Dialectical models must ultimately abolish themselves and redissolve into history

Evidence

Indeed, it may be claimed that no matter how genuinely temporal or historical in character, such a diachronic sequence is bound to remain an abstraction, inasmuch as it is nothing but an ideal cross section of the existential density of concrete history itself—the isolation of a single plane or level of reality, where the latter is understood both as the ideal sum of all such levels and as that ultimate, unthinkable totality which can never be thus additively reconstructed through the operation of pure thought alone. Hence the final moment in the process of dialectical analysis, in which the model strains to return to that concrete element from which it initially came, to abolish itself as an illusion of autonomy, and to redissolve into history, offering as it does so some momentary glimpse of reality as a concrete whole. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 644

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘final moment’ where the model abolishes itself as an illusion of autonomy and redissolves into history — the dialectic’s self-overcoming — is the load-bearing methodological principle of Frankfurt-School criticism Jameson inherits from Adorno and Lukács.
• XREF: The model’s self-abolition and redissolution into concrete history echoes Adorno’s insistence that concepts must negate their own reification, and Lukács’s notion that thought must grasp itself as historically conditioned. — connects to: Dialectical critique exposes ontology as disguised history — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 694