IF THERE IS SUCH A THING AS “popular imagination” among cultural theorists, then Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno have come to occupy nearly opposite positions in it. Benjamin, the flâneur, the collector, the producer of fragments, hero of the academic precariate; Adorno, the professor, the secret (or not-so-secret) systematician, the comfortable resident of the “Grand Hotel ‘Abgrund,’” the fuddy-duddy felled by a couple of bare breasts. And yet it is the very lectures at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research that the infamous Busenaktion interrupted that at times find Adorno practicing the hermeneutics commonly associated with Benjamin: distraction, illumination, flânerie. It is one such particular moment that forms the basis for this article: Adorno steps into his dead friend's shoes and embarks upon a flânerie. He is heading to the opera rather than the cinema, and readers might brace themselves for another denunciation of anything that is not Alban Berg, or another of Adorno's paladins of the musical avant-garde. But Adorno has something different in mind, for he arrives late.

Arriving late as a hermeneutic trick — in an excerpt from his 1958 lectures on dialectics Adorno takes the flâneur to the opera. It is a rare moment in Adorno where distraction becomes a “method of attention” and where, as Edmond Jaloux, in a passage quoted by Benjamin in the Passagen-Werk (Arcades Project), puts it, “le fait seul de tourner à droite ou à gauche constituait déjà un acte essentiellement poétique” (“the mere turning right or left already constitute[s] an essentially poetic act” (M9a,4). This is a step Benjamin's solitary wanderer never took: The Passagen-Werk discusses “Die Oper als Zentrum (GS V.2:1212; “the opera as center,” AP, 906) and pays special attention to Haussmann's Avenue de l’Opéra, but it stops short of the building itself. Benjamin himself, however, discusses a visit to the opera in his Moskauer Tagebuch (Moscow Diaries), and applies to it an optic remarkably reminiscent of Adorno's tardiness. He describes a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov's The Tsar's Bride:

Der Administrator empfängt uns. Er … führt uns durch alle Räume (im Vestibül ist viel Publikum schon lange vor Anfang versammelt, die von ihren Arbeitsstätten direkt ins Theater kommen) zeigt uns auch den Konzertsaal. Im Vestibül liegt ein außerordentlich auffallender, wenig schöner Teppich… . Unsere Plätze sind in der zweiten Reihe… . In einer Pause gehen wir ins Vestibül. Es gibt aber drei. Sie sind viel zu lang und ermüden Asja… . Am Schluß ist die Be schaffung der Garderobe sehr schwierig. Zwei Theaterdiener bilden mitten auf der Treppe einen Kordon, um den Zustrom der Leute zu den winzigen Garderobenräume zu regeln. (GS VI:298)