Critical Theory

by Stephen Eric Bronner

  Dialectic of Enlightenment drove home that point. Its authors considered liberalism, while fine as an idea, an apologia for existing conditions. Its blindness to inhumanity and the irrational made liberalism and its humanist impulses, at best, incapable of effectively challenging its enemies and, at worst, complicit with them. They put the matter bluntly: “Enlightenment behaves toward things as a dictator toward men. He knows them insofar as he can manipulate them.” Goethe’s beloved oak tree sitting in the middle of the Buchenwald concentration camp provides a poignant and symbolic case in point for the fate of Enlightenment.

  Horkheimer and Adorno were not merely concerned with the empirical fact that totalitarianism had grown out of a liberal regime like the Weimar Republic. They were convinced that fascism was the product of conditions that existed prior to its triumph not in some negative sense, but as an actual continuation of those conditions it publicly (and hypocritically) denounced. Liberal ideas were betrayed by the instrumental framework in which they were embedded. Its subversion of conscience was made all the worse by the ideals supposedly justifying its existence. The Jew suffered the most: anthropologically because civilization always branded him as “alien” and historically because he was popularly considered the harbinger of liberalism and capitalism.

  5. Fascism finds its roots in the Enlightenment. This photograph shows Goethe’s beloved oak tree in the Buchenwald concentration camp.

  The irony is unavoidable. Hiding behind the veneer of liberal ideals, the reification process emancipated irrational fears and instinctive drives from the snares of conscience. The resulting anti-Semitism reflects a situation in which “blinded men robbed of their subjectivity are set loose as subjects.” There is no reasoning with these hollow individuals. Their irrationalism runs too deep. It was shaped not simply by fascism but by civilization and the unintended consequences of the enlightenment legacy.

  The retreat from history

  In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin noted that there is “no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Perhaps. But this claim only begs the question: how to differentiate between the two and determine which quality is more prevalent in any given work. Dialectic of Enlightenment never articulated the criteria necessary for providing an answer. Its authors refused to deal with the Enlightenment in terms of its influence upon institutions, movements, and political ideals. They identified it instead with a single form of rationality and then interrogated that in terms of a single anthropological narrative. The Enlightenment is taken to task without reference to the Counter-Enlightenment. The historical conflicts over constraining the arbitrary exercise of institutional power, and fostering the free exercise of individuality, simply vanish. Intellectual traditions lose their relation to organized forms of practice. There is only instrumental rationality: the transformative agent or, better, the new world spirit.

  Dialectic of Enlightenment never treats the seminal political thinkers. There is hardly a word about John Locke, Gotthold Lessing, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, or Tom Paine. The book’s authors looked farther. Their concern was with the Marquis de Sade, Schopenhauer, Bergson, and Nietzsche. Not one of them identified either with Enlightenment political principles or the organizations dedicated to realizing them. They were anti-liberal, anti-socialist, anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian, anti-rationalist and anti-historical.

  Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of scientific rationality is also politically misleading. Fascists were never infatuated with scientific rationality or universal categories. They instead made ideological use of notions like “Jewish physics” or “Italian mathematics.” Most positivist and neo-positivist exponents of scientific rationality in the twentieth century were liberals like Karl Popper; some were social democrats like Rudolf Carnap; and a few like Hans Reichenbach were even once members of the ultra-Left. Norberto Bobbio, the great socialist thinker and activist, was surely correct when he noted that contempt for positivism (not its embrace) was a hallmark of fascism.

  None of this, apparently, was relevant. Horkheimer and Adorno were more interested in the dialectical process that works behind the conscious intentions of individuals and groups. But their dialectic lacked historical specification. They never inquired into the moments of political decision that produced the new barbarism. Dialectic of Enlightenment has nothing to say about the Dreyfus Affair, the Russian Revolution, the fascist March on Rome, or the Nazi triumph. The organizational and ideological conflicts remain as invisible as the personalities involved. The connection between totalitarianism and modernity—with the Enlightenment as its source and instrumental rationality as its medium—simply doesn’t wash.

  It remains unclear why the most advanced capitalist nations like the United States and England never experienced a genuine fascist threat while far less advanced nations, like Italy and Romania, succumbed to the forces of reaction. It is also unclear why Japan never experienced the Enlightenment. Nor is there a discussion of totalitarianism from the Left. What occurred in the Soviet Union was a product not of modernity but the lack of it: Gramsci actually considered the Bolshevik revolution “a revolution against Das Kapital” while Leon Trotsky and Lenin maintained that the communist triumph was possible only because Imperial Russia was “the weakest link in the capitalist chain.”

  Orthodox Marxists among the social democratic leadership—not surprisingly—were clearer about all this than the far more philosophically sophisticated members of the Frankfurt School. Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg not only predicted the emergence of a terror apparatus in the Soviet Union as early as 1918, but analyzed it as the product of economic underdevelopment. Other scholars would note that in Germany the bourgeoisie had not yet ideologically come to terms with feudalism when fear of the proletariat led to its alignment with the reaction.

  European fascism was not the product of some prefabricated philosophical dialectic but rather the self-conscious ideological response to liberalism and social democracy. Its mass base everywhere lay primarily in pre-capitalist classes—the peasantry, the underclass, and the petite-bourgeoisie—whose existential and material interests seemed threatened by the capitalist production process and its two dominant classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Classes identified with modernity mostly supported political parties embracing a continental form of liberalism or a social democratic party still formally embracing orthodox Marxism and its communist rival. All these parties except the communists were supporters of the Weimar Republic, and all were enemies of the Nazis who made war on them in word and deed.

  Dialectic of Enlightenment casts these real historical conflicts into a metaphysical fog. Its famous interpretation of Odysseus, whose denial of his identity becomes the only way for him to survive his exile, offers a case in point. “The sacrifice of consciousness is carried out according to its own categories, rationally.” There is no turning back. Instrumental reason is necessary to survive and the forms in which we survive generate our destruction. Enlightenment is the story of a dynamic whose reifying effects culminate in the number tattooed on the arm of a concentration camp inmate. There is an extraordinary sweep to this provocative argument. But it is predicated on false concreteness and misplaced causality. Instrumental reason did not bring about Nazism or even destroy the ability of individuals to make normative judgments. The Nazi victory was rather the product of a clash between real movements whose members were quite capable of making diverse judgments concerning both their interests and their values.

  Fascism was never a foregone conclusion just as it was never simply a function of modernity. Real movements and real organizations, real traditions and real ideas, were in conflict. To ignore them is to embrace the reification of thinking that the Frankfurt School nominally sought to oppose. What emerges from Dialectic of Enlightenment is an unyielding process that excludes more than it illuminates—precisely because it is neither determinate in its historical claims nor precise in its political judgm
ents. The desire to unify qualitatively different phenomena under a single rubric could only produce historical disorientation and political confusion. Given his own association with Stalinism, Lukács may not have been one to point fingers. Nevertheless, there is something legitimate about his quip that the Frankfurt School watched the descent into barbarism from its “grand hotel abyss.”

  What next?

  Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno intended to confront the limits of Enlightenment from the standpoint of enlightenment itself. Their point of departure was the erosion of autonomy. Progress is seen by them as generating barbarism and the critique of capitalism is situated within a broader “anthropology of domination.” Their undertaking stands squarely within the dialectical tradition of Marxism. But the positive moment underpinning their critique never becomes concrete or clear. Because the whole is false, and mediations are never introduced, critical theory becomes compelled to consider negation as its guiding principle. The totally administered society is a product of teleology in reverse. Reification is creeping into every crevice of society and instrumental rationality, wherever it appears, is evincing yet another form of domination. Horkheimer and Adorno provide no criteria for drawing distinctions. For them, the basic situation is obvious: instrumental rationality is the problem, the commodity form is the culprit, and the culture industry is the enemy. There is no alternative. There is only an ongoing resistance waged in the name of an always elusive, if supposedly genuine, experience of individuality.

  Dialectic of Enlightenment was intended to have a sequel. Its authors might have felt that they had gone too far. Horkheimer had hopes for a “positive dialectical doctrine which has not yet been written.” The Enlightenment seemed to require rescuing or reclaiming. But that never came to fruition. There is much debate regarding why not. Some look to the fragmentary organization of the work—its use of aphorisms, montage, and its anti-systemic character. Others highlight the authors’ intellectual investment in negation. Still others point to their break with the Left and their fear of political engagement. Yet, there might be a different reason. Its authors might simply have found it impossible to offer a “positive dialectical doctrine”—because they no longer had anything “positive” to say.

  Chapter 5

  The utopian laboratory

  In 1795, Friedrich Schiller published his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. His aim was to preserve the utopian promises that the French Revolution had destroyed in the terror and the subsequent conservative swing—or Thermidor—that followed the execution of Robespierre in 1793. Schiller introduced aesthetics as a utopian response to reality. His classic work describes a new life-world in which the play impulse with its sensuous and form-giving qualities transforms existence and, implicitly, redefines the character of labor and science. The aesthetic realm incarnates the “inner truth” of humanity. Obliterating differences of status and power, it projects new forms of solidarity, freedom, and a non-instrumental treatment of nature. Utopia inheres within the “beautiful illusion” generated by art. But this illusion also serves as a regulative ideal. It shapes reality in accord with its own liberating standards and purposes: it embodies the promise of happiness that history has betrayed.

  The Frankfurt School would experiment with redeeming the ruins, fragments, and forgotten images that point to the realization of that promise. The proletarian revolution of its time may have turned totalitarian and the new vanguard may have failed in its historical mission. But, still, the reclamation project of the Frankfurt School bore a Marxian stamp. New material conditions were seen as justifying its turn to aesthetics and metaphysics. Contesting the totally administered society and the domination of instrumental reason called for rejecting the usual attempts to employ art for political purposes.

  A critical standpoint on aesthetics now suggested that the aim of art is not to depict the wrongs of society in realistic terms, offer platitudes about how things should be, or pander to the masses. Critical theory must redefine mimesis with an eye on montage, stream of consciousness, and other techniques that offer new forms—new illusions—for experiencing reality and eliciting the utopian longings of the audience. These longings are probably strongest when the conditions for their realization are most improbable. Herein perhaps is the meaning behind the famous words of Walter Benjamin from his essay on Kafka: “It is only for the sake of the hopeless that hope is given to us.”

  Anticipating utopia

  Ernst Bloch liked to quote those words. But he believed that utopia requires a more robust political and philosophical underpinning—and he sought to provide just that in his lifelong preoccupation with the “dream of the better life.” Attempts to demonstrate its content led to disquisitions on everything from reincarnation to alchemy. But he also offered a material foundation for utopia in the failed uprisings, forgotten experiments, and unrealized ideas that comprise the underground history of the revolution. All of them provide intimations of a world built on equality, justice, and freedom. Bloch’s writings thus reinvigorate an idea as old as humanity itself. Their unfinished, free-flowing, and associative character complements their classical erudition, expressionist literary style, and apocalyptic visions. Anticipatory fantasy mixes with a critical use of memory. Impulses for political emancipation are gleaned from the workers’ councils of his time back over to the free towns of Europe, the theology of forgotten Protestant revolutionaries like Thomas Munzer, the origins of natural right, and the sacred texts of the most varied religions.

  Admittedly: the claims made by Bloch were too often asserted rather than argued; his interpretive criteria were sometimes vague; and he often blurred the line between fantasy and logic. Yet, his desire was to make utopia concrete. The best life contests every currently alienated moment of the totality. It projects a unity between subject and object that turns the world into an experiment for the most diverse practices of individuality. The purpose animating this vast enterprise crystallizes in the closing lines of Bloch’s three-volume The Principle of Hope:

  …. man everywhere is still living in prehistory, indeed all and everything still stands before the creation of the world, of a right world. True genesis is not at the beginning but at the end, and it starts to begin only when society and existence become radical, i.e., grasp their roots. But the root of history is the working, creating human being who reshapes and overhauls the given facts. Once he has grasped himself and re-established what is his, without expropriation and alienation, in real democracy, there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: a homeland.

  Ernst Bloch subscribed to a version of this position throughout his long life. His Subject-Object (1949) and the famous conclusion to Spirit of Utopia (1918), “Karl Marx, Death and the Apocalypse,” evince roughly the same vision. A mainstay of the German avant-garde, a maverick Marxist who ultimately endorsed Stalinism in the 1930s, Bloch became a professor at the University of Leipzig after World War II, emigrated to the West when the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961, and taught at the University of Tübingen until his death. In the years before World War I, he and Lukács were best friends. They became Marxists together, and their work reflected the ambitions and hopes associated with the heroic years of the Russian Revolution. They were always together in the cafes and attending events—so much so that elements of both were fused into the character of Naptha, the intolerant authoritarian with Jesuitical traits, in the great prewar novel The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. The two friends broke over various aesthetic and philosophical matters in the late 1920s. Nevertheless, the rift between them only became public during the 1930s in an exchange over the political implications of literature that became known as “the expressionism debate.”

  Lukács had made his peace with the Communist International following its condemnation of History and Class Consciousness in 1924. He resolved to remain within the organization, and he kept to that resolution. His thinking became more rigid and more doctrinaire
yet, for better or worse, also more concerned with linking the revolutionary heritage of the bourgeoisie with communism. That certainly served as his motivation for initiating what undoubtedly became the most important literary debate of the interwar period.

  Echoing the growing call for an anti-fascist Popular Front, trying to understand the cultural roots of Nazism, Lukács challenged European modernism in general and German expressionism in particular for their irrationalism, subjectivism, and utopianism. Essays like “Greatness and Decline of Expressionism” (1934) and “Realism in the Balance” (1938) maintain that fashionable avant-garde trends helped create the cultural preconditions in which fascism could thrive. Lukács’ alternative was a form of “critical realism” perhaps best exemplified in the works of Honore de Balzac, Leo Tolstoy, and Thomas Mann.

  In “Discussing Expressionism” (1938) and other essays, Bloch took issue with Lukács’ line of reasoning. He opposed reducing literature to politics, insisted upon the humanitarian character of the expressionist enterprise, and highlighted its assault upon the cultural philistinism that was so much a part of the fascist worldview. Bloch also defended expressionism for its utopian sensibility and its vision of the new man. He never renounced his early writings. In contrast to Lukács, who once claimed that the worst form of socialism is better than the best form of capitalism, Bloch always contended that the worst form of socialism is not socialism at all. Socialism must prefigure the best life if it is to prove worthy of its name. Utopia cannot remain the land that Samuel Butler called erewhon—or nowhere (sort of) spelled backwards.