Critical theory was intended as a general theory of society fueled by the desire for liberation. Its practitioners understood that new social conditions would give rise to new ideas and new problems for radical practice—and that the character of the critical method would change along with the substance of emancipation. Highlighting the context for practice thus became a core concern for the new interdisciplinary approach of the Frankfurt School. In turn, this led its members to reject the traditional separation between facts and values.
Critical theory would treat facts less as isolated depictions of reality than as crystallized historical products of social action. The aim was to understand a fact within the value-laden context wherein it assumes meaning. Lukács had already placed the category of totality, or what Marx termed “the ensemble of social relations,” at the center of historical materialism. The totality was seen as comprised of various moments with the economy serving as merely one among others like the state and a cultural realm that itself could be divided into religion, art, and philosophy. Each moment is shaped by the totality but each is also understood as having its unique dynamic and, as a consequence, an impact upon the practice of those agents (like the working class) intent upon transforming reality. Each moment thus needs to be taken seriously.
Fromm made this idea his starting point in “Psychoanalysis and Sociology” (1929) and “Politics and Psychoanalysis” (1930). These two early essays noted the impact of society on how the ego is organized, how the psychic apparatus affects the development of society, and the extent to which psychology can aid the political confrontation with inhuman conditions. Fromm also sought to show how psychological attitudes mediated the relation between the individual and society.
Escape from Freedom, his most famous work, analyzed the market character generated by capitalist society and its sadomasochistic variant as a specific response to the cultural crisis of the Weimar Republic. This work spoke to the alienating impulses of modern life that produced the desire to identify totally with a leader. His materialist psychology already found expression during the late 1920s in The Working Class in Weimar Germany, a massive empirical study that dealt with the debilitating impact of traditional attitudes, familial relations, and social life on revolutionary class consciousness.
Critical theory resurrected the concern with ideology and its practical impact. History and Class Consciousness showed how an unacknowledged class standpoint prevented even the giants of bourgeois thought from dealing with the social causes of alienation and reification. Korsch insisted, meanwhile, that all the variants of Marxism needed to be seen in relation to developments in the labor movement at any particular point in time. The Frankfurt School began to analyze mass culture, the state, reactionary sexual mores, and even philosophy with regard to their effects on consciousness. Highlighting how everyday artifacts illuminate the character of society and the cultural trends of an epoch quickly proved of particular interest for its members and associates. Critical theory sought to make good on the injunction of the young Marx and engage in a “ruthless critique of everything existing.” Its leading representatives insisted that the whole could be seen in the particular and the particular reflected the whole.
“The Mass Ornament” (1927) by Siegfried Kracauer, for example, noted how the geometric patterns and highly orchestrated movements of a dance troupe known as the Tiller Girls (anticipating the Rockettes of Radio City Music Hall) reflected the regulation of audiences and the loss of individuality in mass society.
3. The Tiller Girls danced in tightly orchestrated geometric patterns that seemed to reflect the increasing administration and standardization of modern society.
Close friends with Benjamin and Adorno, and loosely associated with the Frankfurt School, Kracauer authored a self-styled “social biography”—Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time (1937)—that placed the music of the great composer in the context of the parliamentary revolt of 1832 with an eye on the antifascist Popular Front. His classic From Caligari to Hitler (1947), meanwhile, would illustrate how Nazi themes increasingly penetrated the German films of the Weimar Republic.
Other thinkers followed suit. “The Storyteller” (1936) by Walter Benjamin discussed the erosion of the oral tradition and the imperiled character of historical experience in relation to the new technological possibilities for reproducing art in modern society. “Lyric Poetry and Society” (1957) by Theodor W. Adorno innovatively interpreted the ideological residues of a poetic genre usually considered insulated from external forces. In a similar vein, Leo Lowenthal viewed the increasing lack of individuality among movie stars as reflecting the growing power of the commodity form in his essay collection, Literature and Mass Culture (published 1984). He also offered an elegant sociological inquiry into the emergence of the bourgeois mentality through major literary characters in Literature and the Image of Man (published 1986).
All of these works evince the influence of the sociology of knowledge whose leading figure, Karl Mannheim, held seminars in the Institute for Social Research. His major work, Ideology and Utopia (1931), argued that even the most universal and utopian mode of thought is ideological insofar as it inherently reflects the interests of a particular social group or class. Only the “free-floating intelligentsia” is seen by Mannheim (who was also deeply influenced by Lukacs) as capable of grasping the totality. Horkheimer dealt with all of this in “The Social Function of Philosophy” (1939). He objected to the mechanical reduction of philosophy to sociology, Significantly, however, he avoided directly confronting the idea of a free-floating intelligentsia. That only makes sense. Horkheimer took pride in the political independence of the Institute. He also maintained that the critique of ideology employs speculative norms for judging how ideas express particular social interests. It evaluates cultural phenomena in terms of both how they justify the existing order and contest the abolition of exploitation and unhappiness.
Critical theory can be understood as presenting a version of the sociology of knowledge with a transformative intent Marx had understood capitalism as an economic system in which the working class serves as the producer of wealth (or capital). If only for this reason, the proletariat constitutes the only force capable of transforming the system. In The Communist Manifesto (1848), however, Marx and Engels insisted that revolutions are possible only if elements of the ruling class break off and join the struggle of the oppressed. Insofar as the working class is entrapped by capitalism, and material misery stunts its consciousness, bourgeois intellectuals are needed to provide the proletariat with a systemic critique of capitalism and consciousness of its revolutionary possibilities. Lenin drew the radical implications.
The Frankfurt School was sympathetic to communism during the 1930s. Its members did not yet offer an outright critique of technological rationality. They were content to argue that the dominance of instrumental reason was merely an expression of capitalist social relations. As communism turned totalitarian, however, the Frankfurt School became disillusioned, and its critique of the reification process intensified. The Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 that unleashed World War II was the last straw. Practice had betrayed theory. The teleological claims of historical materialism now seemed as barren as the ethical imperatives of idealism. Social transformation was no longer the issue. Totalitarianism turned the preservation of individuality into the central preoccupation of critical theory.
New motivations and forms of resistance were required. Horkheimer’s early collection of aphorisms, Dawn, had already interpreted empathy and compassion as concrete needs and as ethical impulses for action. His thinking was in accord with the criticism that David Hume once made with regard to the philosophy of Kant: animals should be protected, the great Scottish philosopher claimed, not because they think but because they suffer. Emotional experience was thus interpreted as a source of resistance and liberation. Benjamin wrote about how surrealism with its reliance on the powers of the unconscious generates a revolutionary “intoxication” that responds
to a stultifying “poverty of the interior.”
Adorno gave his Minima Moralia (1951) the subtitle “reflections of a damaged life.” Issues of love and personal fulfillment would play an ever more profound role in Fromm’s later writings while Marcuse ultimately developed the idea of a “new sensibility” in An Essay on Liberation (1972). The Frankfurt School was now engaged in redeeming the repressed potential within the lived life of the individual.
Contempt for cruelty and the desire to live an upright existence inspired its intellectual efforts. All its members showed an explicit interest in abolishing not merely social injustice but the psychological, cultural, and anthropological sources of unhappiness. Intellectual support for this undertaking derives from a plethora of sources. The Frankfurt School was audacious in its attempts to assimilate the insights of diverse thinkers into the framework of historical materialism. Its members looked to Freud either for his metapschology, which might underpin their critique of civilization, or for insights deriving from his clinical work. Like the rest of their generation, moreover, leading figures of the Frankfurt School were also inspired by Nietzsche for his resurrection of subjectivity, his “perspectival” approach, his contributions to modernism, and his searing criticisms of the cultural philistine. These thinkers would help deepen the philosophical and cultural outlook of the Frankfurt School. Whether their views fit logically into some prefabricated system of historical materialism was considered immaterial.
Walter Benjamin actually sought to refashion Marxism by framing its revolutionary commitments in theological terms. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” written shortly before his death in 1940, the Messiah can appear at any moment in time; exigencies and constraints give way before the possibilities of the pregnant “now-time” (Jetztzeit); the revolution becomes an apocalyptic “leap into the open skies of history.” Indications of how all this might be achieved—or even what is concretely implied—are lacking. Symbols trump reality: the imagination runs wild. Redeeming the forgotten moments of history now becomes the goal of critique. Benjamin conceived of history as “one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.” Only from the standpoint of a messianic materialism are the shards of that catastrophe open to redemption.
Gershom Scholem was on target when he called his friend a “theologian marooned in the realm of the profane.” What remains from Benjamin’s investigations is less an explicit method than an ill-fated attempt to blend the theological reclamation of experience with the revolutionary kernel of historical materialism. He often made use of modernist techniques, and he was inspired by the emphasis upon subjectivity offered not only by expressionism and surrealism but by romanticism and the baroque. His injunction to “never forget the best” was coupled with his desire to “rub history against the grain.” Discarded fragments reveal the possibility for an apocalyptic redemption of undefined stature that might occur at any moment—or, more likely, never.
Everyday life serves as the material for utopia, and no preconceived plan or set of universal concepts can suffice for its determination. Utopia derives from the imaginative will to reconfigure what Benjamin called the “rubbish” of history—the look of a forgotten boulevard, postage stamps, children’s literature, eating, collecting books, the euphoria of hashish, memories of revolutionaries shooting at the clocks. Montage and stream of consciousness were most appropriate for generating the kind of “revolutionary intoxication” that led those radical street-fighters of 1789 to indeed shoot at clocks embedded in the towers above them. The real changes its face in the light of future redemption. The imaginative will—theological in origin—shatters the material constraints of history. Each moment of time is the door through which the Messiah might pass.
The question is how best to open it. To remember the best requires a distinctly hermeneutical approach predicated on the assumption that “allegory is to language what ruins are to things.” Civilization offers only hints and traces of what utopia must redeem. In keeping with the famous painting Angelus Novus (1920) by Paul Klee, wherein the angel of history with face turned to the past is nonetheless propelled into the future. Benjamin owned the painting and was proud of it. That painting ultimately became an icon of the Left. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin described this angel in the following way:
His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Redemption is now the key to utopia. Critique recalls what history forgets by rummaging around the ruins and putting the garbage to use in sparking the imagination. The totality now makes way for a “constellation” of juxtaposed empirical facts that illuminates a particular theme or concept for which members of the audience must provide ever-changing connections and interpretations. Benjamin’s unfinished and posthumously published Arcades Project is an expression of this outlook. Its attempt to offer an “ur-history of modernity,” by providing thousands of quotations without authorial commentary, projects a transcendent narrative constructed through fragments and fashioned with an ever-shifting gaze on the reader’s desire. Existing within an experiential “horizon,” seemingly preserved from the imposition of external categories, these quotations constitute a grand montage. If the totally administered society is standardizing thought by rendering it formulaic, then redemption cannot be found in the simple narrative form. Only aphorisms or fragments allow for the evanescent moment in which utopian glimpses can be illuminated. The mediated totality surrenders in favor of the individually structured constellation as the organizing principle of critical theory.
“The Actuality of Philosophy,” which Adorno presented as his inaugural lecture to the Institute in 1931, used it to challenge the totalizing outlook of Hegel and Marx. The constellation offers no structured narrative or overarching logic that might provide a consensual view of what is being presented. Each member of the audience can put an interpretive stamp on the fragments as if he or she were looking at a collage or surrealist painting. Benjamin’s Arcades Project crystallizes the constellation. His interpretation of modernity contests the rational presumptions of a seemingly integrated world that is actually dominated by rupture and incoherence.
Critical theory shifts its focus: its aim is now to awaken the individual from the intellectual slumber into which he or she has been socialized. Subjectivity is no longer considered identical with or capable of being defined by any category. In The Jargon of Authenticity (1964), for example, Adorno insists that even existential phenomenology standardizes experience and that ontologically structured intuitions—especially of the sort connected with dying and death—substitute individuation for individuality. Divorcing experience from critical reflection creates an opening for ideology and compromises the ability to resist what Adorno termed the “ontology of false conditions.” But the assault on system, logic, and narrative by Benjamin and Adorno carry a price: it undermines the ability to generate criteria for making ethical and political judgments thereby threatening to plunge critical theory into relativism.
In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987), Jürgen Habermas sought to confront these philosophical problems. He questioned the emphasis on a free-floating subjectivity of resistance and insisted upon explicit foundations for any genuinely critical theory of society. Better to rely on the structure of language—or communicative action—for grounding reciprocity, reflection, and universality. But this form of critique gives too much ground to establishmentarian forms of philosophy. It remains stuck in analytic concerns–the argument remains defined by what it should oppose.
The Frankfurt School originally saw itself articulating a new form of materialism infused with critical reflection, a capacity for fantasy, and the prospect of resisting an increasingly bureaucratized world. But it became ever less clear what practical purposes its speculative inquiries were meant to serve. The understanding of resistance grew increasingly vague. It was as if the real conflicts of interest, the real imbalances of power, were vanishing within a totality defined by alienation and reification.
Chapter 3
Alienation and reification
An extraordinary intellectual event took place in 1932. That was the year in which Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 were finally published, accompanied by a superb review from Herbert Marcuse, in the Institute’s Journal for Social Research. The collection had been smuggled out of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow by its director, David Ryazanov, who was obviously risking his life, considering the political climate at that time. These manuscripts, when coupled with other writings of the young Marx, quickly achieved international renown. They served to justify many of the arguments made by Western Marxism in general and Georg Lukács in particular.
Critical Theory Page 4
