The condition into which art, philosophy, and even thought itself descends in the absence of a unitary and overarching idea or grand narrative (to borrow Lyotard, Jean-François’s useful term). Adorno, Theodor used this term to criticize his friend Benjamin, Walter’s work on the Paris arcades, condemning him for not providing a sturdy enough account of the relation between the fragments he collected in his compendium of modernity. The notion of constellation was in some senses meant to remedy this problem, but Benjamin didn’t take it far enough in Adorno’s view. In his later work on aesthetics, Adorno saw that nominalism was the problem facing all art in an era that had begun to question the very nature and existence of art as such. Nominalism is, as Jameson, Fredric points out in his book on Adorno, both a philosophical tendency and a historical event. It is the repudiation of the universal by the particular that is possible because the historical moment itself defines itself as a refusal of the universal. Jameson uses the concept of nominalism to explain certain trends in postmodernism that he sees are born of an emphasis of the particular at the expense of the universal (by which he means history)---his specific complaints are directed at New Historicism. Further Reading: F. Jameson Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (1990).