It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. — only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language. ◊Dream City and Dream House, Dreams of the Future, Anthropological Nihilism, Jung◊
The momentum of primal history in the past is no longer masked, as it used to be, by the tradition of church and family — this at once the consequence and condition of technology. The old prehistoric dread already envelops the world of our parents because we ourselves are no longer bound to this world by tradition. The perceptual worlds <Merkwelten> break up more rapidly; what they contain of the mythic comes more quickly and more brutally to the fore; and a wholly different perceptual world must be speedily set up to oppose it. This is how the accelerated tempo of technology appears in light of the primal history of the present. ◊Dream City and Dream House, Dreams of the Future, Anthropological Nihilism, Jung◊
Only a thoughtless observer can deny that correspondences come into pay between the world of modern technology and the archaic symbol-world of mythology. Of course, initially the technologically new seems nothing more than that. But in the very next childhood memory, its traits are already altered. Every childhood achieves something great and irreplaceable for humanity. By the interest it takes in technological phenomena, by the curiosity it displays before any sort of invention or machinery, every childhood binds the accomplishments of technology to the old worlds of symbol. There is nothing in the realm of nature that from the outset would be exempt from such a bond. Only, it takes form not in the aura of novelty but in the aura of the habitual. In memory, childhood, and dream. ◊Dream City and Dream House, Dreams of the Future, Anthropological Nihilism, Jung◊
A Kierkegaard citation in Wiesengrund, with commentary following: “‘One may arrive at a similar consideration of the mythical by beginning with the imagistic. When, in an age of reflection, one sees the imagistic protrude ever so slightly and unobserved in a reflective representation and, like an antediluvian fossil, suggest another species of existence which washed away doubt, one will perhaps be another species of existence which washed away doubt, one will perhaps be amazed that the image could ever have played such an important role.’ Kierkegaard wards off the ‘amazement’ with what follows. Yet this amazement heralds the deepest insight into the interrelation of dialectic, myth, and image. For it is not as the continuously living and present that nature prevails in the dialectic. Dialectic comes to a stop in the image, and, in the context of recent history, it cites the mythical as what is long gone: nature as primal history. For this reason, the images — which, like those of the intérieur, bring dialectic and myth to the point of indifferentiation — are truly ‘antediluvian fossils.’ They may be called dialectical images, to use Benjamin’s expression, whose compelling definition of ‘allegory’ also holds true for Kierkegaard’s allegorical intention taken as a figure of historical dialectic and mythical nature. According to this definition, ‘in allegory the observer is confronted with facies hippocratica of history, a petrified primordial landscape.” Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno, Kierkegaard (Tübingen, 1933), p. 60. ◊Anthropological Materialism, History of Sects◊
A central problem of historical materialism that ought to be seen in the end: Must the Marxist understanding of history necessarily be acquired at the expense of the perceptibility of history? Or: in what way is it possible to conjoin a heightened graphicness <Anschaulichkeit> to the realization of the Marxist method? The first stage in this undertaking will be to carry over the principle of montage into history. That is, to assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest most precisely cut components. Indeed, to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event. And, therefore, to break with vulgar historical naturalism. To grasp the construction of history as such. In the structure of commentary. ◊Anthropological Materialism, History of Sects◊
Arcades Awakening 