Benjamin redefines concepts to organize phenomena into constellations rather than generalize them.

Evidence

It was not, therefore, a matter of achieving security by establishing general concepts about the worldfor example, by selecting a few literary works on the basis of something they happened to have in common and summing them up under a single conceptbut a matter of conceiving of what was exemplary, no matter how unique or fragmentary it might be, in its essence, i.e. as the presentation of an idea. Concepts were to be stripped of their usual function of generality and were to serve to organize elementary phenomena into constellations which do not make the similar identical, but . . . effect a synthesis between extremes' and in which the individual … becomes something different: a totality’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 355

Categorization

• DEFINE: The constellation concept — Benjamin’s anti-generalization epistemology — is a key term in Frankfurt School methodology.
• XREF: Constellation thinking feeds directly into Adorno’s method in Negative Dialectics and his essays on cultural criticism. — connects to: Benjamin’s thought operates on parallel discontinuous levels of allegorical meditation — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 140; Benjamin’s machines lead to a theory of aura, not of causality — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 163

Broader Connections

• Benjamin’s thought operates on parallel discontinuous levels of allegorical meditation #corroborates (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 140
• Benjamin’s machines lead to a theory of aura, not of causality #expands (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 163