The Frankfurt School was profoundly mistaken in thinking that the Enlightenment—or, better, its scientific rationality—should be interpreted as triumphant or in isolation from the theory and practice of its rivals. Enlightenment thinking has always been on the defensive. That remains the case. From the “Know-Nothings” of the early nineteenth century to the Ku Klux Klan to the “America Firsters” to the “Tea-Baggers” of our own time, indeed, the United States has suffered from what Richard Hofstadter called a “paranoid” strain in its politics. The most cursory look at world events further justifies this assessment. Human rights, tolerance, cosmopolitan ideals, (and even science) are most everywhere under siege—or, at least, contested—by forces of religious fanaticism, cultural provincialism, and authoritarian reaction.
Ernst Bloch’s Heritage of Our Times (1935) argues that modernity generates resentment and support for atavistic values by premodern constituencies that feel themselves imperiled by its effects. In analyzing fascism, he investigates contradictions existing in a variety of social spheres that have been carried over from one period to the next in which they assume a new character. If capitalist society is shaped by specific conflicts of class interest, for example, it also exhibits pre-capitalist (and thus nonsynchronous) problems with sexism or racism or even leadership that require previously unanticipated solutions. If only for this reason the future is always open. That the political and ideological opponents of modernity can still achieve power is what this perspective has to teach.
In castigating the Enlightenment, the Frankfurt School ignored what Sir Isaiah Berlin first termed the Counter-Enlightenment. Luminaries of the reaction like Johann Georg Hamann were of an inferior intellectual caliber than their liberal opponents. They reveal themselves as so authoritarian, narrow-minded, and bigoted that they are barely worth reading today. In forgetting about them, however, criticisms of the Enlightenment offered by the Frankfurt School ultimately prove distorted. The phenomenon is judged out of context and with an abstract point of reference.
Liberal republicanism and democratic socialism both have their roots in the Enlightenment. Its partisans were in the forefront of those contesting the exercise of arbitrary power by unaccountable institutions. But they also contributed to the transformation of civil society through their attack on elementary forms of cruelty, religious dogmatism, illiteracy, superstition, xenophobia, and impolite behavior. The enlightenment legacy has only gained in its social and political relevance. There are three basic political points for critical theory to consider:
1) Enlightenment ideals evince an elective affinity with anti-authoritarian movements. Left wing movements tend to privilege cosmopolitanism over parochialism, reason over intuition, skepticism over tradition, and liberty over authority. It only makes sense that right-wing movements should embrace the Counter-Enlightenment. Two movements were in conflict from the start. The dialectic of enlightenment is a fiction.
2) Enlightenment norms have an inherently critical character. Victims of prejudice inevitably refer to them when calling for remedial action. No custom or tradition, moreover, is exempt from scrutiny. Universal norms associated with the Enlightenment contest the personal prejudices held even by many of its most notable representatives.
3) Enlightenment principles foster pluralism. They expressly reject integral nationalism and the organic community. They also highlight tolerance, experimentation, and autonomy. Only insofar as the liberal rule of law is operative is it possible to speak about the free and practical exercise of subjectivity.
None of this was fully appreciated by the inner circle of the Frankfurt School—and the implications are apparent in its treatment of mass education and the culture industry. Insofar as works of art are treated no differently than other commodities, the culture industry is seen by the Frankfurt School as standardizing aesthetic experience and imperiling subjectivity. An inevitable loss of intellectual standards takes place through its obsession with maximizing profits by constantly lowering the lowest common denominator. Popularity integrates the work into the system. Its critical character and its ability to project an emancipated alternative therefore necessarily diminish. Only highly complex and sophisticated artworks can subsequently elicit those repressed utopian images and experiences of subjectivity that are capable of resisting the debilitating impulses of mass society.
However, there is nothing stagnant about the culture industry. Its aesthetic and technological inventions have been astonishing. It has fostered pluralism by generating multiple publics—each with its own standards of judgment and purpose. Many of its works challenge the status quo and reification. But that is not really the point. Insisting that genuine art must somehow contest the ontology of false conditions is nostalgia for the seminar room masquerading as radicalism.
Critical theory thereby lays itself open to caricature: its negation appears as the liberator incapable of either identifying the form that liberation should take or dealing with the embrace of oppression by the oppressed. Especially the adherents of negative dialectics never seem willing to put anything on the table other than their completely arbitrary taste for what constitutes resistance. Culture has always been used to maintain the rule of the powerful and the submission of the powerless. The ruling ideas,” wrote Brecht in Saint Joan of the Stockyards (1929), “are the ideas of those who rule.” With its abstract preoccupations, however, the Frankfurt School strips resistance to those ideas of any material referent.
Ideological conflicts within the cultural apparatus remain unspecified and indeterminate. Extreme populist tendencies on the Left may condemn complexity, ignore the canon, and dismiss the idea of classic works in ways that render it complicit in its own oppression. Yet critical theory might benefit from a bit less emphasis on the way in which the culture industry manipulates art than with its still untapped potential for shaping progressive political awareness.
Saturday Night Live and the comedienne Tina Fey helped demolish Governor Sarah Palin—the notorious vice-presidential choice of Senator John McCain and the Republicans in 2008—at least for that campaign. Mass media has, of course, been employed by right wing demagogues. But the culture industry is best conceived as what the critical philosopher Douglas Kellner termed a “contested terrain” in which battles are constantly taking place between unequal combatants with opposed ideological visions and values. Or, to put it another way, the culture industry is a branch of commodity production that can prove critical of commodity production.
Walter Benjamin treated such themes in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1935). This famous essay juxtaposes the premodern against the modern experience of painting. Taking place in a religious context, the premodern encounter with a painting is bathed in an “aura”: the onlooker finds the work unique, authentic, a living symbol beyond the techniques used to produce it, and grounded within a palpable tradition. The technological ability to reproduce the work—think of a painting by Picasso turned into a poster adorning the wall of a college student—strips away its aura, its uniqueness, its authenticity, and its grounding in a fixed tradition. The loss of aura can intensify feelings of alienation and the appeal of reactionary movements intent upon providing an illusory sense of belonging. But the erosion of aura can also open the work to critical reflection or what Benjamin termed “a heightened presence of mind.”
Two possibilities subsequently present themselves: either the audience succumbs to emotional manipulation in an inauthentic attempt to experience what can no longer be experienced or it employs critical reflection to foster existential and political awareness. Too often, however, critics of the culture industry essentially deny that choice: the loss of aura is usually understood as presaging the manipulation of subjectivity and justifying the estrangement of art from the tastes and interests of the broader public.
Entertainment and reflection are not always mutually exclusive. Alternative media and cyberspace offer new options for progressive forces. Technical vir
tuosity also need not prove self-indulgent. Karl Krauss, who was much revered by Adorno, attacked the press and the conformist intellectuals of his time with satirical venom and a linguistic facility rarely found today. But Kraus’s assault on the “failure of the imagination” that marked his time had a concrete focus: it was directed at cultural luminaries who were unable to envision the practical implications of their words.
Similar concerns mark an experimental—if highly controversial—novel like Human Smoke (2008) by Nicholson Baker. That work about the interwar period and the genesis of genocide employs hundreds of citations and anecdotes for the reader to organize in a constellation that analyzes the terrible dynamics of political violence, disparages mythical icons, reclaims forgotten men and women of conscience, and crystallizes the dignity of pacifism. It is possible to disagree with the author’s conclusions, but impossible to ignore the critical perspective on history that he brings to bear or the ethical impulses informing his work. Enough popular intellectuals inside and outside the culture industry are engaged in producing new constellations and rubbing history against the grain—often with a political purpose.
The transformative impulse
Critical theory was originally intended as an interdisciplinary enterprise to which each might bring his or her unique disciplinary talent and expertise. Its representatives highlighted the relation between philosophy and politics, society and psychology, culture and liberation. They conceived of the totality and changed the way in which the social sciences, the humanities, and even interpreters of the natural sciences look at the world. The Frankfurt School called outworn concepts into question. They looked at cultural ruins and lost hopes and what hegemonic cultural forces had ignored or repressed. They demanded that those committed to the ideals of liberation respond to new contingencies and new constraints. They also intimated the need for a new understanding of the relation between theory and practice. It is a proud legacy that is worth preserving—although without slavish devotion to this or that position or prophecy. Critical theory has new conditions to confront: the world has grown larger, new encounters with old civilizations have taken place, identities have multiplied, and—perhaps for the first time—it is possible to speak about a global economy and cultural system.
When Max Horkheimer took over the Institute, he hoped that critical theory would become a kind of public philosophy rather than yet another academic specialty that catered to an audience of experts. If this is still the goal, then critical theorists need to stop using the style of a tax form and abandon a one-sided analysis of mass culture based on the proposition that popularity—or clarity—is somehow inherently detrimental to the radicalism of a work.
Fostering a radical public philosophy is possible only by interrogating public problems and offering alternatives to the ways in which society stunts individuality. Critical theory has too long indulged what Thomas Mann first called a “power-protected inwardness.” New aims and methods are necessary to illuminate imbalances of social, economic, and political power with an eye on the prospects for intervention.
Such an enterprise rests on clarifying the values and interests that existing ideologies and institutions tend to hide—so that everyday people can judge them and respond appropriately. C. Wright Mills made just this point in The Sociological Imagination (1960). In that classic work, which was strongly influenced by critical theory, this noted radical thinker called upon academics and intellectuals to transform “private troubles into public issues.” Women have already turned incest and spousal abuse from private into public concerns; gay and lesbian citizens have advocated the need for legislation against “hate crimes”; people of color are challenging institutional racism; and countless other attempts have been made—and are still being made—to render the myriad institutions of the powerful accountable to the disempowered.
Agency has not disappeared from the world. Radical social movements still exist. But they are divided by deep and abiding differences. There is competition for resources, loyalty, and publicity. Incentives exist for organized interest groups to engage in the moral economy of the separate deal—so that the whole of the Left becomes less than the sum of its parts. Critical theory can help in coordinating interests with new categories and new principles. It has other tasks as well.
Democracy remains unfinished; cosmopolitanism is challenged by identity; socialism requires a new definition; and class ideals still await realization. The cultural inheritance of the past has still not been reclaimed; our experience of the world is still too narrow; and the ability of audiences to learn still requires criteria concerning what needs to be taught. New forms of redemption may still exist for the neglected utopian shards that have been littered throughout history. Engaging these matters requires an interdisciplinary outlook informed by liberating norms. There is always room for the discussion of regulative ideals like justice, liberty, and the like.
That is also the case for ontological categories dealing with the structure and meaning of existence. But there are better things for critical theorists to do than indulge what has become an obsession with attempting to express the inexpressible. Better to identify what is apparent but unrecognized, painful yet remediable, and repressed yet empowering. Only by confronting the world with a multifaceted transformative project can critical theory reassert its uniqueness and the salience of its animating ideals: solidarity, resistance, and freedom.
Further reading
Chapter 1
Illuminations: The Critical Theory Web Site. www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/
Arato, Andrew, and Eike Gebhardt, eds. The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. New York: Continuum, 1982.
Benhabib, Seyla, et al., eds. On Max Horkheimer Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.
Bronner, Stephen Eric. Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Bronner, Stephen Eric, and Douglas Kellner, eds. Critical Theory and Society. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Habermas, Jürgen. Philosophical-Political Profiles. Translated by Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983.
Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Lowenthal, Leo. Critical Theory and Frankfurt Theorists: Lectures-Correspondence-Conversations. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1989.
Tar, Zoltan. The Frankfurt School. New York: Schocken, 1985.
Wheatland, Thomas P. The Frankfurt School in America: A Transatlantic Odyssey. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Wiggershaus, Rolf. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance. Translated by Michael Robertson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994.
Chapter 2
Arato, Andrew, and Paul Breines. The Young Lukacs and the Origins of Western Marxism. New York: Seabury, 1979.
Dubiel, Helmut. Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory. Translated by Benjamin Gregg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985.
Forgasc, David, ed. The Antonio Gramsci Reader 1916–1935. New York: New York University Press, 2000.
Honneth, Axel. Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007.
Horkheimer, Max. Critical Theory. Translated by Matthew J. O’Connell. New York: Seabury Press, 1973.
———. A Life in Letters: Selected Correspondence. Edited and translated by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.
Jay, Martin. Marxism and the Totality: Adventures of a Concept from Lukacs to Habermas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Jones, Steven J. Antonio Gramsci. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Kellner, Douglas. Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.
Korsch, Karl. Revolutionary Theory. Edited by Douglas Kellner. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Adventures of the Dialectic. Translated by Joseph Bien. Evanston, IL: Northwester
n University Press, 1973.
Morton, Adam. Unraveling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Economy. London: Pluto Press, 2007.
Rush, Fred, ed. Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Chapter 3
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969.
Berman, Marshall. Adventures in Marxism. London: Verso, 1999.
Easton, Loyd D., and Kurt H. Guddat, eds. and trans. New York: Doubleday, 1967.
Feenberg, Andrew. Alternative Modernity: The Technical Turn in Philosophy and Social Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press: 1995.
Gerth, H. H., and C. Wright Mills, eds. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1958.
Honneth, Axel. Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea with Judith Butler, Raymond Geuss, and Jonathan Leader. Edited by Martin Jay. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Marcuse, Herbert. From Luther to Popper: Studies in Critical Philosophy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.
Ollman, Bertell. Alienation: Marx’s Concept of Man in Capitalist Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Schmitt, Richard. Alienation and Freedom. Boulder: Westview Press, 2002.
Chapter 4
Adorno, Theodor W., et al. The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. Translated by Glyn Adey and David Frisby. London: Heinemann, 1976.
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