larger work, the Arcades Project (Gilloch 1996, 107). This mammoth assemblage of
facts, observations and quotations conceived of nineteenth-century Paris in terms of what he
called dialectical images. Benjamin was trialling a radically new historical methodology, one
that lifted parts of history out of context and into psychic relations to one another. Translated
into English in 1999, the Arcades Project has largely been read in Anglophonic cultural
studies through its key concept of the dialectical image. Yet as with the Work of Art essay,
the dialectical image is today appropriated to describe a very different situation for cultural
production. While Benjamin and his contemporaries, notably the Frankfurt School theorist
Theodor Adorno and surrealist organizer Andre Breton, understood the image as a mental and
subconscious figure, respectively, contemporary cultural studies scholars have found the
dialectical image in photographs, iPods and data (Borden 2007; Cvoro 2008; Davison 2006).
To return to its place in the early discourses around surrealism and Marxism, however, is to
discover a dialectical image less excited about this or that commodity. The writings of
Adorno, Breton and Benjamin himself are interested in the way that the dialectical image can
be mobilized to critique the totality of capitalism, rather than its fetishes.

*Email: darren.jorgensen@uwa.edu.au
q 2014 Taylor & Francis

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Adorno
Benjamins methods in creating the Arcades Project are derived from dialectical Marxism,
which sets out to elude the positivity that inheres to more conventional modes of
historicism. Dialectical Marxism sets out to demonstrate the contingency of its objects,
their immersion in a complex set of tensions that are produced by the totality of the
capitalist mode of production and to immerse these objects in a negative logic by which
they no longer hold their value as commodities. The problem with interpreting such
consumables as films, photographs, iPods and data as dialectical images lies in the positive
valence they acquire as objective images. Such interpretations are a sign of how far the
methodologies of cultural studies have drifted from the influence of Frankfurt School
Marxism. For as it was conceived by Adorno, negative dialectics evades the reification of
commodity culture by never settling upon an object, instead endlessly critiquing the
historical conditions by which such objects take shape (Buck-Morss 1977, 63 81;
Jameson 1971, 3 59). Subsequent Marxist theorists, prominently Fredric Jameson, have
championed the way that the dialectic is able to grasp the tensions that make up not only
modernity, but postmodernity as well (Jameson 1998). Objects are not dialectical, but are
themselves produced out of the dialectical conditions by which history takes shape.
Adorno anticipated the appropriation of the dialectical image when he wrote to Benjamin
outlining the way that in the nascent Arcades Project images take the place of the critical
contradictions that create them. For Adorno, the dialectical image becomes magical as it
stands in for the image-logic of the commodity itself (Adorno in Adorno and Benjamin
1999, 283). Such a criticism is a damning one, as the Marxist dialectic becomes a part of
the very historical conditions it set out to critique.
Adornos initial enthusiasm for the Arcades Project is only matched by his
disappointment in the form that the Arcades Project comes to take (Adorno and Benjamin
1999, 52 56). Adorno begins outlining his reservations after hearing that it is to be a
historical-sociological work, while Adorno sees it as a philosophical theory whose
social phenomena is grounded more effectively in the inner consistency of our own
categories than it could possibly be through the adoption of other pre-given categories
(Adorno and Benjamin 1999, 83, 84, 85). On reading an early draft, Adorno finds three
problems in what he sees as the undialectical proposition of:
a conception of the dialectical image as if it were a content of some consciousness, albeit a
collective consciousness; its direct and I would almost say developmental relation to the
future of utopia; and the idea of the epoch as the proper self-sustained subject of this
objective consciousness. (Adorno and Benjamin 1999, 105)

At stake is the place of the commodity, which Adorno fears is being fetishized all over
again. Adorno wants the dialectical image to reveal the fetishization at work within the
commodity, rather than the commodity revealing the dialectical image in itself. The
utopian dimension of the commodity should not reveal a future utopia latent within it, but
the dystopian hell of the present society. Adorno remembers that Hell was one of
Benjamins concepts in an earlier version of the Arcades Project, one that explicitly
described the phantasmagoria of commodity capitalism, and mourns its loss from a later
version of this draft (Adorno and Benjamin 1999, 106).
If Adorno is hypersensitive to the problem of being seduced by capitalisms
glittering fetishes, Benjamin is more prepared to risk flirting with bourgeoisie aesthetics
in order to penetrate the mysteries of this seduction. For Benjamin, understanding
the transformation of objects into fetishes was the point of returning to the artefacts of
the nineteenth century in the Arcades Project. In the cornucopia of observations,

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commentaries and quotations from old Paris can be found revelations about its
materiality, its street lights, fashions, panoramas and the arcades themselves. These act
as figures for the historical present. Amidst their collage can be found the deep mythic
structures of capitalism in movement. Benjamin was sympathetic to the hallucinatory
qualities of this Paris, in which a fantastic labyrinth of shoppers, hustlers, gamblers,
prostitutes, romantics and thieves appear like cyphers for capitals own mysterious
movements.
Adornos critique of Benjamins dialectical image derives from his issues with
surrealism, which he thought to be only interested in appearances. Surrealisms
combination of contradictory elements alluded to an extra-rational dimension that he
thought of as mystification (Buck-Morss 1977, 144). This problem is also at work in
Benjamins Arcades Project, which also neglects the material and economic base that
Marx diagnosed to be the cause of all contradiction. The Arcades Project and surrealism
work rather with the superstructure, not penetrating deeply enough to pursue the
fundamental energies of capitalism (Buck-Morss 1977, 147). For Adorno surrealism was
all too captivated by Freud, whose model of the psyche was nothing but a model of the
bourgeoisie mind. Adorno saw his own theories completing Freuds insights by making
them relevant to the material world, while the surrealists arrested these insights into the
stratified realm of visual art (Buck-Morss 1977, 128 9).

Surrealism
Adornos critique of the Arcades Project derives from his critique of surrealism, yet it is
through surrealism that it is also possible to redeem the negative dimension of
Benjamins dialectical image. For, Benjamin found in surrealism a common interest in
obsolescence as a subconscious figure, as iron constructions, early factories and old grand
pianos turn into artefacts of the present (1978, 229). His essay Surrealism: The Last
Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia anticipated the eclipse of dream images by the
spectacles of state capitalism, if not the rising power of the reproduced image itself
(1978, 225). In this detritus lies a profane illumination of the present in the past, in what
is called the marvellous (1969a, 14 16). As Susan Buck-Morss, in her magisterial first
book The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the
Frankfurt Institute, writes, these objects were at the same time transformed by the very
fact of their presentation as art, where they appeared in a collage of remote and
antithetical extremes (1977, 125, original italics). The hallucinatory passions lain in
obsolescent objects offer a key to understanding the fantasies and dreams that drive the
illusions of the present. Surrealism offered the means for conveying a consciousness of
things thrown together by a logic that is not logical, because history itself is not logical,
but is instead the folding of one phantasm into the other, one hallucinatory materiality
transforming into a cosmopolitan interzone. The marvellous is not far from the psychic
flash that Benjamin wanted to produce in The Arcades Project through juxtapositions of
old and new (Benjamin 1999, 462 463). Yet Benjamin was more interested in the
historical dimension of incommensurability than Breton, the way that psychic instability
afforded a revolutionary insight into the everyday operations of capitalism. The flash of
lighting that conjoins different moments in time in Benjamins dialectical image becomes
a way of discovering history in the contemporary moment, folding time in and out of the
material world, as one reveals itself in the other and the other in the one (Benjamin 1999,
462 463).

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Two texts from 1993 tackle the ways in which surrealism influenced Benjamin. John
McCole finds in the Arcades Project a surrealist interest in dreams and kitsch, which
Benjamin thought would mature into a greater political possibility (221). Margaret
Cohen thinks that Marxism itself plays a greater role in surrealisms influence upon
Benjamin, arguing for the centrality of Bretons own Marxism as a way forward in
grappling with the phantasmagoria of capitalism. Her book, Profane Illuminations:
Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution, argues that Benjamin found in
surrealism a shared interest in dreams and a means to unlock the illogical dimensions of
the mode of production (1993, 174). She describes Benjamin and Breton as Gothic
Marxists, attempting to preserve the complex, psychic effects of capitalism without
reducing it to a teleological event in some unravelling model of human society (1 15).
This is also what makes Benjamin and Breton appear so appropriate for reading such
interactive, contemporary forms as data and iPods, that emerge from the kind of endless
present that characterizes both modernity and postmodernity. If such items are hardly
possessed of the obsolescence that Benjamin described in shopping arcades and steel
architecture, they do feature something of the strangeness that the surrealists found in the
new commodities of gloves and toothbrushes that were introduced in their own time
(Apollinaire cited in Cardinal 2004, 2). Yet the problem remains that such examples are
also commodities, products of the phantasmagoria of contemporary capitalism. Uros
Cvoro concludes his analysis of the iPod as dialectical image by declaring that
Benjamins utopia lay within capitalism, in the difference that resided in the very
structure of capitalism (2008, 96). This difference is the generative and positive force of
capitalist economy, as one difference produces rather than negates the other. Cvoro
represents the central problem that theorists of the dialectical image confront in todays
media saturated world. This is this prevalence of the objective rather than subjective
image, as artefacts of reproduction assume the place of those invisible, mental images
that were pertinent to the European avant-gardes of the earlier twentieth century. In an
age of reproduction, media images are never quite obsolescent, as they are cycled and
recycled into an endless contemporaneity.
Breton
To understand how the dialectical image can be conceived as critical of this reproduction,
rather than an extension of it, it is possible to turn to Bretons suspicion of the image and
its place in state capitalism. Breton saw both the potential and problems that the rise of
mass visual culture had for the subconscious image, that he conceived as playing a part in a
revolution in consciousness (Breton 1969b). He turned to the visual arts to provide a
vehicle for this revolution, as artists were able to translate the radical nature of this
subconscious around the world. Although surrealism remains best known through the
fame of its visual artists, Breton remained suspicious of the visual sensibility more
generally (Breton 1972; Lomas 2004). He was most interested in images that take place
inside the eyelid, in the pre-conscious state between dreams and waking. The visual arts
were/are but a fallen version of a greater mythopoesis created within the minds powers of
correspondence and creation. Turning from the outer visual world to the inner cosmos,
Breton employed the dialectic so as to arrive at that which holds within itself the
marvellous, this being the ineffable and unexpected in the everyday, rather than in mass
spectacle.
The corruption of the surrealist image by capitalism and fascism was Bretons
persistent concern, turning him into a dialectical cop who policed images as they slipped

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beyond the subconscious marvellous. Surrealist images, as Michel Carrouges notes,

should mediate between the objective world and a subjective unconscious world, in a
dialectical movement that keeps these two worlds in a state of symbiosis (1974, 160).
Yet, for Breton, the surrealist image should also be revolutionary. As early as 1925, Breton
declared his admiration and loyalty to Lenin and Trotsky, and the expulsions from his
surrealist faction that followed were driven by an increasing commitment to communist
revolution (Lewis 1988, 32),. In the Second Surrealist Manifesto, Breton attempted to
negotiate a middle road between surrealist artists and the communist party, taking the
pettiness of both to task in the process, in an attempt to foster a comprehensive view of a
revolution that would take place both in the mind and in the world (1969b). Breton wanted
to make the surrealist movement commensurable with the revolutionary one, by showing
that surrealism shared with it a dialectical method:
Surrealism, although a special part of its function is to examine with a critical eye the notions
of reality and unreality, reason and irrationality, reflection and impulse, knowledge and fatal
ignorance, usefulness and uselessness, is analogous at least in one respect with historical
materialism in that it too tends to take as its point of departure the colossal abortion of the
Hegelian system. It seems impossible to me to assign any limitations economic limitations,
for instance to the exercise of a thought finally made tractable to negation, and to the
negation of negation. How can one accept the fact that the dialectical method can only be
validly applied to the solution of social problems? The entire aim of Surrealism is to supply it
with practical possibilities in no way competitive in the most immediate realm of
consciousness. I really fail to see some narrow minded revolutionaries notwithstanding
why we should refrain from supporting the Revolution, provided we view the problems of
love, dreams, madness, art, and religion from the same angle they do. (1969b, 140)

Thus, it was that Breton embraced communism as an ally in the pursuit of unlimited
possibility, a possibility that could be realized through a combination of critique and
affirmation, in the negation of limits and the embrace of irrational problems.
Although the French communists were not enthusiastic about surrealism, in 1927
Breton joined the its party. The closest the communists came to reconciling their own
Marxist ideas with those of Breton was in the defence of Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuels
film LAge dor (1930), after an ultra-right group had slashed paintings and gone some
way to destroying the cinema at its premiere. The French communist paper defended the
films attack of the bourgeoisie, seeing in the surrealists the disjunction between the figure
of the artist and a mechanistic capitalist society (Lewis 1988, 95). The artists themselves,
Dali and Bunuel, thought that the film had been all too easily co-opted by the bourgeoisie,
that what Bunuel saw as a desperate, passionate call to murder was successful because, in
Dalis terms, it was seen by an audience made mindless by periodicals and avant-garde
revelations (cited in Durozoi 2002, 203). The Soviets in the French communist party
agreed, but blamed the film itself, seeing LAge dor as an immature pandering to
bourgeoisie tastes (Lewis 1988, 103).
While the Soviets threw their international weight behind socialist realism, Breton
himself argued that artists needed autonomy in order to bring about the change in
consciousness described by communist revolution (Ades 1995, 105 106). The differences
between Breton and the Soviet French culminated in his alliance with the exiled Trotsky
(Taminiaux 2006). While Trotsky could appreciate something of the politics that was built
into Bretons surrealist philosophy, surrealism remained an object of suspicion by hard
liners. At this delicate juncture between revolutionary politics and high culture, Breton
was super-sensitive to surrealisms commodification. Bretons vilification as the
totalitarian Pope of surrealism, throwing tantrums and changing positions, admitting
and dismissing members of the surrealist clan at will, is a wilful misrepresentation when

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we understand Breton from a dialectical point of view, as he struggles to create a middle

ground between communism and surrealism. Ultimately, Bretons problem was that of the
historical avant-gardes themselves, that wanted to pay witness to capitalisms
phantasmagoria while eluding the corruptions that this phantasmagoria rends to
revolutionary freedom.
Breton proved that he was neither a sensible politician nor an opportunist as he drove
the most influential artists and public figures in surrealism away from his circle. Two of the
first people excluded from Bretons circle were Antonin Artaud and Philippe Soupault,
whose interest in art did not constitute a devotion to politics in the wider sense. They
refused Bretons demand that they align their practice with the rise of revolutionary
communism in Europe (Lewis 1988, 62; Durozoi 2002, 136 137). The Second Manifesto
of Surrealism (Breton 1969b) is commonly and most easily read as a vitriolic tract against
those who he had fallen out with revolutionary surrealism, yet it is also a consummate
defence of the movements Marxist politics. Bretons most famous condemnation was of
Salvador Dali, in a series of essays published over the 1930s and 1940s (Ades 1995, 109).
Dali had made efforts to appease the suspicions of the Franco government in Spain,
meeting with none other than Franco, and also came to proclaim his Catholicism, going so
far as to visit the Pope (Gibson 1998, 502 503). While it is difficult to measure the
sincerity of Dali and his showy pronouncements, Breton made a distinction between the
pre-Catholic Dali and the Catholic one, accusing the Catholic of pursuing wealth and fame
(Gibson 1998, 507). Dali did not deny his interest in money, and went so far as to eroticize
Hitler and Lenin in his paintings, treating them as powerful dream figures (Ades 1995,
126 108). Whatever Dalis ironic intentions, Breton recognized in the artists fetishes a
dangerous turn to adoration and ultimately fascism. On this point Bretons suspicion of
fetishism is not so far from Adornos, as both police the transition of the image into a
politically degraded commodity.
Later scholars of the history of art would ignore or misread the revolutionary
consistency of Bretons positions over the course of the 1920s and 1930s. Typical of
Bretons vilification is Rosalind Krauss influential essay on photographic surrealism.
Krauss attacked Bretons dialectical method, writing that:
If one wishes to produce a synthesis between A and B, it is not enough simply to say, A plus
B. A synthesis is rather different from a list. And it has long been apparent that a catalogue of
subject matter held in common is neither necessary nor sufficient to produce the kind of
coherence one is referring to by the notion of style. (1981, 8)

She goes on to argue that, at different moments, Breton privileges representation, while at
others he is suspicious of it, oscillating between writing and images. Thus, she concludes
that Breton contradicts himself on this matter as he contradicts himself on almost every
point in surrealist theory (1981, 12). Yet Bretons assimilation of apparently
heterogeneous elements within surrealism, such as poetry and painting, automatism and
figuration, is surely the point of a dialectical method in the first place. That these do not
necessarily add up to a neat definition of surrealism, to a Hegelian synthesis, reflects the
fact that Marxs interpretation of the dialectic was more his model than Hegels. For Marx
contradiction is the very fabric of capitalism, and surrealism can only operate within its
historical situation. The unity of Bretons arguments lies in its vigilance with regard to
contradiction, as he declares his support for particular forms of sensibility regardless of
medium. If his arguments appear inconsistent, it is because their reason lies beyond the
dictates of formal distinctions between poetry and painting, which are typologies
generated by an art cleansed of politics.

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Benjamin
These critiques of Breton recall those that Adorno makes of the dialectical image, that like
surrealism is made up of unresolvable fragments of the past and present. The sheer scale of
the Arcades Project only confounds a neat appropriation of its idea, the translated volume
running to 900 pages that are largely quotations. The book offers a model of an antiteleological consciousness of history, a dialectic without synthesis, possibly because it
remains a draft without a final form, as Benjamins death prevented its completion.
Readers of the Arcades Project are forced to interpret its overall idea through other
Benjamin texts, whether this be the Theses on the Philosophy of History (Jennings 1987,
38), the Work of Art essay (Tiedemann 1999, 930) or A Short History of Photography
(Gilloch 1996, 113). This latter interpretation of the dialectical image after the photograph
is most common among Anglophonic scholars (Borden 2007; Haverkamp on Buck-Morss
1992, 70; Taussig 2000, 259). Such readings may well stem from the influence of Roland
Barthes. For Benjamins description of the dialectical image as a warp in time, between the
present and what remains of the past, is echoed in Barthess account of the way in which
photographs return us to a past that then exists in the present (1977, 44).
As if to outline the transition that the dialectical image makes from a mental or
subconscious image to the photograph, Michael Taussigs essay The Beach (A Fantasy)
describes the ocean shore as a space by which psychic transitions take place, before
making a shift to interpreting a photographic collage of a train travelling atop an ocean as a
dialectical image (2000, 259) The collage resembles the surrealistic paintings of Rene
Magritte, that juxtapose one representation with an impossible other, such as a train
coming through a fireplace or an apple floating in front of a mans face. Magritte also used
the titles of his paintings to create the kind of disjuncture whose psychic effects Breton
described as the marvellous (1969a, 14 16). So that a sky outlined in the shape of a
flying bird is called The Large Family (1963), and a woman riding a horse through a forest
is called The Blank Check (1965). These images literalize the dialectical image, so that
Iain Borden is able to theorize that any such juxtaposition of images, and any nuanced title,
is a dialectical image (2007). Yet these images are not simply juxtapositions, one image
negating the other, the train negating the fireplace and the apple negating the man. They
use the dialectic to emphasize an irreconcilable relation.
So it is that the Marxism of both Adorno and Breton offers a more difficult means of
using the dialectical image as a methodology. It is one that preserves the
incommensurability of the Arcades Project itself, as history becomes a multiplicity of
irreconcilable evidence. The relations within this evidence produces a dialectic without a
synthesis. It may be that Benjamins death, and the incomplete condition of the Arcades
Project, realized Adornos own desires for the project rather than Benjamins. For in its
nascent form, its method without a message, the book resists the kind of positive
recuperation that other Benjamin texts, such as the Work of Art essay, would come to
suffer. The Arcades Project will likely remain off the undergraduate curriculum, and a site
of contention and misreading among scholars. Yet it remains useful for cultural studies for
this very reason, as the concept of the dialectical image offers a means by which the
negativity of Frankfurt School Marxism can be retooled for an image saturated twenty-first
century. For the interpretation of this or that cultural artefact remains only a first moment
in capturing the complexity and incommensurability that constitutes global capitalism.
The Arcades Project uses the dialectical image to reimagine the totality of nineteenth
century Paris rather than its individual artefacts. To think such a totality, as Jameson has
famously argued, is the task of Marxism itself (Jameson 1981, 50 56). The struggle that

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Breton had with the appropriation of the surrealist image offers something of a model for
understanding how the dialectical image might function as a critical tool in the twenty-first
century. For images are immersed in a dialectic not only with each other, but with their
place in an immense assemblage of capitalist production. In the Arcades Project Benjamin
does not task the individual image with capturing this totality, as with photography, but
instead uses the image as a figure by which the psychic forms of this totality take
immanent shape.
Notes on contributor
Darren Jorgensen lectures in art history at the University of Western Australia. He is currently
researching and writing on art from remote Aboriginal Australia.

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