Raulet Gérard and Max Reinhart. From Modernity as One-Way Street to Postmodernity as Dead End

New German Critique, No. 33, Modernity and Postmodernity (Autumn, 1984), pp. 155-
177Postmodernity makes short work of the process of history; it even brings down the subject of history. The historical subject/object taken over from Hegel by Marx and Lukaics is dismissed - more accurately, it appears to have walked off the job, to have stepped down from the stage of both philosophy and history. To the degree that the proletarian subject/object has been eliminated in reality, the philosophical construction of history has also fallen apart. In the face of this fallen modernity, Benjamin's "One-Way Street" collection represents one of the last dialectical attempts to apprehend in poetic images (Denkbilder) the general disintegration, which is nothing other than the victory of total reification, and to explode the poverty of reified experience. Only in this manner could a dialectic of reification still be construed, namely, by reflecting the reified fragments of experience and forcing them, as it were, to the extreme. Marx himself said that "the burden must be made still more irksome by awakening a consciousness of it."' The "destructive haracter"2 is always prepared for theworst. Wherever the attempt is still made to read traces, to make them dialectically more visible, he sees them, but here and there, going in all directions. "Surrender to the object, up to the literal self-extinction of the self' - thus Adorno understood him.3 For the destructive character, reading traces means to take on the overwhelming powers that be and to go to the extreme end of reification, that is, to the self-extinction of one's own character. In the hope of breaking through reification, he liquidates his own identity. But as history has shown, this positive barbarism has come off badly.