Dialectical method requires separating terms before mingling contraries to distinguish them

Evidence

For the point about synesthesia is that you cannot mingle the senses until they have first been clearly separated from each other, and disentangled each according to its own timbre and aroma: indeed, synesthesia is in the present context not so much a way of mingling sensations as rather of distinguishing them. The lines from “Correspondances” establish two simultaneous but different sets of oppositions: within the fresh, clear sensations, the various senses against each other (touch, sound, sight), each sense making the other stand out sharply by the contrast; then the larger opposition of clear sensation itself to that rich, mingled, corrupt sensory experience which is primarily odor and hallucinatory ecstasy. All of Baudelaire’s work, on a thematic and ethical level, can be seen as the reduplication on ever higher planes of this initial and paradoxical mingling of contraries in order to distinguish them: dandyism, sadomasochism, blasphemy: so many attempts, on the psychological plane, to flee the insipidity of pastel, of harmonic consonance or sentimental effusion, by soiling it with its dialectical opposite. The work as a whole is generated out of a series of progressively enlarged identifications: thus the proposition, “only the spiritually vile and debased can know what purity really is,” derives its force from the initial premise that the pure sensation can only be rendered through a mingling with its opposites in language. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 656

Categorization

• XREF: This is pure dialectical method — the ‘mingling of contraries in order to distinguish them’ is the Adorno/Benjamin constellation logic Jameson inherits, and prefigures his own critical strategy of juxtaposing opposed critical languages to make each clarify the other. — connects to: Thinking must hold dialectic and its opposite together at once — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 170; Dialectics attend to what is not immediately visible, whereas immediacy erases contradiction — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 326; Dialectical analysis sees a thing through awareness of what it is not (+1 more)
• DEFINE: Offers a precise, non-obvious redefinition of synesthesia: not sensory fusion but the sharpening of each sense via contrast — a genuinely clarifying reversal.

Broader Connections

• Thinking must hold dialectic and its opposite together at once #expands (0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 170
• Dialectical analysis sees a thing through awareness of what it is not #qualifies (0.80)
• Dialectical thinking requires abstraction from existing forms to form general concepts. #expands (0.78) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 12
• Dialectics attend to what is not immediately visible, whereas immediacy erases contradiction #expands (0.75) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 326