Dialectical criticism replaces linear narrative with a construct built from internally generative stylistic moments

Evidence

For the fundamental formal problem of the dialectical writer is precisely that of continuity. He who has so intense a feeling for the massive continuity of history itself is some-how paralyzed by that very awareness, as in some overloading of perception too physical to be any longer commensurable with language. Where all the dimensions of history cohere in synchronic fashion, the simple linear stories of earlier historians are no longer possible: now it is diachrony and continuity which become problematical, mere working hypotheses. Adorno’s larger form will therefore be a construct rather than a narrative. … The individual work of art is therefore understood as a balance between inner organs, as an intersection of what we will in a later chapter call determinate categories of a stylistic nature, separate yet profoundly interdependent on each other, such that a modification of one (such as the intensity of instrumental coloration) immediately involves a shift in the proportions of the others (temporal dimensions of the work, contrapuntal development, and so forth). Change takes place in an artist’s development as a result of such a modification in the relationships that obtain between the fundamental categories of the work itself; the dialectical critic, however, will plot this change on his graph as a series of moments which generate each other out of their own internal contradictions. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 112

Categorization

• XREF: This is the core of Jameson’s Frankfurt-School method chapter — the ‘determinate categories’ and internal-generation model directly echoes Lukács’s totality and prefigures Jameson’s own later concept of mediation. The ‘modification of one category shifts the proportions of others’ is a structuralist total-system account. — connects to: Dialectical criticism occupies a non-position between immersion and externality — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 53; Negative dialectics replaces unity with what lies outside conceptual domination — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2534
• DEFINE: Defines how the dialectical writer’s form works: a construct rather than a narrative, organized around internally-generating moments rather than chronological development.

Broader Connections

• Dialectical criticism occupies a non-position between immersion and externality #expands (0.90) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 53
• Negative dialectics replaces unity with what lies outside conceptual domination #corroborates (0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2534