Benjamin argued a work’s encrypted corners can resist the ideology its maker holds

Evidence

After reading Lowenthal’s essay on Dostoevsky, Benjamin asked him: Has this German reception been equal to the challenge of Dostoevsky’s work? Is no other reception conceivable, from the work’s point of view? … To meand I haven’t opened Dostoevsky for a long timethese questions are at the moment more open than they seem to be for you. To me, it is conceivable that precisely in those corners of a work into which your psychoanalytic point of view leads, catalysts could be found which could not be assimilated to the petty-bourgeois way of thinking. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 240

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A compact rebuttal of crude class-content criticism: the artwork’s own recesses may generate ‘catalysts’ unassimilable to the author’s ideology — a genuine alternative to both Lowenthal and orthodox reflection theory.
• XREF: Echoes Benjamin’s later theses on art and technique; contrasts with Adorno’s insistence that truth content requires full construction, not interpretive corners.