Adorno read the archaic-modern fusion as catastrophe, not a golden-age classless past

Evidence

In accordance with your immanent vision of the dialectical image (with which, to employ a positive term, I would contrast your earlier conception of a model), you interpret the relationship between the oldest and the newest, one which was already central to your first draft, in terms of a utopian reference to the ‘classless society’. The archaic thereby becomes a complementary addition to the new, instead of actually being ‘the newest’ itself, and is therefore rendered undialectical. However, at the same time, and equally undialectically, the image of classlessness is projected back into mythology … instead of becoming properly transparent as the phantasmagoriaof Hell.Thusthecategoryinwhichthearchaicfuseswith the modern seems to me more like a catastrophe than a Golden Age. I once remarked how the recent past always presents itself as though it had been destroyed by catastrophes. Hic et nunc, I would say that this is how it presents itself as pre-history. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 240

Categorization

• XREF: The key line ‘the recent past always presents itself as though it had been destroyed by catastrophes’ connects to Benjamin’s Angel of History and to Adorno’s later philosophy of history; also to the book’s core revisionist reading of Adorno. — connects to: Adorno’s negative dialectics located emancipation’s hints in modern art’s distortion — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 380
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘Catastrophe, not Golden Age’ — how Adorno’s correction of Benjamin’s classless-prehistory image prefigures his later negative-dialectical philosophy of history.
• DEEPTHINKING: The dialectical move — archaic as ‘the newest itself’, classlessness as phantasmagoria of Hell rather than utopian origin — is dense and paradigm-shifting on reading prehistory against the grain.

Broader Connections

• Adorno’s negative dialectics located emancipation’s hints in modern art’s distortion #complicates (0.85) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 380