Dialectical criticism judges a work by how its strengths structurally require its weaknesses

Evidence

This is why a genuinely dialectical criticism must always include a commentary on its own intellectual instruments as part of its own working structure. … Yet it is not the basic insight of Plekhanov which is at issue, but rather the transformation into a single-shot formula of what was at the time a fresh concept, evolved to do justice to the peculiar structure of a given work; such analysis is dialectical to the degree that it stresses the dynamic interaction and interdependency between symbolism and the other elemerits of the work and articulates, the way in which the overdevelopment of one element (in this case a visual object) relates vitally to the underdevelopment of others. Thus dialectical criticism replaces the older absolutes of truth or beauty with a judgment in which the insistence on the preeminence of the historical situation underlines the inseparability of strengths and weaknesses within the work of art itself or in the philosophical system, and stands as a concrete object lesson in the way in which the very strengths themselves, in all their specificity, require the existence of determinate and correlative weaknesses in order to come into being at all. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 682

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a work’s very strengths require determinate correlative weaknesses — replacing truth/beauty absolutes with historical-situational judgment — is a dense, paradigm-shifting formulation central to Jameson’s whole method.
• XREF: Directly the Frankfurt-School lineage the reader is tracing: the inseparability of strengths and weaknesses is recognizably Adorno’s negative dialectics, and the ‘single-shot formula’ critique foreshadows Jameson’s own later critique of totalization. — connects to: Dialectical criticism lets each work dictate its own interpretive categories — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 678; Criticism should recover a work’s original clumsiness rather than its refined difficulty — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 488; Benjamin’s criticism redeemed flawed works by treating them as fragments of truth — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 354

Broader Connections

• Criticism should recover a work’s original clumsiness rather than its refined difficulty #expands (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 488