Stone offers a more historically sensitive gloss on the rationale behind the deployment of constellations when she focuses on the following assertion: “Becoming aware of the constellation in which a thing stands is tantamount to deciphering the constellation which, having come to be, the thing bears within itself ” (ND 163).
For Adorno, “the specificity of any thing consists in the sedimentation of history in it”. In the course of history, “any thing enters into multiple relations with other things; each such relation shapes and marks this thing; each thing, therefore, exists as a precipitate of its complex history”.
Optimally, concepts will provide “a chart or map” of these “sedimented past relations” (ibid, pp. 84-85)
