ABSTRACT
28The visual images displayed in this photoessay, the breadth and diversity of which are beyond the compass of our lexicon, provide a comprehensive cross-section of our native city. The photographic image has the remarkable capacity to compress incommensurable volumes into itself – throbbing between its rectilinear margins is the metronomic pulse of a metropolis. Hong Kong is a concatenation of mixes contradictions and incongruities, a space for all manner of surprising disjunctions and integrations. This much is evident from a perfunctory review of the photographs in question. Yet, as Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory made clear in his late wrangles with Walter Benjamin, the imperative of dialectics requires us to supplement every cultural artifact with an act of critical interpretation. What, in Adorno’s estimation, is an undialectical critique, a disparagement that Adorno applied to Benjamin’s late writings, from the decryption of/elaboration on Baudelaire’s poetic phenomenologies to the posthumous Arcades Project? For Adorno, every deviation from a rigorously materialist dialectic posits the existence of an ahistorical invariant, a transcendent dimension that bypasses the situationally determined negotiations of history. This is to deliver the historical phenomenon from the contingency of time as well as the dialectical deadlocks that generate and complicate it. The act of interpretation is enmeshed and embedded in a concrete time and space; it is the discernment of the dialectical complexities that crystallize into a determinate object. It insists that the object is never self-explicatory, that its position in the sociohistorical networks that traverse it must be located through an exegetical process. Every object, in this way, is transformed into a Benjaminian “monad” of sorts, a microcosm that is always timely (of its time), representative of broader social antagonisms. If the artifact, in its self-assured presentation, endeavors to give an impression of immediacy, proclaiming an inviolably sacrosanct autonomy that lifts it outside of sociopolitical reality and renders its relationship with this reality inaccessible, interpretation unveils the multiple mediations that determine its inscription and transmission. It is in this fashion that the conception of a phenomenon’s “content” is broadened. Of course, this critical project was synonymous and coextensive with a specific political orientation, that of revolutionary Marxism.
