Adorno charged that Benjamin’s psychologization blocked a proper dialectic of the commodity fetish

Evidence

Benjamin was thus, in Adorno’s view, not able to account for the objective power of the commodity fetish, and was carrying out an un-Marxist form of psychologization which was dangerously close to that of C.G. Jung. This was preventing him from achieving the proper, thorough dialecticization of the commodity fetish, and from accounting adequately for the social mediation of the work of art. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 231

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies what ‘dialecticization of the commodity fetish’ means operationally: accounting for the social mediation of the artwork.