Constellation: From Benjamin to Adorno
Philosophy cannot simply do without concepts. Whenever we try to understand something, we identify it as something: an event, an object, a historical process, a social relation. Concepts make such identification possible. Yet as soon as a particular is identified through a general term, a difficulty arises. What is singular about the thing may disappear from view. A concept tells us what an object has in common with other things that fall under the same category, but it does not necessarily capture what is distinctive about this particular one.
This creates a tension at the heart of philosophical thought. On one side lies subsumption. If thought relies exclusively on universal concepts, individual things risk being treated merely as instances of a general rule. The particular becomes intelligible by being placed under something more general, but in the process what does not fit that generality may be overlooked. Thought gains order at the possible cost of losing something in the object itself.
On the other side lies the temptation of immediacy. Perhaps this loss could be avoided by abandoning conceptual mediation and trying to grasp things directly, as they are in themselves. But that alternative is no solution. Without concepts, there is no articulated philosophical knowledge, only the appeal to an allegedly unmediated encounter with the object. Escaping abstraction altogether therefore threatens intelligibility rather than securing it.
The problem is more precise than the claim that concepts are simply inadequate. We need conceptual determinations in order to think, yet no single determination can be assumed to exhaust what it seeks to comprehend. Philosophy needs a way of remaining conceptual without allowing conceptual identity to become the final identity of the object.
It is against this difficulty that Adorno's notion of constellation acquires its significance. The term promises a form of thinking that neither simply subsumes the particular under a universal nor abandons conceptual mediation in the hope of reaching the object directly. But Adorno did not invent the image. He inherited it, in a transformed form, from Walter Benjamin.
To understand Adorno's notion of constellation, we therefore have to begin with Benjamin. The crucial issue is why Benjamin associates constellation with something he calls Ideas, and why he distinguishes Ideas from concepts.
2. Benjamin: From Concept to Idea
Benjamin's distinction between concept and Idea appears most explicitly in the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” to The Origin of German Tragic Drama. His concern is with the relation between philosophical truth and the individual phenomena from which philosophy proceeds. Concepts are indispensable because they make phenomena intelligible, but an Idea cannot simply be identified with the concept under which phenomena are classified.
Benjamin puts the distinction in the following way:
“Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars.”
(Benjamin, 2003, p. 34)
The image clarifies what he means. A constellation is not a universal extracted from a number of stars. Nor is it a second astronomical object hidden behind them. It is a determinate configuration in which distinct elements stand in relation to one another. The arrangement makes a pattern intelligible that cannot be reduced to any single star.
This is why Benjamin says that Ideas are neither the concepts of their objects nor their laws. Concepts perform an essential mediating function: they articulate phenomena by distinguishing their elements, including what they have in common and what differentiates them. Benjamin also emphasizes their capacity to divide phenomena into their constituent elements, making conceptual distinctions a means of preserving rather than simply eliminating their particularity. Ideas perform a different function. They determine the relations among these elements, which become intelligible through their configuration rather than through their subsumption under a single general determination.
The distinction can therefore be represented schematically:
Phenomena → concepts → articulation and differentiation
Conceptual elements → configuration → representation of an Idea
This is not a distinction between two degrees of generality. The Idea is not simply a broader or more comprehensive concept. Benjamin instead distinguishes two modes of intelligibility. Phenomena determine the scope and content of concepts through their existence, their common properties, and their differences; the Idea, in turn, determines the relation among the conceptual elements elicited from those phenomena.
This last point is important. Benjamin does not present the Idea as a private construction imposed on empirical material. He describes Ideas as the “objective, virtual arrangement” or interpretation of phenomena. The elements through which an Idea is represented are drawn from phenomena, but the Idea is not reducible to those phenomena taken separately.
Benjamin therefore gives a distinctive account of philosophical representation. Ideas are not represented in themselves. They acquire representation through the configuration of concrete elements in concepts. The phenomena are neither simply absorbed into Ideas nor left outside them. They are divided into elements that can enter into an intelligible configuration, through which the Idea is represented.
This is the sense of Benjamin's claim that “Ideas are timeless constellations.” The term “timeless” does not mean that Ideas are additional empirical entities existing somewhere outside history. An event occurs at a particular moment; an artwork belongs to a determinate historical situation. An Idea is not another event alongside them. Its status is different from the temporal existence of the phenomena through which it is represented.
The important point is therefore not that Ideas float free of history, but that their mode of being cannot be reduced to the temporal existence of the phenomena themselves. Historical material is indispensable to their representation, yet the Idea is not simply another historical fact.
Benjamin's position can now be stated more precisely. Philosophical thought does not merely rise from particulars toward increasingly general concepts. Nor does it leave phenomena behind in order to contemplate Ideas independently of them. Rather, concepts articulate the elements of phenomena, and those elements enter into configurations through which Ideas are represented.
This distinction becomes clearer when Benjamin's conception of the Idea is placed against its Platonic background.
3. Benjamin and Plato: Reworking the Idea
Benjamin explicitly turns to Plato when discussing the philosophical Idea, and his discussion of beauty points in particular to the Symposium. Plato's account there culminates in the distinction between the many beautiful things and Beauty itself: the beautiful is not exhausted by any particular body, action, law, or instance, but is presented as something that exists in its own right.
This provides an illuminating background for Benjamin's distinction. A concept such as “beautiful things” could function classificatorily by grouping together objects that possess certain characteristics. Plato's Idea of Beauty, by contrast, is not simply the common feature extracted from those objects. It belongs to a different order.
Benjamin retains something of this distinction between Idea and concept, but transforms the relation between Idea and phenomenon.
A simplified Platonic picture might be expressed as:
Particulars → participation in → Idea
Benjamin's structure is different:
Phenomenal elements → configuration → representation of an Idea
These schemes are only schematic, but they help clarify the difference. Benjamin does not simply place an eternal model behind empirical things and treat particular phenomena as imperfect instances of it. The Idea is represented through the configuration of elements drawn from phenomena. Its relation to the empirical world is therefore not simply one of model and copy.
The constellation metaphor makes this difference visible. The stars remain distinct, but their arrangement makes a configuration intelligible that cannot be reduced to any one of them. Likewise, the elements drawn from phenomena retain their particularity, while their determinate relation provides the configuration through which an Idea is represented.
This is why Benjamin can speak of the philosophical task as preserving or “redeeming” phenomena without reducing philosophy to empirical description. The individual elements are not discarded in favor of an abstract universal. They become part of the presentation through which an Idea is represented.
Benjamin therefore remains recognizably within the Platonic inheritance while changing its structure. He retains the conviction that philosophical intelligibility cannot be reduced to empirical classification, but he reworks the relation between Idea and phenomenon. The Idea is not simply a universal model standing behind sensible things; it must be represented through the configuration of concrete elements.
The distinction is important because it becomes the point at which Adorno's criticism begins.
4. Adorno's Objection: Can an Idea Escape Conceptuality?
Adorno's objection to Benjamin is not that Benjamin distinguishes Idea from concept. Adorno himself depends upon the claim that conceptual thought never simply coincides with what it thinks. The problem is whether Benjamin's distinction risks concealing the conceptual work through which the Idea is articulated.
Adorno formulates the criticism like this:
“Even in Benjamin concepts have a tendency of hiding their conceptuality in an authoritarian manner.”
(Adorno, 2007, p. 62)
The force of the remark lies in the word “authoritarian.” Adorno is not simply making a political accusation against Benjamin. He is identifying a danger in the epistemological status of concepts. A construction may appear to acquire a special authority once it is designated an Idea rather than a concept. Its conceptual character can then recede from view, making the operations through which it is articulated harder to examine critically.
The issue is therefore not whether Ideas are useful, but whether the distinction between Idea and concept can be used to exempt certain determinations from the critical examination to which conceptual claims remain subject. If something is presented as belonging to another order altogether, its dependence upon conceptual selection and organization may become difficult to recognize.
This is where Adorno's broader position becomes decisive. The inadequacy of a concept does not provide a way out of conceptuality. Even the recognition that a concept fails to coincide with its object requires further conceptual mediation. As Adorno puts it, “Only concepts can fulfill what the concept hinders.” The determinate failure of concepts necessitates recourse to others, and from their relations arise constellations (Adorno, 2007, p. 62).
The point is subtle. Adorno does not think that we should choose between conceptual knowledge and some immediate access to the object. He thinks that the distance between concept and object has to be confronted within conceptual thought itself.
This changes the problem inherited from Benjamin. The question is whether the particularity that exceeds any one conceptual determination can be approached through a critical configuration of determinations without being assigned to a supposedly higher order beyond conceptuality.
Adorno's answer is not to abandon Benjamin's constellation. It is to develop its configurational principle within a different account of conceptual cognition, objectivity, and critical mediation.
5. Adorno's Constellation: From Idea to Historical Configuration
5.1 From the Idea to a Configuration of Concepts
Adorno retains Benjamin's image because it captures something he does not want to lose: a constellation is not reducible to any one of its elements, yet neither does it exist independently of them.
What changes is its philosophical status.
For Benjamin, the constellation belongs to the representation of an Idea. Adorno develops the configurational structure within conceptual cognition itself. Concepts need not be opposed to constellation as though the former belonged to ordinary classification and the latter to a higher order of truth. Concepts can themselves become the elements of a constellation.
Adorno describes this directly. The unifying moment survives, but it no longer leads upward toward a general master-concept. Instead, the concepts enter into a constellation, and this constellation illuminates “the specifics of the object” that classificatory procedures leave aside or cannot accommodate (Adorno, 2007, pp. 164–166).
The transformation can therefore be expressed this way:
Benjamin: conceptual elements drawn from phenomena → constellation → representation of an Idea
Adorno: concepts + historical material → constellation → disclosure of the object
The difference is not that Adorno replaces Ideas with a collection of facts. He develops a conception of constellation in which the configuration itself becomes the critical medium through which concepts can be brought into relation without one of them becoming the final definition of the object.
This is also why the constellation is more than a collection of concepts. Its significance lies in their relation. A concept acquires a different force when it is placed beside another determination that qualifies it, conflicts with it, or reveals what it excludes.
Adorno's constellation is therefore a way of using conceptuality without allowing any single concept to monopolize the object.
5.2 Weber: Concepts and Historical Material
Adorno turns to Max Weber for a methodological example of how concepts can emerge from engagement with historical material rather than being completely fixed in advance.
In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber describes the “spirit of capitalism” as a historical individual: a complex of elements associated in historical reality that are united into a conceptual whole from a particular standpoint. Because such a concept refers to a historically significant configuration, Weber argues, it cannot simply be defined according to the classical formula of genus and species. It must be gradually assembled from individual elements taken from historical reality, so that the final conceptual formulation emerges at the end of the investigation rather than standing fully formed at the beginning (Weber, 2004, p. 47).
This gives Adorno a useful point of departure. A historically significant object cannot always be understood by applying a finished universal to it. Its conceptual determination develops through contact with the material it seeks to comprehend.
Adorno does not simply adopt Weber's methodology, nor does he treat Weber as having discovered his own theory of constellation. In Negative Dialectics, Weber serves as an example of something that methodological self-understanding can obscure: even where concepts are consciously constructed for methodological purposes, successful inquiry may owe more to the object than the method itself acknowledges.
Adorno argues that Weber's mature works contain precisely such a moment. Concepts are gathered around a central object, and their relation expresses what the object is in a way that isolated definitions cannot. Adorno calls the resulting context a constellation and interprets its objectivity as something that emerges within the relation among the determinations themselves (Adorno, 2007, pp. 166–168).
Weber therefore helps clarify Adorno's argument, although Adorno does not simply endorse Weber's methodology. Weber's historical investigations achieve a degree of objectivity that exceeds his own methodological account of ideal types. The concepts gathered around an object can form a configuration whose significance cannot be reduced to their function as instruments of inquiry. For Adorno, the constellation becomes legible as a sign of objectivity precisely when the relations among concepts disclose something about the object itself. Weber's example remains ambivalent: it reveals a possibility within his work that his methodological self-understanding does not fully acknowledge.
5.3 How the Constellation Illuminates the Object
A constellation does not create another celestial object behind the stars. It makes a relation among them visible. The individual stars remain distinct, but their arrangement allows a pattern to emerge.
Adorno's constellation works in a similar way. It does not add a second object behind the object under investigation, nor does it provide a single concept under which every aspect can be subsumed. It brings determinate conceptual elements into a relation in which their differences and tensions disclose features that an isolated determination leaves obscure.
This is why the constellation is not simply more concepts. Its significance lies in their arrangement.
Suppose a social phenomenon is approached through a single concept. That determination may identify something real, but its generality may also conceal other dimensions of the case. A second determination may reveal what the first excludes; a historical detail may force an apparently adequate category to be qualified; a third concept may expose a tension between the first two. The object becomes more intelligible as its conceptual determinations enter into a relation that reveals their limits, tensions, and dependence on the historical configuration to which they belong.
Adorno describes this as a way of allowing language to obtain objectivity through the relations in which concepts are placed around a thing. Constellations, he argues, can represent “from without” what the concept has cut away “from within.” They do not overcome conceptual mediation; they make visible what the act of conceptual determination necessarily leaves out (Adorno, 2007, pp. 164–166).
This is the crucial point. The object does not become intelligible because thought finally discovers the one concept that contains it. Nor does what exceeds a concept remain an entirely unknowable residue outside thought. It becomes perceptible through the relations among determinations.
A constellation can therefore disclose the non-identical without pretending to name it exhaustively. What one concept leaves out can become visible when another determination is placed beside it. A distinction that seemed stable in isolation may become unstable when confronted with a particular case. A category that appeared sufficient may reveal its limits through its relation to other categories and to the historical material.
Adorno's constellation thus preserves something that classification alone cannot. Classification asks what something comes under. Constellational thinking asks what becomes visible when the determinations through which something is understood are placed into a critical relation with one another.
The object remains more than any single determination, but that “more” is not simply beyond thought. It appears in the tensions, omissions, and incompatibilities generated within thought as it attempts to determine the object.
This is why constellation is a form of critical mediation. It does not give us the object without concepts. It allows concepts to disclose their own limits while remaining directed toward the object.
6. What Adorno's Constellation Achieves
The movement from Benjamin to Adorno can now be stated in a single distinction.
For Benjamin, the constellation describes the configuration through which conceptual elements drawn from phenomena represent an Idea whose status cannot be reduced to those elements individually. Adorno retains the configurational principle while developing it into an account of critical cognition: concepts enter into determinate relations through which the object becomes more intelligible than any single determination could make it on its own.
The difference matters because Adorno refuses both alternatives identified at the beginning. Subsumption reduces the particular to what a universal concept can recognize. Immediacy imagines that the object could be grasped without conceptual mediation. Constellational thinking occupies neither side.
Thought does not overcome the distance between concept and object. Instead, it works within that distance, arranging determinations so that the limitations of one can become intelligible through another.
That is why Adorno needs the constellation.
The constellation is not a way of thinking without concepts. It is a way of thinking through concepts without allowing any single concept to close the object within itself.
References
Adorno, T. W. (2007). Negative dialectics (E. B. Ashton, Trans.). Continuum. (Original work published 1966).
Benjamin, W. (2003). The origin of German tragic drama (J. Osborne, Trans.). Verso. (Original work published 1928).
Jarvis, S. (1998). Adorno: A critical introduction. Routledge.
Plato. (1999). Symposium (H. N. Fowler, Trans.). Harvard University Press. (Original work written ca. 385–370 BCE).
Weber, M. (2004). The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism (T. Parsons, Trans.; R. Baehr & G. Wells, Eds.). Penguin Books. (Original work published 1905).
Comments
Post a Comment