Real Dialectics

Real dialectics? Today, we witness the dialectic increasingly within the real. My basic axiom is the following: no dialectics without metaphor. In the early days of the Frankfurt School, the idea was to demonstrate that culture (magazines, films, and so on) was a space of monotonous repetition. We saw this not only in the work of Adorno and Horkheimer on the “culture industry,” but also in the work of Walter Benjamin in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” They were not alone. They were joined by the Situationist International, and others who sought to break the individual from the harness of a culture of repetition.

Do we not witness the production of novel metaphors and dreamlike sequences that are not repetitious but generative within the real itself today? On the other hand, it is you who witnesses the dialectic from the place of a fundamental repetition. Your symptom repeats. It is not a question of simply opposing dialectics to repetition, as I have been doing ever since I was first provoked by an argument made in Dublin by Rik Loose some years ago. It is a question of where the dialectic goes in the contemporary moment.