Critical Theory_A Very Short Introduction

by Stephen Eric Bronner

  Max Horkheimer wrote to Leo Lowenthal that mass culture was cheating the individual out of his own experience of time, or what Henri Bergson called the durée. Marcuse feared that people no longer had the capacity to act as subjects and that they were being manipulated into thinking that something depended on their choices. Horkheimer and Adorno articulated what would become the general stance of the inner circle in Dialectic of Enlightenment:

  Life in the late capitalist era is a constant initiation rite. Everyone must show that he wholly identifies himself with the power which is belaboring him. This occurs in the principle of jazz syncopation, which simultaneously derides stumbling and makes it a rule. The eunuch-like voice of the crooner on the radio, the heiress’s smooth suitor, who falls into the swimming pool in his dinner jacket, are models for those who must become whatever the system wants. Everyone can be like this omnipotent society; everyone can be happy, if only he will capitulate fully and sacrifice his claim to happiness.

  7. Conformism and loss of individuality mark the happy consciousness.

  Writing as a young rebel about other young rebels, caught between disgust for an old culture and longing for the new, Georg von Lukács—he employed the aristocratic designation at the time—envisioned a transformative role for the critic in Soul and Form (1911). Its literary and philosophical essays were evocative, complex, esoteric, and decidedly nontraditional. Art enabled the individual to resist society not simply by challenging popular tastes and perceptions, or so Lukács argued, but by intensifying experience through its allegorical and symbolic qualities.

  Critical interpretation might prove necessary in order to elicit them. In turn, however, such philosophical interrogation would generate other interpretations. Both the philosophical exercise in literary criticism and the work of art are thus unfinished by definition. They are always open to reinterpretation by new audiences at new times. That is because products of creative activity harbor a secret to be uncovered and then recovered. No less than the artwork, the critical essay through its form can elicit repressed experiences of the soul. The boundaries between philosophy and aesthetics, reflection and experience, start to collapse. The artist in Lukács’s new and broader definition of the term now appears as a “problematical man.” Not the political revolutionary but the erudite cultural radical with a bohemian bent—like Nietzsche—is the agent of the new: the prophet of an invigorated subjectivity, an emergent culture, and a transformed reality.

  How the culture industry works

  The Frankfurt School assumed that opposition to mass society meant opposition to mass culture. Its inner circle took the standpoint of the intellectual outsider. They knew that mass media tends to champion right-wing causes. But they also knew that the culture industry can also produce works of a seemingly progressive slant. Mass media had already often bashed capitalism, intolerance, and the power elite. Even then, however, it seems to standardize experience and undermine critical reflection. According to the Frankfurt School, the culture industry integrates all opposition by its very nature. The impotence of a work is a direct function of its popularity. No work is safe: not the nonobjective paintings of Wassily Kandinsky and not the rigorously intellectual music of Arnold Schönberg.

  A dynamic is involved: classical music once served as a backdrop for movies (like those of Charlie Chaplin and Fritz Lang) while today it often serves as the backdrop for commercials. The anti-traditional avant-garde has, meanwhile, entered the museum. Its works, too, can now be contemplated serenely by liberal individuals of good will. Sometimes the cultural philistine will be made to feel a bit uncomfortable by what the culture industry presents. But the fuss is over nothing. The critical or utopian potential within the artwork has already been nullified. It has been reduced to just another form of free expression in a free and affluent society.

  The Frankfurt School believed that the culture industry is an essential feature of the totally administered society. Marxists had always viewed culture as a prop for the ruling class, and Louis Althusser later wrote about an “ideological-state-apparatus.” But the Frankfurt School took this line of argument in a different direction. Assumptions made by the inner circle concerning the character of mass culture, its ongoing assault on intellectual standards, involve the integration of concerns that were first raised by conservatives.

  In the eighteenth century, Edmund Burke already fretted that the “fine draperies of life” were being torn asunder, and his less sophisticated and more radical nineteenth- and twentieth-century followers insisted with Gustav Le Bon that “the populace is sovereign and the tide of barbarism mounts.” Elites always warned against what Jose Ortega y Gasset called “the mass man” and his entry into public life. All this makes it important to highlight the differences between critical theory and the various assaults on mass culture by genuine reactionaries.

  Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse were not unduly worried about the threat to tradition and cultural authority. They were closer to Nietzsche, the cultural revolutionary rather than the political reactionary, who decried Victorian decadence with its puritanical conformism and hypocrisy, its dead materialism and stultifying rationalism. For the Frankfurt School it remained a matter of the “higher spirit” being doomed to misunderstanding or worse by a “herd” incapable of intellectually mastering its “will to power.”

  If the whole is untrue, if there is no way of affecting society politically, then cultural criticism becomes the only source of resistance. The baton shifts from Hegel and Marx to Nietzsche, whose aristocratic radicalism made him an exponent of high art against its popular rival and of modernism against the cultural philistine. He was a cosmopolitan and opposed the vulgar anti-Semitism embraced by people like the composer Richard Wagner, who often hid his prejudices under the cloak of “nationalism.” But Nietzsche was also skeptical of the supposedly universal foundations of morality and science. He had little sympathy for the masses or the democratic ethos embodied in progressive mass movements. Disgusted by what he considered the growing mediocrity of his society, acutely aware of the deepening cultural malaise, and intuiting apocalypse, Nietzsche championed experimentation, individuality, and a “perspectival” view of reality.

  Dialectic of Enlightenment took up these themes. But its authors’ views on the culture industry were already evinced in earlier works. Adorno’s “On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening” (1938) noted that the products of the culture industry were not works of art that were only later packaged as commodities but, instead, conceived as commodities from their inception. Horkheimer followed suit by embracing high art as against popular entertainment in “Art and Mass Culture” (1941).

  Only the most technically complex works, both of them believed, could foster reflection and resistance against declining cultural standards and perpetually changing fashions. The issue is not the political content but the form in which it is expressed—the medium is the message. Adorno put the matter bluntly in Minima Moralia: “the value of a thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar. It is objectively devalued as this distance is reduced.”

  The Frankfurt School was elitist in its view of public life. Yet its members were decidedly modernist in their inclinations. They harbored no romantic illusions about some bygone golden age, and they were unconcerned with the existential anxieties of the establishment. They were intent upon challenging the culture industry because it was standardizing experience and thereby rendering everyday people more and more receptive to tradition and authority. Material riches were, in keeping with the old bohemian and romantic idea, seen by the Frankfurt School as impoverishing the spirit. The happy consciousness was condemned because it was hollow and vapid. Herbert Marcuse insisted that the culture industry was complicit in closing the political universe.

  Quiescence of the individual and the closure of political life were considered a function of capitalism, the bureaucratic state, and the mass media. Jürgen Habermas analyzed this in h
is groundbreaking first book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1961). Its subtitle in German is “a category of bourgeois society.” Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, two younger students of Adorno, later complemented this enterprise with their own study of its “proletarian” rival. Nevertheless, it was Habermas who introduced the public sphere into the sociological lexicon.

  He viewed this realm as mediating between the organized political institutions of the state and the economic forces of civil society. The public sphere included all the activities and organizations capable of fostering public debate. These range from the free press to the town meeting, from the family to salons, and from the educational system to the cheap production of books. The roots of the public sphere may derive from the medieval free cities, but it gained ground during the Enlightenment and the democratic revolutions of 1688–1789. This was the context in which open deliberation became a value in its own right, the aggrieved masses employed their common sense, and individuals exercised their civil rights. Public opinion was a source of empowerment: it tended to protect the individual from the arbitrary power of regimes still wavering between monarchy and republicanism.

  All the great movements for political democracy and material equality—from the social democratic labor movement of the nineteenth century to the civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s—generated a vibrant public sphere. It is even fair to say that the character and power of a movement can be gleaned from the vitality of its public sphere.

  With respect to empowering the masses, however, the problem arose once public opinion became identified with publicity. As the mass media gained dominance, popular struggles began surrendering their power to the organizations and experts involved with the bureaucratic welfare state. The new cultural apparatus increasingly placed a premium on consensus and narrowed the range of debate. Habermas would remain preoccupied with the role played by democratic will formation throughout his career. There is a reason why he initially embraced the student movement of the 1960s. He also continued to believe that an altered civil society might yet contest the increasing dominance of instrumental reason: Legitimation Crisis (1975) remains one of his most salient (if neglected) works. But Habermas’s emphasis upon the primacy of the liberating discourse and political participation was not shared by most members of the inner circle. As far as they were concerned, “only the word coined by commerce” holds sway, and attempts at mass enlightenment can only result in mass deception.

  Reification maintains its hold over public life. More than that—an ontology of false conditions imperils subjectivity and the ability of individuals to render moral judgments. Resistance against the power of the happy consciousness thus turns into an ethical imperative. At least that is what the Frankfurt School believed. The question is only what such resistance implies and entails. If the totally administered society is truly total, and capable of integrating and domesticating all critical undertakings, then the prospects for political action are dim. Resistance as political practice is a worthless enterprise. The negation is the only available option, and negative dialectics must define the critical enterprise. If organized activity can prove effective, by contrast, then the system is not totally administered and, since meaningful alternatives exist (with respect to policy and programs), a different critical approach is required. Viewing the totally administered society as an immanent tendency doesn’t help matters: negative dialectics and a theory of practice are mutually exclusive alternatives.

  Tolerance and public life

  Following the return of the Institute for Social Research to Germany in 1947, ironically, its inner circle turned into genuine public intellectuals. Max Horkheimer became Rector for the University of Frankfurt. Fearful of both communism and the kind of social disruption that generated Nazism, he supported the Vietnam War and proved a staunch critic of the student movement. Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm, meanwhile, became intellectual superstars during the 1960s and 1970s. Both identified with the New Left and openly supported movements concerned with social justice, anti-imperialism, human rights, the abolition of nuclear weapons, and constraints on the military-industrial complex.

  As for Jürgen Habermas, his essays on contemporary political matters have been collected in countless volumes. An early advocate of educational reform and the New Left, though sharply critical of its excesses, Habermas always honored its commitments to radical democracy and social justice. Even T. W. Adorno took on a public role. Known as a fierce critic of the New Left, which was often represented by his own radical students, he provided dozens of radio interviews and popular essays that sought to clarify his ideas. He even offered a withering analysis of astrology in “The Stars Down To Earth” (1953).

  If the Frankfurt School was participating in the public sphere, of course, it was legitimate to ask whether this did not indicate the existence of an open society. Tolerance was apparently being extended to critics of the totally administered society. That situation might produce conceptual confusion. Herbert Marcuse sought to deal with this matter in what became perhaps his most notorious essay “Repressive Tolerance” (1965). In that work, he maintains that the classical liberal notion of tolerance has lost its radical character.

  Once connected with the critique of religious prejudices and political authority, experimentation and the exercise of judgment, tolerance has turned into a bulwark for the status quo. Marcuse’s argument once again relies on the idea that the medium is the message. Insofar as the culture industry presents all positions on any issue in a public forum, they all ultimately appear as having equal value. Tolerance as exhibited by the culture industry thus renders all truth claims relative—or, better, turns their acceptance into a matter of taste. Now it is not just beauty but truth that lies in the eye of the beholder. What happened to art has happened to the discourse. Both become subordinate to the commodity form whereby qualitative turns into merely quantitative differences. When considering imperialism and war, or assaults on the welfare state and creationism, one stance is as good as another. The mass media renders resistance no more legitimate than support.

  Repressive tolerance is a real phenomenon. Fox News is a living embodiment of the concept. But that doesn’t mitigate the problems associated with Marcuse’s essay. There is, first of all, a difference between arguing that tolerance has lost is radical edge and that tolerance is repressive. The political emphasis is also misplaced. The real problem was never repressive tolerance but the repression of tolerance. Censorship is still rife and, historically, the Left has usually suffered the most when civil liberties were constricted in advanced industrial societies.

  Marcuse’s essay has little to say about criteria for judging what is to be censored, the bureaucracy required for instituting censorship, or the likelihood that such a bureaucracy will grow. It also ignores how the culture industry has often attacked intolerance and reactionary values: All in the Family and its main character, Archie Bunker, began a trend. Television sitcoms like The Cosby Show and Good Times, or Will and Grace and Ellen, may not have critically depicted the “real life” of oppressed and maligned groups. But they were progressive in the broader ethical and political agendas that they served. Talk about the integration of the gains that these subaltern groups have achieved, or how they strengthened the system, only begs the question: Were these gains domesticated or was the system itself forced to adapt and change?

  Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man highlights the possibilities attendant upon redirecting technology to overcome scarcity and pacify existence. Advanced industrial society, however, still rests on a structural contradiction between the interests of the bourgeoisie (which buys labor power and controls the means of production) and the working class (which sells its labor power and stands in alienated relation to the means of production). But this objective contradiction is not subjectively perceived as such. Political consciousness on the part of the working class is lacking due to the real failings of communism, the seeming a
ffluence of Western capitalism, and—perhaps above all—the culture industry.

  Marcuse popularized that concept in the United States. Like other members of the Frankfurt School, indeed, he was deeply concerned with how it prefabricates experience and nullifies critical thinking. His perspective clearly builds upon Dialectic of Enlightenment. What should serve as the aesthetic sublimation of erotic and life-giving impulses into art is instead transformed by the culture industry as the work adapts itself to the logic of commerce. “Repressive de-sublimation” drains its liberating and critical potential. Individuals are thrown back on their own resources. Loneliness and alienation produce an ever greater reliance on the culture industry and participate in the happy consciousness. Popular art strengthens the system even as it diminishes the psychological capacity for exercising the utopian imagination. The popularity of an artwork produces its death throes.

  But is it true that the popularity of a work necessarily invalidates its critical character or artistic radicalism? The seemingly endless array of rebels without a cause evince what Adorno called “non-conformist conformity” while the shallow cynicism and pseudo-heroic combat against imagined conspiracies offer what Paul Piccone—the mercurial editor of the journal Telos that brought critical theory to America—termed “artificial negativity.”

  But, surely, that is not the case with great artists like Charlie Chaplin or Bob Dylan or Francis Ford Coppola. Condemning the artistic quality of their works is possible only if they are denied the status of art by definition. Yet that is the claim made by Horkheimer, Adorno, and—albeit with a twist—even by Marcuse. It is the only position that fits the reification argument in Dialectic of Enlightenment and One-Dimensional Man.