Adorno’s causal-sounding prose operates as poetic simile rather than syllogistic argument.

Evidence

Psychoanalysis of the Austrian character? Object lesson in the way society resolves in the imaginary realm those contradictions which it cannot overcome in the real? Stylistic juxtaposition of music, symbolic logic, and financial sheets? The text under consideration is all of these things, but it is first and foremost a complete thing, I am tempted to say a poetic object. For its most characteristic connectives (“it is no accident that”) are less signs of some syllogistic operation to perform than they are equivalents of the “just as … so” of the heroic simile. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 40

Categorization

• DEFINE: Names Jameson’s reading method: treat dialectical texts as poetic objects whose causal connectives are rhetorical figures, not inferences.