Critical Theory and Phenomenology: Polemics, Appropriations, Perspectives 3031276140, 9783031276149

Table of contents :
Preface: Putting Phenomenology in Dialogue with Critical Theory
Intersections Between Phenomenology and Critical Theory
Phenomenology and Jugendstil
Critical Theory and the Continental/Analytic Divide
Materialist Eidetics
New Practices of Philosophy
References
Contents
The Function of Pre-theoretical Experience in Critical Theory and Phenomenology
1 Pre-theoretical Experience in Phenomenology
2 Traditional and Critical Theory
3 The Positivism Debate
4 Physiognomics
5 Unregimented Experience
References
Eidetic Intuition and Physiognomic Interpretation
1 Adorno and Phenomenology
2 Abstraction
3 Genesis
4 Physiognomics
5 Conclusions
References
Adorno’s Genetic Phenomenology
1 Misunderstandings
2 Social Genesis
3 Second Nature
4 Questions of Generality
5 Conclusion
References
On Radio. Phenomenology and Critical Media Studies
1 Administrative Versus Critical Research
2 Against Phenomenology
3 The Metacritique of Neopositivism
4 Radio Physiognomics
5 Fine-Tuning Empirical Research
6 Challenges for a New Phenomenology
References
Benjamin and the Essence of Phenomenology
1 The Problem
2 Reception
3 Criticism
4 A Two-Front War
5 Essence
References
Tactile Reception and Life-Worldly Circumspection
1 Architecture
2 Circumspection
3 Tactility and Film
4 Conclusion
References
History at the Crossroads: Heidegger and Surrealism
1 The Surrealist Interpretation of History
2 Reactionary and Revolutionary Historiographies
3 Philosophizing History
References
Statistic Intersubjectivity. A Phenomenology of Television Audiences
1 Perception and Statistics
2 Collective Perception
3 Television
4 Conclusion
References
Kracauer: The Birth of Dialectics from Phenomenological Sociology
1 Phenomenology
2 Simmel
3 Journalistic vs. Academic Philosophy
4 Existentialism
5 The Reform Movements
6 Authenticity
7 Dialectics
References
Sancho Panza and the Dialectics of Historic Film
1 Theory of Film
2 Adorno
3 History
4 Documentary and Fiction
5 Historic Film
6 Actualization and Empathy
7 Digital Colorization: A Case-Study
8 Historic Intentionality
References
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

Contributions to Phenomenology 125

Christian Ferencz-Flatz

Critical Theory and Phenomenology Polemics, Appropriations, Perspectives

Contributions to Phenomenology In Cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology Volume 125 Series Editors Nicolas de Warren, Department of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA Ted Toadvine, Department of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA Editorial Board Lilian Alweiss, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland Elizabeth Behnke, Ferndale, WA, USA Rudolf Bernet, Husserl Archive, KU Leuven, Belgium David Carr, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA Chan-Fai Cheung, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, Hong Kong James Dodd, New School University, New York, USA Alfredo Ferrarin, Università di Pisa, Pisa, Italy Burt Hopkins, University of Lille, Lille, France José Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada Kwok-Ying Lau, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, Hong Kong Nam-In Lee, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea (Republic of) Dieter Lohmar, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany William R. McKenna, Miami University, Ohio, USA Algis Mickunas, Ohio University, Ohio, USA J. N. Mohanty, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA Dermot Moran, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland Junichi Murata, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan Thomas Nenon, The University of Memphis, Memphis, USA Gail Soffer, Roma Tre University, Rome, Italy Anthony Steinbock, Department of Philosophy Stony Brook, University Stony Brook, New York, USA Shigeru Taguchi, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan Dan Zahavi, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA

Scope The purpose of the series is to serve as a vehicle for the pursuit of phenomenological research across a broad spectrum, including cross-over developments with other fields of inquiry such as the social sciences and cognitive science. Since its establishment in 1987, Contributions to Phenomenology has published more than 100 titles on diverse themes of phenomenological philosophy. In addition to welcoming monographs and collections of papers in established areas of scholarship, the series encourages original work in phenomenology. The breadth and depth of the Series reflects the rich and varied significance of phenomenological thinking for seminal questions of human inquiry as well as the increasingly international reach of phenomenological research. All books to be published in this Series will be fully peer-reviewed before final acceptance. The series is published in cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology.

Christian Ferencz-Flatz

Critical Theory and Phenomenology Polemics, Appropriations, Perspectives

Christian Ferencz-Flatz Alexandru Dragomir Institute for Philosophy Bucharest, Romania

ISSN 0923-9545     ISSN 2215-1915 (electronic) Contributions to Phenomenology ISBN 978-3-031-27614-9    ISBN 978-3-031-27615-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27615-6 CNCS-UEFISCIPN-III-1.1-TE-2016-030 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface: Putting Phenomenology in Dialogue with Critical Theory

This book is a collection of essays dealing with the relationship between two main traditions in continental philosophy, namely phenomenology and critical theory. In particular, they focus on three key authors: Theodor W. Adorno (Chapters “The Function of Pre-­theoretical Experience in Critical Theory and Phenomenology”, “Eidetic Intuition and Physiognomic Interpretation”, “Adorno’s Genetic Phenomenology” and “On Radio. Phenomenology and Critical Media Studies”), Walter Benjamin (Chapters “Benjamin and the Essence of Phenomenology”, “Tactile Reception and Life-­Worldly Circumspection”, “History at the Crossroads: Heidegger and Surrealism” and “Statistic Intersubjectivity. A Phenomenology of Television Audiences”) and Siegfried Kracauer (Chapters “Kracauer: The Birth of Dialectics from Phenomenological Sociology” and “Sancho Panza and the Dialectics of Historic Film”), following an overarching main thread in their respective treatment of material eidetics. To be sure, all three authors have criticized the ambition of early phenomenology to develop techniques and methods for arriving at synthetic, and not just analytic, claims about the structure of experience and its objects without directly drawing from experience proper. This is precisely what the phenomenological notion of “material ontology” refers to. In contrast to a formal ontology, which merely contends to analytically develop what is implicit in our notion of an “object” in general, material or regional ontologies aim at synthetically unearthing the essences that underlie our empirical concepts, constituting a rational or philosophical discipline as a counterpart to any possible empirical science: for instance, a rational social ontology as the a priori fundament of the social sciences.1 Despite their criticism of this project, however, early critical theorists have also been particularly drawn by these attempts, and borrowed from them. The three sections of this book, devoted to the aforementioned authors also have some other common threads, for instance in their specific concern for history, and they all conclude with an attempt to verify the methodological and philosophical reflections developed in their first, more abstract chapters with a more concrete application in

 See for this especially Salice 2013.

1

v

vi

Preface: Putting Phenomenology in Dialogue with Critical Theory

the specific field of media studies in their final chapter (with regard to the Radio, Television or Cinema). This introductory chapter is an attempt to both reconstruct some of the most significant motivations that drove this project and to contextualize the reflections that follow by also pointing out some of their implicit references, which guided their reflections in some form from the onset, but no longer made it explicitly into this selection.

Intersections Between Phenomenology and Critical Theory This book is not an attempt to build bridges between phenomenology and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. Such an effort would be vain anyhow, given that the opposition between the two schools has long ceased to be as irreconcilable as their proponents initially viewed it. Indeed, during the 1920 and 1930s, for instance, Adorno’s early lectures still emphatically saw critical theory in explicit opposition to the phenomenological project, which Adorno interpreted as the last desperate attempt to save philosophical idealism from its imminent demise.2 Similarly, Max Horkheimer’s programmatic essay “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937) depicted phenomenology as but one of the contemporary versions of traditional theory against the backdrop of which he advocated “critical theory” as an entirely new breed of theoretical work.3 During the past few decades, however, this stark opposition between the two has gradually softened on several accounts. The process was, on the one hand, certainly favored by contingent circumstances like the dominance of Analytic Philosophy on the postwar American academic scene, which led most major currents of contemporary European philosophy to side under the common denominator of “Continental Philosophy”. Naturally, such a context also encouraged an eclectic interpenetration of their respective methodologies as well. This intermingling comes to view most strikingly when considering the development of the Society for Phenomenology and Existentialist Philosophy, which now long includes sections devoted to various versions of critical theory. Aside from these contingent historical factors, however, their convergence was ultimately also driven by internal reasons pertaining to both schools. Thus, already in the 1980s, Jürgen Habermas elaborated his grounding theory of communicative action in constant engagement with the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schutz and Gadamer’s hermeneutics of mutual understanding.4 More recently, Axel Honneth drew heavily from early phenomenological accounts of intersubjectivity, most notably Heidegger and Sartre, for his critical analysis of recognition.5 On the

 See for instance Adorno 1977.  Horkheimer 1972. 4  See especially his preliminary work to the Theory of Communicative Action: “Ein Literaturbericht (1967): Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften”, in: Habermas 1982, pp. 89–330. 5  See especially Honneth 2003. 2 3

Preface: Putting Phenomenology in Dialogue with Critical Theory

vii

other side, several early phenomenologists have either switched camp (like Marcuse), or at least established some sort of middle ground between the two positions (like Günther Anders, or perhaps also Karl Löwith), while, in somewhat more recent years, several important scholars working within the phenomenological tradition like Günther Figal, or László Tengelyi have engaged in sympathetic interpretations of key figures of the Frankfurt School like Walter Benjamin or Adorno,6 not to speak of the growing interest for a “critical turn” in phenomenology, advocated by authors like Lisa Guenther, Sara Ahmed and others, who deemed phenomenology as a potential tool for a critique of “concrete conditions, institutions, and assumptions that structure lived experience.”7 All of this is not to say that the two traditions now overlap without breech. On the contrary, sedimented preconceptions on both sides still often lead to misunderstandings and overly polemical stances. However, the present book is not meant to help settle such misunderstandings, as it is not intended to fully retrace the long history of mutual interactions between the two schools either. Instead, it primarily aims to reconstruct some of the core motives of their original dispute, while I would now like in the following to argue why such an endeavor is still useful and meaningful today, at least from a phenomenological perspective, even though the dispute itself may have long ceased.

Phenomenology and Jugendstil This is the case, first of all, because this particular strain of early criticism was never duly received within the phenomenological camp, while it instead proves far more relevant and subtle than expected. This is strikingly true even for critical arguments that may appear most trivial, droll and inadequate in a contemporary perspective, as can perhaps best be illustrated with an example: Adorno’s frequently repeated association of phenomenology with the Jugendstil movement and neo-­ romanticism in general, which phenomenologist are probably not specifically inclined to take seriously. Thus, Adorno writes in his Negative Dialectics: “A century after Kant, such flattening of the intelligible into the imaginary came to be the cardinal sin of the neo-­ romanticists of the fin de siècle [von Neuromantik und Jugendstil], and of the phenomenological philosophy tailor-made to their measure.”8 Similar observations are sprinkled throughout Against Epsitemology, as well as in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and in his Jargon of Authenticity. But why is this comparison so striking after all? As is well known, in classical idealism, philosophy and art were separated

 See Figal 1993 or Tengelyi 2012.  See the official presentation of Puncta. Journal of Critical Phenomenology: https://journals.oregondigital.org/index.php/pjcp. See also the concluding chapter of this book. 8  GS 6, p. 382; En., p. 391. 6 7

viii

Preface: Putting Phenomenology in Dialogue with Critical Theory

by a necessary time lag, since art was in Hegel’s view nothing but the initial, immediately sensible manifestation of the idea, which then found its definitive fulfillment in the philosophical concept. However, with the historicist trend that followed the demise of German Idealism, art and philosophy were no longer viewed as successive phases in the revelation of truth, but instead they came to be seen as mere cultural expressions of their age, while their relationship predominantly became one of synchronicity. Thus, historicist philosophers began taking a strong interest in the essential ties, which connect the philosophy and the art of a specific historic period, regarding both as impregnations of the same Zeitgeist. The paradigmatic point in case was the parallelism between Leibniz’ philosophy and Baroque art, which Dilthey addressed at length: There is a profound connection which unites Fleming’s, Gryphius’ or Angelus Silesius’ lyrics, or the high time of classical music, with Leibniz’ philosophy. The new sentiment of the intrinsic meaningfulness of life, its connection to the feeling of a certain cohesion between all things, or the lived experience of musical harmony as an expression of the most sublime revelations of life: all of this is raised by Leibniz to the level of philosophical consciousness.9

But if, according to this view, philosophy and art appear as coequal expressions of a historic life-sentiment, which determines the stylistic unity of all cultural manifestations of an age, it is clear from the onset why such a perspective is nonetheless surprising when applied to the present day instead of a distant strain in the history of philosophy (which is now anyhow apprehended only in some form of cultural mediacy). There was, no doubt, an element of provocation to this, for, by equating phenomenology with an artistic movement, which was already considered outmoded by 1918, Adorno was challenging the contemporary relevance of phenomenology, which he indeed saw to be somewhat obsolete, as also shown by his malicious remark that “[o]fficial academic discussion in Germany held even before Hitler that Husserl had been surpassed and had faded from importance.”10 But, more than just an insolence, the comparison indeed served Adorno as a hermeneutic tool for connecting phenomenology to its own particular Zeitgeist, or as he puts it in a brief manuscript notation: “[Jugendstil] proves an apt model for capturing the social expression of phenomenology in a dialectical image and deciphering it as such.”11 Numerous passages in Adorno’s writings emphasize the analogy between Husserlian phenomenology and the Jugendstil. This analogy touches on various aspects. (a) First of all, Adorno frequently underscores their equally unreal and phantasmagoric depiction of sensible reality, which derives in the case of phenomenology from the requirements of reduction, that is: the treatment of reality as a mere phenomenon in disregard of its empirical existence, as is the case in Jugendstil representations sublimating nature into mere etheric ornamental motives. (b) Secondly, the two intersect in their preference for a pseudo-concrete language,

 Dilthey 1992, p. 62.  GS 5, p. 190; En., p. 186. 11  Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt a. Main, Ts 2959 ff. 9

10

Preface: Putting Phenomenology in Dialogue with Critical Theory

ix

which characterizes both the common tendency in phenomenology to avoid the established vocabulary of traditional philosophy in favor of improvised terminological constructions, deemed closer to the intuitiveness of common language, as well as neo-romantic poetry, which Adorno most frequently regarded as the literary correspondent of Jugendstil, with its attempt to bestow words an illusionary suggestion of palpable, immediate and substantial reality against the backdrop of an ever increasing functionalization of language.12 (c) Finally, other passages in Adorno relate this analogy to the common tendency in both phenomenology and neo-­ romanticism to mask the meaninglessness of contemporary existence by emphasizing the subject’s capacity to voluntarily bestow it with significance, as this is the case in both Ibsen and Hoffmansthal’s dramas, as well as in Husserl and Heidegger’s ethical considerations, which both ultimately share the guiding notion of the “existential project”. Aside from all of such perhaps minor points of intersection, however, the core analogy between phenomenology and Jugendstil finds its most revelatory philosophical expression in a brief reflection from Against Epistemology, which relates the grounding epistemological intention of phenomenology to Walter Benjamin’s radical characterization of Jugendstil as the “dream of waking up”. Thus, Adorno writes: What is not proper to the subject appears phantasmagorically as reflection in transcendental phenomenology, though it fancies itself breaking directly out of the phantasmagoria in the mirroring of ‘what gives itself as such’. / This is true to Benjamin’s definition of Jugendstil as the dream in which the dreamer dreams that he has awakened.13

In what concerns Benjamin, it is well known that his understanding of Jugendstil as the dream, in which the dreamer dreams he has awakened, interlinks two key observations of his Arcades project. The first refers to the architectural relationship that pertains between the bourgeois interior and the open air during the late nineteenth century: Jugendstil  – a first attempt to reckon with the open air. (…) From another perspective, Jugendstil could blossom in the artificial light and isolation in which advertising presents its objects. Thus birth of plein air from the spirit of the interior is the sensuous expression of the situation of Jugendstil from the viewpoint of the philosophy of history: Jugendstil is the dream that one has come awake.14

The second observation further relates this point to the relationship between art and technology during that particular time: The shattering of the interior occurs via Jugendstil around the turn of the century. Of course, according to its own ideology, the Jugendstil movement seems to bring with it the consummation of the interior. The transfiguration of the solitary soul appears to be its goal. Individualism is its theory. With van de Velde, the house becomes an expression of the personality. Ornament is to this house what the signature is to a painting. But the real

 A similar argument is raised by Günther Anders against Rilke, see Anders 2015.  GS 5, p. 143; En., p. 138. 14  GS V, p. 496; En., p. 392. 12 13

x

Preface: Putting Phenomenology in Dialogue with Critical Theory ­meaning of Jugendstil is not expressed in this ideology. It represents the last attempted sortie [Ausfallsversuch] of an art besieged in its ivory tower by technology. This attempt mobilizes all the reserves of inwardness. They find their expression in the mediumistic language of the line, in the flower as symbol of a naked vegetal nature confronted by the technologically armed world. The new elements of iron construction – girder forms – preoccupy Jugendstil. In ornament, it endeavors to win back these forms for art. Concrete presents it with new possibilities for plastic creation in architecture. Around this time, the real gravitational center of living space shifts to the office. The irreal center makes its place in the home. The consequences of Jugendstil are depicted in Ibsen’s Master Builder: the attempt by the individual, on the strength of his inwardness, to vie with technology leads to his downfall.15

Along the same lines, Adorno, who uses a similar expression as Benjamin, also interprets Husserl’s phenomenology as an “attempted sortie” [Ausbruchsversuch], an attempt to break through the idealistic immanence of pure thought by making use of realist or empiricist moments, which he holds to be already implicit in the ­phenomenological slogan: “back to the things themselves!”.16 At the same time, however, in his view, the key methodological requirement of transcendental phenomenology, namely the reduction of the external world to a mere phenomenon or noema of consciousness, also ensured that the perspective of pure immanence was preserved in spite of all such empiricist impulses. Thus, Husserl’s phenomenology ultimately appeared to Adorno as an attempt to overcome idealism while holding on to idealist grounds, that is: as the paradoxical gesture of reaching out to a world, which transcends consciousness, by only focusing on the internal givens of conscious experience itself. If, however, this general movement primarily justified Adorno’s repeated association of phenomenology with Jugendstil as a similar “dream in which the dreamer dreams he has awaken,” it is important to note here that the analogy itself finds an almost literal confirmation in Husserl’s correspondence with his formal student from Göttingen, Jean Hering. This exchange of letters shows how deeply the motive picked up by Adorno is indeed interwoven with the core intentions of phenomenology. In one of his letters, Hering recounted the following curious dream: I was walking with a friend (then there were more friends). As I noticed that the streets around us were composed of a checked mixture of elements from Paris and from Strasbourg, I realized I was only dreaming and I tried to convince the others of this as well, which I only managed to do with considerable efforts. At this point, however, I realized that the entire story was in fact absurd, because in the dream we were not really dealing with true intersubjectivity. As a consequence, I began trying to convince the others of their inexistence, but, as you can well imagine, they laughed in my face. Meanwhile, we were somewhere in the woods, outside of Göttingen, and the following discussion ensued: “We are just as convinced that we exist as you are. Why do you think it is only you who is right?” “But I have the absolute certitude that I am dreaming, while you are unaware that you are being dreamt of.” Seeing that nothing of what I was saying got through to them, I proposed a bet: I wagered that only I alone could remember the dream the following day since they lacked any identity between their dreamt I and the wake subject. One of them correctly objected

15 16

 GS V, p.52 f.; En., p. 9.  See for this especially the discussions of the next two chapters.

Preface: Putting Phenomenology in Dialogue with Critical Theory

xi

that, in this case, making a bet was entirely pointless. […] Finally, I played my last card: “I am tired and I am going – I was almost going to say: to go to sleep – to wake up.” After saying this I immediately […] woke up, as expected, in my own bed.17

The entire letter reads like a full-blown satire on Husserl’s philosophy, but Husserl himself did not take it lightly, treating it instead with the utmost rigor like a serious scientific objection. His response picks up on Hering’s firm distinction between the “dreamt I” and the “dreaming subject” – as if the two were indeed two separate entities, which lacked any mutual communication, and people would not for instance wake up still bearing grudges against someone who only wronged them in their dream. Contrary to Hering, however, he takes this position to its ultimate consequences. Thus, he shows that the “dreamt I” can, within the dream, even perform the Cartesian meditation, discovering phenomenology and reaching the absolute certitude of their own existence, without however breaking through the barrier, which separates them from real waking life. On the contrary, the entire idea of breaking through immanence, as it is staged in Hering’s dream, appears to Husserl from the onset as a methodological misunderstanding, without realizing, apparently, that the discussion in fact touches upon a core issue of his own phenomenology, namely: the question of whether “true intersubjectivity” can be constituted within the sphere of pure and immanent consciousness. “We cannot dream that we are sleeping,”18 Husserl concludes, by condensing in an empirically questionable observation the Cartesian argument, according to which it is impossible for us to doubt our own existence be it only because our doubt itself proves that we are thinking and thus existing as thinking beings. Therefore, Husserl continues, “your dreamt I will never be able to play out his final card, he will never be able to wake up, for the simple reason that he himself is not asleep in the first place.”19 Put in a nutshell, this is in fact what Adorno himself is saying throughout his criticism of Husserlian phenomenology, such that, when read against this illuminating background, his apparently marginal and purely stylistic observations ultimately seem to open a path for tackling key methodological and systematic issues in phenomenology in an entirely different perspective. As such, the example serves as a good introduction for an entire range of similar critical arguments and objections, which are discussed more extensively in the present book.

Critical Theory and the Continental/Analytic Divide However, the problem here is not just that relevant arguments and objections coming from critical theory are unduly ignored or trivialized within the phenomenological camp. In fact, one might even go as far as saying  – and this is the second

 Hua Dok III/3, p. 118.  Hua Dok III/3, p. 120. 19  Hua Dok III/3, p. 120. 17 18

xii

Preface: Putting Phenomenology in Dialogue with Critical Theory

important reason for dealing with such issues – that the reflections put forth in this context can help phenomenology arrive at a better self-understanding in that they shed new light on its all too familiar systematic issues and debates. In doing so, even Adorno’s aforementioned comparison between phenomenology and Jugendstil, or similarly Walter Benjamin’s parallel between Heidegger’s and the surrealist conception of history (discussed in the sixth chapter), certainly open the path for a broader and more contextual reading of phenomenology. Significantly, such a perspective is ultimately in line with the work of second-generation phenomenologists like Heidegger himself, who also demanded for a true self-understanding of phenomenology to proceed by means of a rigorous account of its concrete historic situation of departure.20 Early critical theorists bring important contributions to such an account, not only in that they identify striking correspondences between phenomenology and other contemporary cultural trends, as shown above, but also in that they offer a far more insightful reading of its concrete philosophical context itself, as will be shown throughout the following chapters. Of course, there is actually more to it and at least one important point, which was not addressed explicitly in the chapters of this book and should make the object of a separate volume to supplement it, deserves to be shortly circumscribed here. Indeed, significantly, the considerations developed within the Frankfurt school with regard to the contemporary philosophical context are not primarily centered on thinking phenomenology in a retrospective relationship to the established philosophical schools of their time like neokantianism, but they rather aim at prospectively deciphering its position within the dynamic field of possibilities available at that time for philosophical theory in most notably counterpoising it to logical positivism. In this regard, it is important to stress two points from the onset. On the one hand, critical theory no doubt entertained a far more complex relationship to phenomenology than normally accepted, as the following chapters will extensively show. On the other hand, it also engaged in an equally complex relationship with early logical positivism, which led to important triangulations between the three positions. While one may thus feel inclined to relativize the classical opposition between phenomenology and the Frankfurt school by taking into account their numerous points of confluence as well as the substantial phenomenological influence on key positions in early critical theory, one simultaneously has to acknowledge that the contacts between critical theory and logical positivism were far closer than one may presume on ground of Adorno’s virulent polemics against the positivist trends in sociology during the 1960s. In fact, even the most visible rupture between the two traditions, which followed the famous “positivism dispute” ensuing the sociological symposium from Tübingen in 1961, actually grows out of a long and intricate history of interferences between the two schools, as aptly shown by Hans-Joachim Dahms (1993). In his insightful dissertation on the subject matter, Dahms argued that, despite current divides between analytic and continental philosophy, respectively between logicism and sociologism in general, the two traditions nonetheless had

20

 See Heidegger 1999, p. 24 f.

Preface: Putting Phenomenology in Dialogue with Critical Theory

xiii

remarkable points of convergence ever since the 1920s. First of all, both schools initially derived from the same empiriocriticist tradition initiated by Ernst Mach. Both Adorno and Horkheimer had the empiriocriticist Hans Cornelius as their PhD advisor, while Mach was also one of the guiding landmarks of the Vienna Circle (officially termed the Ernst Mach Association after 1928). Secondly, according to Dahms, both schools preferred similar forms of alternative institutionalization, in keeping their autonomy from the University proper: the Institute for Social Studies, on the one hand, and the Vienna Circle or the Ernst Mach Association, as well as institutions like the Mundaneum Institute founded by Otto Neurath in their wake, on the other. Thirdly, the two schools also shared at least one major theoretical interest in that they both ultimately plead for a philosophy which engages in interdisciplinary exchanges with science by ultimately assuming a materialist stance, even though the latter was understood in a physicalist perspective on the one side and in a sociological perspective on the other. Finally, both schools broadly shared the same political views from the onset and both took a remarkably similar stance towards traditional idealist philosophy. Moreover, Dahms also emphasizes a long history of mutual contacts and attempted rapprochements between them, which culminated with Horkheimer’s ultimately failed plan of uniting the Institute for Social Studies with Neurath’s Mundaneum Institute. It is merely during the preliminary discussions, which ensued with this project that the major theoretical divergences between their two perspectives become acute, finally leading to Horkheimer’s fierce criticism of logical positivism in his article from 1937, “The Latest Attack on Metaphysics”. It is easy to show that Horkheimer’s essay draws heavily from suggestions sketched out by Adorno in their prior correspondence.21 Indeed, Adorno was already since his early stay as a student in Vienna during the 1920s well acquainted with the Vienna Circle, while his later move to Oxford allowed him to get an even better grasp of the most recent developments of the movement in the Anglo-Saxon academic world. He was, so to say, the Frankfurt expert on early analytic philosophy. If Horkheimer’s polemic attack can thus be regarded as representative for the entire school, it is nonetheless important to note that Adorno’s own approach to the subject matter – which did not materialize in an equally substantial writing, but found its clear expression in scattered remarks throughout his oeuvre – is relevant primarily because it overtly places this criticism in the more elaborate scheme of a two-front war, wherein the critique of logical positivism as sketched out by Horkheimer finds its main complement in the critique of phenomenology, which he was himself engaged in. This stance is visible from the onset in Adorno’s inaugural lecture from 1931, “The Actuality of Philosophy”. While explicitly stressing the “extraordinary importance”22 of the Vienna Circle in contrast to the latest developments of

 See especially Adorno’s letter from November 28 1936, in Adorno and Horkheimer 2003, pp. 233–245. 22  Adorno 1977, p. 125. 21

xiv

Preface: Putting Phenomenology in Dialogue with Critical Theory

phenomenology brought about by Heidegger and Scheler, Adorno was at this point already conceiving the idea of a critical philosophy in setting it apart both from the restorative tendencies,23 which he saw at work in the most recent versions of phenomenology, and from the neo-positivist tendency of fully liquidating philosophy by its complete dissolution into the positive sciences. In fact, this strategy of defining critical philosophy by simultaneously opposing it to phenomenological ontology and to logical positivism is remarkably persistent in Adorno’s entire oeuvre, reoccurring for instance in quite similar terms in his conference from 1962, “Why still philosophy”. “Contemporary philosophical critique,” Adorno writes here, “is confronted with two schools of thought that, by constituting the spirit of the age, nolens volens exert an influence beyond the walls of the academic preserve.”24 These are the logical positivism inaugurated by the Vienna Circle and the directions termed by Adorno as “ontological”, which originate in phenomenology, whereas his own critical theory is not simply intended as an alternative third option, but rather finds its primary function and purpose in the simultaneous criticism of both. To be sure, Adorno’s main aim in this regard is to show that the alternative between the two positions – phenomenology as a means for restoring core claims of traditional idealist philosophy and neopositivism as the complete assimilation of philosophy (guised as logistics) to the realm of positivist science – is a false alternative. Indeed, in his view, the two are by no means mutually exclusive as they present themselves, but instead they overlap in numerous regards, for instance in their reductive treatment of philosophical language, as frequently emphasized in the Jargon of Authenticity. Moreover, Adorno’s Negative Dialectics undertakes the task of showing that the two apparently opposite positions of contemporary philosophical subjectivism and objectivism are ultimately complementary. Thus, his famous critique of existentialism in the Negative Dialectics ultimately unearths the dialectical process by which the subjective foundation of knowledge, as put forth in idealism, ultimately led to emptying the object of all its intrinsic qualities and activities in only grasping it as sheer dead matter. Thus, the hypertrophy of subjectivity necessarily entailed reification, while the reverse consequence of this was that, in the end, the same process finally also retroacted on the interpretation of the subject. By positing his identity with the epistemologically oppressed and practically exploited object, the subject ultimately arrived at reifying himself following the guiding  This term refers explicitly to the philosophical aspect in question, namely the restauration of an idealist perspective in philosophy, and not to its political aspect. While the political aspect of the restorative tendency of phenomenology has been discussed at length ever since Lukács’ attack on existentialism, which both associated the latter with the advent of fascism and stressed the connections in this respect between classical phenomenology and its later Heideggerian version (Lukacs 1951, p. 34) – both, no doubt, debatable claims – this present analysis and this book in its entirety focus on a different question, which was seldom treated to this point, namely: that of the possibility of philosophy, the methodological qualms that ensue and the multiple connections between phenomenology and critical theory that develop in this regard. In doing so, the political aspect is for sure not suspended entirely, but shines through on occasion, as will become evident in the following chapters. 24  GS 10, p. 462; En., p. 8. 23

Preface: Putting Phenomenology in Dialogue with Critical Theory

xv

model of objectivity. Thus, the subject adapts to the object it has first adapted to itself both practically (as the social price for the subject’s mastery over nature) and theoretically (with objectivist science, which ultimately drew the consequences of a subjectivist concept of the object against the subject himself). In this perspective, the emphatic claims at objectivity advocated by the positive sciences and embraced by neo-positivist philosophers appear to Adorno as but one end of a historic process, which also includes phenomenology and fundamental ontology at the other end. To be more precise, the latter appear in this perspective as but feeble defense reactions, whereas in Adorno’s view only a full dialectical reflection of the entire process itself, including both its ends, could eventually help disentangle things. What this makes clear, in any case, is that, for Adorno, critical theory saw its task from the onset in simultaneous contrast to both phenomenology and logical positivism. Indeed, the tensions between the three schools overtly determine Adorno’s second PhD in Oxford, which was devoted to Husserl’s phenomenology and was conducted under the supervision of Gilbert Ryle. While these circumstances certainly make the analysis of Adorno’s writings from this period particularly rewarding for any historian of contemporary philosophy, they moreover define a constellation that Adorno seems to have interiorized as an integral part of the argumentative style of his entire later oeuvre, which still ostensibly seeks to criticize a positivist concept of experience, without falling prey to a restorative ontology, just as it seeks to deconstruct philosophical idealism without falling back on the reductive positions of logical positivism. Thus, one could argue, the complex negotiation between these two fronts essentially determines the methodological scope of “negative dialectics” well beyond its declared polemical intention against Hegel and it circumscribes an intellectual attitude which should, no doubt, also be highly relevant for contemporary efforts to think past the plain analytic-continental divide in contemporary phenomenology. But this is, again, an aspect to be treated at length in a next book on the subject matter. The following chapters of this volume are mainly devoted to better understanding the intricate relationship between phenomenology and critical theory in their specific historical context and with a guiding focus on the question of eidetics, i.e. the philosophical grasping of “essences” – a point which itself, no doubt, still entertains some connection to logical positivism as well.

Materialist Eidetics Early critical theorists were no doubt among the first to acknowledge and thoroughly think through the divide between continental and analytic philosophy in reacting to its initial signs. As is well known, at the beginning of the 1930s, several key proponents of logical positivism like Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap launched heavy-handed critical attacks against the phenomenological method. Their criticism, sketched out in papers like “Gibt es ein materiales Apriori?” (1930) or “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache” (1931), explicitly regarded phenomenology as the main contemporary heir to a traditional

xvi

Preface: Putting Phenomenology in Dialogue with Critical Theory

understanding of philosophy, which their scientific approach set out to overcome. Three key figures of early critical theory – Marcuse, Horkheimer and Adorno, who were themselves at the time highly critical of phenomenology, which they considered a meager effort to restore traditional idealist philosophy – took note of those papers and reacted to them in consecutive articles written between 1936 and 1937: “Zum Begriff des Wesens” (Marcuse 1936), “Zur Philosophie Husserls” (Adorno 1937) and “Der neueste Angriff auf die Metaphysik” (Horkheimer 1937). All three essays take it as their task to dissociate their own nascent project of “critical theory” simultaneously from both traditional phenomenology and neopositivism. This led to a highly nuanced theoretical balancing act, which ultimately strived to identify phenomenology and neopositivism as mutually complementary theoretical constructs in opposition to critical theory, but which also picked up key elements from both. Horkheimer thus saw Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology and neopositivism as two complementary and equally hopeless attempts to settle the contemporary divide between an all-powerful but meaningless science and a meaningful but devoid metaphysics. In his turn, Marcuse sketched out a broad historic overview of how the concept of essence changed meaning from Plato to Husserl. In this context, he interpreted phenomenological eidetics as a neutral and resigned late derivative of an originally critical distinction between essence and appearance, while, in his view, neopositivist critics of phenomenology like Schlick ultimately only attested to the same resignation as the latter, abandoning all possible critical function of philosophy: “The contemporary form of the theory of essence no longer holds on to the true insights, which initially led to the separation between essence and appearance. Moreover, those insights are also missing from the abstract rejection of this separation, demanded by positivism.”25 Similarly, Adorno developed his own critical analysis of Husserl’s philosophy during the 1930s by explicitly setting it against the backdrop of the recent neopositivist attacks against phenomenology, which he largely rejected. Thus, his early essay, “Zur Philosophie Husserls”, began by distancing itself both from later phenomenologists like Heidegger and Scheler, who regarded Husserl as a mere formalist precursor to a true “material ontology”, as well as from the “representatives of philosophical scientism”26 like Schlick who branded Husserl as a mere covert metaphysician. However, in their effort to counter the simplistic – or even “barbaric”, as Adorno terms it at one point – accounts of phenomenology put forth in logical positivism, all three aforementioned critical theorists finally arrive at surprisingly cautious and complex assessments of the phenomenological method itself and particularly even of phenomenological eidetics. To be sure, it is this particular aspect that makes the arguments developed by Marcuse, Horkheimer and Adorno in the aforementioned three papers, which are largely ignored today, particularly relevant for the current debates tackling the early points of contention and convergence between

25 26

 Marcuse 1979, p. 46.  GS 20/1, p. 46.

Preface: Putting Phenomenology in Dialogue with Critical Theory

xvii

phenomenology and logical positivism27 – but this point exceeds the scope of our research here, as mentioned above. What is of interest for us in particular is the fact that, in doing so, all three critical theorists finally arrived at developing their own hybrid, original versions of phenomenological concepts and procedures. Thus, for instance, Marcuse concludes his essay by developing a “materialist concept of essence,”28 that “understands the given empirical facts as mere appearances, the essence of which can only be grasped in the context of specific historical tendencies, which aim for a different form of reality.”29 Such an understanding of essence would part ways with both the “neutral essentialities of phenomenology, as well as their neutral leveling in positivism.”30 Similarly, Adorno himself evokes the possibility of a more deplete version of eidetics in commenting on and generalizing Husserl’s concept of the “contingent apriori”.31 To be sure, examples of such constructs are numerous in early critical theory. They range all the way from concrete theorems and concepts (like Benjamin’s inventive use of the concept of intentionality in his early papers discussed in chapter “Benjamin and the Essence of Phenomenology”) to full-blown methodological procedures. It is the main philosophical rationale of this book to show, in particular, how Adorno, Benjamin and Kracauer appropriated elements of phenomenological eidetics in giving them a materialist or dialectical reading. Such an endeavor is, to be sure, not just of historical interest. On the contrary, contemporary phenomenological research could fruitfully re-appropriate such constructions, which initially derived from a persistent confrontation with early phenomenological stances that are nowadays anyhow largely relativized and modified within the phenomenological camp itself. The present book thus offers a detailed illustration of how such a re-appropriation may be initiated when discussing Adorno’s philosophical method of “physiognomic analysis” (Chapter “Eidetic Intuition and Physiognomic Interpretation”), in reconstructing its ambivalent relationship to Husserl’s “eidetic intuition” and in suggesting some possible implications for a contemporary use of eidetics. And similar reflections are then pursued with regard to Benjamin and Kracauer. But, of course, such an analysis can be pushed even further than I managed to do in these essays. Thus, one could indeed also pursue a similar inquiry with regard to other methodological tools in phenomenology and their critical mutations. For instance – to quickly pick up just one particular example out of many – one could indeed interpret Benjamin’s use of collections, in handling the historic material of his Arcades project, as a sophisticated development of his early phenomenologically inspired reflections on the relationship between the concrete empirical

 For an earlier discussion of this, see for instance Van De Pitte 1984. For a more recent debate, see for instance Overgaard 2010 and Vrahimis 2013. 28  Marcuse 1979, p. 73. 29  Marcuse 1979, p. 70. 30  Marcuse 1979, p. 70. 31  GS 5, p. 232 f.; En., p. 231 f. 27

xviii

Preface: Putting Phenomenology in Dialogue with Critical Theory

phenomena and their idea, as first sketched out in his book on the German baroque drama.32 Such a procedure, which Benjamin now and again tries to convert into a key philosophical method, could perhaps also inspire contemporary phenomenologists striving to escape the eternal dilemma between a more and more implausible claim at eidetic aprioricity, on the one hand, and sheer empirical induction as operationalized by positive science, on the other. In contrast to both, the use of material collections could ensure a nuanced treatment of the individual case, which does not reduce it to a mere exemplary of its genre or species, while simultaneously keeping in view the various corresponding configurations of generality, thus offering a possible model for a flexible phenomenological eidetics, which keeps close contact to its empirical material and doesn’t expunge it entirely. Of course, the present book is by no means exhaustive in its treatment of these issues, but instead it rather aims at opening up and demonstrating a fertile field of interrogation for further analyses and discussions.

New Practices of Philosophy Finally, a last reason why phenomenology ought to take a closer look at its reception and re-appropriation in early critical theory concerns the fact that this reception from the onset expanded the field of traditional philosophical practice in ways which communicate with parallel impulses within the phenomenological camp. This is the case, for instance, with Kracauer’s particular blend of philosophically tinged feuilleton journalism during the interwar period, which employed elements of phenomenological analysis for the purpose of tackling everyday objects, immediate historic events and impressions from the daily news. This development, which is discussed extensively in chapter “Kracauer: The Birth of Dialectics from Phenomenological Sociology”, arguably finds its most elaborate theoretical justification in Adorno’s famous article from the 1950s, “The Essay as Form”. Adorno’s article conceives the philosophical essay in contrast to the four fundamental rules, which shape and ground the modern concept of theory ever since Descartes. Thus, in Adorno’s view, the essay favors risky intuition and open experience to validation by clear and distinct observation; it denounces the analytic dissection of the object into elements by directly approaching the primarily given phenomenon as such; it rejects traditional methods, which proceed from the simple to the complex, by preferring to grasp complexities as such instead of adapting them to the false projection of a logically intelligible world; and it finally abandons all hope at theoretical completeness. Interpreted as such, Adorno’s apology of the philosophical essay of course prolongs Horkheimer’s fundamental assessments in his “Traditional and Critical Theory” insofar as both texts ultimately reflect a critical diagnosis of traditional theoretical work in philosophy and try to articulate an alternative. Thus,

32

 For a more extended discussion of this, see chapter “Benjamin and the Essence of Phenomenology”.

Preface: Putting Phenomenology in Dialogue with Critical Theory

xix

Adorno explicitly states that “[i]n its relationship to scientific procedure and its philosophical grounding as method, the essay, in accordance with its idea, draws the fullest conclusions from the critique of system.”33 To be sure, this criticism of traditional academic philosophy and the corresponding turn to new literary forms of philosophical expression comes in Adorno with explicit charges against contemporary phenomenology. However, it is important to note that the driving impulses behind Adorno’s stance nonetheless find significant correspondences in the works of several phenomenologists of that time as well. Thus, as early as 1921, Heidegger’s lecture course “The Hermeneutics of Facticity” was already questioning the field of academia as the default situation of access to philosophy in the present age,34 while later on Günther Anders would explicitly capitalize on this impulse. In a short Vita from the 1960s, Anders writes: Fate had it that, by that time, whoever studied in Freiburg came to encounter not only the paragon of academic rigor, who was Husserl, but also the young Heidegger, who attempted to breach academic philosophy. Although Heidegger himself ultimately gave his un-­ academic strivings an academic cachet, one nonetheless had the opportunity to learn from him a healthy skepticism against the relevance of contemporary academic philosophy. This led the young student I was at the time to experiments, which no longer had anything to do with Heidegger’s intentions, in search of new literary forms of philosophy, by means of which one could reach not only colleagues, but other contemporaries as well, and perhaps not only reach them, but also help transform them.35

Indeed, Anders’ strive to experiment with “new literary forms of philosophical expression” imbues both his journalistic practice as well as his later “occasionalistic” philosophical writings, while motivating an elaborate plea for a philosophical discourse, which struggles to avoid specialized jargon and remain universally intelligible. While his efforts, which certainly draw from Husserl’s and Heidegger’s ideals of linguistic plasticity, are to some extent also aimed against the new jargon of the Frankfurt School, the relative parallelism of their intentions nonetheless shows that early phenomenology and critical theory indeed communicated in their equally tense relationships to traditional theory in ways which remain unaccounted for by

 GS 11, p. 16; En., p. 9. While “The Essay as Form” is itself an essay, which defends the philosophical essay as a necessary consequence of its critique of traditional theory, the article at the same time anticipates numerous points in Adorno’s later systematic works like the Negative Dialectics. Just like his earlier essay, the Negative Dialectics also dwells extensively on undermining the traditional Platonic hierarchy between the ephemeral and the perpetual; it defends a methodological use of concepts, which dispenses with their prior definition in order to deploy them in revelatory constellations; it also pleas for a philosophical method, which arrives at highlighting totality by interpreting mere particular phenomena, and it also emphasizes the primarily critical function of theorizing. Moreover, the Negative Dialectics is in fact not just an attempt to reach similar conclusions as “The Essay as Form” by other means, that is: by an explicit immanent critique of systematic philosophy instead of a mere use of alternative forms, but instead it is itself ultimately essayistic throughout in its literary style, which seems to constantly disavow the systematic architecture of the work from the inside. 34  GA 61, p. 62 f. 35  Anders 1961. 33

xx

Preface: Putting Phenomenology in Dialogue with Critical Theory

Horkheimer’s classical distinction and should be reframed in a contemporary perspective.36 Moreover, one could say, early critical theory and phenomenology intersect not only in their effort to liberate philosophy from its rigid academic forms of expression, but also in their strive to expand its docile field of research by broadening the scope of what can be validated philosophically as “experience”. This comes to view most obviously with Adorno’s concept of “unregimented experience” (discussed at length in chapters “The Function of Pre-­theoretical Experience in Critical Theory and Phenomenology” and “Eidetic Intuition and Physiognomic Interpretation”). For, while this concept is initially coined not just in a polemical stance against the narrow positivist understanding of experience, which Adorno criticized extensively throughout his oeuvre, but also as an implicit charge against the idea of a “pure phenomenology”, cleansed by reduction from all empirical residue, Adorno’s apology for “unregimented experience” at the same time obviously overlaps with the attempts of later phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty or Marc Richir to expand the field of phenomenological research in ascribing it to the sphere of a “wild being” or “wild Wesen”.37 To be sure, this is not just a vague analogy, but rather a profound theoretical affinity, which ostensibly reflects in striking correspondences between phenomenological and critical analyses – suffice it to think of Adorno’s physiognomic interpretations of instances of everyday laughter,38 which resemble phenomenological aperçus, or likewise of Heidegger’s notion of an intuitive “dia-hermeneutics”39 which strongly resembles Benjamin’s notion of “dialectical optics”,40 or even Merleau-Ponty’s subtle analyses of eccentric phenomena like telepathy as instances of “feeling looked at”,41 which can be easily associated with both Benjamin’s method of “profane illumination”,42 or Adorno’s technique of socially deciphering phenomena like contemporary astrology.43 What all of this shows is that – especially when read against the backdrop of contemporary “new phenomenologies” in their large variety of theoretical positions: from responsive phenomenology, analytic phenomenology, feminist phenomenology and post-phenomenology, to critical phenomenology, neurophenomenology, nouvelle phénoménologie and Neue Phänomenologie – early critical theory, with its hybrid re-appropriations of core phenomenological elements, could be easily classified as but a further possible version of a phenomenological project.44 However, the point here is not simply in labeling Adorno, Kracauer and Benjamin as  For a more thorough comparison between Anders and Adorno especially with regard to their implications for contemporary media studies, see especially Schmitt 2020. 37  See, for instance, Merleau-Ponty 1968, p. 157, and Richir 1993, p. 47. 38  GS 8, p. 192 f. 39  GA 58, p. 262 f. 40  Benjamin 1978, p. 190. 41  Merleau-Ponty 1968, p. 245. 42  Benjamin 1978, p. 189 f. 43  GS 9.2, p. 36 f. 44  See the concluding chapter of this book for a more detailed contrast to contemporary “critical phenomenology”. 36

Preface: Putting Phenomenology in Dialogue with Critical Theory

xxi

phenomenologists, despite the all so fluid confines, which today separate non-orthodox phenomenologists from continental non-phenomenologists plain and simple. Instead, this book is rather meant as a plea for re-reading these authors from a phenomenological perspective, which means to say: on the one hand, for properly digesting their criticism of early phenomenology, but on the other hand also: for reassessing their creative responses to what they saw as central difficulties of the phenomenological project and pondering on their possible use for contemporary phenomenological research. Needless to say that a phenomenological reading of early critical theory often also promises to heuristically advance the understanding of those works per se. Most of the chapters of the present book are expanded versions of essays, articles and conference papers delivered within the research project “Continental Philosophy as a Rigorous Science. Elements of Empirical Research in Early Phenomenology and Critical Theory”, funded by the Romanian Science Foundation (CNCS-­ UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2016-0307) and conducted by the author as principle investigator at the Alexandru Dragomir Institute for Philosophy in Bucharest. The project concerned the relationship between philosophy and empirical research throughout the first half of the twentieth century within two of the most important schools of continental philosophy, namely phenomenology and critical theory. In tackling this relationship historically, our research aimed to pose some relevant systematic questions with regard to how contemporary continental philosophy relates to empirical research, its potential for interdisciplinary work and its changes of function within the context of the contemporary human sciences. Of course, the book is far from exhausting in its treatment of the subject matter, and this introduction has already pointed out at least three aspects wherein further research is still needed. Thus, the book, first of all, only addresses the subtle interferences between the phenomenological method and the research methods of early critical theory by focusing primarily on the question of eidetic intuition. Instead, similar analyses can be further conducted for instance with regard to the procedures of qualitative research developed within the two traditions, or their corresponding treatment of history and historiographical research. Secondly, the book only focuses on three main authors broadly associated with the Frankfurt School, namely Adorno, Benjamin and Kracauer, while similar considerations could no doubt be devoted to several other key authors as well, as already suggested above with regard to Marcuse. Thirdly, the book illustrates its methodological reflections with regard to all three aforementioned authors in only drawing some more concrete applications to media-­ theoretical issues (radio, television, film), whereas similar interpretations could be pursued with regard to various other topics as well, as is the case, for instance, with the analyses of everyday interaction, which play a central role in both traditions. But if this entire endeavor is, put in a nutshell, just a sample of what the topic has to offer, it should perhaps nonetheless suffice to make the case for its potential both in a systematic and methodological, as well as in a historic and applicative perspective. Bucharest, Romania

Christian Ferencz-Flatz

xxii

Preface: Putting Phenomenology in Dialogue with Critical Theory

References Adorno, Theodor W. 2003. Der Essay als Form. In Noten zur Literatur. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp (cited as GS 11), pp. 9–33. English translation by S.W. Nicholsen. 1991. The Essay as Form. In Notes to Literature, vol. 1. New York: Columbia University Press. Adorno, Theodor W. 2018. Anmerkungen zum sozialen Konflikt heute. In Soziologische Schriften I. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp (cited as GS 8), pp. 177–195. Adorno, Theodor W. 2018. The Stars Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column. A Study in Secondary Superstition. In Soziologische Schriften II.1. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp (cited as GS 9.2), pp. 7–120. Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund & Horkheimer, Max. 2003. Briefwechsel, vol. 1: 1927-1937, ed. Ch. Gödde and H. Lonitz. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund. 1977. The Actuality of Philosophy. In Telos 31, pp. 120–133. Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund. 1986. Zur Philosophie Husserls. In Gesammelte Schriften 20/1. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp (cited as GS 20/1), pp. 46–118. Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund. 2003. Wozu Noch Philosophie. In Gesammelte Schriften 10/2. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp (cited as GS 10), pp.  459–473. English translation by Henry W. Pickford. 2005. Why Still Philosophy. In: Critical Models. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, pp. 5–17 (cited as En.). Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund. 2003. Negative Dialektik. Gesammelte Schriften vol. 6. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp (cited as GS 6). English translation by E.B. Ashton. Negative Dialectics. London & New York: Routledge. 2004 (cited as En.). Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund. 2003. Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie. Gesammelte Schriften vol. 5. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp (cited as GS 5). English translation by W. Domingo. 2013. Against Epistemology: A Metacritique. Malden: Polity (cited as En.). Anders, Günther. 1948/2015. Über Rilke und die deutsche Ideologie. In Sans Phrase 7, pp. 109–131. Anders, Günther. 1961. Kurze Vita. In Literaturarchiv, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek. Benjamin, Walter. 1991. Das Passagen-Werk. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp (cited as GS V). English translation by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin. 2002. The Arcades Project. Cambridge MS: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1978. Surrealism. The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia. In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. New York: Schocken, pp. 177–192. Dahms, Hans-Joachim. 1993. Positivismusstreit: Die Auseinandersetzung der Frankfurter Schule mit dem logischen Positivismus, dem amerikanischen Pragmatismus und dem kritischen Rationalismus. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Dilthey, Wilhelm. 1992. “Leibniz und sein Zeitalter”. In: Gesammelte Schriften III. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Figal, Günther. 1993. Die Konstellation der Modernität. Walter Benjamins Hermeneutik der Geschichte. In Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie 1, pp. 130–142. Habermas, Jürgen. 1982. Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Heidegger, Martin. 1993. Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1919/20). Frankfurt a. Main: Klostermann (cited as GA 58). Heidegger, Marin. 1994. Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung. Frankfurt a. Main: Klostermann (cited as GA 61). Heidegger, Martin. 1999. Ontology. The Hermeneutics of Facticity. English Translation by J. van Buren. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Honneth, Axel. 2003. Unsichtbarkeit. Stationen einer Theorie der Intersubjektivität. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Horkheimer, Max. 1972. Traditional and Critical Theory. In Critical Theory: Selected Essays. English translation by M. O’Connell, New York: Herder and Herder, pp. 188–243. Lukács, Georg. 1951. Existentialismus oder Marxismus. Berlin: Aufbau. Marcuse, Herbert. 1979. Zum Begriff des Wesens. In Schriften 3. Aufsätze aus der “Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung”. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 45–85.

Preface: Putting Phenomenology in Dialogue with Critical Theory

xxiii

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. English translation by A.  Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Overgaard, Søren. 2010. Royaumont Revisited. In British Journal for the History of Philosophy 18/5, pp. 899–924. Richir, Marc. 1993. Phenomenological Architectonics. In Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Perspectives. P. Burke and J. Van der Veken ed. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 37–50. Salice, Alessandro. 2013. Social Ontology as Embedded in the Tradition of Phenomenological Realism. In The Background of Social Reality. Selected Contributions from the Inaugural Meeting of ENSO. M.  Schmitz, B.  Kobow and H.B.  Schmid ed. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 217–232. Schmitt, Peter. 2020. Medienkritik zwischen Anthropologie und Gesellschaftskritik: Zur Aktualität von Günther Anders und Theodor W. Adorno. Paderborn: Fink. Tengelyi, László. 2012. Negative Dialektik als geistige Erfahrung? Zu Adornos Auseinandersetzung mit Phänomenologie und Ontologie. In Phänomenologische Forschungen 2012, pp. 47–65. Van De Pitte, Margaret. 1984. Schlick’s Critique of Phenomenological Propositions. In Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 45/2, pp. 195–225. Vrahimis, Andreas. 2013. Is the Royaumont Colloquium the Locus Classicus of the Divide Between Analytic and Continental Philosophy? Reply to Overgaard. In British Journal for the History of Philosophy 21/1, pp. 177–188.

Contents

 he Function of Pre-theoretical Experience in Critical Theory and T Phenomenology������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 1 Pre-theoretical Experience in Phenomenology������������������������������������    2 2 Traditional and Critical Theory������������������������������������������������������������    4 3 The Positivism Debate��������������������������������������������������������������������������    6 4 Physiognomics�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    7 5 Unregimented Experience��������������������������������������������������������������������   14 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   16 Eidetic Intuition and Physiognomic Interpretation��������������������������������������   19 1 Adorno and Phenomenology����������������������������������������������������������������   19 2 Abstraction ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   20 3 Genesis ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   25 4 Physiognomics�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   28 5 Conclusions������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   37 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   37 Adorno’s Genetic Phenomenology�����������������������������������������������������������������   41 1 Misunderstandings ������������������������������������������������������������������������������   42 2 Social Genesis��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   43 3 Second Nature��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   46 4 Questions of Generality������������������������������������������������������������������������   48 5 Conclusion��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   51 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   52 On Radio. Phenomenology and Critical Media Studies ������������������������������   53 1 Administrative Versus Critical Research����������������������������������������������   53 2 Against Phenomenology����������������������������������������������������������������������   54 3 The Metacritique of Neopositivism������������������������������������������������������   56 4 Radio Physiognomics ��������������������������������������������������������������������������   57

xxv

xxvi

Contents

5 Fine-Tuning Empirical Research����������������������������������������������������������   60 6 Challenges for a New Phenomenology������������������������������������������������   62 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   63 Benjamin and the Essence of Phenomenology����������������������������������������������   65 1 The Problem ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   65 2 Reception����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   68 3 Criticism ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   70 4 A Two-Front War����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   76 5 Essence ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   80 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   81 Tactile Reception and Life-Worldly Circumspection ����������������������������������   83 1 Architecture������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   83 2 Circumspection������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   85 3 Tactility and Film ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   89 4 Conclusion��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   92 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   94 History at the Crossroads: Heidegger and Surrealism��������������������������������   95 1 The Surrealist Interpretation of History ����������������������������������������������   97 2 Reactionary and Revolutionary Historiographies��������������������������������  104 3 Philosophizing History������������������������������������������������������������������������  114 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  114 Statistic Intersubjectivity. A Phenomenology of Television Audiences��������  117 1 Perception and Statistics����������������������������������������������������������������������  119 2 Collective Perception����������������������������������������������������������������������������  122 3 Television ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  125 4 Conclusion��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  129 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  130 Kracauer: The Birth of Dialectics from Phenomenological Sociology��������  133 1 Phenomenology������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  134 2 Simmel ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  140 3 Journalistic vs. Academic Philosophy��������������������������������������������������  143 4 Existentialism ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  148 5 The Reform Movements����������������������������������������������������������������������  151 6 Authenticity������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  160 7 Dialectics����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  162 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  167 Sancho Panza and the Dialectics of Historic Film����������������������������������������  171 1 Theory of Film ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  171 2 Adorno��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  172 3 History��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  174 4 Documentary and Fiction ��������������������������������������������������������������������  176

Contents

xxvii

5 Historic Film����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  178 6 Actualization and Empathy������������������������������������������������������������������  180 7 Digital Colorization: A Case-Study������������������������������������������������������  183 8 Historic Intentionality��������������������������������������������������������������������������  190 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  191 Conclusion��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  193 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  196 Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  197

The Function of Pre-theoretical Experience in Critical Theory and Phenomenology

It is tempting to interpret pre-theoretical experience as a central point of contention in the long lasting dispute between critical theory and phenomenology. Indeed, according to a widespread view, the discovery and philosophical fertilization of pre-­ scientific experience constitutes one of the major strongpoints of the phenomenological approach. Its emphasis in opposing naïve everyday experience to its scientific appropriation for sure also serves as a chief argument in the latter’s methodological competition with empirical research proper. In its turn, critical theory is associated beforehand with a criticism of such claims to immediate experience, insofar as it primarily aims to show that these experiences are themselves already grounded in social and historical preconditions. The determining factors of such experiences can therefore only be unearthed if one brings into play from the onset theoretical presuppositions which are also indispensable for empirical research. In the following, I will try to challenge this plain contrast between the two positions by first pointing to several difficulties in the phenomenological treatment of pre-theoretical experience. Subsequently, I will refer especially to Adorno’s work in order to show that critical theory not only shares a significant interest in this field of pre-theoretical experience, but that it actually invests pre-theoretical experience with a decisive methodological function, while its own particular treatment of the issue may be instructive for phenomenology as well.

An early version of this chapter was published in German as “Zur Funktion des Vortheoretischen bei Adorno. Der Erfahrungsbegriff der Kritischen Theorie und die Phänomenologie”. In: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 67/6 (2019), pp. 930–951. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Ferencz-Flatz, Critical Theory and Phenomenology, Contributions to Phenomenology 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27615-6_1

1

2

The Function of Pre-theoretical Experience in Critical Theory and Phenomenology

1 Pre-theoretical Experience in Phenomenology So, to begin with: how does phenomenology itself pose the question of pre-­ theoretical experience? It is, of course, impossible to account here for the entire development of this topic within the phenomenological tradition. What I will try to do instead is draw out some key guidelines in the phenomenological treatment of the issue. It is clear from the onset that pre-theoretical experience only comes to the fore as a specific problem in phenomenology with the radical separation of everyday experience and science, that is: with the fundamental observation that the worldview of the sciences does not do concord with the everyday world proper. As is well known, this point is already explicitly stressed in Heidegger’s early lecture courses,1 while it is then expanded on in Husserl’s late writings. Especially in his Crisis-work,2 Husserl comes to show, by focusing on the key example of mathematical physics, that modern science no longer refers immediately to the concrete world of our everyday practices. Instead, it merely derives from that everyday world, by means of idealization and hypothetic substructions, a theoretical construct, which gradually comes to replace the real world in its view. It is precisely this mistaking of a mere “garb of ideas” for the intuitive world of experience proper which constitutes the primary epistemological problem of modern science in general, a problem that, in Husserl’s view, doesn’t concern mathematical physics alone, but also psychology, the development of which he basically interprets as a mere compensatory measure completing the physical world,3 as well as (according to Heidegger, at least) the human sciences, the concepts of which tacitly draw from the former.4 The phenomenological rediscovery of the “life-world”, understood as the immediate correlate of everyday experience, derives its entire pathos from these reflections. Its relationship to official science is fundamentally ambivalent insofar as, on the one hand, the life-world is thematically left out of the scope of modern science, while on the other hand it is nevertheless constantly presupposed as its condition of possibility. The latter is the case not only because the theoretical constructs of science are ultimately themselves distilled on ground of everyday experiences in the life-world, but also because the scientists in their turn appeal to the everyday world constantly in their work: in their use of measuring instruments, or in their concrete research interactions, which of course do not take place in the “physical world”. Now, to be sure, different phenomenological schools  – say those of Husserl, Heidegger and Schutz – seem to interpret pre-theoretical experience quite differently. Thus, Husserl describes it plainly as intuitive experience, that is: as an experience, which ultimately rests upon perception, recollection, expectation and their possible implications, derivations and sedimentations.5 Heidegger instead conceives  See GA 58.  Hua VI, p. 18 f.; En., p. 21 f. 3  Hua VI, p. 229 f.; En., p. 226 f. 4  See for instance the notes on ethnology in Being and Time, SuZ, p. 51 f.; En., p. 490, n. XI. 5  Hua VI, p. 130 f.; En., p. 127 f. 1 2

1  Pre-theoretical Experience in Phenomenology

3

it with a polemical undertone against Husserl on the one hand as an everyday experience, which is given “first and foremost” as an indifferent background to any differentiated particular experience;6 on the other hand, as a practically engaged experience, as this comes to the fore for instance in our concrete use of everyday tools or in our everyday interactions with others.7 In his turn, Alfred Schutz simply speaks of common sense knowledge.8 Despite such differences, however, which are certainly far from irrelevant, it is clear from the onset that all three ultimately envision one and the same phenomenon in different conceptual shadings, namely: the experience of the social world as it is encountered in our extra-scientific engagement with it. Moreover, they also seem to broadly concord in defining how this field should be engaged phenomenologically. This latter point can be substantiated in at least three regards: Thus, it is clear, first of all, that for Husserl, as well as for Heidegger and Schutz, the discovery of this field of prescientific experience is indicative of the need to establish a novel theoretical discipline in order to properly deal with it. In brief: they ultimately aim to discipline pre-theoretical experience in ascribing it to a phenomenological super-discipline. As is well known, Husserl terms this the “science of the life-world”,9 the young Heidegger speaks of a “pre-theoretical science of origins”,10 while Schutz  – who still holds traditional sociology as responsible for covering the field – nevertheless believes that by turning its focus towards pre-theoretical common knowledge, sociology alters its traditional scope entirely.11 Secondly, they all agree in regarding the phenomenology of the life-world as a unique scientific endeavour, which ultimately remains ambiguous insofar as it is deemed unable to fully subject its topic to a scientific objectivation without running the risk of loosing the phenomenon. Instead, such a phenomenology is rather supposed to let itself be assimilated to everyday experience by virtually becoming “un-theoretical”. Husserl himself accordingly describes the science of the life-world as an entirely new type of science, which does not derive its validity from overcoming subject-relativity, as claimed by the idea of objective science, but instead aims to fully assume that relativity as such.12 In his turn, Heidegger presents the aforementioned “science of origins” as a way of “accompanying” (“lebendiges Mitgehen”)13 factical life proper, while the ethnomethodologic school – which is largely seen as a fulfillment of a Schutzian program

 See SuZ, p. 43; En., p. 69.  See SuZ, p. 66 f.; En., p. 95 f. 8  Schütz 1962. 9  Hua VI, p. 126 f.; En., p. 123 f. 10  GA 58, p. 2 f. See also Kovacs 1990. 11  Schütz 1962, p. 38 f. 12  Hua VI, p. 128 f.; En., p. 125 f. 13  GA 58, p. 23. 6 7

4

The Function of Pre-theoretical Experience in Critical Theory and Phenomenology

of phenomenological sociology on an empirical basis14  – takes this demure towards theory to its peak by ultimately borrowing its own research tools from the everyday practices it takes as its object of study.15 Thus, all three versions of the phenomenological project share the same tendency of conceiving the phenomenology of the life-world as a theoretical approach that rejects much of what is usually deemed essential for theory. Thirdly, however, this particular science of the life-world is nevertheless supposed to somehow also distance itself from pre-scientific common knowledge. To this extent, it reduces concrete pre-theoretical experience to its subjective conditions of possibility, on the one hand, and to its mere a priori form, on the other. One can easily substantiate this observation in Husserl, whose discovery of the life-­ world ultimately only leads to a phenomenological “ontology of the life-world”.16 The same can be shown, however, with regard to Heidegger as well, whose analyses of everyday experience ultimately amount to a formal description of the world of practical experience, or similarly to Schutz, whose inquiries finally only aim to lay bare the ideal-typical structures of common sense.17 For sure, this outline could be expanded on numerous accounts. For our present purposes, however, these brief notes should be sufficient to serve as a background for discussing how Adorno  – who, as is well known, points several of his main objections against phenomenology at the aforementioned aspects18  – poses the entire question of pre-theoretical experience differently in light of critical theory.

2 Traditional and Critical Theory Critical theory seems to generally agree with phenomenology in regard to pre-­ theoretical experience insofar as it also emphasizes the relativity of scientific knowledge in relation to the everyday life-world. Thus, already in his programmatic essay from 1937, “Traditional and critical theory”, Horkheimer – who considered this to be the decisive criterion for distinguishing the two aforementioned types of theory – showed that traditional theory regards knowledge in its own self-interpretation as an autonomous field, while critical theory on the contrary takes note of the real social function of knowledge and tries to account for “what theory means for human

 See Barber 2020.  See for instance ten Have 2002. 16  Hua VI, p. 176 f.; En., p. 173 f. 17  This certainly involves a certain tension insofar as phenomenology, on the one hand, claims to simply “accompany” pre-theoretical experience in drawing from it immediately as a resource for knowledge, while on the other hand it finally only arrives at a universal theory of pre-theoretical experience in general. See to this regard also Biemel 1979. 18  See for instance his remarks to the “ontologization of the ontic” by means of concepts like “facticity” or “historicity” in the Negative Dialectics, GS 6, p. 119 f. 14 15

2  Traditional and Critical Theory

5

existence.”19 His considerations are obviously in agreement with Husserl’s ascertainment, as Horkheimer, who explicitly acknowledges the Crisis-work in this context, overtly admits.20 This tendency is present in later critical theory as well. This can be easily substantiated, for instance, when considering Habermas’ interventions during the so called “positivism dispute”21  – the famous dispute that first broke out between Adorno and Popper at a sociological conference in Tübingen with regard to the possibilities and limits of a positivist approach in the social sciences. Habermas’ own position in this dispute sees the fundamental difference between a positivist and a critical approach in the fact that the latter recognizes its own research as a conditioned part of its object, that is: social reality. This conditionality can in his view only be properly accounted for if science comes to “conceive the social context of life as a totality which ultimately also determines the research itself.”22 What this means is precisely that the extra-theoretical context of factical life also engulfs science itself, such that the self-reflection of the latter and its own self-understanding necessarily also lead to a consideration of its roots in pre-theoretical experience proper. To be sure, the mere fact that phenomenology and critical theory concur on this point does not yet mean that they actually interpret it similarly. For although they indeed at times seem to arrive at almost identical theses – in what concerns the significance of theory for “human existence”, or science as a “profession”, for instance – this should not let one forget that the two sides actually employ a quite different understanding of science from the onset: as a founded and therefore derivate behavior of the subject, on the one side, and as a social practice subjected to the division of labor, on the other. Correspondingly, Horkheimer and Habermas indeed part ways with Husserl and Heidegger in showing that scientific research is itself subject to social influences, which ultimately also mark the development of their own theories as well, or that the application of theory to the real world is itself determined by extra-scientific criteria like its industrial utility. Nonetheless, it is obvious that within this broad field disputed by both phenomenology and critical theory, Adorno himself seems to occupy a middle ground between the two positions, insofar as the question of the extra-scientific factors influencing scientific work are of course central to his own reflections throughout as  Horkheimer 2009a, p. 171.  Horkheimer 2009b, p. 122, n. 15. Husserl’s Crisis-work is important for critical theory insofar as Kracauer 1969/2009 first and then especially Habermas 1981 pick up the concept of the “lifeworld” developed by Husserl in this work assimilating it to their own theoretical endeavors. Although in their correspondence, Horkheimer explicitly points Adorno to his aforementioned note on Husserl, Adorno himself, who declares his agreement with Horkheimer’s appreciation of the Crisis, barely mentions the work in his own criticism of Husserl. One can nevertheless wonder whether Husserl’s simultaneous criticism of physicalism and psychologism in the Crisis does not show a deep compatibility with Adorno’s own dialectical reflection, which point to the complementarity between subjectivization and reification. (GS 6, p. 98). 21  See for this Dahms 1994 and Lichtblau 2015. 22  Habermas 1993, p. 158. 19 20

6

The Function of Pre-theoretical Experience in Critical Theory and Phenomenology

well, whereas the decisive intention behind his reflections is primarily that of softening the divide between disciplinary theoretical knowledge, on the one hand, and pre-scientific experience, on the other. In thus aiming to expand the empirical basis of the social sciences by employing a more encompassing notion of “unregimented experience”, Adorno himself arrives, not unlike phenomenology, at reframing the problem of pre-theoretical experience.

3 The Positivism Debate For Adorno, just like for Habermas, the famous “positivism debate” from the early 1960s was primarily about defining the experiential basis for critical social research. In criticizing the diminished concept of “experience” put forth in positivist understandings of social science, the two see themselves from the onset in perfect agreement with phenomenology and especially with Alfred Schutz’ version of phenomenological sociology. Thus, Adorno explicitly states in his lecture course from 1968, Introduction to Sociology: “I would like to point out the fact that other sociological schools, like for instance the phenomenological school of the American sociologist Schutz [...] arrive in a different perspective, namely precisely in the perspective of the so-called phenomenological experience, at similarly emphasizing this moment, that lived experience should be taken into account in contrast to an already reified and petrified notion of experience.”23 The same convergence comes to view in a similar fashion in Habermas’ first intervention in the positivism debate as well. Thus, Habermas writes in a footnote: „Drawing from Dilthey and Husserl’s concept of the ‘life-world’, Alfred Schutz retrieves a concept of experience not yet trimmed by positivist concerns for the methodology of social science”.24 If, however, Adorno’s and Habermas’ plea against the positivist concept of experience largely concurs with the phenomenological stance in that they ultimately also object against reducing “experience” – as this occurs in positivist social research – to a meager residue by adapting it to a rigid methodological framework, this argument nevertheless leads in their case far earlier to a much more pragmatic relationship with empirical scientific procedures. Thus, Adorno does not simply contrast everyday experience in all its methodological crudeness, on the one hand, to the primed experience of scientific procedures, on the other, but instead he is rather set on showing that the complete “scientification” of experience leads to an unavoidable deadlock.25 This primarily has to do with the fact that the results of empirical sociology are experientially all the more puny the more perfected its operational techniques become. On several occasions, Adorno tries to substantiate this observation

 Adorno 2017, p. 91 f.  Habermas 1993, p. 160, n. 5. 25  See GS 8, p. 314. 23 24

4 Physiognomics

7

in his sociological works26 by discussing the example of socio-psychological experiments, which only satisfy their methodological ideal when transposing the social process under scrutiny in an artificial laboratory situation, which is of course no longer able to offer relevant insights regarding the concrete real situations discussed. Similarly, Adorno makes the same point with regard to scaling procedures as well, which are methodologically irreproachable only when they unequivocally reduce the given responses of the inquiry to a single variable, although this implies eliminating the more differentiated aspects of the material. The ascertainment of this fundamental contradiction of scientific methodology, however, does not determine Adorno to simply denounce empirical research as such in favor of everyday experience. Instead, it leads him to assume a more complex stance in relation to empirical sociology, by both advocating the need to supplement quantitative data with qualitative case studies and by emphatically preferring quantitative procedures that best account for the concrete richness of the material. Indeed, Adorno was recognized certain merits in developing multi-dimensional scaling procedures (albeit these merits did not go unchallenged). At the same time, however, this also leads Adorno – and here comes the more important point for us – to explore different ways of engaging experience for the benefit of social cognition, which he opposes to the operational procedures of positivist research. It is precisely at this point that Adorno’s interventions during the positivism debate delve into the problem of physiognomics.

4 Physiognomics Adorno first uses the concept of “physiognomics” in a methodologically more consistent understanding at the beginning of his American period in his works for the Princeton Radio Research Project.27 His engagement with this project follows four years of intensive confrontation with Husserl’s phenomenology in Oxford, where Adorno had begun a second PhD dissertation under the supervision of the analytic philosopher Gilbert Ryle.28 Traces of this in-depth preoccupation with Husserl are visibly spread throughout Adorno’s American works. They are most striking in his writings on Radio and they obviously determine the concept of physiognomics, which he develops in this context. In the following chapter, I will try to point out more thoroughly the connections that tie Adorno’s method of physiognomic analysis to his confrontation with phenomenology. At this point, I merely want to note that the physiognomic method, which he first developed in the context of his critical engagement with Husserl, comes to acquire in Adorno’s later works and especially

 For the following, see GS 8, p. 314 f. or GS 9/2, pp. 317–359.  Adorno 2008, p. 73 f. 28  With regard to this, see also Kramer and Wilcock 1999 and Wolff 2006. 26 27

8

The Function of Pre-theoretical Experience in Critical Theory and Phenomenology

in his sociological writings following the positivism debate a key role in his plea for an expanded concept of experience in critical theory. Numerous passages in his lecture courses or in his detailed introduction to the positivism debate attest to how important the physiognomic approach indeed becomes for Adorno’s philosophical sociology. Thus, the “Introduction” explicitly reads: “Social cognition which does not take the physiognomic gaze its starting point is impoverished beyond baring.”29 The topic can for sure only be treated exhaustively if one engages in an extensive analysis of Adorno’s criticism of Husserl,30 on the one hand, and if one takes into account the prior semantic history of the concept, on the other.31 However, since I won’t be able to go into either of these issues in the present chapter yet, I will for now resume to sketching out three decisive aspects of the physiognomic approach in Adorno, that can be directly contrasted to the phenomenological treatment of pre-theoretical experience, and allow for a fruitful comparison between the concept of experience put forth in critical theory and phenomenology proper.32 (a) In contrast to phenomenology, Adorno’s physiognomics does not primarily aim to establish invariant, structural features of pre-theoretical experience. Its purpose is not that of elaborating a theory of the pre-theoretical as such. Instead, it rather aims to interpret individual phenomena of everyday experience. This difference – which is not yet laid out explicitly in Adorno’s radio essays – might first sound rather trivial. However, it also involves an important consequence. For, insofar as the physiognomic approach indeed engages phenomena in interpreting them, it relinquishes the idea of generalizing its observations both by inductive aggregation of empirical individual cases or by means of a more philosophical “eidetic variation”.33 In Adorno’s view, the interest of this procedure does not reside in obtaining universal theses on ground of mere singular experiences, but rather in showing that the individual case in itself already implies a  GS 8, p. 315.  Adorno’s confrontation with phenomenology finds its most detailed expression in the yet unpublished manuscript of his Oxford dissertation. The subsequently published Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie (Against Epistemology) only offers a partial impression thereof. Of course, the sinuous theoretical intentions behind that dissertation cannot be fully accounted for here in detail. In what concerns the question of physiognomics, however, the following chapter will show, taking Adorno’s criticism of Husserl’s concept of eidetic intuition as its starting point, that his own theory of the physiognomic gaze explicitly re-appropriates a core residue of that phenomenological procedure. See chapter “Eidetic Intuition and Physiognomic Interpretation”. 31  To this extent, one would have to point at the important function that this concept acquires after Lavater in the German philosophy of culture during the twentieth century, in the works of authors like Simmel, Spengler or Klages, with numerous crosslinks to phenomenology, in order to finally show how that precise use of the term, with its implicit contrast between the methods of the human sciences and those of the natural sciences, is also critically reflected in Adorno’s writings. See for this also GS 10/1, pp.  47–71. With regard to the more recent evolution of the term, see also Christians 2000. 32  For a thorough analysis of Adorno’s physiognomics, see also Romero 2007. 33  See for this Lohmar 2005. 29 30

4 Physiognomics

9

certain generality by making manifest aspects of the social totality – hence the often quoted definition of physiognomics in Adorno as an attempt to “seize totality in the traces of social phenomena” („an Zügen sozialer Gegebenheit der Totalität gewahr [zu werden]”).34 To be sure, this procedure rests upon the assumption that all individual phenomena of the social world are from the onset subject to social determination. In consequence, Adorno relativizes the traditional contrast between quantitative and qualitative research methods, according to which one ought to distinguish between individual reactions, attitudes and opinions, on the one hand, which should be approached by means of say clinical interviews, and their summative generalization on ground of quantitative inquiries, on the other hand. In contrast to this, Adorno stipulates that those attitudes, opinions and reactions are in fact from the onset never just those of the individual alone, but they are themselves socially mediated and imbued.35 If this is indeed so, however, then the individual case is always instructive far beyond its individual scope, and it is precisely this aspect that Adorno’s physiognomics is set on drawing from theoretically. In this context, one could well be inclined to note that Adorno is with these reflections again in perfect harmony with the phenomenological tradition, which also grows with its Heideggerian turn from a plain descriptive stance in classical phenomenology into a more refined concept of “hermeneutic description”.36 However, this move is itself not unproblematic insofar as Heidegger’s hermeneutics itself ultimately only contents with establishing the invariant structures of pre-­ theoretical experience without actually “interpreting” individual phenomena as such. Adorno himself points at this difference already in his early radio works. By criticizing an essay of the young Günther Anders’, whom he plainly brands as a follower of Heidegger, he charges him with only engaging the concrete experience of radio in order to arrive at universal anthropological features.37 Similarly, he will later on write with regard to Heidegger himself in a yet unpublished lecture course of the 1950s: “if one indeed goes as far as Heidegger went in this regard, one ought to go even further and not stop at the mere question of temporality. One should rather enter the entire field of the temporally and spatially constituted world, the socially constituted factical world, in order to indeed account for those features which he is set on thematizing. This step is however not taken in ontological philosophies and this appears to me to be the main reason why their constant and pathetic claim at concretion, as it is characteristic for ontological philosophy today, is actually only an illusion.”38 The main point here is that to take serious Heidegger’s

 GS 8, p. 315.  See Adorno 2017, p. 129. 36  GA 63, p. 80. 37  Adorno 2008, p. 132. 38  Th.W. Adorno, Probleme der zeitgenössischen Erkenntnistheorie (1951), Theodor W.  Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt a. Main, Sign. Vo 125ff. 34 35

10

The Function of Pre-theoretical Experience in Critical Theory and Phenomenology

claim would have meant engaging the temporal world in its most particular phenomena here and now, and not just analyzing temporality as a general structure. (b) Secondly, Adorno’s physiognomics also sets itself apart from phenomenology in its treatment of pre-theoretical experience in that it doesn’t declare the everyday experiences it summons up as a theoretical authority of last resort. Despite its constant reassurances of the contrary, this is nevertheless the case in phenomenology. For, insofar as phenomenology indeed aims to distance itself from scientific knowledge proper, it tends to nestle up as closely as possible to pre-­ theoretical common knowledge and thus implicitly takes the latter as a fundamental standard for philosophical knowledge as such. One can exemplarily substantiate this observation by considering Heidegger, who basically regards scientific knowledge in his Being and Time as subordinate to everyday experience: “Every science is constituted primarily by thematizing. That which is familiar prescientifically in Dasein as disclosed Being-in-the-world, gets projected upon the Being which is specific to it.”39 But insofar as, on the one hand, theoretic knowledge rests upon a prior form of “common knowledge” and since, on the other hand, theory is ultimately regarded as the latter’s mere “interpretation” (“Auslegung”), pre-theoretical experience is tacitly elevated in its phenomenological treatment to the status of an a priori which eludes any critical revision. This consequence comes to the fore on several occasions in Being and Time. This is the case, for instance, in the paragraphs devoted to space, where Heidegger opposes the trivial everyday experience of the subjective estimation of distances, which can appear subjectively shorter or longer than they really are, to their objective measurements. In this context, the former are explicitly ascribed to the “original spatiality of Being-In”, which constitutes the primary phenomenological resource for all measurements as well.40 The very same tendency can be identified in Husserl as well, who for instance interprets the everyday experience of the immovableness of Earth as the a priori condition of possibility for the Copernican worldview,41 or similarly in Schutz and in the works of the so-called “new phenomenologists”, where, for instance, the vague bodily schema of involuntarily lived experience is viewed as the a priori fundament for any explicit awareness of the body42 and so on and so forth. While there are, for sure, important differences between Heidegger, Husserl and Schutz in what particularly concerns the historicity and the relativity of pre-­ theoretical experience, such examples clearly show that they nonetheless attribute it a similar function and dignity. In contrast to such depictions, Adorno approaches this issue in an entirely different manner. For sure, he himself occasionally seems tempted, at least in his early

 SuZ, p. 393 (En.: p. 445).  SuZ, p. 106. (En.: p. 140 f). 41  Husserl 1940. 42  Schmitz 2011, p. 7 f. 39 40

4 Physiognomics

11

radio physiognomics, to assume the perspective of a naïve listener, in summoning up everyday experiences like the illusion that the radio set itself “speaks” to the listener. However, the main point in this is precisely that such experiences are not simply taken for granted, but rather questioned themselves. Thus, the radio listener indeed – so Adorno in a somewhat different context – recognizes from the onset immediately whether he is dealing with popular or with classical music in the radio. However, this does not mean that the opposition between popular and classical music should be aprioricized as an ultimate fact. On the contrary, one can well point out the social conditions and presuppositions which determine this distinction as well, thus proving its alleged aprioricity to be a mere illusion. On a more fundamental note, Adorno writes with regard to such everyday phenomena, that it is “only our insight in the genesis of the given types of reaction and their relationship to the meaning of what was experienced” that would allow us to fully “decipher the registered phenomenon”.43 Now, in Adorno’s conception, the entire gist of the physiognomic approach consists in the fact that it aims to gain insights into the genesis of such everyday phenomena of the social world by only making use of a first hand interpretation of those phenomena. Thus, physiognomic interpretation is often determined explicitly as “the capacity of seizing the having-become or the dynamics laid still in the phenomenon”.44 If the physiognomic approach therefore broadly corresponds to what Habermas would term in his earlier works as a “natural hermeneutics of the social world”45 (a phrasing that knowingly ties in with the phenomenological tradition) and if, as such, it ultimately amounts to a pre-scientific interpretation of the social world, Adorno nevertheless explicitly stresses that, in the case of social phenomena, we are in principle always only dealing with forms of “second degree phenomenality”.46 What this means to say is that the phenomena of the social life-­ world are as such always historic products of social processes, and it is precisely in this regard that Adorno’s physiognomics aims to trace “the expression gained by processes of social becoming in what has become”,47 that is: in the individual phenomenon itself. If phenomenology therefore ultimately strives, in its relation to pre-theoretical everyday experience, to unearth the “a priori of the life-world”, while at the same time tacitly tending to aprioricize the findings of that everyday experience, Adorno’s physiognomics on the contrary aims to challenge this claim at aprioricity on grounds of the very same phenomena – and it is precisely therein that one finds its specific critical function. To this extent, Adorno explicitly notes that “the moment of social physiognomics, or generally: the sociological gaze amounts to perceiving the  GS 8, p. 203. This approach anticipates Tran Duc Thao’s immanent critique of phenomenology in his Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, see Tran 1971, pp. 3–121. I thank the anonymous reviewer for pointing me to this connection. 44  Adorno 2017, p. 244. 45  Habermas 1993, p. 158. 46  GS 8, p. 320. 47  GS 8, p. 320. 43

12

The Function of Pre-theoretical Experience in Critical Theory and Phenomenology

having-become in that which presents itself as mere being, as it generally constitutes one of the essential organs of a critical theory of society to understand things that present themselves as being and thus as given by nature, in their having-become”.48 (c) As already noted before, the physiognomic approach thus programmatically exceeds the mere given phenomenon in its treatment of everyday experience, in relating it to its historic genesis, but in doing so it nevertheless still follows suggestions inherent to the phenomenon itself.49 In this regard, the procedure obviously resembles Husserl’s later project of genetic phenomenology.50 Indeed, Husserl’s late philosophy arrives at acknowledging the fact that every intentional object (be it a judgment or a mere object of use in general) visibly bares “genetic sense implications”, which point back at its having-become for consciousness.51 In following through these implications, a genetic phenomenology can in his view reconstruct the internal historicity of every type of object, that is: the successive steps of its constitution for consciousness. If one now returns to Adorno’s physiognomics, one immediately notes several points wherein the two procedures overlap, and Adorno himself signals this on occasion by explicitly acknowledging the merits of genetic phenomenology.52 If, however, the physiognomic approach concords with genetic phenomenology in that it itself interpretatively pursues the historic implications of given social phenomena, the most important difference concerns the fact that genetic phenomenology only refers to the “inner historicity” of those phenomena in the sense of their immanent constitution for consciousness, whereas the physiognomic approach does not trace the stages of their constitution for an individual consciousness, but rather the traces of their social genesis.53 This difference certainly also entails another important consequence. For, in emphasizing this point, Adorno is obviously interested from the onset in distinguishing his concept of physiognomic interpretation from any form of subjective “interpretive understanding” (subjektives Sinnverstehen) whatsoever, as put forth not only by Husserl, but also by Max Weber or Alfred Schutz. Thus, Adorno explicitly writes in his Introduction to the “positivism dispute”: “Interpretation is the opposite of a social sense bestowed by the subject or the social agent. The concept of such sense-bestowing leads to the affirmative fallacy, claiming that the social process and the social order are intelligible as such in relation to the subject, that they pertain to the subject, that they are reconciled with the subject and justified. A  Adorno 2017, p. 245.  GS 8, p. 319. 50  This point will be expanded at length in the third chapter of the present book. 51  See for this, for instance, the classical analysis of Don Welton (Welton 2000, p. 198 f.), as well as Ferencz-Flatz and Staiti 2018. 52  Adorno 2011, p.  273. For a more detailed discussion of this aspect, see especially chapter “Adorno’s Genetic Phenomenology”. 53  See also GS 5, p. 219 (EN.: p. 216) : “Husserl just had to go through the open gate in order to find that the ‘inner historicity’ which he conceded was not just inner.” 48 49

4 Physiognomics

13

dialectical concept of sense would not be a correlate of Weber’s interpretive understanding of sense, but instead it would designate the social essence that impregnates the phenomena, that appears in them and is hidden in them.”54 What this means to say more exactly with regard to physiognomics can be easily inferred when considering another one of Adorno’s sociological essays: “Anmerkungen zum sozialen Konflikt heute”. The essay summarizes the results of two research seminars, conducted at the Institute for Social Research, the intention of which was to demonstrate, by observing normal everyday situations in which people laugh at each other or react aggressively, that such episodes always also encompass social moments that exceed the current situation. It is precisely these moments that physiognomics should try to identify and interpret in the details of those situations. Thus, Adorno programmatically claims in this context: “If experience is to ever regain what it perhaps once had and what it was deprived of by the administered world: to theoretically penetrate what was priorly unknown, it should be able to decipher casual conversations, attitudes, gestures and physiognomies in their most infinitesimal details”.55 He illustrates this with a series of everyday episodes, which he briefly discusses and interprets: a tram conductor that fulminates against the students, an old woman, that barks at children for being too loud on an already noisy street; a family quarrel that brakes out because of a broken TV set; mutual harassment in traffic etc. Such scenes could well serve as topics for a mere phenomenology of everyday experience. Thus, street quarrels of this sort could easily be interpreted as echeloned mutual social acts in a Husserlian perspective; they could be seen as performative situations in the early Heidegger’s perspective, or as perfect examples of “motivational understanding” in a Schutzian perspective. All of the above, however, are but mere versions of what Adorno designates as “subjective interpretive understanding”: a clarification of the sense bestowed by the subjects of those situations to their actions, whereas the intelligibility of the episodes, envisioned by such a phenomenological analysis, correspondingly refers to the intra-­ situational understanding of the agents themselves. However, it suffices to briefly engage any of Adorno’s interpretations in the aforementioned essay in order to see that he is from the onset not concerned with reconstructing the meaning bestowed by the agents themselves to their doings, but instead he primarily aims to transcend that perspective. Thus, Adorno writes for instance: “If the tram conductor ventilates his anger at the students by noting their abundant free time, what is relevant is not the transparent psychological motivation of his act, but the social content of what he says, for instance the envy of those with a stable employment, who are poorly paid, the regulated clerks, who are bound by rigid working hours, at those who will in their view at some point work in more liberal professions, having better material chances. The conductor, who ignores the quite complex causes of these group differences, will let out his resentment at those who, themselves objects of the same social processes, are actually far less privileged

54 55

 GS 8, p. 320.  GS 8, p. 194.

14

The Function of Pre-theoretical Experience in Critical Theory and Phenomenology

than he imagines.”56 Similarly, all of Adorno’s aforementioned interpretations do not halt at the psychological motivations of such conflicts, but aim at recognizing the hidden social motives behind them. In this regard, the physiognomic approach ultimately amounts, in difference to a mere phenomenological analysis, to showing that such everyday situations always involve more than just the subjective meaning ascribed to them by their agents, insofar as these “casual conversations, attitudes, gestures and physiognomies” constantly also express sedimented historical and social tensions. The effort to concretely decipher them is consequently termed by Adorno an “objective interpretive understanding”, which he opposes to the “subjective interpretive understanding” of phenomenology.

5 Unregimented Experience Obviously, such a procedure must necessarily look suspicious in the perspective of empirical social research. Indeed, this suspicion is already vividly expressed by Paul Lazarsfeld, who in a famous early essay of the 1940s titled “Remarks on Administrative and Critical Communications Research” takes upon himself the task of allegedly “bridging” the nascent divide between the methods of empirical research and the critical sociology of Horkheimer and Adorno. In this context, he sketches out a short operational presentation of the critical method, which is obviously adapted to the criteria of empirical research proper, and thus also briefly takes note of Adorno’s physiognomics as well, without explicitly designating it as such. In Lazarsfeld’s view, a critical analysis normally sets out to “make observations in everyday life and try to interpret them in terms of their social meaning”.57 This immediately leads him to sarcastically add that critical theory should waste less time with illustrations and make more serious efforts to arrive at scientifically established facts. Similarly, Hans Albert, who defends Popper’s arguments in the positivism debate against Adorno and Habermas, is obviously delighted to charge both Adorno and Habermas as conservatives. In his view, their preference for unregimented pre-theoretical experience over verified empirical findings ultimately implies siding with popular prejudice and “common knowledge” against a truly critical, scientific knowledge.58 None of these objections hits their target. For one, Lazarsfeld’s operational description of the physiognomic procedure misreads its entire justification for Adorno. To be more precise, Adorno’s main aim with this is plainly to show that a complete operationalization of knowledge as championed by administrative research actually diminishes the scope of knowledge itself. As such, his physiognomics is not intended as a methodological procedure in the strict sense of the term at all, but

 GS 8, p. 190.  Lazarsfeld 1941, p. 11. 58  Albert 1993, p. 204 f. 56 57

5  Unregimented Experience

15

rather as a mere counter-procedural corrective, which is nevertheless indispensable for coming to grasps with the social world. Lazarsfeld thus falsely charges Adorno with what is actually more proper to classical phenomenology, namely the intention to establish intuitive everyday understanding as a sort of autonomous methodological super-technique. On the other hand, in difference to a phenomenology of everyday experience, a physiognomic approach to the social life-world does not even readily identify with the positions of common knowledge, as this is the case in Heidegger and Schutz. On the contrary, its purpose is rather that of somehow fertilizing the insights which come from everyday intuitions and subliminal irritations, but which are seen by empirical science proper as methodologically and operationally unsecured, being at most classified as speculative hypotheses or hunches, if not rejected outright.59 This does not mean siding with everyday knowledge in general, but only treating it as a possible resource, in need of its own critical verification. Significantly, it is important to add, however, that this un-operationalized recourse to experience ultimately makes Adorno’s physiognomics appear shady not just in the eyes of positivist sociology, but also in those of traditional philosophers, who see it as a mere trivialization of a philosophical approach proper. Such an objection is frequently brought up against critical theory by phenomenologists as well, as this is illustrated by a telling passage in one of Aron Gurwitsch’ letters to Alfred Schutz, written shortly after a public debate with Adorno in Frankfurt during the 1950s: “Philosophy is only marginal there [in Frankfurt]; the foreground is taken by the unmasking sociology of those who already got to the bottom of everything.”60 This harsh judgment is not least due to the quite peculiar relationship that phenomenology generally entertains with experience. For, insofar as phenomenology in all its versions indeed emphatically appeals to the “factical life experience” in claiming the everyday life-world as its most specific domain, it nevertheless poignantly persists in differentiating this endeavor from a mere empirical exploration thereof. Thus, classical phenomenology, on the one hand, prefers intuitive fantasy examples to actual facts and, on the other hand, it reclaims for its own procedures of eidetic intuition and eidetic variation an entirely different type of a priori universality in contrast to mere empirical induction. In adopting these methodological principles, one might argue, phenomenology distances itself from a mere empirical exploration of the life-world in that it no longer simply engages factical experiences of the life-world as such, but instead it only brings these experiences to bear by no longer letting them count as factical experiences, in other words: it de-realizes them.61 Consequently, classical phenomenology regards every attempt to draw

 See for this also GS 4, p. 90 f.  Schütz and Gurwitsch 1995, p. 393. 61  Thus, Husserl explicitly states already in his Ideas I that, in phenomenology, “no experience, as experience, that is, as a consciousness that seizes upon or posits actuality, factual existence, can assume the function of grounding.“ Hua III/1, p. 22 (En.: p. 16). 59 60

16

The Function of Pre-theoretical Experience in Critical Theory and Phenomenology

straightforwardly from experience as such implicitly as a debasement of philosophy to the status of a mere “science of fact”.62 The purpose of the present analysis was to show that Adorno radically parts ways with phenomenology in this regard early on. For in opposing his notion of “unregimented experience” to the stripped down concept of experience put forth by positivist research, Adorno is able to deploy the former effectively and in a dialectically refined manner both in his sociology, as a necessary complement to quantitative research, as well as in his philosophical works, where he famously regards “philosophical experience”63 as the necessary contribution of the biographically determined subject to the objectivity of knowledge. Although his physiognomic approach cannot and will not claim itself as a full-blown alternative to the methods of positive research, but only as an extra-methodological corrective, it nevertheless opens up a remarkably wide field of applications for pre-theoretical experience both in philosophy as well as in sociology. Moreover, one could show, it is precisely this point that leads to the interpenetration of the two fields, which constitutes a defining feature of critical theory.64

References Adorno, Th.W. 2003. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1–20. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp (cited as GS 1-20). Adorno, Th.W. 2008. Current of Music. Elements of a Radio Theory. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Th.W. 2011. Philosophie und Soziologie, Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Th.W. 2017. Einleitung in die Soziologie (1968), Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Albert, H. 1993. Der Mythos der totalen Vernunft. Dialektische Ansprüche im Lichte undialektischer Kritik. In Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie, Th.W. Adorno et. al. eds. München: dtv, pp. 193–234.

 Husserl tellingly stipulates in his Crisis-work: “Merely fact-minded sciences make merely factminded people”, Hua VI, p. 4 (En.: p. 6 ). See for this also Ferencz-Flatz 2018. 63  GS 6, p. 50 f. For a phenomenological interpretation of this concept, see also Tengelyi 2012 and Römer 2012. 64  Thus, the “physiognomic gaze” is deployed early on in Adorno’s philosophical writings, for instance in his discussion of Kierkegaard’s metaphors (GS 2, p. 61 f.), in his analyses of Heidegger’s linguistic idiosyncrasies (GS 6, p. 434 f.), or Husserl’s stylistic eccentricities (GS 5, p. 44 f.). On all of these occasions, a certain physiognomic approach is used, as Gurwitsch justly suspects, to reduce philosophical discourse to its concrete conditions in the social life-world. On the contrary, in Adorno’s sociological works, the procedure is employed in several of his micrological casestudies, for instance in his early analyses of popular music (Adorno 2008, pp. 477–496), or in his interpretations of the Los Angeles Times horoscope (GS 9/2, pp. 7–120), whereas Adorno seems to ascribe physiognomics in this context primarily a philosophical function. Thus, in Adorno’s view, “the function of philosophy for empirical social research” resides precisely in recognizing “within the facts themselves” the tendency that “points beyond them” (GS 8, p. 216). See for this also Adorno’s more general plea for using such case-studies as a complement to pure quantitative research in Adorno 2017, p. 149. 62

References

17

Barber, M. 2020. George Psathas: Phenomenology and Ethnomethdology. In Human Studies 43, pp. 343–351. Biemel, W. 1979. Zur Bedeutung von Doxa und Episteme im Umkreis der Krisis-Thematik. In Lebenswelt und Wissenschaft in der Philosophie Edmund Husserls. E. Stroeker ed. Frankfurt a. Main: Klostermann, pp. 10–22. Christians, H. 2000. Gesicht, Gestalt, Ornament Überlegungen zum epistemologischen Ort der Physiognomik zwischen Hermeneutik und Mediengeschichte. In Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 74/1, pp. 84–110. Dahms, H.J. 1994. Positivismusstreit: Die Auseinandersetzungen der Frankfurter Schule mit dem logischen Positivismus, dem amerikanischen Pragmatismus und dem kritischen Rationalismus, Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Ferencz-Flatz, Ch. 2018. Das Experiment bei Husserl. Zum Verhältnis von Empirie und Eidetik in der Phänomenologie. In Philosophisches Jahrbuch 125/2, pp. 170–198. Ferencz-Flatz, Ch. & Staiti, A. 2018. Editors’ Introduction: Notes on a Troubled Reception History. In Studia Phaenomenologica XVIII: The Promise of Genetic Phenomenology, pp. 11–30. Habermas, J. 1981. Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Habermas, J. 1993. Analytische Wissenschaftstheorie und Dialektik. Ein Nachtrag zur Kontroverse zwischen Popper und Adorno. In Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie, Th.W. Adorno, H. Albert et. al. eds. München: dtv, 1993, pp. 155–191. Heidegger, M. 2006. Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Niemeyer (cited as SuZ). English translation by J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson. 2001. Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell (cited as En.). Heidegger, M. 2010. Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (Wintersemester 1919/20). Frankfurt a. Main: Klostermann (cited as GA 58). Heidegger, M. 2016. Ontologie. Hermeneutik der Faktizität. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp (cited as GA 63). Horkheimer, M. 2009a. Traditionelle und kritische Theorie. In Gesammelte Schriften. Band 4: Schriften 1936–1941. Frankfurt a. Main: Fischer, pp. 162–225. Horkheimer, M. 2009b. Der neueste Angriff auf die Metaphysik. In Gesammelte Schriften. Band 4: Schriften 1936–1941. Frankfurt a. Main: Fischer, pp. 108–161. Husserl, E. 1940. Grundlegende Untersuchungen zum Phänomenologischen Ursprung der Räumlichkeit der Natur. In Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl. M. Farber ed. Cambridge Ms.: Harvard University Press, pp. 305–326. Husserl, E. 1976a. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. Den Haag: Nijhoff (cited as Hua VI). English Translation by D. Carr. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston: NU Press. Husserl, E. 1976b. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. Den Haag: Nijhoff (cited as Hua III/1). English Translation by F.  Kersten. 1983. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Nijhoff: The Hague. Kovacs, G. 1990. Philosophy as Primordial Science (Urwissenschaft) in the Early Heidegger. In Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 21/2, pp. 121–135. Kracauer, S. 2013. History. The Last Thing Before the Last. Princeton: Markus Wiener. Kramer, A. & Wilcock, E. 1999. “A preserve for professional philosophers” Adornos Husserl-­ Dissertation 1934–37 und ihr Oxforder Kontext. In Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 73/1, pp. 115–161. Lazarsfeld, P. 1941. Remarks on Administrative and Critical Communications Research. In Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9, pp. 2–16. Lichtblau, K. 2015. Adorno’s position in the positivism dispute: A historical perspective. In Journal of Classical Sociology 15/2, pp. 115–121. Lohmar, D. 2005. Die phänomenologische Methode der Wesensschau und ihre Präzisierung als eidetische Variation. In Phänomenologische Forschungen 2005, pp. 65–91.

18

The Function of Pre-theoretical Experience in Critical Theory and Phenomenology

Romero, J.M. 2007. Adornos gesellschaftliche Physiognomik als dialektische Interpretation. In Zeitschrift für kritische Theorie 24/25, pp. 48–66. Römer, I. 2012. Gibt es eine “geistige Erfahrung” in der Phänomenologie? Zu Adornos Kritik an Husserl und Heidegger. In Phänomenologische Forschungen 2012, pp. 67–85. Schmitz, H. 2011. Der Leib. Berlin: de Gruyter. Schütz, A. 1962. Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action. In Collected Papers. Vol. 1. Dordrecht: Springer. Schütz, A. & Gurwitsch, A. 1995. Briefwechsel 1939–1959. München: Fink. ten Have, P. 2002. The Notion of Member is the Heart of the Matter: On the Role of Membership Knowledge in Ethnomethodological Inquiry. In FQS: Forum Qualitative Research 3/3. Tengelyi, L. 2012. Negative Dialektik als geistige Erfahrung? Zu Adornos Auseinandersetzung mit Phänomenologie und Ontologie. In Phänomenologische Forschungen 2012, pp. 47–65. Tran, Duc Thao. 1971. Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism. English translation by D.J. Herman and D.V. Morano. Dordrecht/Boston: Reidel. Welton, D. 2000. The Other Husserl. The Horizons of Transcendental Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wolff, E. 2006. From Phenomenology to Critical Theory: The Genesis of Adorno’s Critical Theory from His Reading of Husserl. In Philosophy & Social Criticism 32/5, pp. 555–572.

Eidetic Intuition and Physiognomic Interpretation

1 Adorno and Phenomenology Adorno had a longstanding and intricate relationship with phenomenology. His first PhD thesis offered an extensive empiriocriticist argument against the phenomenological concept of the “noema”. Afterwards, he convened a research seminar on Husserl in Frankfurt, published several papers on phenomenology, and worked for almost four years starting 1934 at a second PhD on Husserl in Oxford under the supervision of Gilbert Ryle. This second doctoral project aimed to deconstruct the basic concepts of phenomenology as are: the phenomenological attitude, the noema or the given, while placing a special emphasis on the criticism of eidetic intuition. Traces of that project can be found in several of his later lectures of the 1950s,1 two of which were devoted to Husserl, several others to Heidegger, while critical references to Scheler or Sartre were not uncommon. For sure, these contributions paint a highly complex picture, which is yet to be fully explored by researchers.2 What is, however, striking when considering such an impressive corpus of work is just how little interest it has sparked amongst phenomenologists. To be more precise, Adorno’s criticism of phenomenology in general and ideation in particular, was not completely ignored, but rather traditionally met with condescension in the phenomenological camp. One could easily illustrate this by sifting through some of the most notable reactions during the past seventy years. A first version of the present chapter was published as: “Eidetic Intuition as Physiognomics: Rethinking Adorno’s Phenomenological Heritage”. In: Continental Philosophy Review 52 (2019), pp. 361–380.  Aside from his book Against Epistemology (1956), Adorno’s most extensive confrontation with Husserl can be found in his yet unpublished lectures: Probleme der zeitgenössischen Erkenntnistheorie (1951) and Darstellung und Kritik der reinen Phänomenologie (1956). He also convened at least two research seminars on Husserl during the 1950s with Horkheimer. 2  For some first significant forreys into this field, see Kramer and Wilcock 1999 and Wolff 2006. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Ferencz-Flatz, Critical Theory and Phenomenology, Contributions to Phenomenology 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27615-6_2

19

20

Eidetic Intuition and Physiognomic Interpretation

Already in 1940, Fritz Kaufmann reviewed Adorno’s essay “Husserl and the Problem of Idealism”, harshly concluding with regard to some of Adorno’s more technical misinterpretations that “there is not much hope for light from so much darkness.”3 Two decades later, Jan Patočka devoted an essay to two recent publications criticizing Husserlian eidetics: Adorno’s Against Epistemology and Lothar Eley’s Die Krisis des Apriori bei Edmund Husserl. Here, Patočka reduced Adorno’s discussion of eidetic intuition to a single argument, shared in his view by Lothar Eley, which he then quickly dismissed not without acknowledging Eley’s writing as far “more profound.”4 In 2012, László Tengely returned to Adorno’s criticism, stressing that “in today’s view […] one can immediately see that all the concrete objections brought up by Adorno against phenomenology […] can be refuted without exception.”5 Lastly, the article on “critical theory” in the most recent Husserl Handbuch similarly suggests that Adorno’s objections were outdated by Husserl’s turn to genetic phenomenology, which he is excused for not yet being acquainted with.6 These are for sure just a few of the most relevant examples, but my interest in the present chapter is not simply in showing why Adorno was so poorly received among phenomenologists. Instead, I will in the following try to outline why I consider Adorno’s criticism of eidetic intuition to be still relevant for phenomenology. To this extent, I will engage two points in his interpretation of eidetics, namely: his analysis of the tensions between eidetic intuition and abstraction (2) and his account of how Husserl’s genetic turn – which he was surprisingly well familiarized with – impacted on his eidetics (3). Then, I will show how Adorno’s own subsequent partial reappropriation of eidetic intuition offers a plausible if not unobjectionable solution to those difficulties (4).

2 Abstraction For Adorno, Husserl’s early criticism of the standard empiricist abstraction theories of his time is essential for understanding his conception of eidetic intuition. His argument is reconstructed by Patočka, who takes this to be Adorno’s guiding objection, as follows: “in Adorno’s view, Husserl’s theory of the eidos wants to elude the necessity of arriving at the generality of concepts only after striding across the field of their extension. Thus, in contrast to the traditional theory of abstraction, Husserl wants to obtain generality directly by an act of immediately seizing it.”7 In Adorno’s view then, Husserl holds that in order to intuit the species “redness” we don’t have to run through a multitude of red objects, since it suffices to simply depart from a

 Kaufmann 1940, p. 125.  Patočka 1977, p. 154. 5  Tengelyi 2012, p. 48. 6  Bedorf 2017, p. 333. 7  Patočka 1977, p. 151. 3 4

2 Abstraction

21

single red object and change our apprehension of it, while Adorno sees this as Husserl’s original attempt to delineate his notion of ideirende Abstraktion from the traditional procedures of abstract generalisation. In response, Patočka denies this claim stressing that the Logical Investigations ultimately still take into account the extension of abstract concepts. Moreover, he emphasizes that Husserl’s later understanding of eidetic intuition as variation makes Adorno’s criticism entirely superfluous. This rebuttal, however, misses the point of Adorno’s criticism in five important regards. (a) This is the case, first of all, because Adorno is actually sympathetic to Husserl’s rejection of comparative abstraction, which he doesn’t criticize per se, but regards as the expression of a legitimate tendency in contemporary philosophy, which can be traced back to authors like Dilthey, Simmel or Rickert. These philosophers saw that sheer classificatory generalisations, as performed in the natural sciences, were unable to fully account for phenomena in the field of human reality.8 Windelband’s distinction between nomothetic sciences, aiming for general laws, and ideographic sciences, focusing on individual phenomena while resisting generalisation, captures this exemplarily.9 In contrast to these thinkers, moreover, Adorno even appreciates Husserl for not establishing different criteria of truth for the natural and the human sciences by working out his procedure of eidetic intuition in reference to rigorous hard sciences like logics or mathematics – although, to be sure, the distinction between the human and the natural sciences might play a more important methodological role then Adorno originally assumed for the phenomenological conception of eidetics as well.10 Thus, Husserl was in his mature work indeed quite drawn to the idea of conceiving the methodological scope of eidetic intuition along the lines of the aformentioned divide, as is quite obivious when considering his distinction between the personalist and the naturalist attitude, leading him in several manuscript notations to relate empirical generalisation to the latter, while linking eidetic intuition – albeit as a possible solution for a nomologic foundation of the human sciences – with the former.11 While similar tendencies can be identified in Heidegger’s work as well,12 the point of these observations is not just in unearthing a significant common ground between early phenomenology and its broader intellectual context, but in simply stressing that, contrary to Patočka, Adorno doesn’t accuse Husserl of aiming to overcome comparative abstraction, but of not succeeding in that  – and I will immediately show why.  GS 5, p. 102; En., p. 96.  Windelband 1911, p. 145. 10  GS 5, p. 103; En., p. 97. 11  See manuscript M III 1 II 6/2-12, to be published as Text 11 in the second volume (Ergänzungsband) of the new edition of Ideas II, currently prepared at the Husserl Archives in Cologne. I am grateful to the director of the Archive, Dieter Lohmar, for granting me permission to study this material. 12  See Heidegger 2004, p. 38 f. 8 9

22

Eidetic Intuition and Physiognomic Interpretation

(b) Before arriving at that, however, one needs to stress that Patočka’s attempt to clear Husserl of any affinity with singular (as opposed to comparative) abstraction is contradicted by explicit passages in the second Logical Investigation like the following: “Thus, we directly apprehend the specific unity Redness on the basis of a singular intuition of something red. We look to its moment of red, but we perform a peculiar act, whose intention is directed to the ‚Idea’, the ‚universal’.”13 Moreover, it is hard to neglect that this conception of eidetic intuition was influent throughout the phenomenological movement, being picked up in the writings of Pfänder, Geiger, or Scheler. See for instance the following passage in one of Geiger’s works: “It is possible to grasp the essence of the tragic already in the individual work of art, and not only by passing through the bulk of tragic dramas. Thus, aside from the individual analysis of a tragedy, as performed by the literary historian, one can also discover the general, that is: the universal essence of the tragic, within the individual work of art.”14 Like Husserl himself, Geiger supports this thesis by comparing the phenomenological method to geometry: just like a geometrist working on a drawn figure directly intends the ideal geometrical figure in itself when looking at the empirical drawing so too a phenomenologist should be able, in looking at a singular phenomenon, to simply switch to intending its idea. Needless to say that this analogy is problematic both because mathematical ideation, which leads to “ideal essences” and provides for deductive procedures, is ultimately of a different sorts than phenomenological intuition, which leads to “morphological essences” that should be tackled descriptively; and because mathematical drawings are mere schematizations of mathematical concepts and not concrete individual examples of their essences. Instead, despite acknowledging both these points in his later writings, Husserl never came to question the geometrical model of his eidetic method in all its later refinements, and this is precisely why Adorno’s criticism still maintains its relevance herein despite Husserl’s readjustments. (c) Thirdly, the entire strategy of showing that, even if Adorno’s comments would apply to Husserl’s early conception of eidetics, which favors singular abstraction, they certainly don’t apply to his mature method, misreads the broader intention of Adorno’s criticism. For indeed Husserl’s later understanding of eidetics as variation explicitly acknowledges some form of comparativeness in that it discovers the invariant structure by contrasting different variants of a phenomenon. This point is already evident in the Ideas I despite the sharp contrast to empirical induction and it is then emphasized forcefully in a notation from around the same period: “We can not extract what is typical to humans, monkeys, animals and so on (…) on ground of one concrete monkey (…). Instead, I must regard several humans, animals etc. in order to properly seize the

13 14

 Husserl 2001, p. 312.  Geiger 1925, p. 36.

2 Abstraction

23

typical, the concrete generality, which is common to them. The type is an ens similitudinis.”15 Now, insofar as Adorno’s criticism focuses primarily on the Logical Investigations, it may indeed appear inviting to show that his early positions were later on revised, as does Patočka or, similarly, Tengelyi, who claims that Adorno’s objections are easily dismissed when considering the most recent evolutions in French phenomenology.16 However, this argument misses an important point in Adorno’s criticism, namely the fact that Husserl’s revisions are themselves a crucial point in case for Adorno. Put in a nutshell, Adorno’s Oxford dissertation basically interpreted Husserlian phenomenology as an attempt to save philosophical idealism with the tools of modern positivism.17 According to his narrative, this led Husserl to contradictions which forced him to gradually take back all of his initial claims thus operating a covert self-destruction of philosophical idealism. In view of this narrative, however, it is quite clear that simply pointing out Husserl’s revisions, or emphasizing that they continued throughout post-husserlian phenomenology only reinforces Adorno’s interpretation instead of contradicting it. For, insofar as Adorno’s main thesis in this regard is precisely that phenomenology is a philosophical project, which came to be rebutted point for point by its own proponents in its subsequent evolution, the readjustments brought by the later development of the eidetic method or by the genetic turn only substantiate his argument. (d) Fourthly, Patočka’s defense is also misdirected insofar as Husserl’s later work still bares visible traces of his earlier commitment to singular abstraction. This comes to the fore first of all in his understanding of “eidetic singularities” or “concrete essences.”18 These are, according to Husserl, the individual eidé of concrete individual objects, obtained by simply abstracting their concrete position in space and time through “eidetic reduction”. In light of this conception, one could say, Husserl still maintains that we can obtain an essence on grounds of a singular object, but this essence is beforehand only an “eidetic singularity”. Furthermore, however, Husserl holds that “our apprehension of general objects, general essences, already presupposes our apprehension of concrete essences”19 and that “concrete essences must be already sorted out in order for us to be able to grasp a general essence,”20 which means to say that eidetic singularities, and thus a certain form of singular abstraction is actually indispensable for acquiring general essences in Husserl’s later eidetics as well.21  Husserl 2012, p. 213.  Tengelyi 2012, p. 48. 17  For a condensed presentation of this, see Adorno 1940. 18  Husserl 1983, § 15 and 75. 19  Husserl 2012, p. 214. 20  Husserl 2012, p. 214. 21  Adorno himself also criticizes the notion of eidetic singularity by showing that, since both the concepts of “eidetic singularity” and „noema” designate the concrete object without its empirical position, the difference between eidetic and transcendental reduction tends to get obscured. See GS 15 16

24

Eidetic Intuition and Physiognomic Interpretation

Moreover, it is quite clear that, despite Husserl’s attempts to keep confusions between his earlier concept of singular abstraction and his later understanding of eidetics at bay, the distinction is nevertheless blurred in at least two regards. This is the case, on the one hand, because in Husserl’s later view eidetic singularities are themselves ultimately obtained comparatively, by extracting one and the same identical content as it is given in perception and the corresponding fantasy.22 On the other hand, because the later Husserl still implicitly shows a vivid tendency to obtain eidetic generality only on ground of singular examples. Thus, even in the aforementioned manuscript, where he defines generality as ens similitudinis, he constantly keeps pondering on whether one indeed needs several red objects to obtain redness, or whether one could just as well do by comparing different parts of the same object. 23 The result of this reflection is inconclusive, but it is easy to see that the very notion of eidetic variation ultimately rests on a similar tendency, insofar as its principle of only using a single starting example for obtaining generality actually involves avoiding reference to a plurality of empirical cases as in plain induction. This implication comes to view when considering the tensions to which the eidetic method leads especially in Husserl’s treatment of intersubjectivity, where he repeatedly ponders on whether intersubjective objectivity can be obtained on grounds of a sheer self-variation of the ego, without engaging other subjects.24 While the answer most often appears to be negative, its reoccurrence is nevertheless indicative of how great the temptation must have been for Husserl to make that assumption. Moreover, it is obvious that this problem also affects the question of the phenomenological ego, which is at base an “eidetic singularity”, while its sublimation as eidos ego in fact circumvents intersubjectivity proper by means of self-variation. What these observations prove in any case is that, despite the recourse to imaginative variation and thus to a certain form of comparativeness, Husserl’s later eidetics is still nevertheless reminiscent of singular abstraction in only requiring a single example as its actual starting point. (e) Fifthly, Patočka’s response to Adorno’s criticism is also unconvincing because, in Adorno’s view, Husserl’s turn to eidetic variation only marks his failure to establish a plausible alternative to traditional abstraction. Thus, it ultimately amounts to recanting his initial effort to delineate a specifically phenomenological understanding of “essences” in opposition to the classificatory generalities of comparative abstraction. In Adorno’s view, this effort may not have been

5, p. 119 f.; En., p. 112f. This is a quite common confusion in early phenomenology, traceable for instance in Paul Linke’s works (Linke 1916). Though Linke is a marginal figure in the phenomenological camp, being explicitly disconsidered by Husserl (Husserl 1986, p. 226), his conception was an important influence for Benjamin and perhaps indirectly for Adorno. See for this chapter ”Benjamin and the Essence of Phenomenology” below. 22  Cf. Husserl 2005, p. 659 f. 23  Husserl 2012, p. 216. 24  Husserl 1982, p. 72.

3 Genesis

25

declared explicitly by Husserl, but it nevertheless constituted the main philosophical attraction of his concept of Wesensschau, being more or less explicitly appropriated by Geiger, Scheler, or even Heidegger, who himself placed an important emphasis on distinguishing the phenomenological essence from mere abstract generality.25 The notion of the “material a priori” coined in contrast to Kant – which claimed the ability to combine aprioricity with substantive content – encapsulated this ambition. Thus, according to Adorno, Husserl’s turn to eidetic variation actually contradicts his own initial program, as perceived at the time, by lapsing back into the same conception of abstraction, which it promised to overcome. This is the case both because, in its interpretation as eidetic variation, “essence remained for him nothing other than the old universal concept of the prevailing logic”26 – since, conceived as invariants, the phenomenological essences are equivalent to generic abstract representations – and because this procedure only allows for the individual case to be taken into account as an example, which is already just a schematic instantiation of its abstract concept.27 I will return to these issues in the final section of this chapter, but what this exposition should have made clear by now is that Adorno’s treatment of these issues is far more complex than phenomenologists take it to be, pointing to central difficulties of the eidetic project.

3 Genesis Significatly, the entire argument sketched out above already touches upon a genetic implication. For, Adorno claims that, if it were at all possible to grasp the “essence” by focusing on a single phenomenon, this could only work by tacitly involving the subject’s prior experience of other objects of the same kind, serving as an implicit background for “ideation”.28 In other words: singular abstraction is itself only a form of covert comparison, which relies on prior experience albeit only tacitly. This argument might seem trivial, but for Adorno it involves further reaching consequences concerning the relationship between genesis and eidetics in general. It is well known that Husserl first conceived his eidetic method in sharp contrast to genetic inquiries, as immediately apparent when considering the oppositions between the sheer descriptive evidence of general representations and their psychological genetic explanation in the Logical Investigations.29 Consequently, both Kaufmann and Patočka or Tengelyi readily take note of the fact that Adorno accuses Husserl’s eidetics of hypostasizing generality by interpreting it as the object of a  Heidegger 2004, p. 38 f.  GS 5, p. 126; En., p. 120. 27  GS 5, p. 123 f.; En., p. 117 f. 28  GS 5, p. 108 f.; En., p. 102 f. 29  See also Ferencz-Flatz and Staiti 2018. 25 26

26

Eidetic Intuition and Physiognomic Interpretation

form of direct evidence sui generis, which should be contemplated in a static intuition in disregard of its genetic origin in our intellectual activities and syntheses. In response, phenomenologists can easily show that Husserl’s later work emphatically stressed precisely the complex syntheses involved in both plain and eidetic i­ ntuition. However, this response also falls short of properly addressing Adorno’s criticism not only because it again involves the tricky question of Husserl’s revisions, but because of a key subtlety in Adorno’s argument here, which has to do with his concept of “second nature.”30 As is well known, this concept, coined by Hegel and reappropriated by Lukács, is generally employed by Adorno to designate the second degree immediacy of cultural determinations and social conventions, which are taken for granted and go unquestioned as if they were so by nature, even though they are only products of human history: they are taken as physei, while they are only thesei. Thus, the entire point of Adorno’s criticism of eidetic intuition amounts to saying that, if intellectual objects are actually products of intellective syntheses (as shown in Husserl’s later philosophy), but they are treated in view of eidetic intuition as if they were given in sheer evidence, then eidetic intuition is by design prone to fall pray to the typical illusion of second nature – and this is precisely why Adorno claims in the original manuscript of his dissertation that “the substrate of eidetic intuition is second nature.”31 Consequently, Adorno interprets Husserl’s entire genetic turn as an implicit refutation of his initial conception of eidetic intuition. Now, one might for sure doubt this latter interpretation. It is in fact easy to show that the advent of genetic phenomenology didn’t lead Husserl to abandon his eidetic stance, all the more since genetic phenomenology is itself only conceived as an “eidetics of genesis”.32 However, the fact that Husserl didn’t explicitly revise his theory of eidetic intuition as a consequence of his genetic turn doesn’t mean that there are no implications to the latter, which tacitly impact on the grounding framework of his eidetics, and indeed I think there are at least two important points, which corroborate Adorno’s interpretation. Those are: (a) Husserl’s theory of typification and (b) his conception of idealisation. Let me just briefly show how this is the case. (a) In Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, typification generally designates the process by which the subject’s experience of novel objects is apperceptively assimilated to their prior experience of similar objects, while motivating their expectations with regard to further objects of that kind.33 This process is regarded by Husserl as the pre-predicative origin of empirical concepts. Instead, while Husserl explicitly differentiates types as empirical generalities from

 For a more detailed account of Adorno’s reception of genetic phenomenology, see the following chapter. This paragraph only focuses on its relationship to the eidetic project. 31  “Das Substrat der Wesensschau ist die zweite Natur.” Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt a. Main, Ts 2959 ff. 32  See Derrida 2003, p. 140. 33  See also Lohmar 2003 and Ferencz-Flatz 2014. 30

3 Genesis

27

eidetic generality proper, obtained through phenomenological variation,34 it is nevertheless questionable whether such variation could in fact even be possible without the guidance of some typical anticipation. For how else could we vary different sorts of tables, in order to arrive at the eidos “table”, unless we had some vague empirical notion of what tables generally are? Such questions are of course not new for phenomenologists. The aforementioned point was already stressed explicitly by Alfred Schütz in the 1950s35 and it is today taken for granted in Dieter Lohmar’s re-appropriation of genetic phenomenology, centering on the question of typification.36 (b) If, however, Husserl is reluctant to accept such a close rapprochement of empirical and eidetic generality, invoking geometry as his guiding model – since here for sure the generality of judgments and truths is of a different kind than sheer empirical induction  – the problematisation of mathematical idealisation in genetic phenomenology only further undercuts Husserl’s earlier understanding of eidetic intuition. Thus, it is safe to say that, as soon as Husserl begins, in the wake of his genetic turn, to deconstruct the basis of mathematical evidence, by showing that mathematical objects are mere limit-figures, established through idealisations on grounds of sensory experience,37 this step also qualifies how the geometric model stands in relation to phenomenological eidetics in at least two regards. This is the case above all because geometric idealisations ultimately only prove to offer a problematic type of evidence, which can no longer be taken for granted phenomenologically, but which requires a genetic retracement of origin to become fully transparent, while the same should apply for any and every use of idealisations. For sure, this does not necessarily entail that phenomenology, in contrast to geometry, precludes the use of idealisations – consider for instance the thought-experimental limit-variants, which Husserl often employs to test the validity of his eidetic claims within the scope of eidetic variation38 – but this specific technique has an entirely different function and nature here, and certainly entertains a different relationship to concrete experience than in the case of geometric idealisations.39 Thus, it may well be that Husserl doesn’t draw radical consequences out of these insights with regard to eidetic intuition and ultimately maintains an eidetic stance in his later genetic reflections. Nevertheless, it is clear that, upon closer examination,  Husserl 1973, p. 339 f.  Schuetz 1959. 36  Lohmar 1998. 37  See especially Husserl 1970, pp. 353-378. See also Hacking 2010 and Ferencz-Flatz 2017. 38  See for instance Husserl 2008, p. 219 f. See also Ferencz-Flatz 2018. 39  Further on, it is questionable whether geometry and phenomenology indeed make a similar use of fantasy. In his Against Epistemology, Adorno adresses the methodological role of phantasy in phenomenology on several occasions, criticizing “the reified and rigid view of fantasy as a mere discovery of objects distilled from the factical which should have no advantage over the factical except the fact that they are not.” (GS 5, p. 129; En., p. 123). An extended discussion of this criticism would exceed the purpose of the present chapter. 34 35

28

Eidetic Intuition and Physiognomic Interpretation

the two aforementioned points tacitly subvert essential presuppositions of Husserl’s conception of eidetics to the extent that – even though Adorno wasn’t familiar with these specific details, which are for their most part only laid out in Husserlian manuscripts still inaccessible to him – they corroborate Adorno’s interpretation of genetic phenomenology, which amounts to seeing it as a decisive step towards exposing eidetic intuition and its evidential claims as a mere case of “second nature”, that is: as self-oblivious social phenomena.

4 Physiognomics Now, the main point here is that, with this criticism, eidetic intuition is not simply dismissed by Adorno. Instead, the purpose of the following section is to demonstrate that, once taken into account both issues of his aforementioned criticism, Adorno actually attempts to re-appropriate core elements of phenomenological ideation within the framework of his own philosophical project. Thus, a key feature of his later critical method, “physiognomic analysis,” developed in the aftermath of his confrontation with Husserl, can be shown to offer a complex reassessment of eidetic intuition in light of his own earlier criticism. In the following, I will first offer a brief overview of Adorno’s concept of physiognomics, pointing out its relationship to phenomenology. Subsequently, I will show how this methodological device is meant to tackle his prior objections against phenomenological ideation. (a) When considering the relationship between Adorno’s physiognomics and phenomenology it is worth noting that the two share a significant historical background. While the modern concept of physiognomics became popular in the 18th century, with Lavater who defined it as “the science of recognizing a man’s character based on his exterior appearance”,40 the concept acquired a broader methodological scope in the early 20th century, when it was regarded – alongside Einfühlung  – as one of the key terms for capturing the main difference between the research methods of the human sciences and the natural sciences. One can still sense this contradiction in the works of Oswald Spengler, who explicitly opposed the physical worldview, aiming for causal explanation, to the historical worldview, aiming for physiognomic interpretations of human phenomena as manifestations of their specific culture.41 To be sure, neither Husserl nor other of the main figures of phenomenology employ the concept of physiognomics in a similarly strong methodological acceptation, but their work nevertheless shows an important affinity to the aforementioned tradition insofar as they themselves generally advocate a similar opposition between the research attitude of the natural sciences, regarding the world as a causal nexus of objective facts, and the “personalist” attitude of the human sciences, regarding it as a 40 41

 Lavater 1775, p. 13.  Spengler 1926, p. 91 f.

4 Physiognomics

29

meaningful correlate of subjective experience. It is precisely this common methodological background that accounts for the numerous instances wherein the two traditions overtly intersected, as in the works of Husserl’s student, Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, who developed a phenomenologically inspired racial physiognomics during the 1930s, or in several phenomenological accounts of empathy, emphasizing aspects of expressive physiognomy. In any case, it is safe to say that this background is highly relevant for Adorno’s own re-appropriation of physiognomics as well. For, although Adorno sets his physiognomics apart from both Lavater and Spengler, he intersects with the latter already insofar as his equally broad understanding of physiognomics is also conceived as a humanist methodological alternative to the practices of quantitative research in the social sciences. Adorno’s concept of “physiognomics” was first given a methodologically consistent formulation in his work for the Princeton Radio Research Project during the early 1940s. Called in by Paul Lazarsfeld to head the Musical Department of the project, Adorno’s task was to work out theoretical hypotheses concerning the reception of classical music in the radio, which could be tested empirically and should ultimately lead to concrete program suggestions. Instead, he penned an extended manuscript titled “Radio Physiognomics” as a preliminary step for a full blown social theory of the Radio, wherein he opposes the physiognomic method, as a tool for interpreting specific phenomena of the radio experience in view of how they express society at large, to the methods of audience surveys regularly employed in the Princeton Project. Understood as such, physiognomics would further on become a key methodological tool for Adorno’s critical sociology42 and play a central part in his famous debate with Popper (known as the “positivism dispute”) in the 1960s, in which he opposed a philosophically tinged critical sociology to positivist social research. However, Adorno’s physiognomics resembles phenomenology not just in that it fulfills a similar theoretical task in relation to naturalist research. Elaborated in the aftermath of his confrontation with Husserl, his approach bares numerous striking affinities to the phenomenological method, ranging all the way from his terminology soaked in Husserlian expressions like “neutrality modification”,43 to methodological postulates like that of refraining to the sheer description of how radio appears as a phenomenon in pouring out of the loudspeakers while disregarding causal explanations. However, while these resemblances have been duly noted in existing literature,44 the question of how Adorno’s understanding of physiognomics draws from his criticism of phenomenology45 still remains largely unaddressed. It is

 “Gesellschaftliche Erkenntnis, die nicht mit dem physiognomischen Blick anhebt, verarmt unerträglich.” (GS 8, p. 315). 43  Adorno 2006, p. 505. 44  See Babich 2014 and Kane 2016. 45  For sure, one could be tempted to regard Walter Benjamin as a more plausible source both for this concept and for Adorno’s philosophical understanding of the relationship between individuality and generality. However, there are at least three points, which should be taken into account when 42

30

Eidetic Intuition and Physiognomic Interpretation

instead precisely at this point that our earlier reflections on eidetic intuition prove relevant. For, indeed, in several key passages of his oeuvre, Adorno establishes an explicit relationship between physiognomics and phenomenological ideation: “On the one hand, ideation has an elective affinity for ideology, for the surreptitious acquisition by indirect things of a directness vested with the authority of absolute, unimpeachable, subjectively evident being-in-itself. On the other hand, essence perception is our word for the physiognomic view of mental facts [geistige Sachverhalte]”.46 (b) To be sure, the concept Adorno employs here for pointing out how ideation and physiognomics overlap is ambiguous. For, one can indeed read geistige Sachverhalte, as in the translation above, as “mental facts”. This would be perfectly in line with Husserl’s early interpretation of categorial intuition, the objects of which he describes as ideale Tatbestände, a term Adorno himself translates in an English paper from 1940 as “ideal realities.”47 Thus, the notion of geistige Sachverhalte would simply mean as much as “ideal objectivities”, or “objectivities of understanding,” which means to say that these objects are only given to higher degree processes of intellection in contrast to sheer sensory perception. However, this is not what Adorno (and Husserl himself) normally refer to when speaking of geistige Gegenstände, an expression, which is used instead in most of Adorno’s essays (presumably via Hegel’s “objective spirit”) plainly as an equivalent of social or cultural phaenomena. In “The Essay as Form”, for instance, concepts like geistige Phänomene or geistige Gebilde

making that claim: 1. Several passages, both in Adorno’s early radio physiognomics, as well as in his later works and lectures, explicitly put this concept, developed in the immediate aftermath of his work on Husserl, in relationship with phenomenology. I have quoted these passages throughout the paper and in their view it is fairly undoubtful that Adorno indeed saw a relevant connection here. 2. Though Benjamin’s speculative theory of the salvation of the phenomena by means of the idea, developed in his book on the Baroque German Drama, and its developments in his later work indeed has some resemblances with Adorno’s own conception of singular abstraction, this is nevertheless not really what Benjamin’s concept of physiognomy originally refers to and it doesn’t overlap with his later use of the term either. Benjamin was no doubt an influence for Adorno, but it is nevertheless safe to say that Adorno doesn’t borrow his concept of “physiognomics” from Benjamin, all the more since Adorno’s own concept is employed in an entirely different context, namely primarily his methodological confrontations with empirical sociology in the 1940s and 60s. 3. One could even show that Adorno’s early interpretation of Benjamin’s aforementioned speculative methodological solution to the problem of individuality and generality, as well as his precise understanding of Benjamin’s “micrologic” approach themselves bear visible traces of his advanced confrontation with phenomenology. Thus, Adorno, for instance, explicitly interprets Benjamin’s method in the Baroque-book as a thought-experimental procedure (GS 1, p. 335) much in line with the common reading of eidetic variation at the time (cf. Kracauer 1922, p. 88 f.). For a more detailed account of these issues, see also Ferencz-Flatz (2019). 46  “Einmal ist Ideation wahlverwandt der Ideologie, der Erschleichung von Unmittelbarkeit durchs Vermittelte, die es mit der Autorität des absoluten, dem Subjekt einspruchslos evidenten Ansichseins bekleidet. Andererseits nennt Wesensschau den physiognomischen Blick auf geistige Sachverhalte.” (GS 6, p. 89; En., p. 82). 47  Adorno 1940, p. 12.

4 Physiognomics

31

(translated plainly as “cultural artifacts”) simply designate “culturally predetermined objects” in general.48 Now, one might say that the two aforementioned acceptations are quite distinct, but their relationship becomes apparent when considering the fact that – according to Adorno’s aforementioned criticism of ideation – eidetic intuition pretends to offer evident access to a form of ideal being, which is ultimately only a hypostasized product of social constitution, that is: a cultural artifact. Instead, if ideal objects are indeed just a type of cultural objects, then the entire criticism of eidetic intuition ultimately becomes just a particular case of a criticism, which applies to cultural and social phenomena in general falling under the concept of second nature. Consequently, Adorno’s physiognomics sets itself apart from ideation already insofar as it extends its range from mere “ideal objects” to the entire scope of second nature. Surprisingly, such an extension is not entirely incompatible with Husserl’s own account. For the later Husserl indeed shares a quite similar acceptation of Geistesgegenstände as “cultural objects,” which he also comes to apply in his discussions of ideal objects. In his Origin of Geometry, for instance, Husserl sees ideal objectivity as but a “class of spiritual products [geistige Erzeugnisse] of the cultural world, to which not only all scientific constructions and the sciences themselves belong but also, for example, the constructions of fine literature.”49 Thus, one could say that Adorno’s criticism overlaps with Husserl’s later genetic assessments of eidetics – but only up to a point. For, while manifold passages in Adorno’s readings of Husserl directly acknowledge genetic phenomenology as a way of interpreting phenomena with regard to their “genetic sense implications” in order to lay bare their original accomplishment and their inner historicity,50 the entire gist of this assessment lies in showing that, with his genetic turn, Husserl “just had to go through the open gate in order to find that the ‘inner historicity’ which he conceded was not just inner.”51 In other words: Husserl stops short of discovering that, if its objects are ultimately cultural and social products, they should be questioned not just with regard to their origin within individual consciousness, but moreover their social and historic origin proper – and this is precisely where Adorno’s physiognomics and phenomenology part ways. To be sure, this criticism is itself not without pertinence in a phenomenological perspective. For, if genetic phenomenology indeed operates upon the assumption that those “genetic sense implications” can be retraced within the confines of individual consciousness, this assumption is at times avowed to be only a fictional heuristic presumption: “The objects about which one judges are pre-given with the sense ‚object for everyone’ for everything which is germane. This is equally true for determinations of practical intent. In order now to arrive at an original act of  Adorno 1984.  Husserl 1970, p. 356. 50  GS 5, p. 219; En., p. 216. 51  GS 5, p. 219; En., p. 216. 48 49

32

Eidetic Intuition and Physiognomic Interpretation

judgment and to track down the completely original activity which is carried out in judicative determination, we must also disregard this and act as if the operations were precisely my own completely original acquisitions, without any such reference to a community already there.”52 If this is so, however, then Adorno is indeed entitled to demand for a phenomenology, which suspends this restriction and takes on the full social implications of its objects. (c) By targeting social phenomena in general conceived as historic realities, Adorno’s physiogmomics interfuses the practices of eidetic description and genetic interpretation, which Husserl’s phenomenology still largely regards as two distinct methods. If social phenomena are thus, for Adorno, throughout products of social accomplishments, their physiognomic interpretation ultimately amounts to making descriptively visible “how they as products express the social processes which produced them.”53 In following through this line of inquiry, however, physiognomics obviously operates with a quite particular understanding of phenomenality, which Adorno spells out in saying that its phenomena no longer count as ultimate givenness, but only partake at a “second degree phenomenality.”54 To be sure, this point is already anticipated in Adorno’s early radio essays, explicitly stressing the need to conceive a fluid relationship between what counts as intuitive phenomenal characteristics proper and the mere acquirings of knowledge. Thus, Adorno writes: “We must be careful, however, not to regard the relation between ‚phenomenal’ characteristics and preceding knowledge as static. Musical phenomena are as little isolated as any others. Our previous knowledge may well constitute an element of our present experience, migrate into the phenomenon.” 55 Adorno first illustrates this by pointing to how our palate is shaped to distinguish intuitively between good and bad taste by former instruction and education, and even knowledge of social conventions. Similarly, historically acquired knowledge migrates into how the phenomenon is concretely perceived acoustically as well, insofar as, for instance, “[o]ur knowledge that the live performance is taking place at a great distance from our room may actually form a sediment within our present experience.”56 Of course, these issues are also tackled in Husserl’s later accounts of “apperception” or “appresentation”. Thus, in several manuscripts from the 1930s, Husserl distinguishes two modes of perceptual givenness: presentation and appresentation. While presentation refers to the direct intuitive givenness of an object as perceptively present in the flesh, appresentation designates a merely presumptive or

 Husserl 1973, p. 57.  GS 8, p. 320. 54  GS 8, p. 320. 55  Adorno 2006, p. 138. 56  Adorno 2006, p. 138. 52 53

4 Physiognomics

33

mediated form of perceptual givenness, requiring as its foundation a direct presentation.57 In Husserl’s view, all our perceptions include moments of appresentation. As such, appresentations continuously expand the scope of actual perception in referring to simultaneous (“co-present”), anticipatory or retrospective (“ad-memorized”) aspects. Thus, he explicitly claims, with an obvious reference to the aforementioned “genetic sense implications”: “Perceptually indicated are not just co-present things, but also prior events, causal processes, in which the thing was entangled, existing human beings having specific purposes, which arrive in certain periods of behavior, when they have certain typical needs they have to fulfill etc.”58 Moreover, in Husserl’s view, these apperceptive additions may also be acquired as mere sediments of exterior knowledge, such that a sheer conceptual designation given in hearsay or by tradition may, just as in Adorno, migrate into how the phenomenon is perceived – Husserl often designates this as Wissensbelege.59 Despite these obvious correspondences, however, there is an important point wherein Adorno and Husserl part ways. For, contrary to Husserl, whose concept of appresentation presupposes a perceptual presentation as its fundament, Adorno’s criticism of phenomenology basically aims to deconstruct this claim. Thus, an entire section of his book Against Epistemology offers an in-depth criticism of Husserl’s concept of givenness, which amounts to showing that the grounding layers of sensory presentation stipulated by Husserl themselves presuppose the fully constituted social world they wish to explain, such that their alleged immediacy is mediated in its turn. According to Adorno, this can be shown most strikingly when considering how our mere sensations already presuppose the body as part of the full-blown social reality.60 If this is indeed so, however, and if “[t]he insistence on the mediacy of each and every immediate is the direct model of dialectical thought”,61 as Adorno stipulates, it is easy to recognize that his physiognomics from the onset operates with a quite different concept of phenomenality than phenomenology proper. Put in brief, the essential difference concerns the fact that, even though Husserl himself may push the boundaries of phenomenology ever further in the wake of his genetic turn by deconstructing his own initial conceptions of sensation, ego, intentional object and so forth, he thereby nevertheless only arrives at a substitute original layer of primal impression, pre-reflective “original I”, or primary instinct, just as later phenomenologists would themselves stipulate parallel original experiences to be taken for granted as a mode of ultimate givenness. On the contrary, insofar as Adorno’s physiognomics principally regards all phenomenal characteristics as a “second degree phenomenality”, that is: as merely constituted, mediated and non-­ ultimate aspects to be interpreted genetically in a historic perspective, it ultimately

 Husserl 2008, p.  10 f. For Husserl’s concepts of “apperception” and “appresentation,” see Holenstein 1972, pp. 132-166 and Dwyer 2007. 58  Husserl 2008, p. 411. See also Ferencz-Flatz 2012. 59  See especially Husserl 2008, p. 423 f. 60  GS 5, p. 149 f.; En., p. 144 f. 61  GS 5, p. 160; En., p. 156. 57

34

Eidetic Intuition and Physiognomic Interpretation

operates a critical reversion of traditional eidetics: “As the experience of what has already come to pass with things that are supposed to be no more than what they are, such ideation, such intuition of essences, would almost be the very opposite of what it is taken for: not the obedient acceptance of ‘being’ but a critique of being as the merely apparent, not the consciousness of the identity of thing and concept but rather a consciousness of the breach between them.”62 (d) The above quoted passage comes from one of Adorno’s preparatory lectures preceding his Negative Dialectics, titled Ontology and Dialectics. The lecture contains Adorno’s most detailed attempt to contrast and relate his account of physiognomics to eidetic intuition. His reflections are relevant here insofar as they emphasize an important point in Adorno’s critical reinterpretation of ideation, namely the fact that his criticism thereof does not primarily concern the immediacy and intuitiveness of eidetic intuition as one might think, but its failed attempt to overcome the traditional understanding of abstraction, whereas his own physiognomics appears to offer a remedy. Thus, Adorno explicitly stresses that mental or spiritual states of affairs can indeed be intuited like perceptual objects, as Husserl claims; this is instead the case, in his view, only because they are not constituted by individual consciousness, but socially pre-­ given – hence their intuitible objectivity, which his own physiognomics presupposes.63 Of course, this intuition is not absolute and irrefutable, as it is not in the case of sensory perception, but this is not his main objection against phenomenological ideation: “Husserl rightly insisted on the intuitable character [of spiritual states of affair], but he then proceeded to identify what this physiognomic insight disclosed with universal scientific concepts based upon a method of abstraction distinguished from the intuition of essences”.64 In other words: the main problem is that Husserl failed to establish a real philosophical alternative to comparative abstraction and thus to the practices of scientific classification. Even more explicitly, Adorno claims: “[t]he pseudos, or original deception, here is not the unscientific character of categorial intuition but a dogmatic scientivistic appropriation of it which expects it to provide what it is unable to provide.”65 What these quotes show beforehand is that Adorno doesn’t share the common criticism of ideation, ultimately accusing it of not fulfilling its scientific ambitions. As is well known, Husserl indeed regarded phenomenology on a par with traditional eidetic sciences like geometry, considering ideation to be a rigorous method for arriving at a priori (albeit only descriptive and not deductive) general truths. On the contrary, Adorno points out the more elementary fact that, in claiming to supersede  “Als Erfahrung des Gewordenen in dem was vermeintlich bloß ist, wäre Ideation fast das genaue Gegenteil dessen, wofür man sie verwendet, nicht gläubige Hinnahme von Sein, sondern Kritik am Sein als einem Scheinenden”. (OD, p. 284; En., p. 202). 63  OD, p. 284; En., p. 202. 64  OD, p. 283; En., p. 201 f. 65  OD, p. 283; En., p. 201 f. 62

4 Physiognomics

35

traditional procedures of empirical generalization like induction, phenomenology implicitly adopts the scientific model of generality, which underlies those inductive procedures and which it initially strived to overcome. To be sure, Adorno’s model of physiognomic analysis is also opposed to the inductive procedures of empirical science, as this comes to the fore most explicitly during the so-called „positivism debate”, but in Adorno’s view his approach nevertheless diverges from phenomenology on a more fundamental level not least insofar as it targets a different understanding of generality. Thus, if Adorno often describes his physiognomic interpretations of social phaenomena as “extrapolations”, this does not amount merely to a generalization cut short, as if he was simply asserting general claims on grounds of a single individual case (as in singular abstraction proper), but instead it involves a different conception of generality, which he opposes to the classificatory generality of quantitative research (ultimately also underlying eidetic variation). Thus, the physiognomic analysis of a social phenomenon is not interested in whether its assessments apply for the general class of such phenomena or not, but instead it intends to show that the individual case already points beyond itself making visible aspects of society at large. Its “essences” – for Adorno emphatically keeps using this term – are not general determinations as common features of individual objects, but aspects of the social totality which expresses itself in all its epiphenomena – hence Adorno’s most common definition of physiognomics as an attempt “to seize society as a whole in specific traits of social phenomena.”66 These insights are historically relative and by no means essentialist in a traditional understanding of the term, as they do not pretend to be apodictic and impossible to falsify. To be sure, such an approach is only possible insofar as the particular phenomena of the social world are not isolated in themselves, but subject to social determination. Thus, Adorno ultimately undermines the traditional opposition between qualitative and quantitative research  - i.e. between individual reactions, attitudes and opinions addressed by clinical interviews in qualitative research and their summative generalisation on ground of quantitative questionnaires - noting that those reactions, attitudes and opinions are themselves never just those of a single individual, but they are from the onset socially mediated and patterned.67 A similar observation can, of course, be made even more forcefully when considering for instance the standardized products of mass media, whereby the part is in Adorno’s view always representative for the whole,68 but it ultimately also applies for eccentric or idiosyncratic phenomena as well, which are not subject to conventional standardization, but acquire precisely in virtue of their abnormality a higher relevance for illuminating the social norm than an arbitrary average example.69

 GS 8, p. 315.  Adorno 2017, p. 129. 68  GS 10.2, p. 530. 69  GS 8, p. 552. 66 67

36

Eidetic Intuition and Physiognomic Interpretation

To be sure, in all of these cases some form of generality is from the onset intimately entwined with the individual case, such that one cannot properly tackle the one without already addressing the other. In Adorno’s view, this is precisely what allows one to read generality directly out of the concrete individual case without any recourse to comparative and quantitative summation. Moreover, in his lecture, Ontology and Dialectics, Adorno takes these reflections a step further, by briefly sketching out a social genealogy of eidetic intuition itself: “The more completely socialized the world becomes, the more densely its objects are enveloped in universal determinations, the more the individual phenomenon or state of affairs can distinctly manifest its universal character, and the more can be exposed through micrological immersion in the phenomenon. All this, indeed, is sharply opposed to the intentions of ontology, although it may well have prompted the doctrine of the intuition of essences in a way unknown to ontology itself.”70 Thus, while, for Adorno, the applicability of this procedure depends on the individual phenomenon’s entanglement with the social whole, the phenomenological conception of ideation ultimately fails despite all its refinements because it only addresses those phenomena from the onset as interchangeable examples, already presupposing just an exterior, summative relationship between individuality and generality.71 Following up on these considerations, Adorno goes as far as claiming that this classificatory interpretation of the relationship between generality and individuality is itself primarily responsible for the “ideological misuse”72 of ideation. While, for Adorno, ideation becomes ideological as soon as it is “vested with the authority of absolute, unimpeachable, subjectively evident being-in-itself,”73 this in fact occurs already by ascribing it universality and necessity, that is: the capacity to offer immediate access to scientific classificatory concepts. To be sure, this super-scientific ambition of phenomenological ideation reflects visibly on the latter’s relationship to empirical science. Thus, Husserl indeed often comes to claim that empirical findings ultimately can’t even serve to verify eidetic insights: “Experience can make the eidetic researcher attentive that there might be a mistake in his observations, it can determine him to double check and correct those observations by means of a novel intuition, but it can not serve itself as a correction: for only eidetic intuition can provide me with eidetic insights.“74 On the contrary, Adorno himself holds his physiognomics to be principially fallible and empirically verifiable, while at the same time showing how they can in turn help critically question empirical queries: “The results of a physiognomic study are necessarily subject to quantitative verifications. This verification, however, must presuppose as careful a phenomenal description as possible. The description may uncover elements inherent in the phenomenon which an untrained respondent can notice only with difficulty even though he experiences

 OD, p. 284; En., p. 202.  GS 5, p. 126; En., p. 120. 72  OD, p. 284; En., p. 202. 73  GS 6, p. 87; En., p. 82. 74  Husserl 1986, p. 248. 70 71

References

37

them.”75 While, compared to phenomenology, his position seems to make more modest claims in relation to empirical research, it actually allows for a far more efficient mutual relationship with the latter, whereas classical phenomenology risks, in Adorno’s view, being refuted in toto with every empirical falsification: “On the contrary, where empirical investigations are able, in a genuinely concrete way, to demonstrate in relation to the anticipations of thought, to the medium of exemplifying thought, that the categorial character quasi-immediately intuited in the particular does not possess universality attributed to it, then they already reveal the mistake of a method adopted by Husserl and Heidegger alike.”76

5 Conclusions Numerous passages in Adorno’s writings attest to the fact that he indeed viewed his concept of physiognomics in a direct relationship to ideation. Thus, for instance, a passage in his lecture Einleitung in die Dialektik reads as follows: “At the same time, I don’t want to conceal the specific moment of truth in phenomenology. For, whoever lacks the capacity to see how the essential appears or manifests itself in particular social phenomena, being thus incapable of acknowledging and reading individual faits sociaux as ciphers of sociality, should according to my own conception of sociology give up this discipline entirely”.77 While these are precisely the terms in which Adorno normally discusses his own physiognomic approach, the present chapter sought to show that the detailed methodological reflections on physiognomics scattered throughout his oeuvre can be read as a nuanced response to several key problems of phenomenology, which emerge in his early criticism of Husserl, most notably: the problem of singular abstraction and that of genetic description. Developing these points in detail allowed me to show how Adorno’s interest in micrological case-studies and physiognomic analyses of social phenomena in his philosophical sociology roots in his interpretation of phenomenology. Stressing this point, however, could ultimately prove relevant not only in a historical perspective, in helping to lay bare the phenomenological heritage of early critical theory, but also in a systematic perspective, in eventually offering phenomenology possible arguments to re-appropiate in its own methodological defense.

References Adorno, Th. W. 2006. Current of Music. Elements of a Radio Theory. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Th. W. 1940. Husserl and the Problem of Idealism. In The Journal of Philosophy 37/1, pp. 5–18.

 Adorno 2006, p. 111.  OD, p. 284; En., p. 203. 77  Adorno 2017, p. 41. 75 76

38

Eidetic Intuition and Physiognomic Interpretation

Adorno, Th. W. 1984. The Essay as Form. English translation by B. Hullot-Kentor and F. Will. In New German Critique 32, pp. 151–171. Adorno, Th. W. 2003a. Gesammelte Schriften vol. 1–20, Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp (cited as GS 1-20). Adorno, Th. W. 2003b. Negative Dialektik. Gesammelte Schriften vol. 6. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp (cited as GS 6). English translation by E.B.  Ashton. 2004. Negative Dialectics. London & New York: Routledge (cited as EN). Adorno, Th. W. 2003c. Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie. Gesammelte Schriften vol. 5. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp (cited as GS 5). English translation by W.  Domingo. 2013. Against Epistemology: A Metacritique. Malden: Polity (cited as EN). Adorno, Th. W. 2017. Einleitung in die Soziologie (1968). Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Th. W. 2008. Ontologie und Dialektik 1960/61. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp (cited as OD). English translation by N. Walker. 2019. Ontology and Dialectics 1960/61. Cambridge: Polity. (cited as EN). Babich, B. 2014. Adorno’s radio phenomenology: Technical reproduction, physiognomy and music. In Philosophy and Social Criticism 40/1, pp. 1–40. Bedorf, Th. 2017. Kritische Theorie. In Husserl Handbuch. Leben-Werk-Wirkung, Sebastian Luft and Maren Wehrle eds. Stuttgart: Metzler, pp. 332–336. Derrida, J. 2003. The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy. English translation by M. Hobson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dwyer, D. 2007. Husserl’s appropriation of the psychological concepts of apperception and attention. In Husserl Studies 23/2, pp. 83–118. Ferencz-Flatz, Ch. 2012. Objects With a Past. Husserl on ‘Ad-memorizing Apperceptions’. In Continental Philosophy Review 45/2, pp. 171–188. Ferencz-Flatz, Ch. 2014. A Phenomenology of Automatism. Habit and Situational Typification in Husserl. In Phenomenology and Mind 6, pp. 65–83. Ferencz-Flatz, Ch. 2017. Zur geschichtlichen Wende der genetischen Phänomenologie. Eine Interpretation der Beilage III der Krisis. In Husserl Studies 33/2, pp. 99–126. Ferencz-Flatz, Ch. 2018. Das Experiment bei Husserl. Zum Verhältnis von Empirie und Eidetik in der Phänomenologie. In Philosophisches Jahrbuch 125/2, pp. 170–198. Ferencz-Flatz, Ch. 2019. Edmund Husserl. Das Wesen der Phänomenologie. In Entwendungen. Walter Benjamin und seine Quellen, Jessica Nitsche and Nadine Werner eds. München: Fink, pp. 199–219 Ferencz-Flatz, Ch and Staiti, A. 2018. Editors’ Introduction: Notes on a Troubled Reception History. In Studia Phaenomenologica XVIII, pp. 11–30. Geiger, M. 1925. Phänomenologische Ästhetik. In Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft. Zweiter Kongreß für Ästhethik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft Berlin, 16.–18. Oktober 1924, pp. 29–42. Hacking, I. 2010. Husserl on the Origins of Geometry. In Science and the life-world: Essays on Husserl’s ‘Crisis of European Sciences’, D.  Hyder and H.-J.  Rheinberger eds. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 64–82 Heidegger, M. 2004. The Phenomenology of Religious Life. English translation by M. Fritsch and J.A. Gosetti-Ferencei. Bloomington: IU Press. Holenstein, E. 1972. Phänomenologie der Assoziation. Zu Struktur und Funktion eines Grundprinzips der passiven Genesis bei E. Husserl. The Hague: Kluwer. Husserl, E. 1976. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff (quoted as Hua VI). English translation by D. Carr. 1970. The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology: An introduction to phenomenological philosophy. Evanston: NU Press. Husserl, E. 1973. Experience and Judgment. English Translation by J.S. Churchill and K. Ameriks. London: Routledge & Keagan. Husserl, E. 1982. Cartesian Meditations. English translation by D. Cairns. The Hague: Nijhoff.

References

39

Husserl, E. 1983. Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. English translation by F. Kersten. Den Haag: Nijhoff. Husserl, E. 1986. Aufsätze und Vorträge. 1911–1921. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. 2001. Logical Investigations, vol. 1. English translation by J.  Findley. London/ New York: Routledge. Husserl, E. 2005. Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory (1898–1925). English translation by J.B. Brough. Dordrecht: Springer. Husserl, E. 2008. Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937). Dordrecht: Springer. Husserl, E. 2012. Zur Lehre vom Wesen und zur Methode der eidetischen Variation. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1891–1935). Dordrecht: Springer. Kane, B. 2016. Phenomenology, Physiognomy, and the ‚Radio Voice’. In New German Critique 43/3, pp. 91–112. Kaufmann, F. 1940. ‚Husserl and the Problem of Idealism’ by Th.W. Adorno. In Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1/1, pp. 123–125 Kracauer, S. 1922. Soziologie als Wissenschaft. Eine erkenntnistheoretische Untersuchung. Dresden: Sybillen. Kramer, A. and Wilcock, E.. 1999. ‚A preserve for professional philosophers’ Adornos Husserl-Dissertation 1934–37 und ihr Oxforder Kontext. In Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 73/1, pp. 115–161. Lavater, J.  C. 1775. Physiognomische Fragmente, zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntniß und Menschenliebe, vol. 1. Leipzig/Winterthur: Weidmanns & Co. Linke, P. F. 1916. Das Recht der Phänomenologie. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Th. Elsenhans. In Kant-Studien 21, pp. 163–221. Lohmar, D. 1998. Erfahrung und kategoriales Denken. Hume, Kant und Husserl über vorprädikative Erfahrung und prädikative Erkenntnis, Dordrecht: Springer. Lohmar, D. 2003. Husserl’s Type and Kant’s Schemata: Systematic Reasons for Their Correlation or Identity. In The New Husserl. A Critical Reader, Don Welton ed. Bloomington & Indianapolis: IUP, pp. 93–124. Patočka, J. 1977. The Husserlian Doctrine of Eidetic Intuition and its Recent Critics. In Edmund Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals, F.  Elliston and P.  McCormick eds. London and Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, pp. 150–59. Schuetz, A. 1959. Type and eidos in Husserl’s late philosophy. In Philosophy and Phenomenolo­ gical Research 20/2, pp. 147–165. Spengler, O. 1926. The Decline of the West. Form and Actuality. English translation by Ch.F. Atkinson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Tengelyi, L. 2012. Negative Dialektik als geistige Erfahrung? Zu Adornos Auseinandersetzung mit Phänomenologie und Ontologie. In Phänomenologische Forschungen 2012, pp. 47–65. Windelband, W. 1911. Präludien, vol. 2. Tübingen: Mohr. Wolff, E. 2006. From Phenomenology to Critical Theory: The Genesis of Adorno’s Critical Theory from His Reading of Husserl. In Philosophy & Social Criticism 32/5, pp. 555–572.

Adorno’s Genetic Phenomenology

It is fair to say that Adorno’s lifelong critical engagement with phenomenology was never properly assimilated within the phenomenological camp. The various stages of this engagement are today fairly well documented1: it first took shape all the way back in the 1920s, during his empirio-criticist phase, leading to an early dissertation project on Husserl’s concept of the noema; it reached its first peak during the 1930s, while writing a second dissertation on Husserl in Oxford, which was reworked throughout the 1950s and published in a substantially reduced version as the Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie (Against Epistemology in English); the core motifs of this work still reverberate throughout the 1960s, during the so-called “positivism dispute” or in his Negative Dialectics. The present chapter does not aim to engage the sophisticated theoretical intentions motivating Adorno’s interest in phenomenology in general or the complexities of its evolution. Neither will it try to show why his work on phenomenology was by and large poorly received not just by contemporary phenomenologists, but also by fellow critical theorists – as, indeed, Adorno’s first substantial essay on Husserl was rejected from publication by Horkheimer for being too infused with phenomenology proper, while Against Epistemology is probably the least discussed of his major publications. What I will do instead is focus on a single aspect of this phenomenological criticism, namely: Adorno’s discussion of genetic phenomenology, which is, on the one hand, key for his entire argument and which was, on the other hand, most persistently and I would say: conveniently ignored by the few phenomenologists who did respond to that criticism. Thus, already in 1940, Fritz Kaufmann quickly rebutted Adorno’s overemphasis of the static and passive elements in Husserl’s allegedly platonic theory of knowledge, as put forth in his early paper “Husserl and the Problem of Idealism”, by pointing out “the dynamic trend [which] becomes more and more outspoken in

 See especially Kramer and Wilcock 1999 and Wolff 2006.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Ferencz-Flatz, Critical Theory and Phenomenology, Contributions to Phenomenology 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27615-6_3

41

42

Adorno’s Genetic Phenomenology

Husserl’s later development.”2 In a similar vein, Thomas Bedorf suggests in his article on “critical theory” from the most recent Husserl-Handbuch (2017) that Husserl’s genetic turn, which Adorno is excused for not being acquainted with at his time, probably invalidates most of the latter’s critical objections.3 While phenomenologists therefore generally seem to regard genetic phenomenology as something of a safe stronghold against the bulk of Adorno’s criticism, I will try to show in the following that Adorno was in fact not only remarkably well familiarized with Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, given the circumstances of his early reception, but that his critical interpretation thereof might still offers some notable insights today.

1 Misunderstandings To be sure, it is tempting not to take Adorno’s comments on genetic phenomenology all too seriously. First of all, it is quite obvious that his in depth study of Husserl’s writings dates back to the 1930s. His later reflections on the subject matter may be valuable as they at times arrive at a more precise phrasing or re-contextualize earlier arguments, but they certainly don’t add novel elements to the discussion by at least for instance also referencing any of the publications drawn from Husserl’s Nachlass during the 1950s and 60s, such as his Ideas II or the Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Syntheses, which substantially reshaped Husserl scholarship on the subject matter. Adorno’s only vague reference to Erfahrung und Urteil in a late lecture course misquotes the very title of the book.4 The main issue here is instead not just that most of Adorno’s comments and interpretations are based solely on early reminiscences rather than on a fresh and more expanded confrontation with the material. Instead it primarily concerns the common belief that an interpretation of Husserl’s thought, which predates his posthumous publications entirely couldn’t generally bring any solid argument to the table today. This appears to be all the more so in the specific case of genetic phenomenology, to which Adorno only had access at the time via a few cryptic paragraphs in the French translation of the Cartesian Meditations and some scattered remarks in the Formal and Transcendental Logic. Both writings of course address genetic phenomenology only quite generically, as a programmatic desideratum, without going into any detailed account of its specific scope and procedures, and they both obviously downplay its contrast to Husserl’s earlier so called “static” understanding of phenomenology in presenting it un-­ problematically as a mere extension of the latter.5

 Kaufmann 1940, p. 124.  Bedorf 2017, p. 333. 4  See the yet unpublished lecture course of the summer semester 1956: “Darstellung und Kritik der reinen Phänomenologie”, Frankfurt a. Main: Adorno Archiv. 5  See for this also Ferencz-Flatz and Staiti 2018. 2 3

2  Social Genesis

43

Moreover, Adorno’s most poignant and visible remarks on genetic phenomenology in Against Epistemology don’t seem to amount at first to anything more than commonplace misunderstandings in Husserl scholarship. Thus, for instance, Adorno emphatically claimed already in an early letter to Horkheimer that Husserl’s genetic turn was nothing but a relapse into “Neokantianism plain and simple”,6 a comment he also picked up in his preface to Against Epistemology. Further on, his brief reference to genetic phenomenology in the book itself salutes Husserl’s unearthing of the “inner historicity” of logical constructs, immediately adding that “Husserl just had to go through the open gate in order to find that the ‘inner historicity’ which he conceded was not just inner”.7 In other words: genetic phenomenology was just one step away from arriving at actual history proper. Both objections have been treated extensively in phenomenological scholarship: the first resonates with Donn Welton and Sebastian Luft’s contention, that Husserl’s genetic turn was ultimately inspired by Paul Natorp.8 The former seems a mere version of a criticism brought against Husserlian phenomenology throughout the 1950s and 60s by several proponents of a “mundane,” existential or hermeneutic phenomenology, which regarded Husserl’s genetic turn as but a feeble precursor of its so-called historic turn.9 Both arguments have benefitted from ample discussions in the phenomenological field, to which Adorno’s scattered remarks don’t seem at first glance to add anything relevant. What I want to show instead, in this chapter, is that, aside from his Against Epistemology and its brief comments on Husserl’s genetic turn, Adorno’s lecture courses and especially the original manuscript of his Oxford dissertation also address at least three other more subtle points of criticism, which deserve some closer attention from a phenomenological perspective, namely: the social scope of phenomenological genesis, the problem of second nature, and the question of generality.

2 Social Genesis The first of these points may appear as nothing but a mere addition to the aforementioned historicity-argument in Against Epistemology. In brief, Adorno claims, genetic phenomenology ultimately fails in its quest to unearth the true origin of ideal objects because it only derives these objects from the constitutive acts of the individual subject. Instead they should be traced back to the social processes that originated them. Thus, an amended version of genetic phenomenology, we are lead to presume, should no longer pursue the constitution of concepts and judgments – or generally: apperceptions – by regarding them as indices of an experiential history of

 Adorno & Horkheimer 2003 p. 447.  GS 5, p. 219; En., p. 216. 8  See Welton 2003, p. 267 and Luft 2009, p. 62. 9  See for this Ferencz-Flatz and Staiti 2018, pp. 19 f. 6 7

44

Adorno’s Genetic Phenomenology

individual consciousness, but it should read them as traces of their social determination instead.10 To be sure, such objections, ultimately aimed against the individualistic scope of Husserl’s phenomenology or its solipsism, are themselves quite common in phenomenological literature and Adorno’s ample discussion of intersubjectivity in the fifth Cartesian Meditation often arrives at arguments which closely resemble the traditional denunciations of Husserl’s transcendental deduction of intersubjectivity within the phenomenological camp by the likes of Merleau-Ponty or Alfred Schütz.11 Indeed, for Adorno, as for Schütz, Merleau-Ponty and others, sociality predates and conditions individual subjectivity, such that any attempt to deduce the former from the latter is ineluctably bound to circularity. This line of criticism, however, gets an interesting twist in Adorno’s reflections in that it constantly veers towards the question of language. Thus, in Adorno’s view, Husserl’s solipsistic tendency ultimately originates in his early decision to ground the analyses of knowledge on soliloquy instead of communicative speech proper. Indeed, in his sixth Logical Investigation, Husserl claims that the act of judging and its judgment content are basically the same in the case of soliloquy and in that of intersubjective communication. As a consequence, a phenomenology of judgment, which he regards as the decisive prerequisite for a phenomenological theory of knowledge in general, can readily leave out all communicative aspects.12 According to Adorno, however, this inaugural move rests upon a fictitious assumption, insofar as the form and structure of speech itself already implies a communicative other as its correlate from the onset. Interestingly, Adorno even pushes this argument a step further by showing that, in fact, the very linguistic expression of the ego, the pronoun “I”, presupposes a reference to others as a common word any speaker may use to designate himself – a point Husserl seems to concede in his discussion of “occasional expressions”13  – such that, in effect, egological phenomenology already presupposes intersubjectivity by its very terminology. Now, one could well claim that such a view is in fact perfectly compatible with Husserl’s own conception. First of all, Husserl himself seems to arrive at a quite similar assessment of language in his Experience and Judgement, by explicitly admitting that words already presuppose reference to a specific linguistic community. Nevertheless, he chooses to ignore this complication in further on only “pursuing the act of judgment as if it were an act always exclusively mine,”14 despite the obvious fact that his entire consideration thus becomes merely counterfactual. Secondly, several authors have argued that, in his later genetic manuscripts, Husserl develops a far more balanced account of the relationship between sociality and

 This argument is expressed most forcefully in the 1956 lecture course “Darstellung und Kritik der reinen Phänomenologie“, Frankfurt a. Main: Adorno Archiv, as well as GS 20/1, p. 92 f. 11  See especially GS 20/1, pp. 112 f. 12  GS 5, p. 201; En., p. 197. 13  See for this Ferencz-Flatz 2011. 14  Husserl 1973, p. 58. 10

2  Social Genesis

45

individual subjectivity proper. More than a decade ago, for instance, Tetsuya Sakakibara claimed that Husserl’s genetic manuscripts on intersubjectivity no longer regard the individual subject as prior to intersubjectivity, but rather see the two as co-original, by for instance referring to how the infants’ relationship to their parents already predates their awakening as an I.15 Similarly, in Anthony Steinbock’s view, Husserl actually overcame genetic phenomenology as such in his final manuscripts by conceiving what he termed a “generative phenomenology”, focused on issues like the home- and alien world, birth, infancy and death, or generational, historic intersubjectivity.16 If genetic phenomenology thus, in his view, expanded the scope of static phenomenology by adding the temporal dimensions of experiential constitution, generative phenomenology in its turn expands the individualistic scope of genetic phenomenology in supplementing it with the dimensions of history, culture and sociality. If genetic phenomenology, according to Steinbock, proved the structural analyses of static phenomenology abstract in unearthing their broader temporal framework, generative phenomenology proves the individualsubjective perspective of genetic phenomenology to be merely abstract by laying bare its embedding in an even larger framework of historic and cultural sociality. Thirdly, even leaving aside Husserl’s debatable understanding of intergenerational sociality, questions of social genesis obviously also keep reoccurring throughout his genetic considerations proper. Thus, his detailed excursions in the late Lebensweltmanuscripts often evoke the possibility of apperceptions being adopted mimetically from others or transmitted by mere hear-say or traditional convention,17 while in Experience and Judgment, for instance, such processes are also mentioned as a possible source for the modalisation of judgments. Is this instead really enough to ward off Adorno’s objection? An optimistic view would stress the fact that, even regardless of the programmatic claims of his genetic or generative phenomenology, several of Husserl’s later manuscripts  – and most explicitly his famous notes on the “origin of geometry” with their deduction of geometric ideality from the early practices of land measurement – can indeed be seen to perform a sort of socially tinged genetic phenomenology not unlike Durkheim and Mauss’ social genealogies of logical principles, which Adorno often cites as a guiding model in this context,18 or his own deduction of abstraction from free exchange. On the contrary, a more pessimistic interpretation would hold that the entire issue of social genesis is ultimately only taken into account by Husserl as a “higher-level problem”, which constantly presupposes the grounding layer of ­egological constitution or simply comes to complement it, whereas the entire point  Sakakibara 2008.  Steinbock 2003. 17  Hua XXXIX, p. 423 f. 18  This point is again developed most extensively in the unpublished 1956 lecture course “Darstellung und Kritik der reinen Phänomenologie“, Frankfurt a. Main: Adorno Archiv. Significantly, the same lecture course moves on to plea for an immanent critique of Durkheim and Mauss’ sociological genealogy of logic, which he here regards as a necessary complement to his criticism of Husserl. 15 16

46

Adorno’s Genetic Phenomenology

of Adorno’s argument  – which he repeatedly stresses throughout Against Epistemology – is that our most basic apperceptions all the way to the very structures of individual subjective experience are themselves already infused with social determinations. While this again seems quite acceptable in view of more recent versions of phenomenology, the question remains what this actually entails for defining the theoretical scope of the genetic method.

3 Second Nature An answer to this question may arise from considering the second point in Adorno’s discussions of genetic phenomenology, which is not even phrased initially as a point of criticism, but rather comes to view as a positive acknowledgement. Husserl’s genetic turn, Adorno writes appreciatively, proves that what phenomenology initially regarded as its absolute certainties, self-given in ultimate and unquestionable evidence, was in fact only a form of “second nature”.19 What does this mean more exactly? As is well known, Adorno adopts the concept of “second nature” from Lukács, using it in a somewhat broader acceptation to designate the acquired immediacy of states of affairs  – cultural determinations and social conventions – which are taken for granted and go unquestioned as natural even though they are in fact products of determined historical practices and contexts. In Adorno’s criticism of phenomenology, throughout his Oxford dissertation, this understanding of “second nature” comes to the fore most persistently, as already shown in the previous chapter,20 in his account of the so-called “intuition of essences” or “eidetic intuition”. For, if eidetic intuition treats intellectual objects, abstractions and generalities – which are the product of various intellective syntheses according to Husserl’s own genetic account and which should be rooted even deeper in specific social processes according to Adorno – as if they were simply self-given in sheer evidence, then eidetic phenomenology actually falls pray to a typical illusion of false naturalization. On the contrary, Husserl’s turn to genetic phenomenology appears, in his view, from the onset as a move set to expose and overcome this difficulty. The broader consequence of this observation is, on the one hand, of course, that, contrary to Husserl’s own self-interpretation, which tends to regard genetic phenomenology as a seamless expansion of the initial scope of static phenomenology, Adorno basically sees genetic phenomenology as a retraction of Husserl’s earlier philosophy, to which it stands in stark contrast. In fact, the main narrative in Adorno’s entire Oxford dissertation is that, throughout his oeuvre, Husserl relentlessly pursued and unwillingly exposed internal contradictions of his

 This point is developed most extensively in the original manuscript of Adorno’s Oxford dissertation, Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt a. Main, Ts 2959 ff. 20  See chapter “Eidetic Intuition and Physiognomic Interpretation”, pp. 19–37. 19

3  Second Nature

47

phenomenological project, such that within the evolution of his own thought one already finds its most substantial criticism, and it is precisely in this view that Adorno sees genetic phenomenology at core as a self-criticism of static phenomenology. On the other hand, Adorno’s argument also emphasizes another aspect, which – again as in the case of his earlier objection concerning the social dimension of genesis – is not entirely ignored by Husserl, but only appears somewhat diffused in his reflections. For, if one indeed speaks of “second nature” here, with regard to the objects of phenomenology, this implies from the onset more than just the fact that those objects are essentially products, to be traced back to an individual or social origin. It also implies that they have as such acquired a certain derivate immediacy and that they are normally treated precisely in ignorance of their genesis in simply being taken for granted. In Adorno’s interpretation, it would then be the main task of a genetic phenomenology done right to fight and expose this tendency, while static phenomenology simply succumbs to it. For sure, as I mentioned earlier, this point is not completely ignored by Husserl either and it indeed comes to the fore most poignantly in his late discussions of sedimentation and habituation. As is well known, in Husserl’s view, no apprehension of an object is merely momentary and ephemeral as such. Instead, every original experience of an object constitutes a lasting result, which may sink from actual givenness to retention or even complete latency when forgotten, but which nevertheless remains an enduring possession, to be awakened anytime by association and recollection. In other words: it becomes a habitus and is incorporated in our ongoing perception, such that our current encounters of such objects are marked through and through by precipitates of earlier experiences: they are sprinkled throughout with sediments of our experiential history. Moreover, in Husserl’s view, the same pertains not only with regard to objects of perceptual experience plain and simple, but also with regard to higher degree objects like judgments and concepts. In this context, he explicitly introduces the striking notion of “secondary passivity” to discuss those judgments or intellectual objects in general, which are now only encountered quasi-passively, by for instance springing to mind out of the blue, but in the case of which this passivity essentially refers back to its initial origin in an actual spontaneous production.21 Now, throughout these reflection on sedimentation, one might say, Husserl indeed comes as close as possible to a phenomenological account of what Adorno terms the “second nature” of phenomenological eidetics – but one should nevertheless also keep in mind two crucial differences. On the one hand, in contrast to Husserl, Adorno stipulates a far more fluid relationship between what counts as a primal experience proper and what merely pertains to sedimented, secondary passivity. Thus, he frequently points to how former instruction and education, earlier experience, and even historically acquired knowledge and social convention constantly infiltrate our experience to the point where it

 With regard to Husserl’s concept of “secondary passivity” see for instance Husserl 1973, p. 279. Cf. also Biceaga 2010, pp. 43 ff. 21

48

Adorno’s Genetic Phenomenology

becomes difficult to distinguish what is an originally experienced phenomenon and what isn’t. In fact, it is precisely because of this ongoing process of naturalization, that is: because “second nature” essentially involves an acquired illusion of immediacy, that Adorno is consequently lead to coin the striking concept of “second degree phenomenality”,22 which he regards as the necessary point of departure for a genetic inquiry. On the other hand, Husserl regards secondary passivity as a mere consequence of temporal constitution in general, which doesn’t pose any serious threats to the core phenomenological claims concerning intuition and evidence insofar as, in his view, every sedimented apperception ultimately points back at a corresponding perceptual presentation, which is itself primarily self-given. Thus, however, the entire question of “second nature” becomes entirely harmless. Adorno’s criticism of phenomenology basically aims to challenge this claim. To this extent, the third section of Against Epistemology develops an in-depth criticism of the phenomenological concept of givenness by showing that what Husserl in his constitutive analyses regarded as the grounding layers: the moments of sheer sensory presentation, themselves depend upon the fully constituted social world they should help explain. Thus, their alleged immediacy is in fact also mediated. According to Adorno, this comes to view most strikingly when considering how the most basic element of sensory perception, namely: sheer sensation, already presupposes the full-blown body as part of our concrete social reality.23 Differently put: Husserl may indeed, in the wake of his genetic turn, push the boundaries of phenomenology further and further by deconstructing his own initial conceptions of sensation, ego, intentional object etc., but one could nevertheless say that this process always only leads back to a substitute original layer, termed as primal impression, pre-reflective „original I”, or primary instinct. In contrast to this, Adorno himself rather pleas for principally regarding all phenomenal aspects  – and this means: givenness as the core presupposition of phenomenology – from the onset as merely constituted, mediated and non-ultimate. In his view, therefore, genetic phenomenology is called to radically undermine the grounding phenomenological understanding of what a “phenomenon” is by showing that all phenomenality is ultimately to be treated only as a “second degree phenomenality”; in all consequence, the entire purpose of phenomenology would be to show that there are no “phenomena”.

4 Questions of Generality This brings me to my third and final point of contention, which concerns the generality of genetic phenomenology. Again, Adorno doesn’t explicitly address this issue as a form of criticism, but the discrepancies to Husserl’s own views are quite

 GS 8, p.  320. See for this also chapter “Eidetic Intuition and Physiognomic Interpretation”, pp. 19–37. 23  GS 5, p. 160 f.; En., p. 155 f. 22

4  Questions of Generality

49

obvious. For, according to Husserl, on the one hand, genetic phenomenology “does not concern bringing to light a factical genesis for factical apperceptions (…) in a factical stream of consciousness, or even in all factical human beings”,24 but only in outlining the general mode of genesis which applies for a specific type of apperceptions. Adorno, on the other hand, considers that, with its genetic turn, “Husserl’s philosophy, seemingly as in a dream, opens its eyes to dialectical materialism”. Or, perhaps even more explicitly, in another passage: “Husserl persistently stares at the rigid and alienated epistemic object until it springs open and lays bare for an instant what its rigor should conceal: the historic process”.25 Consequently, in Adorno’s view, the true purpose of genetic phenomenology would not be to provide us with a mere theory of “second nature” in general, as it were – or better: a structural description of how habituation and sedimentation work in general and in the case of intellectual objects in particular  – but instead it should offer a tool for concretely dispelling the illusionary immediacy of specific cases of “eidetic naturalization”. In other words: it shouldn’t aim for a universal theory at all, but instead it should be applied in scope and critical in purpose in accordance to Adorno’s professed creed that it is generally “one of the essential organs of a critical theory of society to understand things that present themselves as being and thus as given by nature, in their having-become”.26 Now, the contrast here might not be entirely clear from the onset if one considers, for instance, a recent paper by Alice Pugliese, which places the entire scope of genetic phenomenology under the sign of what she terms “motivational analysis”.27 In brief, according to the author, genetic phenomenology develops a specific transcendental method for laying bare the experiential history of subjective life by following through threads of motivational implication, which Husserl also terms sinngenetische Implikationen. Insofar as every particular form of consciousness is rooted in specific other forms of consciousness, which precede it and motivate it, one can at any time read within the former the implications pointing at its motivational basis in the latter. To this extent, one may recall that Husserl indeed famously stressed his early emphasis on the phenomenon of “indication” or “implication” in the Logical Investigations to have already laid the ground for his entire later genetic phenomenology.28 The point here is, however, that the very notion of “motivational analysis” is as such equivocal. For since indeed all factical experiences and their apperceptions point back at their origin, motivational analysis could, on the one hand, appear as an applied procedure for actually and specifically retracing the genesis of those concrete sense implications – and this is indeed how both Pugliese and Adorno would like to interpret the task of genetic phenomenology. Instead, as my

 Husserl 1998, p. 137.  Both quotes are from Adorno’s original Oxford manuscript, Theodor W.  Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt a. Main, Ts 2959 ff. 26  Adorno 2017, p. 245. 27  Pugliese 2018. 28  Husserl 1973, p. 75. 24 25

50

Adorno’s Genetic Phenomenology

aforementioned quote shows as well, Husserl himself makes it quite clear on several occasions that his own aim is not that of actually following through such a procedure specifically, that is: in actually performing motivational analysis, if one wants to call it that, but in simply outlining the eidetic framework which grounds such a procedure, that is in “establishing the universal and primitive laws under which stands”29 the formation and derivation of apperceptions. In other words: genetic phenomenology is, in Husserl’s view, not in the least interested in tracing back a specific apperception to its factical origin, but instead it simply aims to sketch out the general type of genesis that would necessarily correspond to a general type of apperception; for instance: pre-predicative experiences as the genetic root for predicative judgments, or perceptual modalisation for negation. Similarly, genetic phenomenology has no interest, in Husserl’s view, in confronting specific instances of habituation or sedimentation as they stand, but primarily in pointing out how habituation and sedimentation structurally work in general etc. Of course, one could well conceive of a non-eidetic phenomenological approach to these issues along the lines suggested by Pugliese, but it is important to note that such an approach actually parts ways with Husserl. This is instead precisely where Adorno’s argument becomes particularly interesting. For, in Adorno’s view, Husserl’s genetic turn ultimately constitutes precisely the point where the phenomenological method itself in all consequence arrives at calling itself into question and thus becomes a case of “false consciousness gone right”30 (richtiges falsches Bewusstsein) as he terms it: “this means to say, more precisely, that the very assumption and analysis of reification, performed by the phenomenologist in a strictly descriptive and non-speculative manner, leads him to making manifest as its finding history – and, as a consequence, that finding stops being a mere finding to be simply accepted as such.”31 In other words – and this is indeed where all the aforementioned three points of criticism concur – the genetic turn undermines the grounding claim of the phenomenological descriptive-eidetic method in showing that the ultimate givens of its eidetic intuition are not ultimate givens at all, to be simply adopted and described in evidence as called for by the famous “principle of principles”. I have tried to show, in the preceding chapter, that one can indeed support this interpretation when considering how Husserl’s theory of typification and his conception of idealisation – which ultimately derive from his genetic turn – subvert the epistemological framework of his entire eidetic project.32 For, on the one hand, experiential typification, which Husserl comes to regard as the indispensable precondition for the constitution of empirical concepts, is, despite Husserl’s attempts to show otherwise, also involved in the constitution of eidetic concepts as an implicit guidance for eidetic variation. On the other hand, Husserl’s late genetic deconstruction of mathematical objects as idealisations of sensory

 Husserl 2001, p. 627.  GS 20/1, p. 81 f. 31  GS 20/1, p. 92. 32  See for this chapter “Eidetic Intuition and Physiognomic Interpretation”, pp. 19–37. 29 30

5 Conclusion

51

experience, that is: as sheer Grenzfiguren, extrapolated from sensory experience, also radically calls into question the guiding model of geometric evidence, which grounds the eidetic method. Despite these obvious implications of his genetic turn, however, it is clear that Husserl himself ultimately holds on to his eidetic method in its full scope all the way to his final works. Moreover, he sidetracks the entire subversive potential of genetic phenomenology, as envisaged by Adorno, by interpreting it throughout most of his canonic writings as a mere “eidetics of genesis”.33

5 Conclusion What does all of this basically amount to? An early version of the key passage from Against Epistemology, I quoted at the beginning of this chapter, reads as follows: “Husserl just had to go through the open gate in order to find that the ‘inner historicity’ he conceded was not just inner; that among the moments which account for genesis of sense one also finds facts and therefore that the condition of possibility for all sense, even that of formal logics, resides in real history, that is: in the history of society as the true objective reference for pure thought”.34 What I tried to show in the present chapter is that, following Adorno’s interpretation, one indeed only has to push three little moments in Husserl’s account of genetic phenomenology – namely: the relationship between social and individual genesis, the problem of habituation and false immediacy, and the question of the empirical basis of eidetics – a bit further and the genetic method changes its scope entirely. Thus, it stops being a general theory of the most universal and primitive laws determining immanent genesis, as Husserl saw it, and becomes an interpretative tool for unearthing concealed sedimentations in concrete historical phenomena, as Adorno saw it, adopting it as a key element of his critical theory. To be sure, Husserl would resist such a twist of his conception not lastly because of his creed that phenomenology can only remain a true philosophical method if it prevents all conflation with the empirical, as he was indeed persistently concerned with setting his genetic phenomenology apart from all forms of empirical genesis despite its obvious parallels to both developmental psychology and factual historiography proper.35 But, since such an absolute separation is today ultimately no longer held tenable by contemporary phenomenologists themselves, it may be worthwhile for them to contemplate how Adorno negotiated his own empirically grounded blend of critical philosophy in opposing interpretative philosophical procedures to a more narrow-minded, positivist understanding of empirical methods.

 It would be worthwhile to explore the analogies between this move and Heidegger’s philosophical integration of history as “historicity”, which Adorno criticizes in the Negative Dialectics as a case of “ontologization of the ontic”, GS 6, p. 119 f. 34  GS 20/1, p. 92 f. 35  See for this also Ferencz-Flatz 2017. 33

52

Adorno’s Genetic Phenomenology

References Adorno, Th. W. and Horkheimer, M. 2003. Briefwechsel I. 1927–1937. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Th.W. 2003a. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1–20, Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp (cited as GS 1-20). Adorno, Th.W. 2003b. Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie, in: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. English translation by W. Domingo. 2013. Against Epistemology. A Metacritique. Cambridge: Polity. Adorno, Th.W. 2017. Einleitung in die Soziologie (1968). Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Bedorf, Th. 2017. Kritische Theorie. In Husserl Handbuch. Leben – Werk – Wirkung. S. Luft and M. Wehrle eds. Stuttgart: Metzler, pp. 332–336. Biceaga, V. 2010. The Concept of Passivity in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Springer. Ferencz-Flatz, Ch. 2011. Husserls Idee einer “Phänomenologie der Okkasionalität”. In Philosophisches Jahrbuch 118, pp. 85–103. Ferencz-Flatz, Ch. and Staiti, A. 2018. Editors’ Introduction: Notes on a Troubled Reception History. In Studia Phaenomenologica XVIII: The Promise of Genetic Phenomenology, pp. 11–30. Ferencz-Flatz, Ch. 2017. Zur geschichtlichen Wende der genetischen Phänomenologie. Eine Interpretation der Beilage III der Krisis. In Husserl Studies 33/2, pp. 99–126. Husserl, E. 1973. Experience and Judgment, English translation J.S. Churchill and K. Ameriks, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Husserl, E. 1998. Static and Genetic Phenomenological Method. English translation by A. Steinbock. In Continental Philosophy Review 31, pp. 135–142. Husserl, E. 2001. Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Syntheses: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, English translation by A. Steinbock, Dordrecht: Springer. Husserl, E. 2008. Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937). Dordrecht: Springer (cited as Hua XXXIX). Kaufmann, F. 1940. “Husserl and the Problem of Idealism” by Theodore W. Adorno. In Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1/1, pp. 123–125. Kramer, A. and Wilcock, E.. 1999. ‚A preserve for professional philosophers’ Adornos Husserl-Dissertation 1934–37 und ihr Oxforder Kontext. In Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 73/1, pp. 115–161 Luft, S. 2009. Reconstruction and Reduction: Natorp and Husserl on Method and the Question of Subjectivity. In Neo-Kantianism in Contemporary Philosophy, R. Makkreel and S. Luft ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 59–91. Pugliese, A. 2018. Motivational Analysis in Husserl’s Genetic Phenomenology. In Studia Phaenomenologica 18, pp. 91–108. Sakakibara, T. 2008. Struktur und Genesis der Fremderfahrung bei Edmund Husserl. In Husserl Studies 24, pp. 1–14. Steinbock, A.  J. 2003. Generativity and the scope of generative phenomenology. In The New Husserl: A Critical Reader, D. Welton ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 289–325. Welton, D. 2003. The Systematicity of Husserls Transcendental Philosophy: From Static to Genetic Method. In The New Husserl: A Critical Reader. D. Welton ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 255–288. Wolff, E. 2006. From Phenomenology to Critical Theory: The Genesis of Adorno’s Critical Theory from His Reading of Husserl. In Philosophy & Social Criticism 32/5, pp. 555–572.

On Radio. Phenomenology and Critical Media Studies

1 Administrative Versus Critical Research To this day, administrative and critical research are commonly regarded as the two main trends of scholarship in the field of communication and media studies. Their opposition is often discussed under variant other labels as well. Thus, the administrative approach is occasionally also termed as “empirical”, “quantitative”, or “positivistic”, while the critical approach identifies itself as “Marxist”, “qualitative”, or “contextual”. In principle, administrative research focuses foremost on the direct and measurable effects of media, as epitomized by studies on audience compositions and preferences; it is fact based, and most often serves the purposes of a sponsoring agency, regardless if this concerns matters of public interest, or private commercial objectives. On the contrary, critical research is mostly concerned with the more general social and historic context of media practices, engaging their reception only in correlation with the specific interests of the agencies controlling or manipulating them; Dorfmann and Mattelart’s famous reading of imperialist ideology in Disney’s Donald Duck comics from the 1970s is presumably the most often cited example thereof. A trivial description of the main point of difference between the two could read as follows: […] administrative research is mobilized to answer a question from, say, CBS, about what kind of people view reality shows on television and why, while critical research would want to make CBS as well as the ids and egos of viewers part of the problem. The one allegedly takes viewers’ responses at face value; the other psychoanalyzes their responses, sorting the destructive from the constructive and specifying the ways in which society is affected thereby.1

This is, for sure, intended as an oversimplification, not least because the two positions have, as the authors of the aforementioned passage show, gradually shifted.  Katz and Katz 2016, p. 8 f.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Ferencz-Flatz, Critical Theory and Phenomenology, Contributions to Phenomenology 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27615-6_4

53

54

On Radio. Phenomenology and Critical Media Studies

Thus, while the two trends are still seen as divided by fundamental issues ranging from diverging epistemologies to opposite ideological frameworks and even geographically distinct research networks, it is generally held that both have in the meanwhile consistently “rubbed off” on each other. Therefore, strictly empirical approaches have become more and more open to critical influences, while proponents of the critical school have by and large adapted to the procedures of empirical research. In consequence, researchers from both camps have repeatedly argued for a revision of that division. In what follows, I will be interested neither in defending the ongoing relevance of this chasm, nor in offering a further argument for overcoming it. I will instead go back to the debate which famously originated it – namely the exchange between Adorno and the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld in the early 1940s – in order to thus point out an element of this debate, which is most often overlooked, namely: the central role phenomenology played in it.

2 Against Phenomenology As was already pointed out in the preceding chapters, Adorno had a long and complicated history with phenomenology before joining Lazarsfeld’s Radio Research Project in New York in the late 1930s. While his first PhD, which he finished in Frankfurt in the late 1920s, was a timid attempt at criticizing Husserl’s concept of “noema” from a perspective still heavily marked by Hans Cornelius’ blend of empirio-criticism, he continued to publish on phenomenological issues throughout the 1930s, and arrived in New York at the end of that decade after almost finishing a second PhD on Husserl in Oxford, under the supervision of Gilbert Ryle. It is particularly this last dissertation project, which occupied his past 5 years before the Radio Project, which is most relevant in the present context on several accounts. For one, it puts into play Adorno’s most ambitious attempt to systematically overthrow phenomenology by laying bare the necessary antinomies involved in all of its key concepts: the phenomenological attitude, categorial intuition, the noema, the given, the relationship between fact and essence and so on. However, his stance in approaching this is, surprisingly, not plainly critical at all. Put in a nutshell, Adorno’s thesis basically amounts to seeing Husserl’s thinking as an attempt to save philosophical idealism with the tools of positivism. In Adorno’s view, this attempt is set to fail, but it leads Husserl, in the development of his thought, to gradually take back all of his most relevant initial claims, thus exposing the internal contradictions of idealism itself. In showing this, however, Adorno’s aim is not simply to criticize Husserl for being wrong. Instead, his intention is rather to acknowledge the philosophical development of Husserl’s thought as a covert self-destruction of idealism, and it is precisely therein that Adorno appreciates Husserl’s main philosophical merit. In doing so, his effort is relevant secondly because of the precise method Adorno puts into play in his interpretation of Husserl, a method which he terms as “immanent criticism” and which, bluntly put, involves him playing the phenomenologist in order to criticize phenomenology. To be sure, Adorno himself seemed to have on

2  Against Phenomenology

55

occasion enjoyed actually impersonating a full-blown phenomenologists. In one of his letters, he recounts a Paris conference in the late 1930s, where he was hailed in a phenomenological panel by phenomenologists like Ludwig Landgrebe for rebuking a bad exegetical paper on Husserl with highly technical arguments.2 Moreover, an early draft of his critique of Husserl was harshly criticized by fellow critical theorists like Horkheimer and Marcuse, who rejected it from publication on account of its being too imbued with phenomenology to be even understandable for non-­ phenomenologists. While, in principle, they both agreed to his critical stance on phenomenology, they basically considered his phenomenological deconstruction of phenomenology yet to close to phenomenology proper.3 Thirdly, the issue becomes even more complicated if one considers the fact that Horkheimer’s initial rejection presumably also had another motive, which concerned Adorno’s tactical positioning within the philosophical field of his time. While tactical considerations of this sort come up quite frequently in Adorno and Horkheimer’s correspondence, in this particular case they relate primarily to how Adorno negotiated his interpretation of Husserl between the competing camps of logical positivism, on the one hand, and existential ontology, on the other. Both were highly critical of Husserl at the time. As a consequence, Adorno himself is concerned, when engaging in a critique of Husserl, to avoid his arguments conflating both with those of Schlick, Carnap, or Ryle, who ultimately reduced philosophy to a subordinate task in relation to positivist science, and those of Heidegger, who in Adorno’s view advocated a covert return to metaphysical idealism. Despite Adorno’s efforts, however, Horkheimer, who himself wrote an extensive essay on logical positivism at the time regarding it in conjunction with Heidegger and Husserl, still feared that Adorno’s position ultimately came too close to that of the Oxford school of logical positivism.4 While these discussions were addressed in some more detail in the introduction of the present work, the main point here is that only after acknowledging these intricate mutual relationships within the philosophical field of the time, one can truly assess what it means that, within the framework of his collaboration with Lazarsfeld in the late 1930s, Adorno develops a striking inclination for a certain kind of phenomenological approach (which he terms “physiognomics”). For, while the phenomenological elements of Adorno’s work for the radio project have not gone completely unnoticed  – two recent papers, by Brian Kane and Babette Babitch, titled “Phenomenology, Physiognomy, and the ‘Radio Voice’”, respectively “Adorno’s Radio Phenomenology” explicitly take note of this5 – one cannot plainly call his work phenomenological either, as the two aforementioned authors do, without even asking what methodological and tactical considerations could have possibly driven him from a systematic destruction of phenomenology, as he envisioned in Oxford, straight to advocating it within the same year. A closer scrutiny of this  Adorno and Horkheimer 2003 II, p. 574 f.  Adorno and Horkheimer 2003 I, p. 422 f. 4  See for this also Kramer and Wilcock 1999. 5  See Kane 2016 and Babich 2014. 2 3

56

On Radio. Phenomenology and Critical Media Studies

issue would no doubt have to show both that Adorno’s so called radio phenomenology is still to a large extent conceived polemically in relation to traditional phenomenology, while his relative change of tactics in relation to it can largely be led back to a significant change of context.

3 The Metacritique of Neopositivism If one would try to once more briefly summarize what was at stake in Adorno’s extended rebuttal of phenomenology in his Oxford project, one would have to note that, while Adorno systematically rejected all of Husserl’s chief philosophical claims, substantiating the status of phenomenology as a non-empirical, philosophical science of the “material a priori”, he nevertheless still held good some positive notion of the phenomenological method itself, which even allowed him to repeatedly criticize phenomenological claims for not being actually “proven phenomenologically”. It is precisely at this point that, contrary to the views of Horkheimer, his criticism indeed parted ways with the likes of Schlick, Carnap or Ryle. For, if one might say that, in Husserl’s view, phenomenology fundamentally stands or falls with its aprioric claims, which alone allow setting it apart from empirical fact-based science, logical positivism, which denied those claims, aimed to show primarily that phenomenology in particular and philosophy in general should cede all positive cognitive ambitions to science, while retaining only the corrective minor task of a logical analysis of language. In contrast to both Husserl and logical positivism, then, one could interpret Adorno’s own stance as an attempt to side with logical positivism in rejecting all of phenomenology’s super-empiric claims, while at the same time opposing logical positivism in maintaining the legitimacy of a phenomenological approach against a reductive form of empirical research proper. If his work in Oxford obviously supports the former in the philosophical context of logical positivism, his entire argument in favor of a physiognomic approach could be seen as substantiating the latter in the entirely different context of his collaboration with empirical scientists for the Princeton Radio project. In this regard, it is no doubt important to stress from the onset that, in adapting to this novel context, Adorno comes remarkably close to issues, which are highly topical for phenomenology itself nowadays, for instance in the more recent debates concerning the naturalization of phenomenology. As is well known, these debates have been stimulated by obvious correspondences between novel empirical findings in the neurosciences and certain earlier intuitions in phenomenology, which pose the question of how exactly their two research methods could be rendered compatible. Needless to say that a naturalization of phenomenology, which would allow it to enter dialogue with the causal empirical findings of neuroscience, is vehemently rejected by orthodox phenomenologists, who only see a possible integration of the two as coming from an improbable phenomenologization of natural science. On the contrary, researchers who champion the aforesaid naturalization of phenomenology in different versions of “neuro-phenomenology” themselves have serious

4  Radio Physiognomics

57

difficulties in ultimately defending the methodological legitimacy of such a naturalized phenomenology in front of empirical research proper.6 While Adorno himself could of course not yet have anticipated these debates and generally took no interest in making an explicit apology for phenomenology per se, his arguments in favor of a physiognomic approach – which I will discuss in the following as prolonging his tactically sophisticated criticism of phenomenology – nevertheless offer enlightening suggestions as to how such an intermediary position, in brief: a phenomenology conceived as open to empirical research without ceding ground to positivist research methods proper, could be defended theoretically. This applies for phenomenology in general, but it applies to media phenomenology in particular all the more since Adorno himself first developed his concept of physiognomic analysis in his early works on radio.

4 Radio Physiognomics As is well known, Adorno was called in 1939 to head the Musical Department of the Radio Research Project in New  York. His task there was to work out theoretical hypotheses concerning the reception of classical music in the radio, which could be tested empirically, and to elaborate program suggestions for the Columbia Broadcasting System, which partially funded the research. What he did instead was sketch out an extended “Radio Physiognomics”, which he presented as a first step leading to a full-blown social theory of the Radio. This approach was, on the one hand, with all its idiosyncratic observations, highly reminiscent of phenomenology, while, on the other hand, it engaged in a complex criticism of empirical research. Under these circumstances, however, if one consequently wants to interpret Adorno’s methodological appeal to physiognomics here as an attempt to tactically negotiate a plausible intermediary position between classical phenomenology, on the one hand, and empirical research, on the other, one has to show primarily how this attempt entailed both a substantial revision of phenomenology and a reassessment of empirical research. This is precisely what I intend to do in this chapter. In what concerns the relationship between physiognomics and phenomenology, one should for sure not overemphasize Adorno’s decision to prefer the first term to the latter, for the two concepts in fact not only share a significant historical background,7 but indeed overlap in numerous points, both methodologically and thematically. Thus, in a methodological perspective, Adorno’s radio physiognomics overtly intersects with the phenomenological method in focusing exclusively on the “how-elements” of the radio, that is: on a description of the acoustic qualities of the “radio voice”, disregarding both its specific “what” (that is: the particular programs aired on radio) as well as the technical, psychological or social factors, which

 See for this debate Marbach 2010, Zahavi 2010, Vermeersch 2011, Moran 2013 and others.  In this regard, see above, primarily chapter “Eidetic Intuition and Physiognomic Interpretation”.

6 7

58

On Radio. Phenomenology and Critical Media Studies

causally determine those qualities.8 In a thematic perspective, his analysis ultimately arrives at defining Radio music as an acoustic equivalent to image consciousness9 – substantiated by an in-depth discussion of the “hear stripe” – which visibly draws from Husserl’s account of image perception in even borrowing from it key terms like that of the “neutrality modification”. If such resemblances are easy to trace, however, the points of divergence are no less significant. First of all, it is obvious that, while phenomenology aims to give structural descriptions of typical lived experiences and their correlates, Adorno’s physiognomy, on the contrary, dwells on ultra-specific details  – gestures, bits of casual conversations, or minor items of the everyday world  – by selecting the specific moments of the phenomenon which hold an “expressive value” and reveal more than simply meets the eye: Whenever we switch on our radio the phenomena, which are forthcoming bear a kind of expression. Radio “speaks to us” even when we are not listening to a speaker. It might grimace; it might shock us; it might even “raise its eyes” at the very moment we suddenly realize that the inarticulate sounds pouring from the loudspeaker are taking the shape of a piece of music which particularly touches us. […] Thus we may define radio physiognomics preliminarily as the study of the elements of expression of the “radio voice”.10

In doing so, Adorno’s physiognomics substitutes a quasi-empiricist “flair for facts”, as he calls it elsewhere, implicit in his effort to identify those very elements of actual experience that strike as particularly telling or as subliminally irritant and need to be deciphered, to the schematic use of imaginary examples in traditional phenomenology. This approach is best exemplified by Adorno’s detailed analyses of listeners playing with the twirl-dial of their radio,11 or his description of how a radio set left running without any listener attending to it resembles other pieces of house-­ hold infrastructure like the water pipes.12 As a consequence of this, physiognomy is secondly not aiming for mere invariant features, that is: for sheer abstract typicality, but instead it takes the risk of extrapolating from the mere idiosyncratic, not by simply generalizing it, but by basically arranging the most intriguing details of the phenomenon into an insightful picture. In this, it is fundamentally interpretative and doesn’t pretend to substitute sound scientific induction with implausible claims at super-historic aprioricity, as was arguably the case with traditional phenomenology’s eidetic variation.13 Thus, for instance, in his “Radio Physiognomics”, Adorno tries to corroborate his interpretation of listeners playing with the dial-twirler of their Radio sets as a form of albeit futile resistance against the “ubiquity-standardization” of mass media by referring to a different phenomenon which fits a similar pattern, namely fan-mail:

 Adorno 2006, p. 78 f.  See for instance Adorno 2006, p. 97. 10  Adorno 2006, p. 77 f. 11  Adorno 2006, p. 151 f. 12  Adorno and Horkheimer 2003 II, p. 511 f. 13  See with regard to this chapter “Eidetic Intuition and Physiognomic Interpretation” above. 8 9

4  Radio Physiognomics

59

Our attempt to justify our interpretation of the dial-twirler by discussing the mechanisms behind fan mail does not aim to prove our theory by citing more “facts” which might be considered independent of it. We are only trying to show that these facts “fit” the same theory. Furthermore, by going back to this theory, facts apparently so far apart as dial twirling and fan-mail-writing begin to “speak”. To go back to the terminology of this study, they “gain a common expression”.14

Thirdly, physiognomy as such doesn’t conceive of itself as a self-grounding, fundamental and universal super-discipline – Adorno doesn’t even explicitly term it as philosophy – but only as a provisional technique for harvesting unregulated insights. It is not even a method really, but rather an anti-methodic and historically relative corrective to methodology, which should then be corroborated by empirical research, which requires in depth explanation, and which could well be disproven. In his earliest draft of the radio physiognomics, this endeavor is thus explicitly defined in contrast to the psychological, sociological and technical treatment of the radio as a necessary preliminary clarification, which allows cross-links between the diverging considerations of those sciences: […] older physiognomics was undertaken and regarded as an intuitive science of its own. Our attempt is nothing of that sort. It is only a description of phenomena assembled at a crossing point with the aim of showing the unity of aspects scientifically so different from each other as are the psychological, technological and sociological sciences. It is not the ambition of radio physiognomics to replace these scientific approaches by a “vision” of the totality. Physiognomics intends only to define more correctly the inherent features of radio phenomena and to elaborate within these features certain relations which deserve as much attention for further analysis as radio’s isolated scientific problems. […] All these considerations can be, and have to be pursued for themselves. As far as we can see, however, it is only by means of radio physiognomics that we can ever become aware of the way they are concretely connected instead of reconstructing their unity in a totally abstract way after having sectioned it into the disciplines traditionally used for handling them.15

Now, these claims are for sure not incompatible with certain tendencies of post-­ Husserlian phenomenology, of which they could easily be shown to offer an alternative version. While orthodox phenomenologists may consider this version to involve only a deplete and reductive view of phenomenology, which abandons its most significant claims – and one that might be applicable to media analysis, but is perhaps less apt in tackling different regions of phenomenology  – it nevertheless proves relevant above all in that, by indeed plausibly tuning down most key elements of the phenomenological method, it doesn’t lose its edge in relation to empirical research proper.

14 15

 Adorno 2006, p. 168.  Adorno 2006, p. 118.

60

On Radio. Phenomenology and Critical Media Studies

5 Fine-Tuning Empirical Research Whenever the question of the mutual compatibility between administrative, empirical research and critical theory is raised, Lazarsfeld’s paper from the early 1940s, “Remarks on administrative and critical communications research”,16 is inevitably brought up as the first and most remarkable effort made at bringing the two schools at peace. Instead, it should be made clear from the onset, that Lazarsfeld’s albeit not unsympathetic account of Adorno’s method is in fact highly condescending and dismissive of it. Thus, Lazarsfeld’s alleged defense of critical theory, which is obviously sketched out for the benefit of administrative researchers, fundamentally aims to brake down the former into a set of basic research operations, by explicitly noting that such an “operationalization” of this approach in terms of empirical research proper does not come easy. In his view, then, the aforementioned physiognomic moment of critical analysis – which he interprets as a necessary first step for a critical social theory – is basically reduced to “making observations in everyday life and trying to interpret them in terms of their social meaning”.17 This endeavor is then immediately dismissed more or less explicitly insofar as it is, on the one hand, tacitly informed by an implicit theoretical perspective from the onset, while on the other hand, it is charged with “spending so much of its efforts on simply ‘showing up’ things, rather than on fact-finding or constructive suggestions”.18 Now, in response to this reductive interpretation of critical theory in general, and its physiognomic approach in particular, in light of administrative methodology, Adorno comes to develop his own quite subtle thoughts on a possible collaboration between the two, which are then expanded throughout his later sociological works. To be sure, the main tendency of these methodological reflections aims at plainly opposing physiognomic analysis to regular empirical research, which on the one hand impoverishes the possible harvest of experience proper by fully operationalizing it, while, on the other hand, it trivializes its insights by subjecting them to rigid standards of generalization.19 To this extent, it is relevant to note that, in a later text, Adorno even arrives at sketching a physiognomic analysis of positivist research itself,20 which basically parallels Lazarsfeld’s attempt to empirically operationalize critical physiognomy. Be this as it may, however, the main point here is that, while Adorno is indeed reluctant to reduce physiognomic insights to empirically verifiable hypotheses, he is by no means simply content to critically dismiss empirical research altogether. No doubt, according to Adorno, there are several reasons, which complicate the question of empirical verification by queries in the case of pyhsiognomic findings. In his view, such findings resist verification, first of all, because they often touch  Lazarsfeld 1941.  Lazarsfeld 1941, p. 11. 18  Lazarsfeld 1941, p. 13. 19  Adorno 2006, p. 670 f. 20  GS 8, p. 342 f. 16 17

5  Fine-Tuning Empirical Research

61

upon subliminal, even irrational bits and patterns of behavior, which are immediately rejected by respondents, who on the contrary tend to rationalize their comportment.21 Secondly, this is the case also because of the intricacies and complexities of the discussed phenomena themselves – he refers, for instance, to the reception of classical music, the experience of which is extremely difficult to verbalize even by trained listeners – such that these phenomenal complexities are then consequently difficult to transpose into relevant quantifiable questions, being obviously misconstrued by simple surveys focused on likes and dislikes.22 Finally, Adorno holds that the very results of empirical inquiries face specific problems of theoretical interpretation, which make them at core incapable of actually settling the questions they are suppose to settle. However, the relevant point here is in any case that, in Adorno’s view, empirical verification is not simply to be rejected – while it can’t be taken for granted either – but instead it should be tackled in a more reflected manner, by being put to use only where and only to the extent that it can bring relevant insights, while at the same time allowing for complementary methods.23 Thus, for instance – in the field of reception studies – Adorno defends the need for a preliminary, phenomenologically tinged content analysis, which should first try to objectively establish the outline of the phenomenon itself before properly testing the quantitative matter of its reception, and this goes in line with a general defense of qualitative methods like the extended interview, or the feature analysis, in addition to sheer quantitative research in his writings,24 which makes Adorno’s arguments for an experientially dense physiognomic description particularly relevant for contemporary advocates of a phenomenological approach in media studies. At the same time, Adorno holds – and this is again an important point for contemporary media phenomenologists  – that physiognomic accounts shouldn’t be deemed relevant for social theory only if they can be posed as hypotheses proper and verified empirically in order to be established as fact. Instead, given the aforementioned impediments to their verifiability, their empirical validity should be measured by alternative criteria as well, which Adorno outlines on several occasions, in claiming for instance that a physiognomic interpretation has its main criterion for validation in whether or not it is able to shed new light on aspects of a phenomenon which are otherwise unintelligible, or whether or not it can bring different aspects of the same phenomenon to mutually clarify one another.25

 Adorno 2006, p. 673 f.  GS 10/2, p. 708 f. 23  Adorno 2006, p. 671 f. 24  GS 10/2, p. 708 f. 25  GS 8, p. 333 f. 21 22

62

On Radio. Phenomenology and Critical Media Studies

6 Challenges for a New Phenomenology The point of all of this was basically to show that, at the very core of the main chasm in media and communications studies, there is a little story about phenomenology, which might be inspiring for both media scholars with a phenomenological interest in search of arguments to defend their approach against the backdrop of prevalent positivist methodologies, as well as for phenomenologists in search of a new concept of theory, which proves capable to engage empirical findings without either ceding ground to administrative research proper, nor rejecting it outright. But there are for sure further implications in sight here as well, and I would like to end this chapter by only briefly hinting at one, which seems particularly topical these days. To be sure, in Adorno’s own view, critical theory amounts to more than just physiognomic analyses and its difference to administrative research certainly runs deeper than that. In fact, another important point of difference between the two is already stressed in Max Horkheimer’s grounding essay, Traditional and Critical Theory (1937). According to Horkheimer, traditional theory generally sees itself as an autonomous sphere, which primarily aims for the subsumption of facts under theoretical claims be this by arriving from the former to the latter following the rules of empirical induction, or by applying the latter to the former. On the contrary, critical theory sees it as its chief task to also explore the social function of science itself within the greater scheme of things, in order for instance to understand how its own position ultimately depends on the division between manual and intellectual labor. In other words: in contrast to traditional theory, critical theory is supposed to also reflect upon theory itself and theorizing as a part of its own object, which is society at large.26 However, if one applies this general program more specifically to the case of media studies, a critical approach to this field would not only include questions regarding the social function of media, as is generally presumed in discussions concerning the administrative vs. critical divide, but also questions regarding the function and status of media studies themselves and its most prominent and scientifically self-assured branch which is administrative research. In other words: administrative research is a central topic for critical media studies, and indeed, in several of his media-sociological writings, Adorno already hints at the fact that certain practices of administrative media studies testify to the same processes of standardization and reification, which also affect the media themselves.27 Now, in Adorno’s view, such reflections definitely don’t fall under the competence of a sheer physiognomic analysis, but exceed it. Only, here comes the interesting part. For, according to Adorno, the borders between what physiognomy can experientially detect in a phenomenon and what a more general critical social reflection can surmise about it are themselves historically relative and fluctuating. Thus, in his view, “we must be careful not to regard the relation between ‘phenomenal’ characteristics and knowledge as static […]; our knowledge may very well come to constitute an object of our experience and migrate into the phenomenon”.28 This is,  Horkheimer 1982, p. 193 f.  GS 10/2, p. 712. 28  Adorno 2006, p. 138, fn. 1. 26 27

References

63

instead, precisely the point where the relationship between administrative research, phenomenology and critical theory becomes particularly intricate today. Indeed, one might claim that, once video products themselves begin including view counts, reach and engagement rates, as well as several other analytic metrics in their own display, as this happens regularly with new media on the internet, for instance, or, to put it differently: once media themselves basically start collecting data and also partially displaying analyses thereof that until recently fell under the exclusive competence of administrative research proper, as this is standard nowadays with most new media applications, the entire relationship between research in its variant acceptations and its object changes structure. As a consequence, elements of (administrative) research now literally become part of how media objects actually work. While such profound interconnections between administrative research and its very field of study may seem to render it in principle less capable of theoretically clarifying the field in all its contemporary intricacies, at the same time, it is certain that this migration of research itself “into the phenomenon” makes a critically tinged phenomenological approach here all the more plausible.

References Adorno, Th. W. 2003. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 1–20. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp (cited as GS 1-20). Adorno, Th. W. 2006. Current of Music. Elements of a Radio Theory. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Th. W. and Horkheimer, M. 2003. Briefwechsel. Vol. 1–4. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Babich, B. 2014. Adorno’s radio phenomenology: Technical reproduction, physiognomy and music. In Philosophy and Social Criticism 40/1, pp. 1–40. Horkheimer, M. 1982. Traditional and Critical Theory. In Critical Theory. Selected Essays. New York: Continuum, pp. 188–252. Kane, B. 2016. Phenomenology, Physiognomy, and the “Radio Voice”. In New German Critique 43/3, pp. 91–112. Katz, E. and Katz, R. 2016. Revisiting the Origin of the Administrative versus Critical Research Debate. In Journal of Information Policy 6, pp. 4–12. Kramer, A. and Wilcock, E. 1999. “A preserve for professional philosophers” Adornos Husserl-Dissertation 1934–37 und ihr Oxforder Kontext. In Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 73/1, pp. 115–161. Lazarsfeld, P. 1941. Remarks on Administrative and Critical Communications Research. In Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9, pp. 2–16. Marbach, E. 2010. So you want to naturalize consciousness?  – Why, why not?  – But how?  – Husserl meeting some offspring. In Philosophy, phenomenology, sciences. C. Ierna, H. Jacobs and F. Mattens eds. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 391–404. Moran, D. 2013. Let’s look at it objectively –Why phenomenology cannot be naturalized. In Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 72, pp. 89–115. Vermersch, P. 2011. Husserl the great unrecognized psychologist. A reply to Zahavi. In Journal of Consciousness Studies 18/2, pp. 20–23. Zahavi, D. 2010. Naturalized phenomenology. In Handbook of phenomenology and cognitive science. S. Gallagher and D. Schmicking eds. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 3–19.

Benjamin and the Essence of Phenomenology

1 The Problem If one wants to determine the extent to which Husserl’s phenomenology influenced Walter Benjamin, it is important to avoid from the onset both underestimating and overestimating that influence. Both tendencies have alternatively marked the discussion of the issue so far. The former charge can be brought against both Scholem, who quickly dismissed Benjamin’s reception of phenomenology by noting that after his year of study in Munich the latter only acquired an “unclear concept”1 of Husserl’s philosophy, as well as against Adorno, who plainly held that Benjamin “did not understand”2 Husserl at all. In his early writings  – for instance in his two conferences: Die Aktualität der Philosophie and Die Idee der Naturgeschichte – Adorno even takes this assessment a step further, presenting Benjamin and phenomenology as complete philosophical opposites. Both of Adorno’s papers start out with a brief overview of contemporary philosophy, which culminates in an analysis of the most recent developments of phenomenology, most notably: Scheler and Heidegger. In order to assess these developments, Adorno generally interprets Husserl’s phenomenology as an attempt to render philosophy objective and concrete after the demise of idealism, but by employing the very tools of idealism itself. In Adorno’s view, this attempt was ultimately bound to fail, and Scheler’s vitalism and Heidegger’s ontologism prove this in relapsing to positions, which phenomenology initially claimed to have overcome. Thus, Adorno regards this evolution of phenomenology An early version of this chapter was published in German as “Edmund Husserl. Das Wesen der Phänomenologie”. In: Entwendungen. Walter Benjamin und seine Quellen. J.  Nitsche and N. Werner eds. Paderborn: Fink. 2019, pp. 199–220.  Scholem 1997, p. 65.  GS 11, p. 571; En., p. 224.

1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Ferencz-Flatz, Critical Theory and Phenomenology, Contributions to Phenomenology 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27615-6_5

65

66

Benjamin and the Essence of Phenomenology

as an objective sign of its historic failure. Ironically, his interpretation was to a certain point not far from Husserl’s own assessment of Heidegger and Scheler, who in his view plainly returned to a form of philosophical anthropology, which compromised the original intentions of his phenomenology. In this context, Adorno himself, in any case, regards Benjamin’s book on the German Tragic Drama as a decisive alternative to the dead-end represented by phenomenology. To be sure, Adorno seems to somewhat revise this stance in the after-war period. For, while still opposing Benjamin and phenomenology on several occasions, he now also highlights significant points wherein they overlap. Thus, for instance, in the preface to the first edition of Benjamin’s Writings, Adorno insightfully notes: “Benjamin belongs to the philosophical generation that tried in every way to break out of idealism and system, and there are ample connections between him and the older representatives of such efforts. He is linked with phenomenology, especially in his youth, by the method of defining essences through the analysis of objective meaning, a linguistically oriented method, as opposed to the arbitrary definition of terms.”3 In the most recent literature on Benjamin, this observation is supported by numerous biographical details. Thus, we know today that Benjamin thoroughly read Husserl’s essay, Philosophy as a Rigorous Science, around 1913, while he was studying in Freiburg; that he keenly attended the seminars of Moritz Gieger, the co-­ editor of the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, as a student in Munich in 1915; and finally that he intensively engaged the writings of lesser known phenomenologists like Jean Hering or Paul Linke at a later period. As such, it remains nevertheless questionable in how far this interest indeed left a substantial mark on Benjamin’s thinking. To this regard the two most recent attempts to connect Benjamin’s thought to phenomenology – undertaken by Peter Fenves and Uwe Steiner – seem to be in perfect agreement. For, despite their diverging accents, they nevertheless intersect in clearly overestimating this influence, by ultimately reducing it to elements of the phenomenological program, to which Benjamin in fact had no access. Thus, Fenves traces Benjamin’s interest in phenomenology back to the procedure of “phenomenological reduction”, by taking the following remarks as his starting point: This study is guided by the following thesis: in response to the debates that Husserl unleashes among his students with the introduction of the idea of the phenomenological reduction, Benjamin begins to work out his own version of the reduction, in which the so-­ called “natural” attitude gets “turned off” (in German, ausgeschaltet) and is thus brought to a “halt” (in Greek, epochē). The supposedly “natural” attitude—which Benjamin will associate with mythology—consists in the general premises that there is a world of substantial things that lie outside of our consciousness and that our experience is the result of the manner in which these things affect us.4

This may look like a promising approach for interpreting several of Benjamin’s writings. However, it remains a fact that neither of the latter’s explicit references to phenomenology seem to even take note of the question of phenomenological  GS 11, p. 571; En., p. 223.  Fenves 2011, p. 2.

3 4

1  The Problem

67

reduction and there are serious reasons to believe that his interpretation of phenomenonology indeed abstracted from this essential moment entirely. A similar objection can be brought against Uwe Steiner’s considerations as well. For, although Steiner more cautiously only refers in his remarks to the one essay by Husserl we now know for certain that Benjamin studied, namely his Philosophy as a Rigorous Science, his most important observations nevertheless go well beyond that particular essay. To be more precise, Steiner especially refers to Benjamin’s theory of perception and his understanding of corporeality, which he relates to Husserl’s parallel reflections by for instance presuming that Benjamin borrowed his own distinction between Leib and Körper from Husserl.5 Now, it may indeed be the case that several passages in Benjamin’s early writings show striking resemblances to the late Husserl, or even to Merleau-Ponty – see for instance the following phrase: “The lived experiences of others are in principle not perceived differently than our own, they are not deduced, but actually seen in the body to which they are attached as a lived experience.” [“Fremdes Seelenleben wird nicht prinzipiell anders als eignes wahrgenommen, es wird nicht erschlossen, sondern im Leiblichen, das ihm als Seelenleben zugehört, gesehen.”]6 Despite such obvious points of correspondence, however, it is quite clear that Benjamin was not familiarized with either the phenomenological theory of the body, nor with the later phenomenological concept of perception. Moreover, his aforementioned psychophysical reflections explicitly refer to Klages, who also uses the distinction between Körper and Leib early on, as their main source. Further on, the very concepts one might be most tempted to associate with a phenomenological influence are explicitly traced back by Benjamin to entirely different sources. This is the case, for instance, with the concept of the “phenomenon”, which Benjamin relates to Plato in his early considerations, or the concept of “intention”, which he uses in a Latin form in his earlier notes (speaking of intentio prima and intentio secunda) and which he thus traces back to its original scholastic roots. To be sure, this is not to deny that Benjamin’s philosophy lends itself to fruitful parallels with phenomenology and that such a parallel can have a heuristic value for a more precise understanding of his writings. At the same time, it is doubtless that certain phenomenological ideas have reached Benjamin via intermediaries, for instance via their reflection in philosophical anthropology as suggested by Uwe Steiner. Regardless of such considerations, however, one should nevertheless be cautious when reconstructing Benjamin’s reception and appropriation of phenomenological motives and methods in correctly isolating his actual sources and in identifying the specific accents of his own reading of that material without attributing him an understanding of phenomenology which is customary for us, but could not have been shared by Benjamin.

 Steiner 2008, p. 120.  GS VI, p. 65.

5 6

68

Benjamin and the Essence of Phenomenology

2 Reception If one regards Benjamin’s explicit references to phenomenology in this light, one is immediately led to two fundamental observations. On the one hand, it is obvious that Husserl himself played a rather marginal role in Benjamin’s reception of phenomenology. On the other hand, Benjamin’s interest in phenomenology was exclusively sparked by the question of eidetics, that is: the theory of the intuitive givenness of essentialities and their apprehension. In what concerns the former, it seems certain that Benjamin indeed read Husserl’s Philosophy as a Rigorous Science, which he explicitly mentions in a letter to Franz Sachs from 1913: “I am reading Bonaventura’s Nachtwachen, which is far more than just ‚culture‘– and the excellent Hyperion almanac from 1910. Also now an essay by Husserl.”7 The note itself might be rather vacuous. But if one also considers that 4 years later, when again mentioning Husserl’s essay in a letter, Benjamin has nothing further to add than the sheer fact that he read it,8 one can at least presume that it did not leave any decisive imprint on his thought. Aside from this, the only further remark attesting to his engagement with Husserl can be found in a letter from 1915, where he avows reading “Husserl’s difficult grounding work [...] in order to gain access to his school”.9 In view of this passage, one might for sure ponder on whether this refers to the Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, as Steiner presumes in an earlier article, or rather to the Logical Investigations. The two alternatives obviously shed a different light on Benjamin’s reception of phenomenology. Regardless of this question, however, the aforementioned passage obviously shows, on the one hand, that Benjamin explicitly designates Husserl’s work as a difficult reading, which seems to at least indirectly confirm Adorno’s claim that Benjamin had a hard time understanding Husserl. On the other hand, Benjamin’s aforementioned attempt to gain access to phenomenology around the year 1915 by reading Husserl must obviously ended in failure given that, in 1917, he still refers to an essay by Paul Linke saying that it offered him some introductory “insight into the essence of phenomenology”.10 In contrast to these sketchy remarks, none of Benjamin’s more consistent notes on phenomenology is directly linked to Husserl himself, who is only referenced in passing, but rather to secondary sources like Jean Hering’s essay “Bemerkungen über das Wesen, die Wesenheit und die Idee”, which he quotes in his book on the German Tragic Drama, Linke’s essay “Das Recht der Phänomenologie”, which he discusses at length in his early manuscripts, as well as some of Moritz Geiger’s articles, which he mentions in his letters. To this extent, it is also important to note that the conceptions put forth by these authors diverged from Husserl’s  Benjamin 1993, p. 77.  “I have also read Husserl’s Logos-essay several years ago,” he again writes in a letter from 1917, Benjamin 1993, p. 162. 9  Benjamin 1996, p. 301. 10  Benjamin 1993, p. 144.

7 8

2 Reception

69

understanding of phenomenology in several important points, which did not seem to have interested Benjamin in the least. Thus, Husserl for instance makes the following derogatory remark in 1917 with respect to Linke’s aforementioned essay: “P. Linke’s essay, Das Recht der Phänomenologie, cannot be considered as a presentation of our position, insofar as his ‘phenomenology’ never took up the core elements of that science which we called for, methodologically founded and carried out in exemplary analyses in our Ideas.”11 As such, it does not really make sense to discuss Benjamin’s confrontation with phenomenology by strictly referring to Husserl’s work. Instead, such an analysis should be carried out primarily in following the precise outlines of phenomenology, which were in fact relevant for Benjamin. The second observation, which can be drawn from Benjamin’s direct remarks on phenomenology, concerns the fact that his reception of phenomenology might have indeed remained only vague, as correctly noted by Scholem, but his interest in phenomenology nevertheless had a distinct focal point in the question of the so called intuition of essences, that is: phenomenological eidetics. One can see this clearly when considering his only more detailed account of Husserl’s phenomenology, which Benjamin included in his contribution to the Encyclopaedia judaica: Juden in der deutschen Kultur. The article is, to be sure, somewhat problematic, insofar as the original version authorized by Benjamin himself was lost, while the published version, which he discovered to be much abbreviated and reworked, was strongly disapproved by Benjamin. However, according to Benjamin’s own account, the contentious passages in his contribution concerned the authors’ position with regard to Judaism, the analyses of which Benjamin saw as central to his paper, while the short presentation of Husserl’s phenomenology only contains a brief and technical discussion of his philosophy, which could hardly have been affected by such interventions. If one sifts through this presentation, instead, it becomes quite obvious that Benjamin sees the analysis of eidetic relationships of essence as the sole distinctive feature of a phenomenological approach. Thus, he writes referring to the authors he considers as the most important Jewish contributors to phenomenology, namely Husserl and Geiger: Husserl’s main work, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (1913) takes upon itself the task of laying bare the logical process, which leads the researcher from the empirical to the “pure” givens. The latter are to be found both in the field of our sensory impressions, as well as in that of our ethical or aesthetical valuings. His school has pursued the description of “eidetic” matters of fact in the most diverse fields. In the case of aesthetics and mathematics, Moritz Geiger’s (born 1880) works have been fundamental in this regard.12

To be sure, Benjamin’s phrasing is somewhat misleading here, insofar as the “pure” givenness he points at obviously doesn’t refer to the “transcendentally purified” immanent correlates of consciousness – for instance, an object of perception apperceived in pure immanence as a correlate of perception, regardless of whether it

11 12

 Hua XXV, p. 226.  GS II, p. 810.

70

Benjamin and the Essence of Phenomenology

really exists or is only hallucinated – but rather to its eidetic structure, which Husserl opposed to the mere empirical, individual fact as its general essence. According to Husserl, the transcendentally purified phenomenon can be obtained on ground of a phenomenological or transcendental reduction, which allows the phenomenologist to pass from the transcendent or real external object to the immanent sphere of the ‘intended as such’. The essence, on the other hand, is only accessible on ground of an eidetic reduction, which allows the phenomenologist to ascend from the individual fact to its general structure. If, however, these two moments come to be somewhat mistaken for one another in Benjamin’s account, this is not due to an unauthorized abbreviation by the editors, but rather to the fact that Benjamin first received the phenomenological theory of essences – which is at the core of all his explicit references to phenomenology – via the idiosyncratic account of Paul Linke, who himself obviously confuses the phenomenological and the eidetic reduction. Thus, according to Linke, the “phenomenological reduction” consists in detaching an empirically observable fact – for instance the perception of a given sunset – from its empirical connection to the real spatial and temporal world, in thus first arriving at an intuition of essence. Thus, in his view, the immanently viewed sunset is offhand identified with the eidos: “it is now a sunset of the same ‘type’ as the one we experienced yesterday. To be more precise: it is the general species ‘sunset as I have seen it yesterday’, or even better: it is what grounds such a species, a pure idea, or in Husserl’s more recent terminology an eidos or an essence.”13

3 Criticism Benjamin only discussed the phenomenological theory of essences explicitly in a short note dated 1916 which comments upon Linke’s essay. However, this brief note can also be put in relationship with the detailed epistemo-critical prologue of his book on the German tragic drama. To be sure, the eidetic theory developed here only bears a vague reference to phenomenology, such that his account, which declaratively follows a Platonic model, can be fully interpreted without ever mentioning phenomenology at all.14 Nonetheless, Uwe Steiner, who explicitly emphasized the connections between the prologue and Benjamin’s earlier phenomenological reflections, considers that the implicit references to phenomenology made in this context amounts to a full-blown criticism of phenomenology.15 Insofar as the prologue indeed represents, alongside the aforementioned note on Linke, the most important source for understanding Benjamin’s relationship to phenomenology, it is worthwile briefly engaging Steiner’s assessment.

 Linke 1916, p. 197.  See for instance Holz 2011. 15  Steiner 2010, p. 248. 13 14

3 Criticism

71

When thus sifting through Benjamin’s aforementioned early writings, one immediately takes note of the fact that the sole explicit objection he brings up against the phenomenological theory of essences occurs in his discussion of Linke’s paper and only concerns an imprecision in Linke’s own account, which he reproduces as follows: “P.F. Linke wants to prove that the abstraction theories of concepts are but a solution to a pseudo-problem by showing that eidetic objects are on the contrary immediately given as such.”16 In contrast to this, Benjamin himself wants to show that the essence or the eidos should be rigorously set apart from the concept. Therefore, in his view, a phenomenological eidetics would still need to be complemented by a theory of the concept. From a phenomenological perspective, this objection may seem totally misguided. To properly understand it, it is important to stress from the onset that Linke himself only offers a very imprecise account of Husserl’s criticism of empirical theories of abstraction in the second Logical Investigation insofar as Husserl actually doesn’t speak about concepts at this point at all, but about “general representations”.17 However, Linke does not take this important nuance into account and Benjamin also seems to neglect it. Thus, Benjamin indeed explicitly appreciates Linke’s treatment of the issue precisely because his awkward confusion between phenomenological and eidetic reduction leads him to severe the question of the eidos entirely from that of generality proper, thus explicitly attributing an eidos to singular objects (for instance the eidos of the particular blotter on my table). From a phenomenological perspective, one could of course easily respond to this in pointing out that Husserl’s phenomenology certainly makes the difference between concept and essence or eidos quite firmly, and the distinction is also explicitly mentioned in a footnote to Jean Hering’s aforementioned essay, which Benjamin quotes in his epistemo-critical prologue.18 This distinction, however, rests on entirely different assumptions in phenomenology than in Benjamin. For Husserl, the entire gist of his theory of essences lies in showing that general objects can be sighted with evidence by means of eidetic intuition prior to any concept proper. The conceptualization of these essences only sets off with the so-called “expressive acts”, that is: with the subsequent stratum of linguistic verbalization. In Husserl’s view, this latter is in principle unproductive, as it can only reproduce all other intentionalities – ranging all the way from sensory perception to eidetic intuition – in the medium of expression.19 Therefore, Husserl fundamentally holds that the eidos needs to be set apart from the concept, insofar as the former is a correlate of eidetic intuition, while the latter is at most a correlate of the act, which brings it to linguistic expression. According to this view, the concept has an eidos as its fundament.20 If instead Benjamin accuses Linke of confusing the concept with the eidos, it is worth noting that, in distinguishing between the two in response, he

 GS VI, p. 29.  Hua XIX, p. 113–226. 18  Hering 1921, p. 533. 19  Hua III/1, pp. 284–288. 20  See for this also Sowa 2007. 16 17

72

Benjamin and the Essence of Phenomenology

himself points to three entirely different aspects while completely neglecting the sole relevant point of difference in Husserl’s view. For, insofar as Benjamin follows Linke in relating both concept and eidos solely to individual objects, and not to general representations, Benjamin stipulates that the concept of an object differs from its eidos first of all in that the concept still preserves the object’s spatial and temporal determination, while the eidos abstracts from them. Secondly, in contrast to the eidos, the concept allows for regressive iteration, insofar as, in addition to the concept of an object, one can at any time also construct the concept of the concept of that object, while this is not possible in the case of the eidos. Thirdly, in contrast to the eidos, the concept has a distinctively relational character, insofar as it is always the concept of its object, while the essence or the eidos has a certain independence from its object. One might well debate these features, but what is certain is that they do not correspond to the standard phenomenological accounts of these issues. Thus, Hering himself explicitly ascribes the same relational character to the essence as well, which in his view is necessarily termed as “the essence of something”.21 Such differences, however, are less important and they are no longer mentioned explicitly in the epistemo-critical prologue. Instead, it is more relevant to stress the actual reason behind Benjamin’s attempt to distance himself from the phenomenological distinction between essence and concept, namely his intention to challenge the interpretation of eidetic cognition as a strictly intuitive process, by on the contrary regarding the medium of language as key for the apprehension of essences – and this point of criticism is of course still central in the epistemo-critical prologue as well. Thus Benjamin unequivocally writes in this context: “The being of ideas simply cannot be conceived of as the object of vision, even intellectual vision.”22 Instead, an idea is rather “something linguistic, it is that element of the symbolic in the essence of any word.”23 To be sure, Benjamin doesn’t address phenomenology directly in this context. Instead, he explicitly refers to the romantic conception of “intellectual intuition”, while his brief hint at “seeing” („Schau“) ideas indeed seems to have been directed against Husserl’s concept of Wesensschau. Thus, one might say that the main difference involved here concerns the very definition of what an “idea” is and in this sense Benjamin’s metaphysics of language obviously parts ways with the phenomenological conception of the intuitive givenness of intellectual objects. On the other hand, however, one could also pinpoint the aforementioned difference more palpably by considering the methodological function that language plays on both sides for philosophical reflection. In this regard, Benjamin conceives the task of philosophy like Husserl as the “description of ideas”, but this description entails an entirely different method than for Husserl. For, if phenomenology as a “descriptive eidetics” primarily aims to faithfully reproduce the intuitive givens of eidetic intuition, in Benjamin’s view the description of ideas should

 Hering 1921, p. 497.  GS I, p. 215; En., p. 35. 23  GS I, S. 216; En., p. 36. 21 22

3 Criticism

73

operate precisely the other way around, insofar as he doesn’t see their apprehension as a precondition, but rather as a consequence of the conceptual analysis of the phenomena. Thus, in contrast to phenomenology, Benjamin no longer holds that the philosopher must, in taking the phenomena themselves as his starting point, intuitively grasp their essence, in order to then conceptually express an eidetic ascertainment, but instead he should first decompose those phenomena in their conceptual elements in order to then apperceive the idea in piecing the conceptual elements together. In one of his early papers, Adorno tries to sketch out this procedure more explicitly, in opposing it to the sheer intuition of essences employed by phenomenologists. He calls this “philosophical interpretation” and describes it as follows: And just like the solution of a guessing game takes shape by permuting the individual and disparate elements of the question until they compose a figure which springs out as the solution, while the question disappears –, philosophy itself has to permute its elements [...] in various constellations, or to put things less astrologically and more scientifically: in various experimental arrangements until they compose a figure which can be read as a response, while the question disappears.24

Now, Adorno’s account may render Benjamin’s metaphysical intentions, which resound already in his professed objective of “saving” the phenomena by such a procedure, somewhat harmless. At the same time, it nevertheless allows to relativize his stark opposition to phenomenology. Indeed, Adorno’s reference to scientific experiments is in this context all the more appropriate since Benjamin himself, in one of his early writings (“Versuch eines Beweises, dass die wissenschaftliche Beschreibung eines Vorganges dessen Erklärung voraussetzt”), regards experimental procedures in science as a way of “saving the phenomena”. To be sure, there are also important differences to be noted here between his two accounts. Thus, in his earlier text, Benjamin interprets the scientific experiment as an attempt made “under the presupposition that such phenomena indeed exist, to save them, that is to seize in them and retain a moment of necessity, a mathematical moment.”25 But, insofar as the scientific experiment, in his view, fundamentally only allows the scientist to corroborate the necessity of a physical law by proving whether or not it applies to the sphere of our experience, Benjamin concludes that the explanation (that is: the hypothesis) necessarily precedes the description (that is: the recount of the experiment). In doing so, Benjamin’s earliest reflection on the subject matter can be said to determine the relationship between philosophical ideality, on the one hand, and the concrete experience of the phenomena, on the other hand, in precisely the opposite terms as his later account in the epistemo-critical prologue. For, if the ideal necessity of mathematical construction, according to the earlier version, precedes its subsequent verification on the empirical individual case, the later account sees a philosophical approach as first departing from the empirical in order to subsequently arrive at the necessity of the idea by conceptually penetrating the former. If Benjamin therefore designates this procedure  – in contrast to his earlier writings, where

24 25

 GS 1, p. 335.  GS VI, p. 41.

74

Benjamin and the Essence of Phenomenology

explanation was given a higher theoretical dignity than description – as a “description” of ideas, this presumably implies a revision of his own earlier standpoint in what concerns the relationship between philosophy and the empirical phenomenon rather than an implicit criticism of phenomenology per se. Further on, one should perhaps also consider the fact that Benjamin’s approach may indeed be easy to set apart from Husserl’s more narrow understanding of phenomenology as a “descriptive eidetics”, an understanding of phenomenology which he doesn’t seem to have explicitly taken note of anyhow, but it nevertheless shows obvious resemblances to the methods of a “phenomenological hermeneutics”, which itself puts forth a form of “hermeneutic description”26 disputing the precedence of intuition over concept – a comparison to which, perhaps contrary to his own intention, Adorno’s characterization of Benjamin’s method as a form of “philosophical interpretation” lends ground. If it is therefore easy to relativize this methodological difference between Benjamin’s approach and phenomenology, a further point in Benjamin’s criticism needs to be taken into account. In his epistemo-critical prologue, Benjamin sharply differentiates his own approach, directed at “truth”, from all philosophical methods, which only aspire at “knowledge” in centering on a conception of intentionality. This implicit criticism of the concept of intentionality is interpreted by Adorno as an overt polemical attack against phenomenology: “In the most extreme contrast to contemporary phenomenology, Benjamin’s thought [...] refuses to simply reproduce intentions. Instead, he wants to crack them open and push into the unintended (ins Intentionslose stoßen).”27 However, if one scrutinizes Benjamin’s early use of the concept of intentionality more closely, his understanding of the notion – which the editors of the collected works explicitly relate to Benjamin’s “confrontation with Husserl”28 – hardly corresponds to the rigorous phenomenological acceptation of the term. Thus, these early notations are mainly driven by the ambition to draw a more complex picture of the various stratifications of language than accounted for by the traditional theory of signification, which only resumes to the grounding relationship between sign and meaning. In this context, Benjamin doesn’t seem to identify the latter primarily with phenomenology, but instead he rather references authors from the opposite end of the theoretical spectrum like Russel or Riehl. To this extent, it suffices to take a look at his reflections concerning the semantic potential of the “word-skeleton” („Wortskelett“) – a notion that refers to the written or auditory “image” of the word – or the symbolic “indication”, which he opposes to the “mediate” meaning proper.29 What strikes the reader immediately when sifting through these quite contorted considerations, which try to establish, in a highly eclectic terminology, various mutual relationships between object, concept, essence, word, name and sign, is the fact that Benjamin himself seems to have first positively

 See for this for instance Heidegger 1995, p. 80.  GS 1, p. 573. 28  GS VI, p. 640. 29  GS VI, p. 11–17. 26 27

3 Criticism

75

adopted the concept of intentionality in some rather peculiar formulations, as are his notions of an “objective” or “immediate” intention. Thus, Benjamin’s early papers at base aim to sketch out a theory of the different strata of intentionality, by for instance distinguishing between a primary (or symbolic), a secondary (or semantic) and a tertiary (or semiotic) intention, which obviously evokes Duns Scotus’ use of the concept (who was an important reference for Benjamin at the time) rather than its phenomenological acceptation. If Benjamin therefore later on rejects the concept of intentionality, it is important to keep in mind that this step occurs as the result of gradual shifts in his thought, which lead him to conceive a term he himself employed earlier without reserves more narrowly in relating it exclusively to the field of sheer “knowledge”. Thus, Benjamin defines knowledge in the later context of his epistemo-­critical prologue as “a way of acquiring its object”,30 or similarly as “an intent, which realizes itself in empirical reality.”31 The emphasis is here obviously on the fact that the preliminary epistemic intention of the subject already predetermines the structure of its anticipated insight. As is well known, Benjamin conceives knowledge in opposition to an emphatic concept of truth, which is not “acquired by questioning” (“erfragbar”) and which is not grounded on its relationship to consciousness, but on the contrary simply exposes the idea as the “ontological fundament” (“Seinsgrund”) that it is. In order to clarify this conception of truth, several interpreters have drawn attention to the fact that it ultimately grounds on a peculiar, mystical theory of language.32 At the same time, however, it also involves a specific experience of philosophic contemplation, which Benjamin obviously understands in contrast to intentionality and this means here: in contrast to all prior subjective anticipations. In another early notation, Benjamin describes this experience as follows: “The look must fall upon its object such that it elicits something in it, which springs out against the intention. While the mere reporter, who holds the attitude of a trivial philosopher or individual scientist, delves into lengthy descriptions of the object which he has in sight, its intensive contemplation on the contrary allows for something to spring out of the contemplated object; it enters contemplation, takes hold of him, and something else – namely the truth beyond intention – comes to speak through the words of the philosopher.”.33 If Benjamin further on deepens this opposition between his philosophical concept of truth and intentionality proper in the epistemo-critical prologue by even speaking of a “death of the intention”, it must be stressed from the onset that even this experience is, in an earlier notation, still described in terms of intentionality. Thus, in his commentary to a Bavarian prayer – lass dich [Gott] auch um das bitten, worum du gebeten werden willst – he establishes a sharp distinction between the “primary intention” of the prayer, which simply asks God for something, and a “secondary intention”, which Benjamin paradoxically defines as an “absolute

 GS I, p. 209; En., p. 29.  GS I, p. 216; En., p. 36. 32  See for instance Bröcker 2011. 33  GS VI, p. 50. 30 31

76

Benjamin and the Essence of Phenomenology

intention, beyond any correlate”,34 which occurs in the experience of praying by eliminating the primary intention (that is: by “death of the intention”). When viewed in this perspective, however, it is clear that, while the earlier and quite discretionary use of the concept of intentionality is only loosely, if at all, related to the phenomenological understanding of the term, the later and more narrow concept of intentionality, which derives from here, is only linked explicitly to a conception of “knowledge”, which does not appear to be aimed at phenomenology in particular, but rather to a widely shared neo-Kantian conception. A characteristic example thereof would be Rickert’s grounding work, Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis, or some of Hermann Cohen’s writings.35

4 A Two-Front War What this shows beforehand is that Benjamin’s criticism of phenomenology seems just as difficult to grasp without speculative over-interpretations as is his positive reception of it in general. Ultimately, Benjamin doesn’t seem to have had any interest in an explicit and detailed critical confrontation with Husserl’s phenomenology, as envisioned throughout the 1930s by Adorno. This becomes obvious not only when considering his reserved response to Adorno’s presentation of his project,36 but also throughout his reflections in the epistemo-critical prologue. Thus, all of Benjamin’s explicit references to phenomenology here are, despite all differences of perspective, which do not seem to weight that much in the context, strikingly positive and not in the least critical. This is perhaps most obvious when considering the two lengthy quotes from Scheler and Hering, which Benjamin uses plainly in support of his own position. If this is somewhat surprising in the case of Hering, whose phenomenological account of essentialities is in striking contradiction with Benjamin’s conception of ideas  – for instance in what concerns their account of concepts, or similarly the distinction between idea and essence –, the reference to Scheler brings into play an obvious point of agreement between Benjamin and phenomenology, which presumably carried more weight than all minor divergences. In this regard, Adorno is obviously wrong to see Benjamin’s reference to Scheler simply as a criticism of the latter, in interpreting the prologue as a “salvation of induction” in contrast to Scheler’s phenomenological criticism of induction.37 On the contrary, despite Adorno’s interpretation, the prologue actually engages in a sort of two-front war, as it argues both against “every inductive methodology, however

 GS VI, p. 54.  See also Mendicino 2010. 36  Adorno/Benjamin 1994, p. 132. 37  See for instance Adorno/Benjamin 1994, p. 84–85. 34 35

4  A Two-Front War

77

subtle”,38 which generally denies the existence of “constitutive ideas”,39 and against a “superficially schematic”40 deductive art theory. Thus, Benjamin explicitly pleas for a methodology, which sets itself apart simultaneously from induction and deduction in a two-front war that is quite evident in a passage as the following: “Whereas induction reduces ideas to concepts by failing to arrange and order them, deduction does the same by projecting them into a pseudo-logical continuum.”41 Instead, this two-front methodological war, which simultaneously turns against induction and deduction, represents the most characteristic feature of the phenomenological aesthetics, developed around the same time by Moritz Geiger, long before Scheler’s aforementioned remarks, in an essay from 1913. Benjamin knew and appreciated Geiger’s paper, Beiträge zur Phänomenologie des ästhetischen Genusses, where Geiger explicitly writes: Whoever has followed the phenomenological and object-theoretical literature of the past years will know for sure without further clarifications that phenomenological intuition sets itself apart both from induction, on the one hand, and from deduction, on the other. Thus, rejecting an inductive procedure for establishing the essence of aesthetic delight does not necessarily mean taking sides with a “deductive” or “speculative” aesthetics; it means believing instead that neither a “top down”, nor a “bottom up” aesthetics is the right path.42

In contrast to this, Geiger defines the phenomenological intuition of essences as a procedure, which indeed takes the individual case as its starting point. However, it doesn’t simply undertake its generalization by mere summation of further individual cases, but it unearths its essential structure immediately and intuitively. To be sure, this account can be charged with oversimplifying Husserl’s more complex understanding of ideation, insofar as Husserl’s late phenomenology at the very least doesn’t simply draw its eidetic insights immediately out of a singular starting example, but instead it requires the procedure of “eidetic variation”,43 which consists in imaginatively permuting the original example until it lays bare its invariant essential structure. Despite this difference, however, Husserl himself is keen to distinguish his procedure sharply both from a deduction, which ignores the individual cases completely, and from an induction, which only subjects the given individual cases to an empirical generalization. In his later essay, Phänomenologische Ästhetik (1925), Geiger uses this methodological approach to demonstrate the potential of phenomenological eidetics in the field of aesthetics by discussing the essence of tragedy as a guiding example. In contrast to both an inductive and a deductive approach, phenomenology is in his view able to directly intuit the general essence of the tragic in plainly interpreting a  GS I, p. 221; En., p. 41.  GS I, p. 220; En., p. 40. 40  GS I, p. 223; En., p. 43. 41  GS I, p. 223; En., p. 43. 42  Geiger 1913, p. 572. 43  See especially Hua XLI. With regard to Husserl’s initial understanding of eidetics, his notion of “eidetic singularities”, and Adorno’s take on them, see also chapter “The Function of Pretheoretical Experience in Critical Theory and Phenomenology”, pp. 1–16. 38 39

78

Benjamin and the Essence of Phenomenology

single tragic work of art. Thus, Geiger’s consideration acuminates in the following provocative statement: “Just as the one and the same essence of the triangle is concretized in individual triangles of entirely different size, one and the same essence of the tragic [...] is concretized in most different shapes in Sophocles, Shakespeare, Racine, Schiller etc. It is the platonic idea, which stands warrant for this conception of the essence, and both Plato and phenomenology followed the guiding model of mathematics with its ahistorical concepts in shaping their concept of essence.”44 However, since one could easily charge this account with ignoring the historic development of tragedy in reducing the entire variety of historic artworks to a common denominator, Geiger ultimately attempts to settle the tensions between the eidetic perspective of phenomenology, on the one hand, and the concrete complications of art history, on the other, by sketching a more dynamic concept of essence, inspired by Hegel, which he opposes to the sheer static or Platonic concept of essence. The former avoids reducing the historic variety of tragedies to a rigid eidetic form, in conceiving their development itself as an eidetic form sui generis, that is: as an eidetic process: One can illustrate this with a biological example: the infant, the youngster, the adult, the old man can all be seen as configurations of one and the same essence of man, since they are all of course men. But does this really say what is decisive here? Isn’t one rather bound to bring into play a concept of essence, which grasps the essence of man itself as something that evolves and develops? Correspondingly, one cannot properly account for the development of the tragic, if one always only finds one and the same essence of the tragic. On the contrary, the tragic must be seen as capable of change, of internal transformation, of development. It is only by thus liquefying the essence of the tragic that one can understand the development of the tragic – and only then can the concept of essence truly become a useful instrument for historic considerations.45

It is difficult to establish with certainty whether or not Benjamin was acquainted with this essay by Geiger as well. Fact remains that his own stance on the subject matter in the epistemo-critical prologue also strives to mediate between eidetics and history in defining a third way between the inductive and the deductive method. Thus, it is precisely at this point that Benjamin most overtly intersects with phenomenology and especially with Geiger. This becomes most obvious, for instance, when Benjamin writes – in perfect agreement with Geiger – with regard to ideas like that of the tragic, or the comic, that their proper aesthetic analysis “does not, from the very outset, commit itself to the inclusion of everything which has ever been described as tragic or comic, but looks for that which is exemplary, even if this exemplary character can be admitted only in respect of the merest fragment.”46 It is precisely within this common framework, which rejects both induction and deduction, that one can also properly assess Benjamin’s more profound points of disagreement with phenomenology, which, as we will see, paradoxically amount to both a tighter alignment to history and a more radical distancing from it.  Geiger 1925, p. 36.  Geiger 1925, pp. 36–37. 46  GS I, p. 224; En., p. 44. 44 45

4  A Two-Front War

79

Thus, in Benjamin’s view, the description of ideas does not take as its starting point the inspection of a singular, or of several arbitrary examples, as in phenomenology, but instead it is required to “circumscrib[e] the sphere of all possible extreme cases”. In other words: it ought to take into consideration all available historic cases, in at least virtually accounting for its most extreme variations. This obviously entails a far more intensive treatment of history, or in Benjamin’s own words: “an ever wider-ranging, an ever more intense reappraisal of phenomena”,47 such that the historic material no longer serves only accessorily as a spring board for eidetic assessments as in phenomenology, but instead the historic ascertainment of those phenomena receives an intrinsic value. While this approach obviously parts ways with plain deduction, its main difference to induction resides in how the historic material is approached. For, in Benjamin’s view, the idea does not spring by itself from the mere empirical accumulation of individual historic cases, but instead the idea only becomes accessible in the material for a procedure which he designates as Ursprungsausweisung and which basically depends on troves, that is: the fortuitous discovery of “genuine” moments of origin in the material. At the same time, however, the relationship these materials entertain to one another as well as to the idea are defined along entirely different lines in Benjamin as in phenomenology. To be sure, Husserl’s eidetic variation often also employs extreme individual examples in order to verify whether the intended invariant structures indeed maintain throughout the most extreme possible individual cases. Husserl often designates such extreme examples as “limit cases” (Grenzfälle). Benjamin himself, however, parts ways with this perspective in that he refuses from the outset to regard the idea as a mere universal representation, that is: as the invariant structure common to all its empirical instantiations. The extreme phenomena, which draw Benjamin’s attention, are therefore not mere limit cases, which share the same invariant structure as a common denominator. The idea is not a commonality of the phenomena, but instead it comes to view with their complementarity, such that in regarding the extremes as “complementary forces,”48 the idea only becomes legible when synthetically assembling their constellation. While Benjamin’s approach thus obviously distances itself from an inductive and from a deductive procedure, which both only aim at establishing general ascertainments on different grounds, it also runs contrary to Geiger’s own attempt to account for the variety of historic phenomena by simply employing a dynamic concept of essence. For, insofar as Benjamin no longer conceives the idea as a constant or even mutable general structure, but rather as a totality which comes to view in the complementarity of its extreme phenomena, he is obviously no longer interested, when considering the historic individual cases, in the process of their successive evolution either. What counts is instead only their simultaneous mutual counter-position within the constellation which flashes out the idea. Thus, Benjamin explicitly writes in his

47 48

 GS I, p. 225; En., p. 45.  GS I, p. 218; En., p. 38.

80

Benjamin and the Essence of Phenomenology

epistemo-­critical prologue: “Philosophical history, the science of the origin, is the form which, in the remotest extremes and the apparent excesses of the process of development, reveals the configuration of the idea – the sum total of all possible meaningful juxtapositions of such opposites.”49 This approach obviously establishes a new relationship between philosophical reflection and the empirical, which sets itself apart not only from the traditional form of induction and deduction, but also from the phenomenological intuition of essence.

5 Essence It may well be that Benjamin’s early epistemological conception, which aims to capture “truth” as a constellation or image within the historic material, already anticipates his late conception of the “dialectical image”. The overt similarities between his two conceptions allow the interpreter to also read his only later critical remark on phenomenology in light of his earlier considerations. In one of the convolutes of his Arcades project, Benjamin thus distinguishes his conception of the “dialectical image” from the “essentialities of phenomenology”, by pointing to the “historic index” of the former.50 One could well read this as a criticism of the “anti-­ historical” tendency of phenomenology  – a charge often brought by Adorno, for instance, but also by Heidegger against Husserl. However, if one tries to think through Benjamin’s comment in its relationship to the theory of ideas, developed in the epistemo-critical prologue, one certainly finds it difficult to agree with Uwe Steiner when writing: “as in the case of the theory of ideas sketched out in the book on the German Tragic Drama, Benjamin is in his later works still interested in differentiating his conception of the image from the ‚essentialities of phenomenology‘, from which it is separated by its ‚historic index‘.”51 For, as shown above, Benjamin is not truly interested in his earlier works to distance himself from the “essentialities of phenomenology”, given that he even quotes Herings reflections on those “essentialities” (Wesenheiten) – a term seldom used by Husserl himself – in support of his own conception. One may well downplay the importance of this reference in considering Benjamin’s often-arbitrary handling of quotations. Thus, one could for instance note that the aforementioned quote only picks up a quite marginal aspect in Hering’s account, while neglecting significant distinctions between his own conception and Hering’s. If, however, the quote indeed refers to a point, which seems rather marginal for Hering himself, namely the “discontinuity” of the essentialities, this point is by no means insignificant for Benjamin’s own interpretation of phenomenology. One can readily see this when considering a later passage, wherein Benjamin sees

 GS I, p. 227; En., p. 47.  GS V, p. 577. 51  Cf. Steiner 2010, p. 253. 49 50

References

81

one of the most characteristic features of phenomenology precisely in its anti-­ systematic fragmentation: “Husserl replaces the idealist systems with his discontinuous phenomenology.”52 Therefore, one could perhaps better say that, while Benjamin felt a certain solidarity with phenomenology in his earlier work, this leaves way to a more critical attitude in his later thinking. In order to properly assess this turn, however, it is important to also note that the aforementioned critical quote in the Arcades project pertains to an entire group of notations, which explicitly or implicitly challenge the methodological assumptions of the epistemo-critical prologue. Thus, for instance, the notation which immediately follows the quote states from the outset that a “[r]esolute refusal of the concept of ‘timeless truth’ is in order”; the passage concludes with the famous claim: “This is so true that the eternal, in any case, is far more the ruffle on a dress than some idea.”53 When seen in this context, however, the critical note on phenomenology mentioned above can itself perhaps more plausibly be read as a revision of Benjamin’s own earlier theory of ideas, rather than as the trace of a renewed interest in and confrontation with phenomenology. If this were indeed so, one could perhaps interpret it better as the concluding chapter of a reception history, which first debuts with an early attempted appropriation of phenomenology and ends with Benjamin finally removing all its latent residues – from the concept of intentionality to the theory of essences itself – from his philosophy. Today, one can hardly deny that this appropriation was indeed only superficial and vague, as suggested by Scholem. At the same time, however, it engaged phenomenological motives and concepts so freely, that it extended those motives and concepts far beyond their original scope in nearly paradoxical combinations – and perhaps this is ultimately telling not only with regard to Benjamin’s particular ethos when dealing with his intellectual sources, but also with regard to his philosophical stance in general. If this were indeed so, one could perhaps consider that what appears to be as the πρῶτον ψεῦδος, the false premise, of Benjamin’s entire reception of phenomenology  – namely his bizarre intention of finding the necessary “instruction with regard to the essence of phenomenology” precisely in Paul Linke of all sources, an author he explicitly notes “is not very appreciated in phenomenological circles”, − is not just the result of intellectual carelessness, but at the same time the perfect illustration of the philosophical attitude described in the epistemo-­ critical preface, which seeks to find access to the essence in the “merest fragment”54 and in the most remote and extreme epiphenomena.

 GS IV, p. 536.  GS V, p. 578. 54  Cf. GS I, p. 224. 52 53

82

Benjamin and the Essence of Phenomenology

References Adorno, Th. W. and Benjamin, W. 1994. Briefwechsel (1928–1940). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Adorno, T. W. 2003a Die Idee der Naturgeschichte. In Philosophische Frühschriften, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp (cited as GS 1), pp. 345–365. Adorno, Th. W. 2003b. Einleitung zu Benjamins Schriften. In Noten zur Literatur. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp (cited as GS 11), pp. 567–582. Adorno, Th. W. 2003c. Die Aktualität der Philosophie. In GS 1, pp. 325–344. Benjamin, W. 1993. Briefe. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Benjamin, W. 1996. Gesammelte Briefe. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp (cited as GB I–VI). Benjamin, W. 1991a. Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp (cited as GS I–VII). Benjamin, W. 1991b. Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. In GS I, pp. 203–430. English translation by J. Osborne. 1998. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. London/ New York: Verso (cited as En.). Bröcker, M. 2011. Sprache. In Benjamins Begriffe. M.  Opitz and E.  Wizisla eds. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 740–773. Fenves, P. 2011. The Messianic Reduction. Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Geiger, M. 1913. Beiträge zur Phänomenologie des ästhetischen Genusses. In Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung. Vol. I, pp. 567–684. Geiger, M. 1925. Phänomenologische Ästhetik. In Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft. Vol. 19, pp. 29–42. Heidegger, M. 1995. Ontologie. Hermeneutik der Faktizität. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Hering, J. 1921. Bemerkungen über das Wesen, die Wesenheit und die Idee. In Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung. Vol. 4, pp. 495–543. Holz, H. H. 2011. Idee. In Benjamins Begriffe. M. Opitz and E. Wizisla eds. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 445–478. Husserl, E. 1986. Aufsätze und Vorträge. 1911–1921, Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff (cited as Hua XXV). Husserl, E. 1977. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff (cited as Hua III/1). Husserl, E. 1984. Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band. I.  Teil. Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff (cited as Hua XIX). Husserl, E. 2012. Zur Lehre vom Wesen und zur Methode der eidetischen Variation. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1891–1935). Dordrecht: Springer (cited as Hua XLI). Linke, P, F. 1916. Das Recht der Phänomenologie. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Th. Elsenhans. In Kant-Studien 21, pp. 163–221. Mendicino, Kristina. 2010. Before Truth: Walter Benjamin’s “Epistemo-Critical Prologue”. In Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 26/1, pp. 19–60. Scholem, G. 1997. Walter Benjamin: Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Sowa, R. 2007. Wesen und Wesensgesetze in der deskriptiven Eidetik Edmund Husserls. In Phänomenologische Forschungen 2007, pp. 5–37. Steiner, U. 2008. Phänomenologie der Moderne. Benjamin und Husserl. In Benjamin Studien. Vol. 1, pp. 107–126. Steiner, U. 2010. Walter Benjamins Husserl-Lektüre im Kontext. In Internationales Jahrbuch für Hermeneutik. Vol. 9, pp. 189–258.

Tactile Reception and Life-Worldly Circumspection

Architecture and film come to intersect overtly on several occasions in Walter Benjamin’s programmatic artwork essay. Their association is not by chance. It ultimately grounds on the fact that both are grouped on the same side of Benjamin’s well known opposition between two cardinal modes of perception: contemplative, optical concentration of the individual, on the one hand, and collective, tactile distraction, on the other. In his view, the shift from the former to the latter decisively determines our contemporary relationship to artworks. While film constitutes Benjamin’s main object of interest, laying bare the transformations of our traditional concept of art, architecture represents the prototype and guiding model for its analysis.1

1 Architecture According to Benjamin, both architecture and film “are received in a twofold manner: by use and by perception. Or, better: tactilely and optically”.2 The distinction between these two basic forms of reception – which is adopted from Alois Riegl,3 but acquires a novel understanding in Benjamin – is rounded out by a second distinction, which concerns their corresponding modes of attention: focused concentration, on the one hand, and distracted, habitual observation, on the other. In view of this twofold distinction, Benjamin determines the apperception of architecture by making three fundamental claims: (a) First of all, he identifies tactile reception in general with use. Thus, Riegl’s opposition between the sheer optical and the tactile apperception of an object An early version of this chapter was published in German as: “Taktile Rezeption und lebensweltliche Umsicht. Film- und Stadterfahrung bei Benjamin und Heidegger”. In: Meta. Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy II/1 (2010), pp. 141–154.  “Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction. The laws of its reception are most instructive.” (GS I, p. 504; En., p. 18). 2  GS I, p. 504; En., p. 18. 3  Riegl 1966. See also Fend 2007 and, for a more detailed overview of tactility in aesthetics, Diaconu 2000. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Ferencz-Flatz, Critical Theory and Phenomenology, Contributions to Phenomenology 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27615-6_6

83

84

Tactile Reception and Life-Worldly Circumspection

becomes equivalent to that between merely perceiving it contemplatively and actively handling it. The two are from the onset characterized by different modes of attention: while optical perception demands focused attention, tactile use is exclusively determined by distraction, as Benjamin explicitly notes that tactility lacks a proper equivalent to the optical mode of focused attention.4 This point is made clear in his scattered remarks on practical exercise (Übung), the purpose of which ultimately consists in engendering an automated relationship with its object no longer determined by conscious awareness and willing. The ultimate purpose of exercise is a state wherein one no longer passes consciously from receptivity to action, but on the contrary the two are interfused in a reflex response. Thus, the “receptive innervation” of the eye grasping the given circumstances passes immediately into the “creative innervation” of the gesture, which responds to it before being explicitly registered in consciousness.5 (b) Use primarily defines our apperception of architectural edifices. This does not necessarily imply a preference for purely functionalist architecture in the style of Le Corbusier, or Adolf Loos, whom Benjamin indeed often positively references in his works for their liberation of the sheer technical functionality of architecture from all its ornamental excess. Instead, the same also applies, in Benjamin’s view, in the case of the traditional bourgeois interior of the nineteenth century, which “forces the inhabitant to adopt the greatest possible number of habits”6 being thus similarly apperceived in a mode of distracted habituality. On the contrary, in Benjamin’s view the pure visual contemplation of architectural edifices is fundamentally unsuited to serve as a guiding model for understanding architecture. (c) Moreover, in the field of architecture, Benjamin ultimately considers that habit and use largely determine optical apperception as well, that is: the way we actually “see” buildings.7 In Benjamin’s view, the passer-by in the modern city moves hastily through a functionalized environment, which he only grasps incidentally and distractedly, in a perspective largely determined by his ongoing business. Two of his examples lay proof of this. In one of the versions of section 18 of the first draft of the essay, Benjamin explains his reflections on architecture by referring to one of its accompanying art-forms, namely advertising.8 In this context, architecture is termed a “bearer of advertisements”, while advertising itself is explicitly defined as “one of the most important agents” of distracted reception. Advertising billboards are, of course, only registered optically by the busy passers-by and not actually used tactilely in any way. However, their optical apprehension  – which essentially occurs in passing them distractedly and not in a mode of focused contemplation – is largely determined by  GS I, p. 505; En., p. 18.  See for instance GS II, p. 766. 6  GS II, p. 216. 7  GS I, p. 505; En., p. 18. 8  GS I, p. 1043. 4 5

2 Circumspection

85

use and consume: they are intentionally designed to capture the eyesight of a distracted viewer and appeal to his or her ongoing interests of use. Secondly, Benjamins refers to modern street traffic. One of his key footnotes in the artwork-essay stresses the “profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus” brought about by modern city life, which are experienced “on the individual scale” by every “man on the street in big-city traffic”.9 In his view, the hustle and bustle of modern street traffic constitutes a situation of metropolitan life, which can no longer be handled by the contemporary pedestrian in a mode of optical attention, but rather requires a habitual and tactile, casual caution, which Benjamin again terms as “distracted reception”. In a further note to the artwork essay, Benjamin returns to a similar reflection, by considering a busy car driver’s experience of street architecture: “Tactile reception and distraction are not mutually exclusive. The automobile driver with his thoughts wandering at his engine trouble, will get far better accustomed to the modern form of the garage than the art historian sitting in front of it and trying to define its style”.10 This is the case primarily because contemplation is, as already mentioned, according to Benjamin, generally incapable of properly accessing architecture, which only demands to be apprehended casually, by means of tactile reception. In other words: understanding architecture is primarily performed by use, whereas its contemplative assessment is at least derivative, if not a sheer misunderstanding – which is presumably, one might add, why the modern tourist’s purely contemplative apprehension of famous architectural edifices is inherently bound to end in frustration.

2 Circumspection In Benjamin’s view, tactile reception at present tends to become the defining feature of our engagement with art in general, extending to artforms, which were originally experienced only in contemplative, focused attention. This is the case with modern jazz music, which is best apperceived  – according to an argument adopted by Benjamin from Adorno – in dancing and not by merely listening to it,11 or similarly with film, which introduces a tactile element of shock into optical perception itself.12 While the tactile reception of architecture remains Benjamin’s main guiding model throughout these considerations, one can only be stricken, when reading them from a phenomenological perspective, by their remarkable affinities to the conception of a life-worldly “circumspection”, as developed by Heidegger in several of his early lectures as well as in a key chapter of Being and Time. Significantly, that conception

 GS I, p. 503; En., p. 26.  GS I, p. 1049. 11  GS I, p. 1049. 12  GS I, p. 1049. 9

10

86

Tactile Reception and Life-Worldly Circumspection

leads Heidegger to interpret the experience of urban architecture, street traffic and finally cinema in a somewhat similar vein as Benjamin. To be sure, Heidegger’s own approach and his intentions in pursuing these issues are quite different from Benjamin’s. His earliest Freiburg lectures start out from an attempt to rethink Husserl’s phenomenology as an “original science of life itself” [Ursprungswissenschaft des Lebens selbst]. In this context, Heidegger understands “life” transitively as life “in”, “from”, “for”, “with” and “against” a world.13 In Heidegger’s view, this has a twofold consequence: on the one hand, it implies that factical life, as he terms it, is always “being-in-the-world”, that is: in a relationship to its environment, while on the other hand, this relationship is ultimately rooted in what he terms “concern”. As a consequence, the world and its objects are in Heidegger’s view primarily encountered in concerned preoccupation, which means that they are experienced while crossing the busy paths of a practical subject and not in pure contemplative perception by an epistemological subject. Thus, Heidegger claims, life-worldly objects do not appear primarily as mere indifferent realities, but instead as meaningful or significant life occurrences.14 Despite this sharp contrast to theoretical contemplation, however, Heidegger does not see our original practical engagement with the world as being strictly “a-theoretical” and that is: “blind”.15 Instead, our everyday praxis has its own specific mode of sight, which guides our practical dealings with the world and confers them their specific reliability.16 Beginning with his lecture courses on Aristotle from 1922, Heidegger terms this primary mode of practically engaged sight “circumspection”. In his view, our surrounding environment is not experienced primarily as a totality of plain objects inertially present, but instead as an ensemble of equipment ready to hand, the elements of which are encountered from the onset in their specific determinations of use, in their particular significance and in their own form of discrete familiarity. They are not mere objects to be stared at perceptively, but “equipment”, which is experienced first hand only when actually put to use. Heidegger’s famous example in Being and Time is that of the hammer: “the less we just stare at the hammer-Thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is – as equipment.”17 In Heidegger’s interpretation, life-worldly circumspection is fundamentally not set on grasping individual objects, since we can never simply encounter one piece of equipment as such.18 Just think of how kitchen tools can only properly be put to use with one another (the spatula with the pan, the bowl, the eggs, the plate etc.) in an intelligibly organized kitchen, where all is “ready to hand” in a practically

 GA 61, p. 90.  GA 61, p. 91. 15  SuZ, p. 69; En., p. 98. 16  SuZ, p. 69. En., p. 98. 17  SuZ, p. 69; En., p. 98. 18  SuZ, p. 68, En., p. 97. 13 14

2 Circumspection

87

transparent manner. Thus, according to Heidegger, circumspection primarily discloses life-worldly objects as parts of a context, an ensemble of equipment, whereas it is precisely in light of the mutual reference to one another of these pieces of equipment that they can appear in their own readiness to hand in the first place. This is precisely why Heidegger suggests that, in making circumspective use of a piece of equipment, we do not actually look at it as such, but we rather look away from it, in being absorbed by the entire complex of equipment in use instead. In apperceiving the object as equipment, we have already interpreted it in its specific use as part of a practical context, wherein we need to orient ourselves with the object in hand. Thus, for Heidegger, the field of circumspection – and with it that of our primary familiarity with our lived environment  – is as such constantly expanding in our ongoing practical engagement with the world, while the piece of equipment itself is simply taken for granted.19 Starting around his lecture course from 1923, Ontology. Hermeneutics of Facticity, Heidegger’s reflections on these issues find their guiding example in the domestic workshop. The example fits perfectly with Heidegger’s intention to illustrate the precedence of an ordered context of equipment over each individual object in particular. In contrast to this, his earlier lectures saw the “totality of signification”, that is: the larger ensemble of equipment which determines our apperception of individual worldly objects, quite loosely as “a sphere of objects given in the most diverse characters of significance”,20 whereas his examples often touched upon situational experiences in everyday city life. However, his later analyses also bring into play a certain implicit interpretation of the city as the larger encompassing horizon. Thus, in his later lecture courses after 1923 and most visibly in Being and Time, significance itself is primarily explained following the example of using tools in the specific situation of the amateur workshop. But even in this narrowed down context, the wider horizon of city life often shines through in the background. Thus, in his key lecture course on the “hermeneutics of facticity”, Heidegger briefly mentions the example of someone simply wasting time on the street. To be sure, Heidegger is not interested here in offering an extended description of a specifically modern social phenomenon  – which Benjamin, for instance, discusses extensively when addressing the “flâneur” as a key motive of nineteenth century Paris and his experience of the “colportage phenomenon of space”21 – but instead he is simply interested in showing how even the pseudo-activity of “wasting time” needs to be interpreted, as an exception, within the framework of habitual preoccupation, outlined in the discussion of the workshop.22 Nonetheless, Heidegger’s brief note seems to at least implicitly acknowledge that the idle experience of the city bum accesses a different character of significance than the utilitarian readiness to hand we experience when using tools in the workshop.

 GA 62, p. 92.  GA 61, p. 94. 21  GS V, p. 528; En., p. 418 f. 22  GA 63, p. 87. 19 20

88

Tactile Reception and Life-Worldly Circumspection

In his lecture course from 1925, History of the Concept of Time (1925) and later on in Being and Time, the example of the “public square” is brought up occasionally as a counterpoint to the domestic interior, discussed extensively as a piece of “living equipment” (“Wohnzeug”). While the latter concept indeed comes close to Le Corbusier’s notion of the house as a “living machine”, developed somewhere around the same time, the “public space” is interpreted by Heidegger correspondingly as the external horizon of the interior space, be it the room or the workshop. Viewed as such, the city appears as a space phenomenologically articulated into “spots and areas”, “proximities and distances”, “orientations” and “dispositions of preoccupation”. Despite these suggestions, however, Heidegger never comes to develop a full-­ blown analysis of the circumspective experience of the city in general, or architecture in particular.23 The most thorough discussion touching upon the issue can be found in his chapter on signs in Being and Time.24 In this context, Heidegger addresses the environmental function of a small arrow, which was installed in the late 1920s on vehicles as a precursor of the blinker light, in order to signal the driver’s intention to change directions in traffic. In interpreting this specific sign, Heidegger notes that the arrow doesn’t only serve the driver as a ready to hand piece of equipment, but also the passerby, who takes note of it.25 The latter encounters the sign as an inner-worldly piece of equipment “in the whole equipment-context of vehicles and traffic regulations.”26 In Heidegger’s view, the proper reaction to the sign represented by the arrow is not its sheer intuitive contemplation, but instead the action of taking a path in avoiding the vehicle or waiting for it to pass, since, just like the hammer, “[t]he sign is not authentically ‘grasped’ if we just stare at it and identify it as an indicator-thing which occurs.”27 The arrow is itself not an object to be merely looked at, but instead a signal for the circumspection of the passerby, who is thus helped gain orientation in his preoccupied engagement with the urban environment. Already in his early lecture courses, Heidegger is interested in sharply delineating circumspection and its correlate environment from pure perception and its implicit theoretical attitude. In this regard, he repeatedly stresses that the “oriented” and “orienting”28 circumspection of the life-world does not primarily intend its objects thematically, but instead the equipment is left in a specific form of discrete non-objectivity. This discreteness comes to view most strikingly, according to Heidegger, precisely when the object ready to hand becomes particularly ostensive as an individual object. This is the case when the object brakes down, is missing or  As such, Heidegger’s influence in contemporary architecture is mainly due to his post-war essays, focusing on entirely different concepts. 24  The same analysis can also be found in his lecture of the summer semester 1925, History of the Concept of Time. 25  SuZ, p. 78; En., p. 109. 26  SuZ, p. 78; En., p. 109. 27  SuZ, p. 79; En., p. 110. 28  GA 62, p. 91. 23

3  Tactility and Film

89

stands in our way. In all of these cases, the piece of equipment acquires a certain thematic ostentation for our circumspection, which Heidegger regards as a transitional state, leading to its pure theoretical perception. The latter, however, is not just a mere possibility of life-worldly experience, but instead a necessary derivation rooted in an actual inclination: that of abandoning “the concern of catering for the world” in just idly contemplating it without any practical objective.29 The specific concern or grounding motivation of the latter is curiosity. Interestingly, it is precisely in this context that Heidegger’s lecture course from the summer semester 1921, Augustinus und der Neuplatonismus, makes a rare comment linking this derivative, theoretical mode of relating to the world to cinema: “The pure will to see, naked curiosity, is the dominant sense even when the experience occurs with an emotional emphasis: fear, horror, scare. The modifications of this fundamental attitude to objects are numerous (cinema).”30

3 Tactility and Film Drawing from strikingly similar observations as Benjamin, Heidegger therefore seems to arrive at interpreting cinema as the complete opposite of the habitual and use-driven or circumspective experience of architecture. On the contrary, in his view, the cinematic experience appears as a purely optical, rather than tactile mode of reception, which departs from life-worldly circumspection proper and only encounters objects in plain curiosity.31 In that regard, it is close to the theoretical attitude. Thus, in Heidegger’s view, a mere “optical” experience of architectural space, as presented in the cinema, can only amount to a “worldless” experience of objects, reduced to their pure aspect, which loses contact with the circumspective experience of the urban surroundings as given in normal preoccupation. To be sure, when regarding a tracking shot across the film space, for instance in one of the early “ghost ride” films, the viewer is not moving circumspectively in preoccupation through the city environment, but instead he only passes optically through a purely visual phantom-space without experiencing it as his environment proper. If the filmic experience thus indeed to a certain extent resembles the experience of the flâneur, as a mode of just aimlessly ranging through the cityscape, then both are as such determined by an apprehension of space, which is strictly opposed by Heidegger to its circumspective, practical engagement in use. Benjamin himself would first seem to agree to this insofar as he also considers the flâneur as a purely optical type, opposing him to the tactile collector in one of his notes for the Arcades-project.32 Nonetheless, he still defines film as a

 GA 62, p. 353.  GA 63, p. 224. 31  SuZ, p. 70. 32  GS V, p. 274; En., p. 207. 29 30

90

Tactile Reception and Life-Worldly Circumspection

fundamentally tactile experience, or to be more precise: as a mode of reception, which brings the tactile to bear in the field of optics itself. In order to properly understand why and how this is actually the case, one needs to address the connection Benjamin establishes between the two core aspects, which characterize filmic reception in his view: (a) on the one hand, film is received primarily in a state of distraction rather than contemplative concentration; (b) on the other hand, it elicits (by means of montage) optical shock effects, which are suffered tactilely by the spectator and not simply registered perceptively. The relationship between these two moments is not entirely clear in Benjamin’s presentation, since, on the one hand, several passages seem determined to keep apart the two aforementioned distinctions  – between tactile and optical reception and between concentration and distraction as modes of attention  – in stressing that tactile reception “does not exclude” distraction, as if it could well include other modes of attention as well. On the other hand, he explicitly claims, as already seen before, that there is no tactile equivalent for focused optical contemplation, as if one would have to assume that perception is in fact “tactile” each time it becomes habitual and “optical” each time it is performed in focused attention. (a) The mutual relationship between tactility, habit and distraction becomes somewhat clearer when considering one of Benjamin’s earlier notes from 1930. The piece is called “Habit and Attention” and it aims to establish from the onset the natural dialectics that pertains between the two: “All attention must become habit, for else one would run the risk of explosion; at the same time, all habit must be disturbed by attention, for else one would run the risk of paralysis.”33 However, in this context, Benjamin is primarily concerned to show that habit and attention do not necessarily exclude one another, but they can actually also come to interfere. To this extent, he refers, on the one hand, to the hyper-acute perception of sounds as experienced by a patient in great pain, which he sees as a mode of settling into extreme attention as a sui generis mode of habituation; on the other hand, he mentions the experience of dream, which grows a specific mode of attentive perception out of the precipitates of daily experience, that is: within the residual medium of habit.34 These remarks are relevant here because, in Benjamin’s view, the “tactile reception” of film and architecture ultimately implies a similar interplay of habit and attention. To be sure, as we get accustomed with objects, spaces, persons or activities, they become less and less present for our attentive consideration, in being further received only distractedly. But Benjamin is not only interested in showing how habit determines a fading of attention, but also the other way around: how habit itself can take shape within the field of distracted attention. This is, in his view, precisely what happens in the case of film. For, if film indeed functions as a means for adapting the human apperceptive system to the bombardment of impressions that assail  GS IV, p. 407 f.  For a different perspective on dream as a topic within these wide-ranging discussions between early critical theory and phenomenology, see also the Preface, p. v. 33 34

3  Tactility and Film

91

it in our contemporary world – as the well known “modernity” theory goes – this adaptation is not a mere habituality, derived from a prior form of attentive perception, but instead a habit shaped from the onset in the medium of distracted viewing. This paradox is stressed out explicitly in a passage like the following: “For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation. / The distracted person, too, can form habits. More, the ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that their solution has become a matter of habit.”35 (b) In this particular quote, Benjamin speaks of “guidance”, when describing the relationship between tactile and optical reception in the case of film. In a further passage he mentions the “tactile element” – or even the tactile “dominant” in the first version of the essay – which comes to bear within the field of optical perception in the cinema. According to Benjamin’s own specification, this tactile element of film perception has to do primarily with the “shock effect” induced by “its succession of images”, in other words: its constant “changes of place and focus, which periodically assail the spectator”. One might be tempted to interpret this as nothing but the usual film-theoretical commonplace, claiming that montage determines the viewer to constantly engage in perspectival shifts, which are intrinsically experienced as disturbing. According to this interpretation – which is already criticized by Rudolf Arnheim, while it is still shared by many of Benjamin’s contemporaries – the spectators are constantly unsettled in their normal perception while watching the film by the fact that every new shot suddenly forces them to realign their entire perspective. However, Benjamin himself does not really go along this line when addressing the tactility of the film experience, and it is important to note that he not only ignores the standard of immersive and empathic film experience, which could bring about such apperceptive frustrations – since it is only when being deeply immersed into the film that one indeed experiences such disruptions as frustrating – but instead he praises the principle of montage precisely for not letting such an immersive experience come about in the first place. This is in fact the entire gist of Benjamin’s comparison between film reception and the contemplation of paintings: Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested. […] The spectator’s process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change. This constitutes the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind.36

35 36

 GS I, p. 505; En., p. 18 (my emphasis, CFF).  GS I, p. 503; En., p. 17.

92

Tactile Reception and Life-Worldly Circumspection

To be more precise, the problem here is not with the mere succession of images per se, but with their mode of succession, which Benjamin describes as erratic and disruptive. In a short note to Chaplin in his Paralipomena to the Artworkessay, Benjamin identifies the fundamental law governing the flow of cinematic images as being that of the “stuttering succession of the smallest movements”.37 The main point here is, however, that Benjamin sees this disruptive element of montage as potentially akin to the interruptions famously used by Brecht as a distancing effect. In one of his essays on Brecht, Benjamin thus writes: “Epic theatre proceeds by fits and starts, in a manner comparable to the images on a film strip. Its basic form is that of the forceful impact on one another of separate, sharply distinct situations in the play. […] As a result, intervals occur which tend to destroy illusion. These intervals paralyse the audience’s readiness for empathy.”38 In paralyzing the audience’s readiness for empathy or in interrupting its course of associations, the film constantly perturbs and discomforts the spectator and it is precisely in this constant irritation, which accompanies film perception as a structural feature, that Benjamin ultimately sees the main tactile element of the cinematic experience. In other words: the distracted viewer exercises optical attention inattentively like a muscle flexed in a reflex response to an irritation and it is precisely in that habit-forming function that its tactile dominant comes to bear.

4 Conclusion One may well wonder whether this tactile element of the film experience still has anything in common with that of architecture and urban experience in general. Read through the lenses of Heidegger, the two seem worlds apart. On the one hand, the tactile reception of architecture is, in Benjamin’s interpretation, marked by use and everyday preoccupation in terms that come close to Heidegger’s own descriptions of the subject’s situated and concerned dealings with the life-world. On the other hand, when talking about the cinema, Benjamin no longer refers to use and practical apperception at all, but only to habit and to the physiological impact of its succession of images, which are experienced by the spectator as a disturbance, in brief: as a shock. But is Benjamin’s stance on this ultimately that different from Heidegger’s? For Heidegger, the “sensational” aspect of film, that is: its emotional emphasis does not fundamentally alter its qualification as a purely optical mode of reception, in contrast to the original circumspective mode of everyday life experience proper. To be sure, in his scarce reflections on the subject matter, he only briefly hints at the emotional aspects of the profilmic content, as this is aptly illustrated by the thrills of horror films, while ignoring the affective elements pertaining to the film form itself, or to its technology, which are central to Benjamin’s account of montage. However,

37 38

 GS I, p. 1041.  GS II, pp. 537–538; En., p. 21.

4 Conclusion

93

this difference seems to weigh less here as Benjamin himself ultimately arrives at similarly ambivalent conclusions in his Artwork-essay. Thus, for instance, in his oft cited note on the cinema’s ability to explore the “optical unconscious”: By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling.39

If this is indeed the case, however, and film allows us to raise the unconscious “compulsions” of our everyday preoccupation into conscious awareness, it basically amounts to an optical elucidation of the tactile field, which corresponds entirely to Heidegger’s own assessment of film as an optical rather than tactile device and correspondingly his understanding of film viewing as closer to a theoretical rather than practical experience. Now, Benjamin himself arrives at a different conclusion and it is worth-wile considering why this is ultimately the case. Indeed, Benjamin doesn’t equate the shock-like effect of the filmic succession of images and the habit driven, pragmatic experience of the urban architectural scape only by mistake in using one and the same concept of “tactile reception” to designate both. Instead, he does indeed see a connection between them, which has to do primarily with Benjamin’s inclination to give a far more physiological reading to use itself than Heidegger, who on the contrary at times seems to completely lose sight of the body in his reflections despite all the metaphors that invoke bodily experience like “ready at hand”. On the contrary, in Benjamin’s account the sensorial aspect of bodily experience  – which is, of course, key to his attempt to give an anthropological reading to Marxist materialism – always plays an important part in his musings on architecture as well, and in this regard his interpretation of the cinema proves quite consistent. On the other hand, Benjamin and Heidegger do indeed seem to address similar issues here, but their main point of difference concerns the way in which they historicize, respectively de-historicize their observations. While Heidegger is thus set to develop a formal concept of “being in the world”, which should not be particularly anchored in the contextual givens of the historical present (although his examples constantly refer to modern city life), Benjamin frames his topic from the onset in a historical perspective. In this regard, the two aforementioned types of experience, which he associates under the label of “tactile reception”, are, in his view, indeed a contemporary phenomenon, which results from the historic demission of contemplative attention, and generally holds a symptomatic value with regard to our contemporary “being in the world” in particular. This demission points at a radically new mode of receiving works of art, while it also indicates a profound historical shift in our perceptive apparatus, which changes from solitary attention to collective distraction in 39

 GS I, p. 500; En., p. 15 f.

94

Tactile Reception and Life-Worldly Circumspection

becoming both pragmatically circumspective and shock-indigent, presupposing an obvious interconnection between the two. Consequently, Benjamin is indeed far more astute in assessing both contemporary architecture and the various tendencies of contemporary film – which he explicitly relates to Brecht’s innovations in the theatre  – than Heidegger, who simply contends with broad, sweeping remarks. While, in the present chapter, I have mostly dwelled in showing the consistent commonalities that pertain between Heidegger and Benjamin in what concerns some defining features of contemporary life experience, which at times leads to perfectly aligned assessments, the following chapter will focus, on the contrary, on what has appeared as their main point of contention: their respective relationship to history.

References Benjamin, W. 1969. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In Illuminations. English translation by H. Zohn. New York: Schocken. Benjamin, W. 1990. Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp (cited as GS I-VII). Benjamin, W. 2002. The Arcades Project, English Translation by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin. Cambridge MS: Harvard University Press. Diaconu, M. 2000. Tastend im Denken die Kunst. Entwurf einer taktilen Ästhetik. In New Europe College Yearbook 7, pp. 109–182. Fend, M. 2007. Sehen und Tasten. Zur Raumwahrnehmung bei Alois Riegl und in der Sinnesphysiologie des 19. Jahrhunderts. In Visualisierte Körperkonzepte. Strategien in der Kunst der Moderne, B. Lange ed. Berlin: Reimer, pp. 15–38. Heidegger, M. 1967. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer (cited as SuZ). English Translation by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. 1962. Being and Time, Oxford & Cambridge: Blackwell. Heidegger, M. 1994. Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung. Frankfurt a. Main: Klosterman (cited as GA 61). Heidegger, M. 2005. Phänomenologische Interpretationen ausgewählter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles zu Ontologie und Logik. Frankfurt a. Main: Klosterman (cited as GA 62). Heidegger, M. 2011. Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens: Einleitung in die Phänomenologie der Religion (WS 1920/21), Frankfurt a. Main: Klostermann (cited as GA 60). English Translation by M.  Fritsch & J.A.  Gosetti Ferencei. 2010. The Phenomenology of Religious Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. 1995. Ontologie. Hermeneutik der Faktizität. Frankfurt a. Main: Klosterman (cited as GA 63). Riegl, A. 1966. Historische Grammatik der bildenden Künste. Graz/Köln: Böhlau.

History at the Crossroads: Heidegger and Surrealism

The main proponents of the Frankfurt School seem to agree in their assessments of Heidegger’s conception of history: while they generally saw Husserl’s phenomenology as being ahistorical plain and simple – an objection first brought up by Heidegger himself in his early lecture courses – Heidegger’s philosophy appeared to them as ultimately suffering from the same shortcoming, while only veiling it better. As Adorno first phrases this in two of his early papers of the 1930s, Die Aktualität der Philosophie and Die Idee der Naturgeschichte,1 Heidegger’s fault lies in his replacing history with the pale abstraction of “historicity”. Adorno’s argument receives a more forceful elaboration in his Negative Dialectics,2 where the concept of historicity is regarded as a mere example of Heidegger’s general tendency to “ontologize the ontical”. According to Adorno, this tendency – which he generally saw as an attempt to capture what resists conceptualization by using a specially coined concept of “non-conceptuality”3 – characterizes the philosophical tradition of idealism in general. In the specific case of Heidegger’s “historicity”, however, this leads to two specific difficulties: on the one hand, the concept reinterprets the ever-changing flow of history as a mere invariant “existential”, while loosing sight of the concrete historic process as such4; on the other hand, it brings about a hypostatic abstraction of the historically given, which is tacitly dressed up as an “eidetic necessity”. A similar interpretation of Heidegger’s conception of history is put forth by Jürgen Habermas as well. In his famous lectures on The Philosophical Discourse of An early version of this chapter was published in German as: “Geschichte am Scheideweg. Heidegger und der Surrealismus bei Benjamin”. In: Philosophisches Jahrbuch 2 (2015), pp. 339−351.  GS 1, p. 330 and 350.  GS 6, p. 134–136. 3  GS 6, p. 123; En., p. 117. 4  Hence the famous verdict: “historicality immobilizes history in the unhistorical realm”. (GS 6, p. 135; En., p. 129). 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Ferencz-Flatz, Critical Theory and Phenomenology, Contributions to Phenomenology 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27615-6_7

95

96

History at the Crossroads: Heidegger and Surrealism

Modernity from the 1980s, he charges Heidegger’s Being and Time with “ontologizing” history, by accusing Heidegger of diluting the lived dimension of history into a mere a priori structure.5 The same point is made by Habermas as early as 1977, in a discussion with Herbert Marcuse, where he notes that Heidegger ignores the concrete historic process by only considering the transcendental conditions of possibility of history (namely historicity or historicality). Marcuse willingly agrees: “Yes, this is indeed the case in Heidegger. History is volatilized in the preoccupation with historicity.”6 On first sight, Walter Benjamin seems to hold a similar view, which is incidentally shared not only by the kinsmen of the Frankfurt School, but also by other early critics of Heidegger like Karl Löwith, or Georg Misch. Among Benjamin’s notations for the Arcades-project, one thus indeed also finds the following observation: “Heidegger seeks in vain to rescue history for phenomenology abstractly through ‘historicity’.”7 By explicitly referring to the un-historic “essentialities” of phenomenology, Benjamin thus seems to also interpret “historicity” as a mere abstraction, which ultimately proves incapable of doing justice to the concrete historic process. Indeed, similar minded critical observations on Heidegger can be frequently found in Benjamin’s letters to Scholem as well.8 Thus, a letter from January 1930, wherein Benjamin reports (in French) on his latest research for the Arcades Project also stressing the need to conduct a more thorough epistemological reflection on the method of historic research in general, he writes: “C’est là que je trouverai sur mon chemin Heidegger et j’attends quelque scintillement de l’entre-choc de nos deux manières, tres différentes, d’envisager l’histoire.”9 Although it is doubtless that Benjamin was indeed critical of Heidegger’s conception of history, a more careful reading of his brief references to Heidegger nevertheless shows, that he held a more nuanced representation of the latter’s conception of history than Adorno, Habermas or Marcuse, which was not entirely negative either. Among his notations for the Arcades Project, one thus also finds the following enigmatic observation: “Of vital interest to recognize, at a particular point of development, currents of thought at the crossroads – namely: the new view on the historical world at the point where a decision is forthcoming as to its reactionary or revolutionary application. In this sense, one and the same phenomenon is at work in the Surrealists and in Heidegger.”10 In thus surprisingly associating Heidegger with the Surrealists, Benjamin seems to attribute them both a new view of history, which can either lead to “revolutionary” or to “reactionary” consequences. This chapter tries to account for Benjamin’s strange association of Heidegger and Surrealism.  Habermas 1983, p. 23.  Habermas 1987, p. 267. 7  GS V, p. 577; En., p. 462. 8  In what concerns Benjamin’s relationship to Heidegger, see also: Fynsk 1992, Caygill 1994, Benjamin 1997 and Hamacher 2005. 9  GB, p. 506. Together with Brecht, Benjamin also planned to convene a seminar with the purpose to “destruct Heidegger”. GB, p. 514. 10  GS V, p. 1026; En., p. 857. 5 6

1  The Surrealist Interpretation of History

97

1 The Surrealist Interpretation of History To be sure, parallels between Heidegger’s and Benjamin’s own conception of history have been drawn before. Thus, one might be tempted to regard the aforementioned passage as just a bizarre further case in point for such a comparison. Already in 1967, Hannah Arendt explicitly used one of her Freiburg conferences – which was attended by Heidegger himself and took Walter Benjamin’s work as its main topic of interest – to point at the striking similarities between their two conceptions of history. In Arendt’s view, both Heidegger and Benjamin saw themselves facing an abrupt break with tradition, while attempting to find new ways for re-­appropriating the past. Thus, Arendt writes in the later published version of this conference: “Without realizing it, Benjamin actually had more in common with Heidegger’s remarkable sense for living eyes and living bones that had sea-changed into pearls and coral, and as such could be saved and lifted into the present only by doing violence to their context in interpreting them with ‘the deadly impact’ of new thoughts, than he did with the dialectical subtleties of his Marxist friends.”11 Similarly, Jürgen Habermas also sketches a comparison between Benjamin and Heidegger’s treatment of history in his short excurse on Benjamin in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. In dealing with the representatives of what he calls a “radical” approach to history in modernity, he explicitly names Nietzsche (who first circumscribes this approach as “critical history” in his second Untimely Meditation), Marx (who makes use of it in writings like the 18. Broumaire of Louis Bonaparte) and Heidegger (whose Being and Time ontologizes that approach by turning it into an existential structure). In Habermas’ view, the three aforementioned authors agree in considering that an optimal access to the past is only viable in light of the future-oriented expectations of the present, whereas, for Habermas, Benjamin’s interest in Surrealism leads him to a similarly radical position.12 As enlightening as such parallels may first seem,13 however, they ultimately only arrive at scratching the surface, in that they sacrifice the most decisive nuances of the aforementioned authors’ conceptions of history in favor of superficial similarities.14 In contrast to such superficial parallelization then, Benjamin’s awkward analogy seems to deserve a more thorough interpretation as it specifically strives to capture – in a lapidary, but dialectically complex manner – both the common ground and the contradictions that pertain between his own perspective on history (which is here seen to coincide with that of the Surrealists) and that of Heidegger. In order to properly understand this assessment, however, it is first necessary to engage in a somewhat more detailed account of Benjamin’s relationship to the Surrealist conception of history, as it is presented especially in his essay from 1929, Der Sürrealismus.  Arendt 2006, p. 93; En., p. 201.  Habermas 1983, p. 23. 13  Further points of intersection between the general philosophical positions of the two authors are discussed with a special interest in the questions of art by Knoche (2000). 14  This objection was raised by Schöttker & Wizisla 2006, p. 27. 11 12

98

History at the Crossroads: Heidegger and Surrealism

The essay is, to be sure, a masterly exercise in the style of Surrealist writing rather than a clear-cut and focused analysis of the philosophical framework underlying the Surrealist conception of history. The question of history is as such touched upon on several occasions poignantly in the text, but it is never explicitly tackled theoretically in a detailed and analytic manner. Nonetheless, a careful reading of the essay clearly shows from the onset that, when Surrealists address history, their interest is not sparked by a theoretical concern for exploring the past, but instead it ­primarily derives from their living relationship with their historically marked environment of things (Dingwelt). Such an interest obviously doesn’t foreground the so-called “historic remains”, which officially count as historiographical documents of the past in contributing to its clarification, but instead it foremost concerns outdated places and objects around us, which are on the brink of losing their life-­worldly functions of use. Thus, Benjamin explicitly writes that Surrealism “was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the ‘outmoded’, in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them.”15 However, if this perspective can indeed be said to define the Surrealist conception of history in general, Benjamin specifically stresses two points which are somewhat more particular, namely: (a) the relationship between the outmoded thing-world of the recent past and the preceding generation and (b) the transformations of this thing-world brought about by the accelerated development of technology. If the former leads to a fundamental phenomenology of the outdated, the latter reveals the decisive historic motivation for the Surrealist conception of history. I will briefly tackle the two issues in turn. (a) In contrast to historic remnants in the usual sense of the term, the outdated has a paradoxical status: while it no longer fully belongs to the present, it cannot yet fully be ascribed to the past either. Thus, the outdated pertains to an intermediary state, oscillating between history and actuality, and it is precisely as such a hybrid phenomenon that it also comes to view frequently in Benjamin’s own reflections. In relating the outdated more precisely to the “recent past”,16 Benjamin often sees it as specifically defining the life circumstances of the preceding generation. Thus, he writes, for instance, in a notation analyzing the category of the “old-fashioned”: “The impression of the old-fashioned can arise only where, in a certain way, reference is made to the most topical. If the beginnings of modem architecture to some extent lie in the arcades, their antiquated effect on the present generation has exactly the same significance as the antiquated effect of a father on his son.”17 This may first sound like a mere analogy, but if Benjamin thus points at a residual grain of unresolved topicality in the old-fashioned, this primarily has to do – as a further notation from the same context shows – with the entanglement of each new generation in the life hori GS II, p. 299 f.; En., p. 50.  See GS V, p. 47. 17  GS V, p. 118; En., p. 69. 15 16

1  The Surrealist Interpretation of History

99

zon of the one preceding it, a life horizon which it first experiences only subliminally or unconsciously. This insight is often developed in rather metaphorical terms in Benjamin’s notations as a dialectics between dreaming and waking up.18 To be more precise, Benjamin assumes that the life-world of our childhood and youth is the “dream-like” reception of our adult parents’ real environment. In his view, this essentially defines how that specific historic world presents itself to us subsequently, once we have ourselves grown into adults. As a consequence, different generations obviously don’t experience the same thing-world identically, while for Benjamin it is crucial to note that the “dream-like” reception of that world by the child enriches it with “symbolic characters”, which lack in their simultaneous lucid reception by adults, but decisively define their subsequent apperception when growing up. Thus, Benjamin insightfully writes in one of his notes: “For us, locomotives already have symbolic character because we met with them in childhood. Our children, however, will find this in automobiles, of which we ourselves see only the new, elegant, modern, cheeky side.”19 In thus presenting the outdated as a hybrid mixture of actuality and historic past, as well as of dream-like entanglement and lucid distance, Benjamin sees its reception primarily characterized by a specific emotional ambivalence, which combines fierce rejection with latent affective attachment. The former comes to view especially in Benjamin’s reflections on the fashion and clothing of the previous generation, which are most often perceived by the contemporary as embarrassing. In contrast to the fashion of historically more distant generations, which have been largely assimilated due to their reception as theatre costumes in historic plays, for instance, the antiquated garments of one’s parents’ generation still remains insufferable. This peculiar defense reaction is captured by Benjamin in a more profound perspective in the following aphorism: “A definitive perspective on fashion follows solely from the consideration that to each generation the one immediately preceding it seems the most radical antiaphrodisiac imaginable.”20 However, this sharp rejection of the thing-world of one’s parents always also encompasses a suppressed element of fondness, which Benjamin attempts to work out perhaps most explicitly in a passage of his Dream Kitsch fragment, widely seen as a preparatory draft for the Surrealism essay.21 Indeed, insofar as the outdated primarily reflects the emotional  See for instance GS V, p. 490; En., p. 388: “A generation’s experience of youth has much in common with the experience of dreams. Its historical configuration is a dream configuration. Every epoch has such a side turned toward dreams, the child’s side.” 19  GS V, p. 493; En., p. 390. The concept of “generation” is also central for Heidegger’s conception of history. See for this Ferencz-Flatz 2013. 20  GS V, p. 113; En., p. 64. 21  “[W]hen we were little, there was as yet no agonized protest against the world of our parents. As children in the midst of that world, we showed ourselves superior. When we reach for the banal, we take hold of the good along with it – the good that is there (open your eyes) right before you [/] For the sentimentality of our parents, so often distilled, is good for providing the most objective image of our feelings. The long-windedness of their speeches, bitter as gall, has the effect of reduc18

100

History at the Crossroads: Heidegger and Surrealism

landscape of the preceding generation, i.e. the affects one has grown out of in becoming an adult, one naturally faces it with the same mixture of rejection and indulgence one generally holds as an adult for the naïve sentimentality of one’s own childhood and youth. It is precisely on ground of this intricate emotional dialectics, in which repression and sympathetic participation are inextricably combined, that Benjamin sees the old fashioned thing-world as an illustrative expression of the unresolved past in general. Significantly, Benjamin also addresses this emotional ambivalence in a later notation, when speaking of what he terms the “dialectics of sentimentality”.22 To be sure, this concept is illustrated in his writings primarily with regard to kitsch and not the outdated, but the two phenomena are actually closely connected in Benjamin’s view. This connection is not only due to the fact that the reception of both similarly combines a superficial element of rejection with affective sympathy, but moreover to the fact that both put into play a similar relationship with history.23 In his Arcades project, Benjamin offers the following brief definition of kitsch: “Kitsch […] is nothing more than art with a 100 percent, absolute and instantaneous availability for consumption [Gebrauchswert].”24 But since the use value [Gebrauchswert] of art generally resides in its capacity to “warm the heart”, Benjamin’s aforementioned notation ultimately arrives at opposing the specifically irritating sentimentality of kitsch to the sublime distance of great art. This opposition is decisive in what concerns their respective relationships to history. Thus, Benjamin indeed regards kitsch and popular art in general – as becomes clear in another notation from 1929 – as a mode of passing on tradition which occurs behind the back of high culture by employing entirely different means.25 Its most specific aspect is that the past is not perceived here as a mere object of distant contemplation, but instead it is transposed immediately into the present as a long time familiar item. In order to characterize the particular relationship to the past that ensues, Benjamin surprisingly compares it to the experience of déjà vu, which touches us, according to a passage in Berlin Childhood, “like an echo—one awakened by a sound that seems to have issued from somewhere in the darkness of past life”.26 Just as in the case of such mysterious recollections, the experience of kitsch doesn’t involve an explicit awareness of the ing us to a crimped picture puzzle; the ornament of conversation was full of the most abysmal entanglements. Within is heartfelt sympathy, is love, is kitsch.” (GS II, p. 622; En., p. 4). 22  See GS V, p. 1215. 23  This relationship is hinted at especially in the following passage of the Dream Kitsch fragment: “Technology consigns the outer image of things to a long farewell, like banknotes that are bound to lose their value. It is then that the hand retrieves this outer cast in dreams and, even as they are slipping away, makes contact with familiar contours. It catches hold of objects as their most threadbare and timeworn point. This is not always the most delicate point: children do not so much clasp a glass as snatch it up. And which side does an object turn towards dream? What point is its most decrepit? It is the side worn through by habit and patched with cheap maxims. The side which things turn toward the dream is kitsch.” (GS II, p. 621; En., p. 3). 24  GS V, p. 500; En., p. 395. 25  GS VI, p. 185 f. 26  GS IV, p. 251; En, p. 19.

1  The Surrealist Interpretation of History

101

past either, but instead that past is only intimated by it. To be more precise, its specific feeling of familiarity evokes an emotional equivalent to one’s embedding in the generational nexus, and that is ultimately: in tradition, and it is precisely at this point that kitsch touches upon the outdated. Thus, if one considers the analogy between kitsch and the outdated in this perspective, it becomes clear that the outdated is not relevant for history, in Benjamin’s view, by simply serving as a document for the explicit reconstruction of a submerged past, but instead its relevance lies in that it allows, as a specific medium for the subliminal familiarity with the historic thing-world, to maintain a purely emotional connection to that past. It is precisely this subliminal relationship to history, which comes to the fore with the outdated, that Benjamin sees as central for the Surrealists as well. (b) Unlike kitsch, a Surrealist work of art of course doesn’t simply aim to reproduce this latent and emotionally charged familiarity with the life-world. On the contrary, it primarily seeks to subvert it and strike its corresponding emotional ambivalence. Benjamin himself takes note of this in his essay, admiring the Surrealists’ ability to bring “the immense forces of ‘atmosphere’ concealed in these things to the point of explosion”.27 If, however, this intense engagement with the antiquated life-world of the recent past, soaked in childhood experience, indeed plays a central role in Benjamin’s interpretation of the Surrealist conception of history, Benjamin explicitly points out that our current interest for these issues sets in at a specific moment in history, when those issues are deeply affected by fundamental transformations, which come as a consequence of technology and its developments. To be sure, such transformations are not the fault of technology per se – which has always been assimilated in childhood experience and thus endowed with “symbolic characters”28 –, but they derive from the accelerated rhythm of technologic development, which begins to characterize the nineteenth century. In Benjamin’s view, this acceleration leads to an unprecedented increase in objects rendered meaningless by history.29 The point here is therefore not that technology generally alters our relationship with the world, but rather that its rapid development speeds up the process by which our surrounding world of objects is constantly replaced by novel objects to the point that it by far exceeds their generationally conditioned assimilation period. This process – which is also poetically hinted at in the Dream Kitsch fragment in stating that “Technology consigns the outer image of things to a long farewell, like

 GS II, p. 300.  “Only a thoughtless observer can deny that correspondences come into play between the world of modem technology and the archaic symbol-world of mythology. Of course, initially the technologically new seems nothing more than that. But in the very next childhood memory, its traits are already altered. Every childhood achieves something great and irreplaceable for humanity. By the interest it takes in technological phenomena, by the curiosity it displays before any sort of invention or machinery, every childhood binds the accomplishments of technology to the old worlds of symbols.” (GS V, p. 576; En., p. 461). 29  GS V, p. 582. 27 28

102

History at the Crossroads: Heidegger and Surrealism

banknotes that are bound to lose their value”30 – obviously leads to a general loss of familiarity with the thing-world, which comes to view in Benjamin’s writings in at least three different regards. (1) It comes to view first of all in noting that the mass production of things on the conveyor belt, on the one hand, and the technical reproducibility of their representation, on the other, bring about a loss of “uniqueness” in objects, which Benjamin relates to their embedding in the context of tradition. As a consequence, objects tend to be perceived essentially only as serial products, without history.31 (2) The same process, which Benjamin famously addresses as the “loss of aura”, when speaking of objects of representation, also has an equivalent in the field of objects of use, since, in his view, the decline of artisan labor led to a situation wherein tools and artifacts no longer sediment their users professional skills and their familiarity with the object. Benjamin designates this capacity for sedimentation rather confusingly as exercise, by essentially noting the constant decrease of the latter in our contemporary society.32 (3) Thirdly, in Benjamin’s view, a similar process also affects contemporary interior architecture, which becomes less and less capable of bearing the traces of its inhabitants.33 By contrasting this to an enlightening description of the interior architecture of the nineteenth century, wherein the habits of the inhabitant interpenetrate with their expression in the surrounding objects populating the interior, Benjamin interprets several trends in contemporary architecture (most notably Le Corbusier’s school) as attempts to establish interiors that reject traces. According to Benjamin, these three historic traits  – the loss of aura, the shrinking of exercise and the erasure of traces – essentially bring into play three different aspects of one and the same phenomenon, that he frequently describes as a far reaching process of gradual alienation from the traditional life-word. It is precisely as a consequence of this that our surrounding thing-world tends to lose its familiar guise. Benjamin himself tries to capture this entire complex of issues with his famous concept of “poverty of experience,” (Erfahrungsarmut) which he sees as the main consequence of our contemporary crisis of tradition.34 This process obviously also affects the generational nexus, for insofar as the historic distancing between the contemporary generation and the preceding one is no longer balanced, as it was

 GS II, p. 620.  GS I, p. 440. 32  GS I, p. 644; En., p. 461: “If we think of the associations which, at home in the memoire involontaire, seek to cluster around an object of perception, and if we call those associations the aura of that object, then the aura attaching to the object of a perception corresponds precisely to the experience [Erfahrung] which, in the case of an object of use, inscribes itself as long practice. The techniques inspired by the camera and subsequent analogous types of apparatus extend the range of the memoire volontaire; these techniques make it possible at any time to retain an event – as image and sound – through the apparatus. They thus represent important achievements of a society in which long practice is in decline.” 33  GS II, p. 217 f. 34  “Experience”, Benjamin writes in his second essay on Baudelaire, “is indeed a matter of tradition, in collective experience as well as private life.” (GS I, p. 608; En., p. 314). 30 31

1  The Surrealist Interpretation of History

103

until the nineteenth century, by their mutual embedding in the binding context of the same tradition, the recently past generation acquires for the present one an expression of radical strangeness. The life-world of our parents already impresses us as archaic and thus lacks an immediate intelligibility for us: “The momentum of primal history in the past is no longer masked, as it used to be, by the tradition of church and family – this at once the consequence and condition of technology. The old prehistoric dread already envelops the world of our parents because we ourselves are no longer bound to this world by tradition”.35 This is instead precisely the main point of interest for the Surrealists. If the Surrealists thus indeed take this peculiar, outdated life-world of the preceding generation as their central point of departure, as Benjamin claims, this is not the case in spite of the strange and unintelligible expression, which it tends to acquire under the present circumstances, but rather because of that expression of unintelligibility. Thus, the Surrealists are not interested in countering the contorted view of the past, which arises under the given circumstances, in order to restore a more genuine view of it “as it truly was,” but on the contrary they accentuate that contortion even more forcefully, in lucidly and un-­ distortedly bringing to expression our broken relationship with tradition. Significantly, this very same grounding interpretation of Surrealism also comes to view in Adorno’s essay from 1956, Looking back at Surrealism, which specifically points to montage as the grounding effect of this approach to the past: To conceptualize Surrealism along these lines, one must go back not to psychology but to Surrealism’s artistic techniques. Unquestionably, they are patterned on the montage. One could easily show that even genuine Surrealist painting works with its motifs and that the discontinuous juxtaposition of images in Surrealist lyric poetry is montage-like. But these images derive, as we know, in part literally and in part in spirit from the late nineteenth-­ century illustrations that belonged to the world of the parents of Max Ernst's generation. There were collections in existence as early as the 1920s, outside the sphere of Surrealism, like Alan Bott's Our Fathers, which partook parasitically of Surrealist shock and by doing so dispensed with the strain of alienation through montage as a kindness to the audience. Authentic Surrealist practice, however, replaced those elements with unfamiliar ones. It is precisely the latter, which, through fright, gave that material the aspect of something familiar, the quality of “Where have I seen that before?” Hence one may assume that the affinity with psychoanalysis lies not in a symbolism of the unconscious but in the attempt to uncover childhood experiences by means of explosions. What Surrealism adds to illustrations of the world of objects is the element of childhood we lost; when we were children, those illustrated papers, already obsolete even then, must have leaped out at us the way Surrealist images do now.36

 GS V, p. 576, En., p. 461 f. A further notation in the Arcades project explicitly relates this perspective to the Surrealist conception of history: “With the accelerated tempo of technology, which also involves a similarly rapid decay of tradition, the import of the collective unconscious, the archaic face of a period comes to light far more rapidly than in the past, it is even visible for the following generation. Hence the surrealist view of history.” (GS V, p. 1235 f.) 36  GS 11, p. 103; En., p. 88. 35

104

History at the Crossroads: Heidegger and Surrealism

2 Reactionary and Revolutionary Historiographies The surrealist conception of history can thus be seen, according to Benjamin, as a way of playing estrangement and familiarity out against one another in regard to the traditional surrounding life-world. Before further engaging the question of how Benjamin interprets the relationship between the aforementioned analysis of Surrealism and Heidegger’s theories, it is useful to first reread Benjamin’s confrontation of the Surrealist and the Heideggerian conception of history in its most extended version. This is the version included in convolute S of the Arcades project (“Painting, Jugendstil, Novelty”), which reads as follows: Of vital interest to recognize a particular point of development as a crossroad. The new historical thinking that, in general and in particular, is characterized by higher concreteness, redemption of periods of decline, revision of periodization, presently stands at such a point, and its utilization in a reactionary or a revolutionary sense is now being decided. In this regard, the writings of the Surrealists and the new book by Heidegger point to one and the same crisis in its two possible solutions.37

Following this passage, one can easily surmise what Benjamin considers to be the common ground of the two conceptions, which is here explicitly designated as a “crisis” of historic thinking and which, as we have seen, Benjamin generally interprets as a new “poverty of experience”. In considering this point, one might for sure first be surprised to see Heidegger associated with such a perspective. But on a closer reading of Being and Time, the crisis of historic thinking indeed appears to be central not only for Heidegger’s fundamental theory of “authenticity,” which constitutes the key to his entire analysis of historicity, but also, and perhaps even more so, in the treatment of “inauthentic” history.38 Its description is in Heidegger’s view primarily meant to circumscribe the dominant relationship that the contemporary subject, engrossed in the present, entertains to a historic past, to which he is no longer bound by tradition. While the “authentic” Dasein in his view originally appropriates the past in the future-oriented perspective of their own “possibilities”, the “inauthentic” Dasein can on the contrary only misunderstand the past in interpreting it exclusively in view of what is presently given. The passage concludes with the following statement, which easily lends itself to comparisons with Benjamin’s formulation of the subject matter: “When, however, one’s existence is inauthentically historical, it is loaded down with the legacy of a ‘past’ which has become unrecognizable, and it seeks the modern.”39

 GS V, p. 676; En., p. 544 f.  With regard to Heidegger’s hidden anti-modernism, which comes to view in this terminology, see also Adorno’s classical criticism in the Negative Dialectics, cf. GS 6, p. 30 f. 39  SuZ, p. 391; En., p. 444. Among many other things, Heidegger’s description also regards dispersion and distraction (Zerstreuung), in a similar vein as Benjamin, as a grounding category of modernity: “Everyday Dasein has been dispersed into the many kinds of things which daily ‘come to pass’. The opportunities and circumstances which concern keeps ‘tactically’ awaiting in advance, have ‘fate’ as their outcome.” (SuZ, p. 389 f.; En., p. 441. 37 38

2  Reactionary and Revolutionary Historiographies

105

Now, Benjamin explicitly designates Heidegger’s solution to this crisis as “reactionary”, while calling the Surrealist approach to it as “revolutionary”. But what does this opposition actually entail in the given context for Benjamin? Of course, the two terms are as such borrowed from the Marxist vocabulary, but Benjamin, who frequently picks op on this distinction, specifies it in a quite particular manner.. Thus, in his famous essay, The Author as Producer (1934), he discusses the political tendencies of contemporary art in explicitly bringing up the following question: “what is the relationship of a work of art to the relationships of production of the time? Is it in accord with them, is it reactionary or does it strive to overthrow them, is it revolutionary?”40 In the same essay, however, Benjamin already aims to give a more nuanced twist to this classical opposition. For, in taking the general crisis of contemporary art as his main point of departure, he notes that, at present, the most important “revolutionary” artistic movements aim at reshaping their own artistic techniques primarily and thus implicitly at reworking their own position within the “relationships of production of the time”, while “reactionary” art only contends with thumping on the need for a “spiritual renewal”, while leaving those relationships of production untouched as they are. This contradiction obviously shows that “reactionary” art is not necessarily in agreement with its time, as suggested by the aforementioned standard definition of the term. On the contrary, it can just as well emphatically express disagreement with the given situation, but it ultimately supports the preservation of the statu quo in that it leaves everything as it stands outwardly by only looking inwardly and demanding for spiritual reform. Similarly, Benjamin’s Surrealism-essay also opposes a “reactionary” and a “revolutionary” attitude in relationship to art by using a brief reference to Pierre Naville to redirect the question towards the contradiction between morals and politics: “where are the conditions for revolution? In the changing of attitudes or of external circumstances? That is the cardinal question that determines the relation of politics to morality and cannot be glossed over.”41 Instead, if one indeed regards the aforementioned opposition between a “reactionary” and a “revolutionary” approach in this particular perspective, that Benjamin emphasizes, it certainly lends itself not only for an analysis of contemporary art, but also for considering the question of our relationship to history in general, and as such it can help us circumscribe the precise point where Benjamin’s confrontation of Heidegger and the Surrealists sets in. Indeed, insofar as both take the grounding fact of the aforementioned break with tradition as their point of departure, Heidegger may be seen as advocating a mere inner or “moral” surpassing of this crisis under the sign of a “resolute” authenticity, while the Surrealists on the contrary prefer its “political” transformation under the sign of a socially effective Surrealist action.42  GS II, p. 685 f.; En., p. 84.  GS II, p. 308. 42  It is easy to see that Benjamin indeed saw the major philosophical movements of his time – and among them especially the contemporary forms of “vitalism”, which constituted a key influence for Heidegger – precisely in this light, if one considers a passage in his second essay on Baudelaire, where Benjamin relates the reception of lyrical poems in late modernity with its contemporary 40 41

106

History at the Crossroads: Heidegger and Surrealism

For sure, this seems like a reductive reading of the two terms, which doesn’t do full justice to their complex ideological underpinnings. But, on the one hand, these are indeed the accents that Benjamin places when considering the two terms. On the other hand, this particular reading of the two positions allows us – precisely in view of the epistemo-critical reflections on history which ground Benjamin’s main contention with Heidegger43 – to draw some important methodological consequences, which come to view most strikingly precisely where Benjamin’s and Heidegger’s conceptions of history seem to be closest to one another, but ultimately collide. In other words: our main interest here is not with this opposition per se, but in how it helps specify a significant difference in what concerns Heidegger’s and Benjamin’s approach to history. In order to best lay bare these consequences, it is preferable to depart from a view unquestionably shared by both authors, namely the idea that it is not the past per se, but rather its relationship to the present, which constitutes the primal object of history. As is well known, Benjamin tries to capture this perspective with his notion of constellation, which sets in, for the historian, between his own present time and the specific period of history, that becomes legible especially for that present. This idea is frequently opposed to the historicist understanding of history: Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal nexus between various moments of history. But no state of affairs is, as a cause, already a historical one. It becomes this, posthumously, through eventualities which may be separated from it by millennia. The historian who starts from this, ceases to permit the consequences of eventualities to run through his fingers like the beads of a rosary. He records the constellation in which his own epoch comes into contact with that of an earlier one.44

This leads Benjamin to the methodological conclusion that a dialectical approach to history can by no means only clarify the concrete historic circumstances of its specific object, but instead it must also take into account the motivations, which determine the present to engage precisely that particular moment of the past and not philosophy as follows: “If conditions for a positive reception of lyric poetry have become less favorable, it is reasonable to assume that only in rare instances does lyric poetry accord with the experience of its readers. This may be due to a change in the structure of their experience. Even though one may approve of this development, one may find it difficult to specify the nature of the change. Turning to philosophy for an answer, one encounters a strange situation. Since the end of the nineteenth century, philosophy has made a series of attempts to grasp ‘true’ experience, as opposed to the kind that manifests itself in the standardized, denatured life of the civilized masses. These efforts are usually classified under the rubric of ‘vitalism.’” (GS I, p.  608; En., p.  314). Benjamin explicitly names Dilthey in this context, then he refers to Klages and Jung, and finally he considers Bergson as key representatives of such a tendency of opposing the contemporary “poverty of experience” to a “true” experience. Instead, he could just as well have also referred to Heidegger, whose conception of history in Being and Time primarily rests upon opposing the “authentic” to the “inauthentic” Dasein. In contrast to this, Benjamin writes with regard to the two main figures in Breton’s Nadja, that they discover the explosive energies hidden in the outdated, by converting them immediately into “revolutionary experience, if not action.” (GS II, p. 300; En., p. 182). 43  GB, p. 506. 44  GS I, p. 704.

2  Reactionary and Revolutionary Historiographies

107

another.45 In a similar vein, Heidegger also stresses the need for an authentic historic interpretation to also tackle its own “hermeneutic situation”, whereas the entailing relationship between the present and the past is presented in the so-called Natorp Report – presumably Heidegger’s most explicit stance on history before Being and Time – with a special emphasis on the history of philosophy as follows: “To appropriate history in such concern means […] to radically understand what placed a specific past philosophical inquiry in it own situation and for it in its own fundamental concern; but to understand this is not simply to take note of it and ascertain it, but to repeat it in the perspective of one’s own situation and for it.”46 It is precisely in view of this fundamental point of intersection that one can now also envision the main dispute between the two positions in focusing on three key issues. (a) Both Benjamin and Heidegger polemically attack a primarily optical depiction of history, such as it is put forth mainly in historicism. Thus, in his essay on Eduard Fuchs, Benjamin criticizes the purely contemplative and serene consideration of history in historicism,47 whereas in his discussions of the correspondence between Dilthey and Count Yorck, Heidegger approvingly quotes the latter’s polemics against a purely “ocular” and “aesthetic” understanding of history, as hypostasized mainly by Ranke.48 In contrast to historicism, both Benjamin and Heidegger shift focus from the past per se to the relationship between the past and the present and they both consider historiography not merely in theoretical terms, but rather as a matter of practical relevance. Heidegger, for one, tries to emphasize this practical understanding of history by regarding historiography from the onset in the perspective of its “existential origin”.49 In his view, history as a science is thus founded in a prior existential relationship to history, which first uncovers it as a potential domain for scientific investigation and determines its scope. If, however, the “authentic” appropriation of history consists primarily, as Heidegger claims, in the repetition of a past existential possibility – which he on occasion also designates in more explicit terms by saying that “the Dasein chooses his hero”50  – an “authentic” historiography should ultimately also adopt this model of authentic historicity, by no longer settling with a merely “aesthetic” depiction of the past, but existentially appropriating that past, that is: apprehending it as a repeatable possibility. The task is not for the Dasein to document the deeds of their hero, but to repeat them anew. As a consequence, history as a discipline is no longer valued in respect to its scientific achievements, but rather in regard of the extent to which the existence of the historian, who relates to  “It is said that the dialectical method consists in doing justice each time to the concrete historical situation of its object. But that is not enough. For it is just as much a matter of doing justice to the concrete historical sintation of the interest taken in the object.” (GS V, p. 1026; En., p. 391). 46  GA 62, p. 349 f. 47  GS II, p. 467. 48  SuZ, p. 400. 49  SuZ, p. 392 f. 50  SuZ, p. 385. 45

108

History at the Crossroads: Heidegger and Surrealism

that past in taking it as their guiding model, is truly shaped by it. This perspective already clearly determines the treatment of the history of philosophy in the Natorp Report: “The influence of a past philosophical inquiry on its future can never reside in its mere results as such, but instead it is based solely on the originality of the questions one obtains and develops concretely, which alone can make it present anew any time as a model for raising new problems.”51 At the core of this existential account of history one implicitly finds attitudes, position-takings and actions of the individual Dasein, which may make sense in specific relation to philosophy, but which become quite problematic when extended to the “nation”, as Heidegger suggests in the later part of Being and Time, which would merely expand the scope of the same existential dynamics in the political sphere.52 In contrast to this, Benjamin’s considerations focus from the onset not so much on the life experiences of the individual, but rather on a variety of phenomena of the social world, which can be seen as historic expressions of the collective. In light of this fundamental difference  – which often comes to view in Benjamin’s attempts to set apart the intentions of his own Arcades-project from those motivating Proust’s work53 – Benjamin is obviously not interested, when ascribing a practical relevance to his historic inquiry, in a merely existential or national-existential manner, with its covert political agenda, but in an open political valorization of social history. Thus, the “constellation”, which is in his view established between the present time of the historian and the corresponding past of his inquiry is seen as a “revolutionary chance” for the present historic moment, such that simply seizing the moment when a particular segment of the past becomes legible already entails a political action.54 To be sure, this does not merely imply that our historic awareness of the past can lead to further political action, but rather that the theoretical apprehension of the past as such is in itself charged with political consequence. In recognizing this, Benjamin pleas for a reconfiguration of the historic method, the concepts of which are to be seen as effective weapons in the contemporary political struggle. As such, the past is no longer a settled issue, but it becomes an object of dispute for the present. This radical and explicit politization of history is defined in the Arcades project as follows: “To treat the past (better: what has been) in accordance with a method that is no longer historical but political. To transform political categories into theoretical categories, insofar as one dared to apply them only in the sense of

 GA 62, p. 348.  Such an existential reading of politics indeed marks Carl Schmitt’s famous essay from 1927, “The Concept of Politics”, that Heidegger appreciatively discussed at length in one of his seminars on Hegel from the WS 1934/35, see GA 86, pp. 177 f. 53  See for instance GS V, p. 497; En., p. 393: “[...] what Proust, as an individual, directly experienced in the phenomenon of remembrance, we have to experience indirectly (with regard to the nineteenth century) in studying ‘current;’ ‘fashion;’ ‘tendency’”. 54  See GS I, p. 1231: “The particular revolutionary opportunity of each historical moment is confirmed for the revolutionary thinker by the political situation. But it is no less confirmed for him by the power this moment has to open a very particular, heretofore closed chamber of the past. Entry into this chamber coincides exactly with political action.” 51 52

2  Reactionary and Revolutionary Historiographies

109

praxis, because only to the present – that is the task.”55 It is precisely this understanding of history that Benjamin also ascribes to the Surrealists,56 while Heidegger, who advocates authentic historicity may be seen to covertly take the opposite side in this struggle. (b) Heidegger and Benjamin’s critique of historicism also implies rejecting an understanding of history, which simply aims to objectively ascertain the historic past “how it truly was”. Thus, Benjamin writes in defense of his politization of history: “The Copernican revolution in historical perception is as follows. Formerly it was thought that a fixed point had been found in ‘what has been;’ and one saw the present engaged in tentatively concentrating the forces of knowledge on this ground. Now this relation is to be overturned, and what has been is to become the dialectical reversal – the flash of awakened consciousness. Politics attains primacy over history.”57 Heidegger puts forth a similar attitude (again: primarily, only with regard to the history of philosophy, but also making more general claims) by explicitly relating it to the necessary biasness of the historian: “What constitutes the actual field of inquiry for philosophical research is determined by the direction of sight in which alone the past can be situated. Not only is this interpretive addition not contrary to historic understanding, but it actually constitutes the grounding condition for bringing the past to speak.”58 In this regard, however, a first point of contention comes to view when considering the fact that, in Heidegger’s view, this process is primarily interpreted as a voluntary procedure of the historian,59 whereas Benjamin follows Proust in speaking of an involuntary flash of insight into the past.60 Their two contrasting positions can be sketched out more forcefully, when considering their respective interpretations of historic understanding. Thus, one can oppose a hermeneutic conception of history in Heidegger’s case to a materialistic conception of history in Benjamin. Indeed, in contrast to Heidegger, Benjamin doesn’t interpret historic understanding as a subjective act of the historian, who uncovers the past as his object, but instead he regards it as a specific moment of that past, which manifests itself. In other words,

 GS V, p. 1026.  “The trick by which this world of things is mastered – it is more proper to speak of a trick than a method –consists in the substitution of a political for a historical view of the past.” (GS II, p. 300; En., p. 182). 57  GS V, p. 1057. 58  GA 62, p. 347 f. 59  Thus, Heidegger writes for instance in the Natorp Report: “The past only reveals itself in accordance to the resoluteness and force of a specific present’s ability to crack it open”. GA 62, p. 347. 60  See GS I, p. 1243: “The image of the past, which flashes up in the now of its legibility, is according to its widest understanding an image of memory. It resembles the images of ones own past, which one accesses in a moment of grave danger. These images occur, as one well knows, involuntarily. History in its strictest sense is therefore an image stemming from involuntary recollection”. 55 56

110

History at the Crossroads: Heidegger and Surrealism

the object of understanding is no longer interpreted as a construct of the subject’s effort to understand it, as would correspond to an idealist conception, but instead understanding itself is conceived materialistically as a phase in the development of its object: the moment it reaches legibility.61 Similarly, Benjamin’s essay on Eduard Fuchs explicitly designates historic understanding as the “after-life” (Nachleben) of its object, by explicitly relating this to the project of a “reception history”. In his view, the latter can be interpreted in a twofold manner: Historical materialism comprehends historical understanding as the afterlife of that which has been understood and whose pulse can be traced in the present. This understanding has its place in Fuchs’ thinking, but not an undisputed one. In his thinking an old dogmatic and naive idea of reception exists together with the new and critical one. The first could be summarized as follows: what determines our reception of a work must have been its reception by its contemporaries. This is precisely analogous to Ranke’s “how it truly was” which “solely and uniquely” matters. Next to this, however, we immediately find the dialectical insight, which opens the widest horizons in the meaning of a history of reception.62

To be sure, Heidegger himself also touches upon the “history of reception” in Being and Time,63 but in his view historic transmission is generally regarded only as a mere hindrance, which should be overcome in favor of an immediate “appropriation” of the past.64 This hermeneutic interpretation of reception history is exemplarily put to work in his earlier lecture courses on Aristotle, where Heidegger explicitly shows how Aristotle’s philosophy left its imprint on the entire later history of philosophy, by being passed down only in a debauched and disfigured form, whereas its faulty historic reception and transmission also impregnates our present access to Aristotle’s thinking.65 As a consequence, an original philosophical interpretation of Aristotle can only truly establish its object by “dismantling” the trail of its historic distortions, that is: its entire later reception history. In contrast to this view, for Benjamin, the past only ever becomes truly intelligible historically by its correspondence to the present, whereas the present itself appears in light of its short-circuit with the past as an “image” of the latter, that is: as its manifestation: “Historical knowledge of the truth is possible only as

 See GS V, p. 494; En., p. 391: “It is said that the dialectical method consists in doing justice each time to the concrete historical situation of its object. But that is not enough. For it is just as much a matter of doing justice to the concrete historical situation of the interest taken in the object. And this situation is always so constituted that the interest is itself preformed in that object and, above all, feels tills object concretized in itself and upraised from its former being into the higher concretion of now-being”. 62  GS II, p. 468 f.; En., p. 29. 63  Cf. SuZ, p. 396 f.; En., p. 448: “As handing itself down, history is, in itself, at the same time and in each case always in an interpretedness which belongs to it, and which has a history of its own; so for the most part it is only through traditional history that historiology penetrates to what hasbeen-there itself.” 64  See for instance the following passage in the Natorp Report: “History is thus not denied because it were ‘false’, but because it still remains effective in the present without becoming an actually appropriated (and appropriable) present.” GA 62, p. 351. 65  See for instance GA 61, pp. 4–9. 61

2  Reactionary and Revolutionary Historiographies

111

overcoming the illusory appearance [...]. The illusion overcome here is that an earlier time is in the now. In truth: the now the inmost image of what has been.”66 Contrary to Heidegger, therefore, who only sees the past as something, which is covered up by its altered persistence in the present – hence the need to uncover it anew by means of a philosophical “destruction” of its reception history – Benjamin sees the present as a manifestation of the past, which is indicative of the historic process itself, whereas it is precisely this conception of an imaginary short-circuit between the present and the past that, according to the Dream Kitsch-fragment, also defines Surrealism.67 (c) Both for Benjamin and for Heidegger, an ideal comprehension of the historic past is essentially marked by repetition. In Benjamin, this comes to view especially with his understanding of citation: History is the object of a construction whose place is formed not in homogenous and empty time, but in that which is fulfilled by the here-and-now [Jetztzeit]. For Robespierre, Roman antiquity was a past charged with the here-and-now, which he exploded out of the continuum of history. The French revolution thought of itself as a latter-day Rome. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a past costume.68

Similarly, in Heidegger’s view, “authentic” historicity establishes a true existential relationship to history in appropriating the past as a mere “virtuality,” that is: as an existential possibility which can serve as a guiding model.69 Thus, Heidegger writes in Being and Time: “in taking as our primary theme the historiological object we are projecting the Dasein which has-been-there upon its ownmost possibility of existence”.70 Insofar as the historian regards the past primarily in light of the existential possibilities, which come to view within it, he is not simply interested in depicting the latter in detail, but instead he is rather keen on adapting them to the present and bringing them to fruition in his own existence as a historian. Moreover, despite superficial resemblances, the two conceptions can be perhaps most easily opposed on ground of their respective position towards empathy (Einfühlung) as a method for uncovering the historic past. For, while Benjamin radically opposes the empathic understanding of history, Heidegger’s theory shows important affinities to it. To be sure, the latter claim might raise suspicions given Heidegger’s well-known hostility towards the very concept of Einfühlung. Thus, Heidegger indeed sharply states in his lecture course of the summer semester 1925,

 GS V, p. 1034 f.; En., p. 864 f.  Thus, Benjamin writes with regard to the “dialectics of sentimentality,” which defines our relationship to the life-world of the preceding generation and which also becomes a determinant factor in Surrealism: “For the sentimentality of our present, so often distilled, is good for providing the most objective image of our feelings.” (GS II, p. 621; En., p. 237). 68  GS I, p. 701. With regard to the concept of citation in Benjamin, see also the article “Zitat” in Opitz & Wizisla 2000. 69  This idea obviously recalls certain formulations of the issue in Kierkegaard, see for instance Kierkegaard 2003, especially chapter II.3. 70  SuZ, p. 394; En., p. 446. 66 67

112

History at the Crossroads: Heidegger and Surrealism

History of the Concept of Time, that “the problem of empathy is just as absurd as the question of the reality of the external world”,71 while similar statements can be found in Being and Time as well. In contrast to this, however, it is important to note, on the one hand, that all the aforementioned passages are primarily intended as a criticism of the concept of empathy in its epistemological use as a solution to the question of intersubjectivity (by Husserl, Edith Stein and others) and not in its methodological function as an instrument for historic understanding (in Dilthey’s acceptation). The latter is, on the other hand, positively referenced by Heidegger in his early Freiburg lecture course of the winter semester 1921/22, Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion, especially in his treatment of the “enactive”, or “phenomenological” explication of history (vollzugsgeschichtlich) – a concept which he here opposes to the “object-historic” apprehension of history (objektgeschichtlich) and which is widely seen to constitute the first draft of his later theory of historicity. Thus, Heidegger speaks of “empathizing with a situation” as the grounding moment of “phenomenological explication”, whereas he is keen on keeping the concept apart from its usual epistemological interpretations by designating it as an “original historic phenomenon”.72 Of course, in his later writings, Heidegger will give up the concept of “empathy” in this understanding as well. However, it is not difficult to see that the entire notion of authentic historicity, which seizes and reiterates the “existential possibilities of past Dasein” as sketched out in Being and Time, evolves out of that initial reflection on “empathizing with a past situation”. In Benjamin’s writings, empathy is basically understood as the main procedure by which the historian transposes oneself imaginatively or emotionally into a past situation in order to regard it through the eyes of its immediate contemporary. As such, empathy is the main methodological device of historicism.73 Most frequently in his reflections, Benjamin contrasts it with another procedure, which he designates as presentification and which requires the historian to transpose the past into his present space and time, instead of transposing himself into the past situation as such.74 The same opposition between empathy and presentification is implicitly also put into play in a literary perspective in Benjamin’s essay on Julien Green. In this context, Benjamin opposes the literary technique of presentification to that of mere narration. While the latter primarily seeks, in representing a past event, to assume the vantage point of the contemporary eyewitness, the former on the contrary brings the past to bear into the present. Similarly, the opposition is also brought up in some of his notations for the Arcades-project with regard to the treatment of history in general. Thus, Benjamin writes abruptly: “The true method of making things present is to represent them in our space (not to represent ourselves in theirs).”75

 GA 20, p. 335; En., p. 243.  GA 60, p. 85; En., p. 59. 73  See GS I, p. 1237. 74  See GS II, p. 331. 75  GS V, p. 273; En., p. 206. 71 72

2  Reactionary and Revolutionary Historiographies

113

Several examples keep reoccurring in his writings as key illustrations for such an approach to the past: the apprehension of architectural edifices (which stem from a historic past while looming into the present world); the relationship a collector entertains to his objects (which entice a specific form of “practical recollection”); citations (which re-contextualize a past text); the modernizations of artworks (which aim precisely at engendering a clash between the past and the present) – and of course also Surrealist montage. All these examples obviously bring into play an interference between the present and a correlative past, whereas, in Benjamin’s view, it is precisely this interplay that serves the historian as a grounding model for his understanding of history in general. What the historian thus seeks in the past is primarily a short-circuit to the present, whereas this endeavor – which is often also designated as the “acknowledgement of the now in what has been” – obviously relates back to the question of the actuality of that past, which Benjamin briefly indicates in his notes on the concept of history as the defining feature of a materialistic approach to history. According to Benjamin, “the historical materialist only approaches the past, where it presents this structure, which is strictly identical with its plain actuality.”76 Following this perspective, one can easily also establish a further difference between Heidegger’s and Benjamin’s position to history, which Jürgen Habermas seems to ignore when ascribing them both equally the aforementioned “radical conception of history”: a conception which interprets the past in view of the presently expected future. In what concerns Heidegger, who indeed places the future at the core of his conception of historicity, Habermas’ observation might indeed be legitimate. Thus, Heidegger indeed writes in Being and Time with regard to historic understanding: “The historicality of unhistoriological Dasein does not take its departure from the ‘Present’ and from what is ‘actual’ only today, in order to grope its way back from there to something that is past; and neither does historiology.

 Benjamin 2010, p. 518. It is precisely this structure, primarily set on grasping the past in terms of its actuality, which also determines Benjamin’s central concept of the “dialectical image”. See, for example, GS V, p. 495; En., p. 391 f.: “In what way this now-being (which is something other than the now-being of ‘the present time’ [Jetztzeit], since it is a being punctuated and intermittent) already signifies, in itself, a higher concretion – this question, of course, can be entertained by the dialectical method only within the purview of a historical perception that at all points has overcome the ideology of progress. In regard to such a perception, one could speak of the increasing concentration (integration) of reality, such that everything past (in its time) can acquire a higher grade of actuality than it had in the moment of its existing. How it marks itself as higher actuality is determined by the image as which and in which it is comprehended.” It is precisely this concept that Benjamin explicitly opposes to Heidegger’s conception of historicity in a much debated passage from his Arcades project: “What distinguishes images from the ‘essences’ of phenomenology is their historical index. (Heidegger seeks in vain to rescue history for phenomenology abstractly through ‘historicity!’) [...] For the historical index of the images not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that they attain to legibility only at a particular time. And, indeed, this acceding ‘to legibility’ constitutes a specific critical point in the movement at their interior. Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each ‘now’ is the now of a particular recognizability. [...] It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.” (GS V, p. 578; En., p. 462 f.) 76

114

History at the Crossroads: Heidegger and Surrealism

Even historiological disclosure temporalizes itself in terms of the future.”77 This is instead most certainly not the case with Benjamin, who explicitly opposes such a view in one of his notations for the Arcades project, by contrasting the “acknowledgement of the now” in the past to a future-oriented understanding of history. Significantly, Benjamin again refers to Surrealism in this context: “Surrealist mien of things in the now; philistine mien in the future.”78

3 Philosophizing History Our reflections in this chapter were primarily intent at showing that Benjamin’s contrasting juxtaposition between Heidegger and the Surrealists is by no means just a witty variation to the standard interpretation of the phenomenological account of history one finds among the proponents of the Frankfurt School. In contrast to the latter, Benjamin’s remarks lay proof not just to an unexpectedly careful and nuanced reading of Heidegger, but it simultaneously allows to more concretely grasp both the common ground pertaining to Benjamin’s and Heidegger’s understanding of history, as well as their main points of dispute. Following Hannah Arendt, one could identify the former in that they both take note of a radical disruption in our relationship to tradition, which marks our contemporary understanding of history. This disruption is interpreted by Benjamin and the Surrealists in light of our familiarity with the historic thing-world, while Heidegger reads it within the framework of his criticism of “inauthentic” sociality and its corresponding form of historicity. In taking this shared insight as a point of departure, an in-depth analysis of the three most important points of divergence between Heidegger and Benjamin has shown that, while both seek ways to philosophically master history in considering that the past can only be seized appropriately when viewed in its ever shifting correlation to the present, their two respective positions illustrate the radical alternative between an existential-hermeneutical and a political-materialistic philosophy of history.

References Adorno, Th. W. 1997. Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp (cited as GS 1–20). Adorno, Th.W. 1981. Negative Dialectics. English Translation by E.B.  Ashton. New  York / London: Continuum. Adorno, Th.W. 1991. Looking Back on Surrealism. In Notes to Literature I. English Translation by S.W. Nicholsen. New York: Columbia University Press. Arendt, H. 2006. Walter Benjamin. In Arendt und Benjamin. Texte, Briefe, Dokumente. D. Schöttker and E. Wizisla eds. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. English translation by H. Zohn. 1968. Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940. In Men in Dark Times. New York: Harvest. pp. 153–206. 77 78

 SuZ, p. 395; En., p. 447.  GS V, p. 1034 f.; En., p. 865.

References

115

Benjamin, A. 1997. Time and Task: Benjamin and Heidegger Showing the Present. In Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism. London: Routledge, pp. 26–55. Benjamin, W. 1970. The Author as Producer. English translation by J.  Heckman. In New Left Review 62, pp. 83–96. Benjamin, W. 1973. On Some Motifs in Baudelaire. English Translation by H.  Zohn. In Illuminations. Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken. Benjamin, W. 1978. Surrealism: the Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia. English Translation by E. Jephcott. In New Left Review 108, pp. 47–56. Benjamin, W. 1991. Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp (cited as GS I-VII). Benjamin, W. 1993. Briefe. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp (cited as GB I-VI). Benjamin, W. 1999. Dream Kitsch. Gloss on Surrealism. English Translation by H.  Eiland. In Selected Writings, vol. 2: 1927–1934. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, pp. 3–5. Benjamin, W. 2002. The Arcades Project. English Translation by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, W. 2010. Über den Begriff der Geschichte. Werke und Nachlaß XIX. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp (cited as WuN XIX). Caygill, H. 1994. Benjamin, Heidegger and the Destruction of Tradition. In Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience. A. Benjamin and P. Osborne eds. London: Routledge, pp. 1–31. Ferencz-Flatz, Ch. 2013. Zum Phänomen der “Generation”. Intersubjektivität und Geschichte bei Heidegger. In Phänomenologische Forschungen 2013, pp. 95–112. Fynsk, C. 1992. The Claim of History. In Diacritics 22/3–4, pp. 115–126. Habermas, J. 1983. Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. English Translation by F.G.  Lawrence. 1990. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Habermas, J. 1987. Philosophisch-politische Profile. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Hamacher, W. 2005. “Now”: Walter Benjamin on Historical Time. In Walter Benjamin and History. A. Benjamin ed. London/New York: Continuum, pp. 38–68. Heidegger, M. 1967. Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer (cited as SuZ). English Translation by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. 1962. Being and Time, Oxford & Cambridge: Blackwell. Heidegger, M. 1994a. Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung (WS 1921/22), Frankfurt a. Main: Klostermann (cited as GA 61). Heidegger, M. 1994b. Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs (SS 1925), Frankfurt a. Main: Klostermann (cited as GA 20). Heidegger, M. 2005. Phänomenologische Interpretationen ausgewählter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles zu Ontologie und Logik (SS 1922). Frankfurt a. Main: Klostermann (cited as GA 62). Heidegger, M. 2011. Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens: Einleitung in die Phänomenologie der Religion (WS 1920/21), Frankfurt a. Main: Klostermann (cited as GA 60). English Translation by M.  Fritsch & J.A.  Gosetti Ferencei. 2010. The Phenomenology of Religious Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. 2011. Seminare: Hegel  – Schelling, Frankfurt a. Main: Klostermann (cited as GA 86). Kierkegaard, S. 2003. Abschließende unwissenschaftliche Nachschrift zu den Philosophischen Brocken. Simmerath: Gütersloh. Knoche, S. 2000. Benjamin  – Heidegger: über Gewalt. Die Politisierung der Kunst. Wien: Turia & Kant. Opitz, M. and Wizisla, E. 2000. Benjamins Begriffe. Frankturt a. Main: Suhrkamp Schöttker, D. and Wizisla, E. 2006. Hannah Arendt und Walter Benjamin. Konstellationen, Debatten, Vermittlungen. In Arendt und Benjamin. Texte, Briefe, Dokumente. D. Schöttker and E. Wizisla eds. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp.

Statistic Intersubjectivity. A Phenomenology of Television Audiences

In the following I will first sketch out a phenomenological interpretation of Walter Benjamin’s reflections on film-viewership, which he considers to be symptomatic for contemporary perception in general, by focusing especially on the implicit theory of intersubjectivity that underpins them. On these grounds I will try to provide an account of the differences in collective experience between film and television viewing. Since I am a philosopher working mostly within the confines of Husserl’s phenomenology my aim in this is primarily a philosophical one: I want to use phenomenology to better grasp Benjamin and Benjamin to better grasp television spectatorship, finally to come to some relevant consequences for a phenomenological theory of intersubjectivity. First I will briefly address two possible objections to such an endeavour. One might ask: What do Benjamin’s claims regarding film and perception have to do with phenomenology? Of course Benjamin was no phenomenologist, but his close relation to phenomenology was often addressed in literature. Thus Peter Fenves argued that Benjamin’s entire later philosophy is an elaborate response to certain problems in Husserl’s phenomenology.1 Without going so far there are several aspects, which make a phenomenological reading of certain motifs in the Artwork essay highly plausible. It is doubtless that phenomenology played an important part for the young Benjamin. In a curriculum vitae written at the end of the 1920s Benjamin places his entire philosophical formation under the sign of three thinkers  – Plato, Kant, and Husserl2  – whereas the years he spent as a student of the phenomenologist Moritz Geiger in Munich left a lasting impression on him.3 This influence can be traced throughout the terminology of Benjamin’s early essays, This chapter was first published as “Statistic intersubjectivity: A phenomenology of television audiences”. In: NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies 6/1 (2017), pp. 15–33.  See especially Fenves 2011 and Steiner 2008.  GS VI, p. 218. 3  GS VI, p. 225. 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Ferencz-Flatz, Critical Theory and Phenomenology, Contributions to Phenomenology 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27615-6_8

117

118

Statistic Intersubjectivity. A Phenomenology of Television Audiences

including explicit phenomenological analyses of shame or visual perception, discussions of technical matters like the relation between eidetic intuition and concept, or comments on methodological papers by lesser known phenomenologists like Jean Hering or Paul Linke. This undeniable early preoccupation with phenomenology was often traced up to the introduction of Benjamin’s first major work, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, which develops a theory of the relationship between the idea of Tragic Drama and the concrete works of the Baroque period that is remarkably reminiscent of Geiger’s conception of phenomenological aesthetics; the task of the latter was that of outlining the idea of a specific art form (Geiger’s example: tragedy) in relation to its concrete historical instantiations.4 Instead, if one considers the conception of history underlying Benjamin’s later thinking which develops out of these early reflections in explicit contrast to the sharp distinction in phenomenology between the invariant idea and its empirical instantiations,5 and if one takes into account Benjamin’s specific treatment of perception, which aims precisely for its historic variables in contrast to a phenomenology of perception aiming for its invariable structure,6 then it is certainly not absurd to read Benjamin’s thesis interpreting film as presently “the most important object of [a] theory of perception”,7 at least in an implicit tension to phenomenology. Benjamin’s aforementioned thesis has already been at the centre of a long-lasting debate over the past few decades: the so-called “history of vision” debate. The basic assumption, which triggered it was that the invention of modern mass media and particularly cinema engendered radical modifications of human vision.8 Since the proponents of this assumption referred heavily to the authority of early cultural philosophers like Benjamin and Simmel, the former’s theory of the historic mutability of perception has become a central piece in this debate. Instead, while this perspective has been highly influential in film studies since the late 1980s, it is now challenged ever more often by scholars that retort to cognitive science and evolutionary psychology claiming that perception is biologically determined and therefore culturally immutable. In response, my claim is that this entire debate is reductive of Benjamin’s position, and there are at least three reasons to support this. When considering Benjamin in relation to the history of vision debate it is important to note that this debate had a relevant precursor in another debate carried out shortly before 1900, and which Benjamin was aware of.9 This debate was first triggered by W.E. Gladstone, who noted that Homer’s writings lacked a term to designate the colour blue; thus, he claimed, colour perception itself was perhaps historically conditioned. The idea was rapidly picked up by both philologists and evolutionist

 Geiger 1925.  GS V, p. 577. 6  GS III, p. 523. 7  WuN 16, p. 196. 8  For a detailed overview see Nanay 2015 and Ligensa 2014. 9  Cf. Saunders 2007. Benjamin makes several critical references to authors involved in this debate. 4 5

1  Perception and Statistics

119

psychologists who began writing extensively about differences in the colour sense of various primitive peoples. Among the participants in this debate we also find Lazarus Geiger, a relative of Moritz Geiger, whom Benjamin quoted on several occasions; also one of Husserl’s closer fellows in the Brentano school: Anton Marty, who brought from the perspective of descriptive psychology one of the most striking arguments against the “historicity of colour vision”. Benjamin’s own rather reserved stance toward this debate – which shows in both his critical references to some of the supporters of the aforementioned thesis and in his appreciation for Marty’s book, Die Frage nach der geschichtlichen Entwicklung des Farbensinns, containing his powerful refutation of the evolutionary thesis10 – should be instructive for his precise position in the Artwork essay as well. What both debates essentially share is that they similarly tend to reduce perception to its sheer physiological aspect by asking whether the human sense organs are as such prone to historical mutation. On the contrary, the main point of reading Benjamin in view of his phenomenological influences is to counter such a simplified account of perception. Indeed, in Benjamin’s best known passage on this issue in the Artwork essay11 the question does not concern just the mere sensory impression, as it does for Simmel, who actually speaks of differences in organ sensitivity, but rather, in a phrasing that anticipates Merleau-Ponty’s considerations, of its intersubjective “organisation”. The history of vision debate obviously reduces Benjamin’s theory to just one of its aspects and thus misses out on the broader scope of his conception. One can distinguish two main foci of interest in Benjamin’s attempts to historicise perception. One of them is indeed the question of technology, bringing about intense shocks, discontinuities, and an over-abundance of stimuli that determine perception to become predominantly tactile and reflex-based instead of optical and contemplative. However, this is merely the first aspect of Benjamin’s account, as his thesis also refers to another central aspect: the historic transformations of perception engendered by “the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life”,12 that is: a certain change in social experience. While the history of vision debate only touches upon the former aspect, my considerations will focus especially on the latter.

1 Perception and Statistics The main passage in the Artwork essay that stresses how the question of the “masses” historically impacts on perception reads: [t]o pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose “sense for the similarity between things” has increased to such a degree that it can now extract it

 Cf. Fenves 2011, p. 60.  WuN 16, p. 101: “The way in which human perception is organized – the medium in which it takes shape – is conditioned not only by nature, but also by history.’ 12  WuN 16, p. 102. 10 11

120

Statistic Intersubjectivity. A Phenomenology of Television Audiences

by means of reproduction even from objects which are unique. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics. The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.13

Obviously this dense passage concerns one of Benjamin’s most controversial concepts: aura. While I will avoid going into lengthy discussions with regard to the precise meaning of this term,14 I will just focus on Benjamin’s claim that, as a consequence of its contemporary decay, our perception no longer grasps its objects as unique and individual entities. For sure, this disconcerting claim is initially proposed by Benjamin only with regard to artworks insofar as their massive technical reproduction leads to a devaluation of the authentic original work of art. Nevertheless, he explicitly states that “[t]his process is symptomatic; its significance extends far beyond the realm of art”.15 Precisely, it applies to the entire sphere of human perception. Put in such general terms, Benjamin’s thesis of course stands in a striking contrast to a long lasting philosophical tradition opposing perception (as knowledge of the individual) to concept or judgement (as knowledge of the general). A subtler version of this conception can be found in Husserl’s phenomenology as well. Thus, Husserl does not contrast perception only with concepts or judgements, but also with phantasy, which he claims is also unable to provide with actual individual objects. This is due to the fact that the sensory qualities we grasp in phantasies are not proper individual determinations at all but just fluctuating “forms of variability”, as he terms them.16 Thus, if perception alone can deliver objects with proper individual determinations, this is because it alone grasps these objects in their full spatial and temporal determination – that is, in their actual hic et nunc. While Benjamin was probably unaware of these reflections in Husserl, in his view the individual uniqueness of perceptual objects (which is implied when speaking of their “aura”17) similarly depends on their concrete spatial and temporal determination – their hic et nunc. Thus, in Benjamin’s view, the technical reproduction of objects by means of photography and their industrial production have led to a situation wherein objects are no longer actually perceived individually but primarily grasped en masse. This claim could refer to the fact that perception is today predominantly directed toward collective objects or phenomena like amassments of cars, conglomerations of buildings, or crowds of people, while Benjamin’s thesis would concordantly concern the specificities of a perception adapted to grasping such realities. Also, it could be understood in the sense that our perceptual objects, which are at core industrially produced mass commodities, are today intrinsically apprehended as uniform representatives of bulks of similar objects, while in this

 WuN 16, p. 103 f.; En., p. 223 (translation partially modified, CFF).  Cf. for this Bratu Hansen 2012, pp. 104–131. 15  WuN 16, p. 213; En., p. 221. 16  Hua VI, p. 550; En., p. 663. 17  Cf. WuN 16, p. 181. 13 14

1  Perception and Statistics

121

case contemporary perception would be set foremost on grasping stereotyped and standardised objects. In fact, these two acceptations are not at all alternative interpretations but rather complementary aspects of Benjamin’s thesis. This becomes clear when considering two crucial aspects in his considerations: the impact of photographic reproduction on perception and Benjamin’s reference to statistics. In a well-known footnote of his Artwork essay, Benjamin claims that photography is particularly well-suited for capturing masses: “[m]ass movements are usually discerned more clearly by a camera than by the naked eye.”18 Instead photography also has a more far-reaching role in adapting perception to mass society. This is hinted at when stating that our “sense for the similarities between things” has today increased to such a degree that we can “by means of reproduction” extract it “even from unique objects”.19 What this elliptic phrase means is that photographic reproductions fundamentally alter our experience of their original objects as well insofar as – with the massive proliferation of their reproductions – the objects themselves come to lose their uniqueness, being de-singularised or serialised in turn. Following Benjamin this can easily be shown in the case of artworks where the originals are themselves diminished by the multiplication of their reproductions on posters, albums, t-shirts, bags or mugs, such that they cease impressing as individual, unique objects here and now, becoming themselves just further instantiations of a reproducible cliché. However, this process is not restricted to the sphere of art alone as is clearly shown by the similar case of touristic attractions. Thus, we could say photography in Benjamin’s view effectively modifies our perceivable world as such by simultaneously multiplying and standardising its objects. The same two complementary aspects of multiplicity and standardisation also come to the fore in Benjamin’s brief reflection on statistics: “[t]hus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing significance of statistics.”20 What exactly does statistics refer to here? In Benjamin’s writings one can often find positive references to statistical research. In an article from the late 1920s he considers contemporary Russian literature to be more significant for statistical inquiry than for aesthetics,21 while in another essay he states the importance of a statistic research concerning the flow of capitals in the editorial market.22 A theoretically more relevant reflection can be found in a small article from 1927: [a]s is well known, there is an entire category of facts, that only receive meaning and relief if they are not considered in isolation. These are precisely the facts that statistics has to deal with. The fact that Mr. X took his life precisely in March can be quite irrelevant in the perspective of his individual fate, instead it becomes immensely interesting, when one finds out that the yearly graphics of suicide have their maximum value in that specific month.23  WuN 16, p. 248, fn.; En., p. 251.  WuN 16, p. 103. En., p. 223. 20  WuN 16, p. 104; En., p. 223. 21  GS II, p. 747. 22  GS II, p. 770. 23  GS II, p. 754. 18 19

122

Statistic Intersubjectivity. A Phenomenology of Television Audiences

For sure, this understanding of statistic as a tool meant for grasping so-called mass-­ phenomena was in line with the use of the term in early sociological works by authors such as Wilhelm Lexis, whom Benjamin explicitly refers to on another occasion.24 Just like in Benjamin’s aforementioned considerations, Lexis’ most influential work, Zur Theorie der Massenerscheinungen in der menschlichen Gesellschaft (1877), sees it as the task of statistics “to determine the actions and passions of the individuals in their manifold groupings, which can’t be grasped in their individual elements, but produce specific mass-phenomena that can be inquired in a scientific manner”.25 Thus the decisive feature of statistics resides in that, in contrast to history, “it doesn’t consider events under their individual aspect, but only registers them as part of a mass, as unities added up in a sum total”26 – in brief, as representative samples. Obviously Benjamin’s aforementioned example also echoes Durkheim’s groundbreaking work Le suicide (1897), a study that famously made the attempt to interpret suicides as a “social fact”  – Durkheim’s term for “mass phenomena”  – by statistically analysing suicide rates. Applied to Benjamin’s reflection in the Artwork essay this would basically mean that the specific theoretical perspective on mass-­ phenomena that is developed in statistic inquiry begins to inform contemporary perception as well, insofar as the latter tends to no longer refer exclusively, as was self-understood traditionally, to individual objects determined according to their unique hic et nunc but rather to mass-phenomena – that is, to standardised objects which perception only registers as “unities of a sum total” even if they were given just as singular instances.27

2 Collective Perception Significantly, the passage on statistics from the Artwork essay concludes by speaking of both “the alignment of reality with the masses” and that of “the masses with reality”28  – and this is indeed the main point here. The process described in Benjamin’s essay does not concern only the object of perception and how it is perceived – that is, its essential multiplication and standardisation – but also a parallel transformation on its subjective side, while most accounts of the passage only note the former.29 Thus, if the massive reproduction of objects affects the very nature of these objects, such that they are no longer perceived in their individual occurrence

 GS V, p. 720.  Lexis 1877, p. 1. 26  Lexis 1877, p. 1. 27  A similar application of statistic epistemology to the field of sensory perception underpins Walter Ruttman’s theory of cross-section montage. Cf. Cowan 2013, pp. 55–98. 28  WuN 16, p. 104; En., p. 223. 29  Cf. Hocquenhem & Schérer 1984; Elo 2005; Bratu Hansen 2008. 24 25

2  Collective Perception

123

hic et nunc but just as samples of mass-phenomena in view of their sheer commonality, a corresponding evolution also takes place on the subjective side of perception. This means to say that perception is today no longer experienced primarily as an act of the individual, i.e. as a unique and exclusive encounter between an individual subject and an individual object in a determined hic et nunc, but rather as a mere segment within a process of collective perception – in other words, as a standardised mass-phenomenon. To be sure, Benjamin’s reflections on perception in his Artwork essay often strike the reader with their constant reference to “collective perception” instead of just perception tout court.30 In his view the standard example for this is the perception of architectural edifices. Insofar as buildings essentially tower into the public sphere due to their size and placement they are never perceived exclusively by one individual alone, but they are always simultaneously visible for an entire community, involving an intersubjective stream of perceptions to which every individual act only partakes. Following such observations Benjamin notes that this particular mode of collective perception, which is traditionally associated with the reception of architecture, begins at present to also affect the reception of other art forms that were traditionally apperceived by the individual alone. This happened in his view in the case of painting with the incessant over-crowding of museums, and it was also a fundamental characteristic of cinema or other fleeting art forms from around the turn of the century. However, while Benjamin considers these transformations to also be symptomatic for perception in general his philosophical claim can again be understood in a twofold manner: in the narrower sense that perception is today no longer predominantly performed in solitude, but most often in the simultaneous presence of others, within the collective; and in the broader sense that perception has today acquired a certain collective scope which defines it even when there is in fact no one else simultaneously present. This latter aspect would be visible precisely in the aforementioned case of mass-articles (which Benjamin conceives as intrinsically de-singularised and stereotyped objects) since our experience of such objects is, as we might say, itself de-singularised such that the subject intrinsically apprehends his own acts of experience as not being singular and unique at all but just as adding up to a mass of similar experiences – that is, to statistics. For sure this latter acceptation of Benjamin’s theory has remarkable correspondences with some of the phenomenological accounts of the relation between perception and intersubjectivity from around the same period. Traces of such a perspective can already be found in Husserl’s own considerations. For although perception is generally viewed by him as an act of consciousness performed by the individual subject, his later writings consider intersubjectivity to also permeate our acts of perception through and through, such that Husserl can even explicitly write in the late 1920s: “I see, I hear, I experience not only with my own senses, but also with that of the others.”31 Such statements become central in post-Husserlian

30 31

 Cf. WuN 16, p. 57.  Hua XIV, p. 197.

124

Statistic Intersubjectivity. A Phenomenology of Television Audiences

phenomenology, most notably first in Scheler and Heidegger. Thus as early as 1923, Scheler assumes a primary indifference between the lived experiences of the I and those of the others, speaking of a primordial “immersion” of the individual in the sphere of an indistinct communal life from which the individual subject only subsequently emerges.32 Similar reflections can be found in Heidegger’s analysis of “being with one another”, as he terms intersubjective experience in Being and Time (1927), while this particular aspect comes to fore most blatantly in his discussion of the “subservience” of the individual subject (termed as Dasein) to the others: Dasein stands in subservience to the others. It itself is not; the others have taken its being away from it. The everyday possibilities of being of Da-sein are at the disposal of the whims of the others. These others are not definite others. On the contrary, any other can represent them. What is decisive is only the inconspicuous domination by others that Da-sein as being-with has already taken over unawares. One belongs to the others oneself, and entrenches their power. “The others,” whom one designates as such in order to cover over one's own essential belonging to them, are those who are there initially and for the most part in everyday being-with-one-another.33

Following such reflections Heidegger significantly relates these ontological descriptions to precisely the sort of phenomena of the contemporary public sphere of mass society that Benjamin also addresses: [i]n utilizing public transportation, in the use of information services such as the newspaper, every other is like the next. This being-with-one-another dissolves one’s own Da-sein completely into the kind of being of “the others” in such a way that the others, as distinguishable and explicit, disappear more and more.34

In this context Heidegger even admits to a certain historical variability of his account of intersubjectivity by explicitly saying that “the extent to which [the] dominance [of the others] becomes penetrating and explicit may change historically”.35 These parallels show that Benjamin’s theory of collective perception has obvious affinities with the phenomenological reflections on intersubjectivity developed around the same time insofar as they both tend to counter a traditional representation of perception – which self-evidently regards it as an encounter between a singular, individual subject and a singular, individual object in a determined here and now – by showing that such an account no longer accurately describes a historical situation in which the percipient is first and foremost a co-percipient of objects that are themselves correspondingly only co-present, while the act of perception is itself determined first and foremost by its affiliation to an anonymous social flux of similar perceptions by overarching mass-phenomena of intersubjectivity. What is particular to Benjamin’s account and is only marginally touched upon by the aforementioned phenomenologists is the fact that Benjamin explicitly and systematically considers the media as one of the most remarkable illustrations of precisely

 Scheler 1974, pp. 29–47.  SuZ, p. 126; En., p. 118 f. 34  SuZ, p. 126; En., p. 119. 35  SuZ, p. 129; En., p. 121. 32 33

3 Television

125

this theory of collective experience, as in his well-known claim that “individual reactions are predetermined by the mass audience response they are about to produce, and this is nowhere more pronounced than in the film”.36 Of course this passage only refers to film and it only concerns the narrower form of collective experience understood as an experience in the simultaneous presence of others. However, it is important to note that while Benjamin indeed only considers film explicitly, in the 1940s his reflections were already applied to radio spectatorship as well by Adorno in his little known essay “Radio Physiognomics”, which gives a much more favourable reading of Benjamin’s theses than both his earlier letters to Benjamin or Horkheimer and his later essays. Following Benjamin’s considerations on how technical reproduction alters the “here and now” of the work of art, Adorno briefly tackles the specific experience of radio spectatorship under the term of “radio ubiquity”,37 noting the differences between the experience of music on the radio and the experience in a live concert. Instead, while Adorno himself only considers the spatial aspect of this difference, one could just as well envision the equally striking difference in “collective awareness” between the two, while such an endeavour would for sure lead to a broader acceptation of what this ubiquity implies. The latter is what I intend to explore with regard to television-spectatorship by drawing from Benjamin’s thoughts on the confluence between statistics and perception.

3 Television To this extent I will first depart from what has been for long one of the most frequent common-places when comparing television to cinema: the contrast between the solitary, isolated viewing experience of the television-spectator and the collective reception in the cinema hall. This point is already touched upon in the earliest theoretical discussions of television in the 1950s by authors like André Bazin or Günther Anders. Indeed, both Bazin and Anders start out from the discrepancy between television’s characteristic as a mass medium and the fact that it is perceived solely by individual spectators isolated from one another. Thus, Anders writes, opposing television to cinema: [t]he situation that is taken for granted in the motion picture theatre – the consumption of the mass product by a mass of people – was thus done away with. Needless to say, this did not mean a slowing-up of mass production […]. [But] that collective consumption became superfluous through the mass production of receiving sets. The Smiths consumed the mass products en famille or even singly […]. The mass-produced hermit came into being as a new human type […].38

 WuN 16, p. 81; En., p. 234.  Adorno 2006, p. 88 f. 38  Anders 1956, p. 15. 36 37

126

Statistic Intersubjectivity. A Phenomenology of Television Audiences

In a similar vein, Bazin characterises the experience of television by referring to two aspects: the psychology of TV, which he relates to the fundamental simultaneity between the subjective act of viewing and the objective program viewed in the paradigmatic situation of live transmissions39; and the sociology of television, which he relates to the fact that television is normally received by a viewer isolated from the bulk of other viewers in the intimate environment of his family at home.40 Just like Anders, Bazin considers these two aspects as fundamental differences in relation to cinema, which actually appears to him in comparison as a much more collective experience than he himself would have admitted in his earlier writings.41 In the following, by drawing from both Benjamin and Husserl, I will try to counter this common-place opposition between cinema and television-spectatorship through an alternate description of the specific intersubjective relation which pertains to the experience of television as well, despite its being quite different from the simultaneous collective viewing experience in the cinema hall. To this extent, I will focus on five short points. (a) The precise form of intersubjectivity involved in the experience of television can be deduced from the onset by analysing the specific act of communication involved in its traditionally most specific type of program: the live transmission. Picking up a distinction made by Husserl in the 1930s between spoken language understood as a direct form of communication and written language understood as a mere virtual form of communication that lacks direct address, the case of television would overlap with neither of the two.42 To be more precise, in the case of television we are dealing with an act of communication that takes place between a speaker that addresses his entire viewership in public broadcast without being able to perceive it in any way, and a viewer who perceives the speaker secluded in his private environment without being able to address him in turn. Instead what is truly remarkable here is not just the fact that this form of communication is strikingly unilateral on both sides of emission and reception, but that it brings about therewith a form of collective awareness established in absence of those with whom it is shared. It is in brief a form of collective awareness – “we, the viewers”43 – that is constituted on the side of the receptor solely

 For sure, the fact that liveness might have been, with brief exceptions, more a rhetorical feature than an actual technical characteristic of the medium does not make it less effective in determining its reception. 40  Bazin 2014, p. 113. 41  Cf. also Hanich 2018. 42  Hua VI, p. 371; En., p. 356. 43  One might claim that this is not necessarily new in phenomenology, as authors like Reinach, for instance, in his discussion of civil law (1913), have also considered the idea of an abstract public, which understand itself as composed by subjects defined in similar terms, but the main point of difference here is that television in fact presupposes simultaneous attendance in the same time, which gives a collective dimension to our experiential act of viewing. 39

3 Television

127

in rebound from the plural address and public broadcast on the side of the emitter.44 (b) What we are dealing with here is for sure something like a “co-presentation” in the precise sense given to this term in Husserl’s phenomenology. Husserl himself most often uses this term to note that, when perceiving an object, say a table, we only see it from one side while our perception also includes some vague anticipation of its other side. In other words: while its front side is actually present to us in perception its back side is also somehow presumed as copresent with it, such that our concrete perception is always made up of both moments of presentation and co-presentation. In variation to such examples, in the case of television we are not dealing with an act of perception that simply anticipates a hidden aspect of its given object on grounds of its aspect in sight, but instead we are given an apparent object, while we presume a plurality of co-present subjects or receptors to that object. Of course this presumption is to a certain degree itself more common than it might appear since basically all objects of our everyday experience have so to say an index of social exposure, which refers them to their place in the experience of others. One could for instance consider fame or notoriety as eminent examples of this phenomenon, and Benjamin himself explicitly draws on such aspects on several occasions. However, what is truly novel and remarkable in the case of television is the fact that here this index no longer constitutes a latent sediment of the object’s intersubjective history, but instead becomes the sign of a full-fledged present social situation wherein my gaze is aimed at the same content simultaneously with countless other gazes. (c) Obviously this presumption is, to follow Husserl’s terminology a bit further, only an “empty intention”. In other words: it is an intention whose reference lacks any concrete intuitive determination insofar as the co-present other spectators are not given to us in any way when watching television. Of course we could easily envision these spectators according to Husserl’s account by a simple act of imagination, as we can, for sure, at will imagine other people simultaneously sitting in their homes watching the same program. However, from a phenomenological perspective such a phantasy illustration remains but the poorest possible concretisation of said presumption not only when compared to the direct experience of situations when despite their mutual isolation television viewers do arrive at manifesting themselves expressively in a manner that makes them perceivable for other viewers  – for instance at football games, when one can hear supporters cheering from across the street – but especially in contrast to experiences that bring to the foreground precisely this implicit form of collective consciousness in absence of the collective. A striking example of this latter can be found already in Bazin’s reflections on television when ­discussing the case of a speaker that commits a slip-up in a live show on cam To be sure, this claim goes against a well-established belief according to which television essentially addresses its viewer as an individual and not as a multitude. This perspective was recently defended from a Heideggerian perspective by Paddy Scannell, see Scannell 2000, p. 5. 44

128

Statistic Intersubjectivity. A Phenomenology of Television Audiences

era.45 According to Bazin, this is a situation, which an actor could easily surpass in the theatre on grounds of the mutual complicity he attains with his audience, but which in the case of live television becomes unbearable, as the actor’s sensation of performing virtually in front of millions excludes any direct contact with them. Of course, Bazin himself conceives his example only in the perspective of the actor who implicitly feels the millions of gazes aimed at him in the moment of his slip-up, but one could regard it just as well in the perspective of the viewer who is for sure, just like Bazin himself, embarrassed for the actor with the explicit awareness of watching him alongside millions of others. It is this very same social tinge of our gaze that also becomes patent each time we watch a close acquaintance appear on television. For if we are normally used to experience television stars and celebrities in this mode of televisual collective awareness, such that we do not even notice it any longer, this mode of consciousness becomes explicitly striking in relation to people that we are truly accustomed to apperceive only in private. (d) It is, of course, true that we do not have any immediate knowledge of the amplitude and structure of this collective. However, we can nowadays hardly imagine how television or radio must have really felt like before the introduction of audience measurement techniques when the only possible way of estimating the reception of a show was indeed just word of mouth or fan mail, while correspondingly the spectator had no other way of knowing his co-spectators than subsequent casual conversations or eventually direct phone calls. In comparison, it is certain that statistic audience measurements, which were explored already in the 1940s, have changed this situation to the core,46 not only by offering broadcasters a means to measure the success of their productions and a criterion for shaping and commercially exploiting their programs, but also  – once this aspect has penetrated public consciousness  – by giving the viewer himself a more determined impression of the range and nature of the audience to which he partakes as viewer. To this extent, the viewer of course does not have to study the results of those statistic measurements as they permeate his naïve experience as well, for instance by a more or less determined awareness of the popularity of different shows, channels, time slots, and the like.47 Thus, statistics are nowadays not just a piece of abstract information, but a determinant factor of concrete viewer experience as well. Note that I have herewith returned to Benjamin’s conception of what I would term “statistic awareness”, which comes to bear here not just on perception as such, but on the field of intersubjective experiences and relations in general. To this extent, it is of course certain that developments in new media nowadays again seem to completely shift the way in which our collective awareness in relation to the media is shaped – on the one hand, by adding live view-counts to internet broadcasts,

 Bazin 2014, p. 83 f.  Cf. Beville 1988 and Ang 1991, and for a more critical perspective Meehan 1991. 47  Cf. Thiele 2006. 45 46

4 Conclusion

129

which allow the viewer to have a precise impression of the extent of his coviewers in real time, and on the other hand, by allowing him via social media applications to engage in concrete communication with those anonymous co-viewers. (e) In his introduction to his collective volume on Audiences, Ian Christie distinguishes three main concepts of audience in the history of cinema. First, he discusses the “imagined audience […] often credited with preferences and responses, which are mere hypotheses or projections of the author’s assumptions and prejudices”.48 Second, Christie speaks of the “economic or statistical audience, recorded in terms of admissions or box-office receipts, which has become the dominant concept of audience for the film industry”.49 Third, he refers to the “[concrete] individual spectator in terms of psychology, anthropology or sociology”.50 Now, if one were to replace the “individual spectator,” in this last phrase with a “collective spectator,” one could easily rephrase this latter part of Christie’s classification by similarly distinguishing between the collective audience as assembled concretely in a specific cinema hall at a certain projection – which is precisely what Benjamin had in mind when speaking of “simultaneous collective spectatorship” – and the statistical sum total of viewers for that film. This distinction would of course be trivial in regard to cinema where the two types of audience are obviously separated by the sheer presence of the spectators at the place and time of a single projection. However, in the case of television its delineation becomes much more problematic since here, one might say, the most abstract notion of audience in Christie’s classification – the statistical audience – itself becomes a concrete new form of lived collective awareness.

4 Conclusion My reflections started from a brief remark in Walter Benjamin’s Artwork essay, according to which the contemporary transformations of perception are analogous to the rise of statistics in theoretical thinking. By interpreting this remark, I tried to show that it involves both a fundamental mutation of our experience and of our social relationships, the consideration of which proves helpful for understanding the nature of television audiences. In conclusion, I would like to mention two further significant implications of this perspective. It is obvious that the phenomenon pointed out – the permeation of our concrete experience by elements of statistical thinking – is far broader than suggested above. It suffices to think of the internet today, which is itself a gigantic complex of

 Christie 2012, p. 11.  Christie 2012, p. 11. 50  Christie 2012, p. 11. 48 49

130

Statistic Intersubjectivity. A Phenomenology of Television Audiences

“mass-phenomena” in which we permanently orient ourselves with the implicit aid of statistical instruments like hashtags, buzzfeeds, or aggregators, while our aforementioned reflections may prove useful for tackling such issues as well.51 At the same time, there is also a significant methodological implication attached to this. For if Husserl himself already saw statistical analysis condescendingly in opposition to a phenomenology of the social, considering that the former can only perform mediated deductions with regard to factual regularities,52 whereas the latter grounds on a direct experience of social phenomena, it is clear that the emergence of hybrid forms of statistic sociality also demand a thorough rethinking of the relationship between phenomenology and quantitative research methods like statistics.

References Adorno, Th.W. 2006. Radio Physiognomics. In Current of music. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 42-132. Anders, G. 1956. The World as a Phantom and as Matrix. In Dissent. Vol. 3. No. 1, pp. 14-24. Ang, I. 1991. Desperately seeking the audience. London-New York: Routledge. Bazin, A. 2014. André Bazin’s new media. D. Andrew ed.. Oakland: University of California Press. Benjamin, W. 2012. Werke und Nachlaß. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 16: Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp, 2012 (quoted as WuN 16). English translation by H. Zohn. 1969. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In Illuminations, New York: Schocken. Benjamin, W. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1–7. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp, 1991 (cited as GS I-VII). Beville, H.M. 1988. Audience ratings: Radio, television, and cable. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum. Bratu Hansen, M. 2008. Benjamin’s Aura. In Critical Inquiry. Vol. 34. No. 2, pp. 336–375. Bratu Hansen, M. 2012. Cinema and experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley: University of California Press. Christie, I. 2012. Introduction: In Search of Audiences. In Audiences: Defining and researching screen entertainment reception. I. Christie ed. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 11–23. Cowan, M. 2013. Walter Ruttman and the cinema of multiplicity: Avant-garde film – advertising – modernity. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Elo, M. 2005. Die Wiederkehr der Aura. In Walter Benjamins Medientheorie. Ch. Schulte ed. Konstanz: UVK, pp. 130–131. Fenves, P. 2011. Messianic reduction: Walter Benjamin and the shape of time. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Geiger, M. 1925. Phänomenologische Ästhetik. In Zeitschrift für allgemeine Ästhetik und Kulturwissenschaft. Vol. XIX. No. 1–4, pp. 29–41. Hanich, J. 2018. Kino, Theater, Fernsehen: André Bazins Publikumstheorie. In Erfahrungsraum Kino. Th. Weber and F. Mundhenke eds. Berlin: Avinus, pp. 72–96. Heidegger, M. 1967. Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer (cited as SuZ). English Translation by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. 1962. Being and Time, Oxford & Cambridge: Blackwell.

 For an analysis of some of the political implications of these evolutions see Märker & Wehner 2013. 52  Hua XXV, p. 18. 51

References

131

Hocquenhem, G. and Schérer, R. 1984. Formen und Metamorphosen der Aura. In Das Schwinden der Sinne. D. Kamper and Ch. Wulf eds. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 75–86. Husserl, E. 1973. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Zweiter Teil. 1921–28. The Hague: Nijhoff (cited as Hua XIV). Husserl, E. 1976. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff (cited as Hua VI). English translation by D. Carr. 1970. The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology: An introduction to phenomenological philosophy. Evanston: NU Press. Husserl, E. 1987. Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft. In Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921). Dordrecht: Nijhoff (cited as Hua XXV), pp. 3–62 Husserl, E. 1980. Phantasie, Bildbewußtsein, Erinnerung: Zur Phänomenologie der anschaulichen Vergegenwärtigungen, Texte aus dem Nachlaß (1898–1925). Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff (cited as Hua XXIII). English translation by J.B. Brough. 2005. Phantasy, image consciousness, and memory. Dordrecht: Springer. Lexis, W. 1877. Zur Theorie der Massenerscheinungen in der menschlichen Gesellschaft. Freiburg: Wagner’sche Buchhandlung. Ligensa, A. 2014. The “History of Vision”-Debate Revisited. In Techné/Technology: Researching cinema and media technologies – their development, use, and impact. A. Van den Oever ed. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 105–114. Märker, O. and Wehner, J. 2013. “E-Partizipation”  – Politische Beteiligung als statistisches Ereignis. In Quoten, Kurven und Profile. Zur Vermessung der sozialen Welt. J.-H. Passoth and J. Wehner eds. Wiesbaden: Springer, pp. 273–292. Meehan, E.R. 1991. Why We Don’t Count: The Commodity Audience. In Logics of television: Essays in cultural criticism. P. Mellencamp ed. Bloomington-Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 117–137. Nanay, B. 2015. The history of vision. In Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Vol. 73, pp. 259–271. Saunders, B (ed.). 2007. The debate about colour naming in 19th century German philology. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Scannell, P. 2000. For-anyone-as-someone structures. In Media, Culture & Society. Vol. 22. Nr. 1, pp. 5–24. Scheler, M. 1974. Wesen und Formen der Sympathie. Bern: Francke. Steiner, U. 2008. Phänomenologie der Moderne. Benjamin und Husserl. In Benjamin Studien. Vol. 1, pp. 107–123. Thiele, M. 2006. Zahl und Sinn. Zur Effektivität und Affektivität der Fernsehquoten. In Ökonomien des Medialen. Tausch, Wert und Zirkulation in den Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften. R. Adelmann, J.-O. Hesse, J. Keilbach, M. Stauff, and M. Thiele eds. Bielefeld: Transcript, pp. 305–330.

Kracauer: The Birth of Dialectics from Phenomenological Sociology

Kracauer’s early writings are often put in relation to phenomenology. Miriam Bratu Hansen, for instance, terms Kracauer’s endeavor here as a “phenomenology of modernity”,1 also speaking of a “phenomenological analysis of everyday life”.2 Similar labels can be found in most accounts of Kracauer’s early work, even by authors who are not necessarily sympathetic to phenomenology, as this is the case with film scholar Gertrud Koch, who appreciates Kracauer’s “phenomenological interpretation of the modern everyday world”.3 To be sure, such assessments most often remain superficial, while the term “phenomenology” itself is not taken very rigorously, but rather plainly equated with a descriptive inventory of the contemporary life-world. Since Kracauer’s texts indeed fit such a description, this lax use of the term is not necessarily objectionable per se. The problem, instead, arises from the fact that Kracauer’s early reflections indeed entertain a consistent and nuanced relationship to the phenomenological philosophy of his time, and since some of his interpreters try to explore this connection as well, the nonbinding use of the term risks leading to confusion. In this chapter, I will extensively deal with the various facets of Kracauer’s engagement with phenomenology by retracing its complex development. I will start with a brief analysis of his early discussions of Husserl and Scheler, leading to his first major work, Sociology as Science (1). Then I will address the role played by Simmel’s work in the context of this early reception of phenomenology (2), also looking at some of the more significant discrepancies which arise when shifting from the academic discourse of contemporary philosophy to the journalistic discourse practiced by Kracauer when it comes to dissecting the An early version of this chapter was published in Romanian as: “Kracauer în context”. Preface to S.  Kracauer. Ornamentul maselor. Romanian translation by Ch. Ferencz-Flatz. 2016. Cluj-­ Napoca: Tact, pp. 5–63.  Bratu Hansen 2012, p. XVII.  Bratu Hansen 2012, p. 27. 3  Koch 1996, p. 27. 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Ferencz-Flatz, Critical Theory and Phenomenology, Contributions to Phenomenology 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27615-6_9

133

134

Kracauer: The Birth of Dialectics from Phenomenological Sociology

“concrete life-­world” (3). Subsequently, I show how this interest in the concrete life-world in both the phenomenological and the critical camp was initially fed by the reception of Kierkegaard, which is visible in some of the existential motives from Sociology as Science (4) and I will look at their respective connections with the reform movements of the interwar period as a significant breaking point for these shared existential interests. (5). Finally, I will consider the different shadings of the concept of authenticity in Kracauer (and some other early critical theorists) and in existential phenomenology (6), and address the important role that dialectics comes to play in this particular context (7).

1 Phenomenology The most explicit attempt to deal with the question of Kracauer’s relationship to phenomenology to date is still Heide Schlüpmann’s article from the late 1980s, “Phenomenology of Film: On Siegfried Kracauer’s Writings of the 1920s”. Unfortunately, however, her paper only contends to observe that: [t]he strength of the essays of the 1920s lies in their phenomenological procedure, their taking up of individual manifestations of daily life and dwelling upon them reflectively. The influence of phenomenology was decisive for Kracauer. The historical and social experiences of his generation, however, led him to turn this method in a critical, materialist direction which distinguishes it from that of his teacher Max Scheler.4

This is where Schlüpmann’s references to phenomenology stop: Husserl’s name is not even mentioned, while the author immediately loses interest in Scheler as well, devoting numerous pages instead to Kant and his notion of the “sublime” in the Critique of Judgement. Taken in itself, Schlüpmann’s observation is for sure not plain wrong, but it is nonetheless reductive in that it sees a superficial evolution from adhesion to rejection where in reality Kracauer’s relationship to phenomenology was from the onset far more ambivalent and its evolution far more contorted than suggested in the aforementioned paper. Kracauer’s biographers offer scarce information with regard to his youthful interest in phenomenology. While Scheler was not really his “teacher” at all, since Kracauer had no academic ties to the phenomenological movement whatsoever, he indeed met Scheler at age 27 during one of his wartime conferences in Frankfurt. It was a patriotic presentation titled: “The Origins of Hatred against Germans”. As is well known, Scheler at the time came after some years of heated war propaganda, while his book Der Genius des Krieges und der deutsche Krieg become one of the most important samples of the local Kriegsphilosophie, a new literary genre which took it as its task to articulate the deeper philosophical meaning of war.5 Although Kracauer would later on parody this conference in his novel Ginster, he  Schlüpmann 1987, p. 98.  See for this de Warren 2017.

4 5

1 Phenomenology

135

nevertheless seems to have been rather impressed with Scheler, sending him some of his own essays in response, to which he was delighted to receive positive reactions. Moreover, in the following year, Kracauer even wrote an appreciative review of Scheler’s post-­war book, Krieg und Aufbau, which also offers a more nuanced account with regard to Scheler’s positions on war than his later outright rejection. Thus, Scheler indeed appears to have been the main hook that drew Kracauer in the direction of phenomenology, while some of his early writings like his essay from 1917 “On Friendship” show a clear affinity to Scheler’s style, if not his method of research and terminology. Despite his growing interest in Scheler, however, it is important to note that, at this point, Kracauer doesn’t yet reference the technical vocabulary of phenomenology and he still avoids engaging in a more systematic methodological reflection with regard to phenomenological philosophy. Instead, such explicit references only begin appearing after Kracauer’s first more serious attempt to engage Husserl, at the beginning of the 1920s, and these reflections find their first most consistent expression in Sociology as a Science, the book Kracauer hoped he could submit as a Habilitationsschrift for attaining a professorship in philosophy in Frankfurt. Significantly, the book already shows a highly ambivalent if not outright critical attitude towards phenomenology, and as such it offers the best possible introduction to the contorted question of Kracauer’s relationship to the phenomenological method. The main argument of the book is no doubt difficult to follow first of all because it is unclear from the onset to what extent this is ultimately a plea in favor of a phenomenological approach to sociology, or a polemic attack against it. In his correspondence with Adorno, Kracauer recounts a letter he received from Husserl shortly before his death in which the latter expressed appreciation for his early book on sociology finding numerous overlaps with his own thoughts on the subject matter as jotted down in later manuscripts.6 Similarly, Adorno writes in a critical essay on Kracauer during the 1960s: “His book Soziologie als Wissenschaft [Sociology as Science] (1922) is clearly concerned with connecting the material-sociological interest with epistemological reflections based on the phenomenological method”.7 On the contrary, the preface to Kracauer’s book, written shortly after finishing the work, suggests that its main intention was rather that of proving, in the specific case of sociology, that a formal philosophical approach like Husserl’s pure phenomenology of consciousness is bound to fail in its attempt to arrive at a concrete understanding of the inter-human life-world. Moreover, this ambiguity also reflects within the work itself. Thus, any unprejudiced reader would have difficulties in deciding whether the book is ultimately an attempt to offer a phenomenological foundation to sociology, which ends in an  Adorno and Kracauer 2008, p. 424: “When I was in Paris, Husserl wrote to me, shortly before his death, that my Sociology as Science arrived at ideas which can also be found in some of his manuscripts, and that my articles in the FZ were always of great interest to him.” Unfortunately, the letter could not be retrieved and Husserl’s correspondence doesn’t seem to bear any other trace of his interest for Kracauer’s works. 7  GS 11, p. 392; En., p. 61. 6

136

Kracauer: The Birth of Dialectics from Phenomenological Sociology

expression of doubt, or a criticism of the foundational aspirations of phenomenology, which ends on a rather sympathetic note. The first of its three sections circumscribes the field of contemporary sociology in the German speaking world of the early twentieth century, as represented by figures like Simmel, Weber, Sombart, Tönnies and others. Following a widely accepted distinction at the time, Kracauer divides the discipline into a material sociology, on the one hand, which in his view runs the risk of getting bogged down in a “bad infinity” of unstructured empirical data with no philosophical or cognitive relevance, and a formal sociology, on the other hand, which tries to identify the necessary structures of human inter-relations by retrieving what Simmel calls “the forms of socializing”.8 This distinction is at the core of the second and most consistent part of the book, which tries, 10 years before Alfred Schütz, to ground sociology in an epistemology inspired by Husserl’s pure phenomenology. What makes this endeavor remarkable is that, contrary to Schütz – whose work from 1932, Der Sinnhafte Aufbau der Sozialen Welt, basically tries to ground Max Weber’s sociological work on Husserl’s conception of intersubjectivity9 – Kracauer, on the one hand, takes Simmel’s formal sociology as his starting point, which the latter defined as a “geometry of the social world” just like Husserl himself at times tended to see his phenomenology as a “geometry of lived experiences”. On the other hand, contrary to Schütz, Kracauer undertakes this endeavor without benefiting from access to either of Husserl’s writings on intersubjectivity, instead only referring to his Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy (1912). Following a remarkably nuanced and vaguely critical presentation of Husserl’s theories, Kracauer tries to show that, if we proceed from the material field of sociology (that is: the elementary facts of human interaction) towards the a priori structures which necessarily underlie them, we must inevitably conclude that “regardless of its degree of generality, social knowledge is as such founded in the cognitive accomplishments of formal sociology, which itself receives its ultimate justification and grounding from the phenomenological evidence regarding the structural constitution of consciousness.”10 The third and final section of the work, however, undermines this entire construction in what Kracauer himself contends to be a rather self-contradictory move: “Perhaps it doesn’t make much sense to sketch out the foundation of a science only to then show that a science thus founded is ultimately impossible to realize.”11 In fact, the final part of the book doesn’t plainly recant the main thesis of its second section, but instead it rather inverts its methodological perspective. If the second section thus abstractly constructed the idea of sociology as a pure science in advancing from the concrete field of social phenomena towards the general forms, which determine it a priori, thus ultimately arriving at the formal structures of

 Simmel 1992, p. 23 f.  The Cartesian Meditations appeared in French in 1931, but Schütz also had access to Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts. 10  Kracauer 2006, p. 76. 11  Kracauer 2006, p. 95. 8 9

1 Phenomenology

137

consciousness outlined by phenomenology, the third section poses the question the other way around by asking to what extend one could arrive from the structures of pure phenomenology back at the meaningful material ascertainments or distinctions one finds empirically in the social field by only employing the phenomenological method of “eidetic variation”.12 In brief, Kracauer is set on seeing to what extent it is indeed possible to develop a “material ontology” of the social world, such as Husserl, Scheler, or Schütz envisioned it, as a discipline capable of a priori advancing knowledge in the field and not just distilling its mere formal carcass. Following a perhaps overly sketchy argument, Kracauer concludes that such an endeavor is indeed only possible by tacitly smuggling in empirical determinations as alleged a priori insights. But this dismissal is not Kracauer’s final word on the issue either. His ambition is rather to outline the difficulties involved in offering a phenomenological foundation to the social sciences, in order to highlight the paradoxical status of a scientific discipline like sociology, which is by definition forced to settle between two mutually exclusive poles: the material-empirical and the formal-­ phenomenological, neither of which can properly account for their object without the other. Thus, Kracauer ultimately suggests that the sociologist needs to entertain a flexible relationship to both poles, by working his way through a middle field, which is neither that of phenomenology proper and its pure forms of socialization, nor that of the brute empirical material. Instead, it is rather made up of schemes and types drawn from the latter, which he describes as follows in one of his early essays: These processes, which I have described elsewhere as the typical schemata of the highest sociological categories, represent, as it were, the first station on the path from formal to material sociology; and even though they do make reference to individual events, they still retain almost the universal validity of the intuitions of essence undertaken in “Galilean space,” [that is: the space of purely phenomenological considerations] intuitions from which they can be deduced as a thought experiment.13

In brief: the demonstration of the impossibility of a rigorous phenomenology of the material world is constantly supplemented in Kracauer by his belief in the ultimate meaninglessness of an empirical research without phenomenological guidance, and it is precisely this ambivalent relationship to phenomenology – which he sees both as impossible and as indispensable – that characterizes Kracauer’s program in the following years as well.

 Interestingly, Kracauer defines eidetic variation in this context as a form of “mental experiment”. This point proves particularly relevant when considering the lengthy and complex relationship phenomenology entertains to scientific experimentation proper. This relationship is rooted in Husserl’s own methodological reflections (for instance, in the third book of his Ideas) and finds its most thorough illustration in the works of early experimental psychologists like David Katz or Albert Michotte van den Berck, who tried to include (first- or third-person) experiments among the legitimate procedures of phenomenological research. In contrast to this contorted history, that Kracauer of course had no way of knowing, his note regarding the mental experiment as the key methodological tool of phenomenology seems remarkably insightful. See for this also FerenczFlatz 2018. 13  Kracauer 1995, p. 159. 12

138

Kracauer: The Birth of Dialectics from Phenomenological Sociology

His explicit references to phenomenology continue throughout the 1920s and early 1930s and find their most condensed exposition in two commemorative articles: one devoted to Husserl, on the occasion of his 70th birthday in 1930, and the other to Scheler, on the occasion of his death in 1928. Both articles try to offer a nuanced critical account of phenomenological philosophy, also obviously attesting to what attracts him most in phenomenology. Thus, the essay on Scheler makes a significant distinction between two methodological tendencies in the latter’s phenomenology: on the one hand, an eidetic tendency inspired by Husserl, which aims for “an immediate intuition of intellectual essentialities [geistige Wesenheiten] in their mutual hierarchic relationships”,14 as this is best illustrated by Scheler’s own hierarchies of values: personal and objective, individual and collective, vital and spiritual values etc.; on the other hand, an empiricist tendency, which goes against philosophical formalism (including its Husserlian version) and aims “to penetrate the material realities of the world in laying bare the various relationships that pertain between the empirical facts in nature and history, on the one hand, and the sphere of intellectual essentialities, on the other”.15 When it comes down to these two tendencies, it is quite obvious that Kracauer himself first prefers the empiricist approach in dissociating himself from the eidetic or essentialist aspect of phenomenology. This interpretation is also supported by a highly enlightening scene in his novel Ginster (published in 1928), which gives a covert and slightly adjusted reconstruction of his first encounter with Scheler at the latter’s conference in Frankfurt.16 The scene ultimately ridicules the method of eidetic intuition as applied by Scheler to prove the necessity of the Great War: Caspari [i.e. Scheler] had big eyes, which he did not direct inwards, as other professors do, while not really roaming through the surrounding space either. On the contrary, he used them to see essences. Against his will, Ginster started imitating the look of professor Caspari, in order to also see the essences. Berta’s essence [the character seated next to him] was clearly a mosaic. Then he turned his sight towards himself: no essence, only the thought that he will in four days be recruited by the military. […] The essence of every nation, Caspari claimed, is immutable, and this leads, due to their specific configuration, to inevitable misunderstandings among nations. […] At that point, Ginster understood that, without him knowing it, he was caught once and for all in a particular essence […]. Had he grown up in a different country, further West, he would probably have been inimical towards himself. The only one who seems to have escaped the curse of national essences was professor Caspari himself, who had an overview of all essences and could manipulate them like a wizard so insistently until war indeed became inevitable. The World War is, said professor Caspari, a necessary event, rooted in the essential differences between nations. Ginster’s eyes were meanwhile sufficiently trained in representing essences to clearly see how they didn’t get along with one another and constantly got into fights.17

 Werke 5.3, p. 24.  Werke 5.3, p. 24. 16  Kracauer admits to this explicitly in a letter to Walter Benjamin, who replies bemused that the episode offers a good description of “Scheler’s intelligible character”. See Benjamin 1987. 17  Kracauer 2013, p. 161 f. 14 15

1 Phenomenology

139

According to Kracauer, Scheler’s example clearly shows that, in phenomenology, the eidetic method can easily lend itself as a convenient alibi for illicitly consecrating the most idiosyncratic views as necessary and a priori laws of essence. However, on a closer look, Kracauer is not determined to plainly reject the eidetic moment of phenomenology in toto. On the contrary, in the concluding part of his essay on Scheler he shows appreciation for the latter’s ability to combine the eidetic and the empirical moment.18 Moreover, he explicitly describes the “material” intention of Scheler’s phenomenology by referring to the relationship he establishes between empirical reality and essentialities. In fact, throughout his discussions of phenomenology during the 1920s and 1930s, it is clear to see that Kracauer is most interest precisely in the eidetic project of “material ontologies”. This is perhaps most striking in his early criticism of phenomenology, which often decries the failure of that project, while nonetheless refusing to declare it outright unfeasible, as will indeed Adorno a few years later. The same interest for material ontology also guides Kracauer’s article on Husserl. The phenomenological method is here defined as follows: What does this method imply? Its main historic merit lies in proposing, against the idealist system, a theory that does not take the supreme formal concepts as its starting point in order to finally arrive back at the same formal concepts. Instead, it tries to account for the variety of phenomena themselves by means of a fundamentally unsystematic intuition. If the idealist construction is necessarily struck with blindness towards reality, phenomenology seeks to principially take note of the reality of essentialities.19

Significantly, Kracauer refers to the “reality of essentialities” here and not just to plain empirical reality as opposed to those essentialities. Nonetheless, Kracauer regretfully notes, Husserl himself was ultimately “unable to reach actual material determinations of essence”,20 such that, in his view, it remains questionable whether phenomenology would ever really gain the concreteness it initially promised. Instead, while Adorno – who shared a similar view both of the “material” ambitions of early phenomenology and of Husserl’s ultimate relapse into “formalism” – saw the subsequent evolution of phenomenology with Scheler and Heidegger as the clear symptom of the failure of the phenomenological project as such, Kracauer himself, who also refers to Scheler and Heidegger in this context, offers a somewhat more cautious verdict especially with regard to Scheler. In his view, Scheler indeed tried to descriptively venture into the sphere of material essences, but if his early catholic phase, which strived to determine the hierarchy of values “top down”, admittedly ended in failure, his later anthropologic writings are seen to attest to a “bottom up” phenomenological approach, which might have promised genuine eidetic access to concrete reality. Unfortunately, so goes Kracauer’s argument, Scheler’s death baffled these hopes, while contemporary phenomenology

 “No other thinker in our universities is capable of combining such an acute sense of reality with such a deep knowledge of intellectual essences.” (Werke 5.3, p. 28). 19  Werke 5.3, p. 129. 20  Werke 5.3, p. 129. 18

140

Kracauer: The Birth of Dialectics from Phenomenological Sociology

(presumably: Heidegger) risks relapsing into an ontological formalism, which is just as estranged from reality proper as the idealism of the older transcendental systems. – “Husserl opened a gate for us”, Kracauer writes in 1930, in the conclusion of his commemorative essay, “we should be careful not to allow it to close back.”21 At the end of the article, a brief editorial note promises an in-depth treatment of these aspects, which would no doubt have offered a more substantial backdrop for situating Kracauer’s relationship to phenomenology. However, since the announced essay was never written, we are left to merely take note of the fact that Kracauer’s later oeuvre indeed still draws from these early intentions. Thus, for instance, his famous Theory of Film, which he began writing at the end of the 1930s in France in the immediate aftermath of his early philosophical reflections, is meant beforehand to sketch out a “material ontology” of the cinema.

2 Simmel Instead, if one were to indeed pin down an author, who best captures what fascinated Kracauer in phenomenology, this would be neither Husserl nor Scheler (whom he only regarded as an unfulfilled promise), but rather Georg Simmel. Now, Simmel was of course not a phenomenologist per se. One year older than Husserl, he came from an entirely different intellectual background and only shared little common ground explicitly with the phenomenological movement until his death in 1918. Of course, Simmel and Husserl knew each other and were in amiable terms. The two have met on several occasions, corresponded and regularly exchanged their works, but these contacts did not seem to have left any significant imprint on Simmel himself, who in a private letter recounts one of his long discussions with Husserl as an exchange, which only served to bring out the major points of divergence between them. In turn, Husserl appreciated Simmel with a certain condescendence, although he intensively read his works. Moreover, several details in their letters might even suggest that he saw some convergence between Simmel’s work and the phenomenological project. Thus, in 1913, Simmel sends Husserl the offprint of one of his essays on “the problem of fate” with a short hand-written note: “is this still phenomenology I wonder?”22 – a remark that could be read as a response to their discussions, wherein Husserl unsuccessfully tried to convince Simmel that he was also doing a sort of phenomenology. Interestingly, similar remarks can also be found in Heidegger, who in one of his early lecture courses claims that Simmel was “essentially influenced by phenomenology”,23 or Alfred Schütz, who saw Simmel’s sociological writings, with their attempt to develop a “theory of social forms”, as a

 Werke 5.3, p. 130.  Simmel 2008, p. 211. 23  GA 58, p. 9. 21 22

2 Simmel

141

relevant precursor for his own phenomenology of social experience.24 To be sure, all three – Schütz, Heidegger and Husserl – also stress the methodological weaknesses of Simmel’s endeavor, which appears to them as lacking the necessary philosophical depth and rigor, while neither of them would have gone so far as to seriously consider Simmel a phenomenologist. To be sure, Kracauer himself is not really interested in making a case for considering Simmel as a phenomenologist plain and simple either, but he nonetheless saw Simmel as an implicit guiding model in his effort to uncover the shortcomings of the phenomenological method and to identify their possible remedy. Thus, Kracauer notes from the onset in his substantial early essay on Simmel, which was initially conceived as the introductory chapter of an unfinished book, that Simmel never truly adhered to a phenomenological program “in the narrow sense”, which means to say that he: …by no means covers the full range of the domain of pure spiritual/intellectual [geistigen] phenomena. He refuses, for instance, to pay any attention to the general structural makeup of consciousness – that is, to thought processes, emotions, acts of imagination, love and hate, and so on. Even though he often touches on these elements in his writings (where one does encounter various discussions that refer to them), he nonetheless never makes them the object of separate theoretical investigation.25

However, at least four of the methodological aspects, that Kracauer stresses in his further argument in the essay, are not only intimately linked to his own understanding of phenomenology, but even explicitly discussed in a vocabulary, which draws from its technical terminology. (a) First of all, Kracauer thus points at the sheer descriptive26 character of Simmel’s analyses. In his view, these analyses are always “fulfilled” (erfüllt) by the lived intuition of their subject matter: [Simmel] observes [his object] with an inner eye and describes what he sees. As remains to be explained in greater detail, it goes against his grain to deduce individual facts from abstract general concepts in a systematic and conceptually rigorous manner. All of his conceptual articulations cling to an immediately experienced (but admittedly not universally accessible) lived reality, and even the most abstract presentations have no other

 Schütz 2004, p. 75 f.  Kracauer 1995, p. 225. 26  Moreover, Kracauer also emphasizes Simmel’s persistence on clarifying worn-out concepts by returning to the concrete experiences that ground them and determine their polysemy: “Most of the concepts of everyday life are not, after all, born out of the immediate observation of the given; instead, the material on which they are based is brought into consciousness only in an indefinite and unclear form. These quotidian concepts are not experiences; they are common currency. For example, in his early work Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft, Simmel strives to disperse the fog of hazy ideas that has gathered around certain fundamental moral concepts (such as egotism and altruism) by exposing the myriad ethical facts that underlie these concepts. Instead of accepting the concepts in question sight unseen and making them the core of one or another ethical doctrine, he descends to their foundations and, by shedding light on reality itself, destroys a series of theories that arise out of the misty realm of concepts which imposes itself between the knowing subject and reality.” (Kracauer 1995, p. 248 f.) 24 25

142

Kracauer: The Birth of Dialectics from Phenomenological Sociology source than the observation that fills them to the brim. Simmel never engages in acts of thought that are not supported by a perceptual experience of some sort and that cannot accordingly be realized through such an experience. He always describes what he has seen; the entirety of his thought is basically only a grasping of objects by looking at them.27

(b) Secondly, Kracauer appreciates Simmel’s descriptions precisely because of their ability of setting aside the details of the individual case under scrutiny in order to highlight its universal or essential aspect. At this point, Kracauer explicitly uses the same concept  – Wesenheiten  – he uses in his writings on phenomenology, a technical term used already by Scheler and consecrated mainly with Jean Hering’s influent essay from 1921, “Bemerkungen über das Wesen, die Wesenheit und die Idee”,28 referenced around the same period by Walter Benjamin as well. Significantly, it is precisely when considering this universal or “eidetic” moment of Simmel’s philosophy, that Kracauer explicitly opposes him to transcendental philosophy (which he presumably identifies with Husserl), by again pointing out the need to establish some sort of middle ground between pure phenomenology and plain empirical research: Simmel delves into a layer of generalities that occupies more or less the middle ground between the highest abstractions and strictly individual concepts; that is, he robs objects of only so much of their full substance as is necessary in order to discover any rule-­ governed connections between them. Since it is his fundamental desire to take account of the individuality of the phenomena as far as possible, he is naturally not content to subsume them under forms that are so broad they obscure the particular singularity of the objects. In this regard he sets himself apart from thinkers rooted in transcendental idealism who try to capture the material manifold of the world by means of a few widemeshed general concepts, with the result that the existential plenitude of these phenomena floats right through their nets and escapes them.29

(c) Thirdly, Simmel’s analyses of these “spiritual essentialities” also come close to phenomenology in that they emphasize their functional inter-relations from the onset instead of treating them only as mere isolated occurrences for themselves. Thus, Kracauer notes, one of Simmel’s main intentions is to overcome the illusion of the phenomenon’s existence for itself by showing how it is always inscribed as such in a more encompassing life-context. As is well known, this point is also stressed out in Husserl’s Ideas. If phenomenology is here considered as an eidetic description of the “lived experiences of consciousness”, its main aim is, according to Husserl, to determine the functional relationships that per-

 Kracauer 1995, p. 257. One can easily see how important precisely this aspect of Simmel’s work is for the way Kracauer understands his own philosophical endeavor when reading his letter to Simmel from November 1917: “In what concerns my own thinking, I always find myself in a conflict: I am to such a great extent set on confronting reality and on visual perception, on the intuition of the individual detail, that I always only take great pain in arriving at conceptual generalizations, which are to a certain extent unintuitive. This is why the ineffable charm of your writings primarily consists for me precisely in the fact that they are always drawn from an intuition even when they are dealing with the most subtle mental processes.” (Simmel 2008, p. 882). 28  Hering 1921. 29  Kracauer 1995, p. 242. 27

3  Journalistic vs. Academic Philosophy

143

tain between the various types of experience and not merely their isolated structure: The point of view of function is the central one for phenomenology; investigations radiating from it suitably comprise the whole phenomenological sphere, and, finally all phenomenological analyses in some manner or other enter into its service as component parts or preliminary stages. In place of analysis and comparison, description and classification restricted to single particular mental processes, consideration arises of single particularities from the ‘teleological’ point of view of their function, of making possible a ‘synthetical unity’.30

(d) Fourthly, Kracauer underscores Simmel’s emphatic use of “mental experiments”, which he explicitly equates in his Sociology as Science with the procedure of “eidetic variation” in phenomenology: [Simmel] is like the chemist who combines a substance unknown to him with all other substances, in order to get a picture of the essence and the properties of the body in question by means of its reactions to all of the remaining chemical substances. It is in such a manner that Simmel undertakes experiments on the concept, submits it to the widest range of situations, and poses one question after another. Wherever the concept is accorded any meaning whatever  – at every site and at every level of the totality  – he examines and observes its behavior from the most varied perspectives.31

In contrast to Adorno, who interprets phenomenology in the early 1930s as a failed attempt to find a compromise between classical idealist philosophy, which still dominated the academic scene of the time, and the new empiricist tendency, which became more and more compelling,32 Kracauer appreciates Simmel, on the contrary, precisely because of his capacity to maintain that fragile balance between sheer empirical research, which risks the loss of intellectual relevance, on the one hand, and the reflections of transcendental philosophy (equated with Husserl’s pure phenomenology), which ultimately run the risk of losing their connection to the real world. Consequently, Kracauer himself tries, at least in his earliest works like the essay on the group as bearer of ideas, to put into play an approach which follows Simmel in being still too phenomenological in the perspective of empirical research and already too empirical in the perspective of phenomenology.

3 Journalistic vs. Academic Philosophy In his essay on Simmel, Kracauer seems particularly fond of Simmel’s capacity to analyze individual phenomena of the social world with regard to their determining essentialities (Wesenheiten), as this is put forth exemplarily in his famous essay on the handle of a pottery vase. This is presumably the main feature of Simmel’s work one would immediately associate with phenomenology in the superficial  Hua III/1, p. 197; En., p. 208.  Kracauer 1995, p. 242 f. 32  Adorno 2003a, 30 31

144

Kracauer: The Birth of Dialectics from Phenomenological Sociology

nonbinding sense of the term highlighted in the beginning of this chapter. Indeed, Kracauer himself appreciates Simmel first and foremost for the force of his descriptions, which he deems capable of faithfully rendering concrete experience without getting bogged down in its individual details: “Simmel enters into the spirit of artistic creations with utmost ingenuity and then struggles to establish formulas capable of conveying the specific content of the phenomena in question.”33 To be sure, these descriptions don’t appear equally compelling to Adorno, who explicitly discusses the handle-essay in a short text from the 1960s comparing Simmel to Bloch.34 Adorno admits that, in the specific context of the early twentieth century, Simmel was the first to reorient philosophy from its traditional technical and abstract problems to the concrete realities of the everyday world. In truth, this was rather Kierkegaard’s merit before Simmel’s, but the former’s reception in Germany, which came with a certain delay, was indeed largely influenced by the local “vitalism” promoted by Simmel. Nonetheless, Adorno holds that Simmel’s essays on individual phenomena like the handle, ruins, money, fashion or acting were ultimately disappointing in that they proved unable to penetrate those phenomena as such, only arriving at mere platitudes. For Adorno, this was primarily due to the fact that the aforementioned essays still only made use of sterile and inadequate categorical schemes, inherited from the theoretical tradition they aspired to overcome, as are: form and content, individual and general etc. At the same time, this failure also came, in Adorno’s view, as a consequence of the fact that Simmel’s reflections delved in formal antinomies, without gaining any relevant material insights into their objects proper. In brief: Adorno criticizes Simmel precisely for his phenomenological shortcomings, and it is worth noting that, in his early lecture courses, Heidegger launches a similar criticism against Simmel by charging him with a “readiness to philosophize about anything and everything”35 in invariant categories which stop short of revealing their phenomena proper, instead of “plunging” into the object of philosophical description without any mental reservations. This criticism no doubt at least partially touches upon Kracauer as well, whose essays also frequently stop short of delivering what their concrete-philosophical aura promises. Indeed, Adorno actually invokes parts of his objections against Simmel in his earlier essay on Kracauer as well, whom he equally, even if somewhat more covertly, accuses of engaging in over-meticulous descriptions à la Simmel, which only strive to eloquently lay bare what everybody already knew anyhow. If instead Kracauer nonetheless partly escapes such criticism in Adorno’s eyes this is due, on the one hand, to his eclectic terminology, with its abundant improvisations and inconsistencies, which – as Adorno notes – favors philosophical expressivity to the detriment of objectivity proper. On the other hand, it is due to Kracauer’s entirely different perspective on “concrete reality”. Thus, Adorno who charges Simmel’s analyses with being far too “conformist” in their choice of subjects, despite their

 Kracauer 1995, p. 229.  Adorno 1992, pp. 211–219. 35  Adorno 1992, p. 215. 33 34

3  Journalistic vs. Academic Philosophy

145

striking diversity, in that they ultimately remain indebted to the standards of traditional philosophical discourse, which ultimately deprive them of their intended concreteness, could not direct the same criticism against Kracauer as well. For, on the contrary, Kracauer’s early essays uninhibitedly approach the contemporary lifeworld in all its phenomenal richness, from swimming trunks and nudism to occultism and vaudeville shows, going through advertisements or film. If Kracauer therefore inherits from Husserl and Scheler, via Simmel, the idea of a philosophy capable of capturing “concrete reality”, this reality is in his case doubtlessly far more concrete. Why is this the case? One possible answer is that, in contrast to Simmel’s choice of topics (like the pottery vase handle), or the concrete examples one finds in Husserl (like the perception of a table), the realities foregrounded in Kracauer’s essays are not timeless constructions, meant to offer a universal illustration of concrete experience, but instead historically indexed details of the real world: dancing lounges, mass tourism, vaudeville, traffic signs etc. Differently put – and this presumably explains the preceding as well – what sets Simmel and the phenomenologists apart from Kracauer is that the former work within the framework of academic discourse, while the latter’s texts are foremost journalistic productions, which might share a similar argumentative and conceptual structure, but nevertheless hold an entirely different relationship to the real world. One can easily take note of this when confronting Kracauer’s articles with, for instance, Martin Heidegger’s early lecture courses, which ultimately share the same provocative desire to engage “everyday” examples, but in fact seldom arrive at anything as palpable as the bulk of details one encounters in the daily newspaper. This trivial observation opens a path for at least two relevant questions. On the one hand, one begins to wonder about the philosophical relevance of journalism and its importance specifically for those trends in contemporary thought most akin to capturing the concrete life-world in its actual experiential givenness, as are particularly phenomenology and critical theory. On the other hand, one begins to see to what extent philosophical discourse is as such determined from the onset by conditions pertaining to its academic presentation36 and the importance of its contacts with different other forms of engaging reality. Fact is that the questions of “contemporary society” and “mass culture”, which are at the core of Kracauer’s writings as early as the 1920s, only penetrated academic phenomenological discourse at least 10 years later. If Kracauer can thus indeed be said to have developed in these early writings something like a “phenomenology of the contemporary social world” – although Kracauer himself would probably not have used the term so casually – this endeavor was in any case initiated incognito, in a medium that was at the time still entirely alien to phenomenology proper. This is presumably what Walter Benjamin had in mind when writing to Kracauer in a letter from 1927 that his articles in the Frankfurter Zeitung are “a curiosity in the history of journalism, an act of contraband performed

 Thus, it would be interesting to follow the impact of the faculty curricula, for instance, on the evolution of contemporary philosophers like Heidegger. 36

146

Kracauer: The Birth of Dialectics from Phenomenological Sociology

with virtuosity and in great style”37 – a contraband, for sure, not just in the sense of adapting philosophical theories to some form of “cultural journalism”, but rather in the sense of using journalism itself as a vehicle for satisfying philosophical intentions, which were still impossible to host in the field of academic philosophy proper at the time.38 Thus, Kracauer’s merit lies not in having brought more depth to journalism by means of philosophy, but on the contrary in having made philosophy more superficial in a good sense of the term by means of journalism, for Kracauer’s analyses are indeed superficial in a quite programmatic intention. They explicitly target the “surface phenomena” of the contemporary world in all their confusing diversity, and as such they seem to first illustrate – if we must indeed relate them to phenomenology – precisely that “picture book phenomenology” (Bilderbuchphänomenologie), which authors like Scheler, Heidegger and Husserl strongly reject.39 Such a phenomenology only contends to pursue fragmentary detail analyses without offering them any systematic underpinning. While Kracauer himself would no doubt embrace such a description of his work, there is nonetheless a certain common systematic intention behind his scattered articles, which he addresses in the introductory part of one of his essays as follows: The position that an epoch occupies in the historical process can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface-level expressions than from that epoch’s judgments about itself. Since these judgments are expressions of the tendencies of a particular era, they do not offer conclusive testimony about its overall constitution. The surface-­level expressions, however, by virtue of their unconscious nature, provide unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of things.40

 Benjamin 1987, p. 41.  A key passage in The Salaried Masses, Kracauer’s work from 1929, clearly shows both the methodological function he ascribes to the journalistic reportage as a means for materializing a concrete philosophy in contrast to traditional idealism, as well as his strive to overcome this approach in developing a method which takes its reference from photographic montage and film: “Does this reality submit to normal reportage? For a number of years now, reportage has enjoyed in Germany the highest favor among all types of representation, since it alone is said to be able to capture life unposed. Writers scarcely know any higher ambition than to report; the reproduction of observed reality is the order of the day. A hunger for directness that is undoubtedly a consequence of the malnutrition caused by German idealism. Reportage, as the self-declaration of concrete existence, is counterposed to the abstractness of idealist thought, incapable of approaching reality through any mediation. But existence is not captured by being at best duplicated in reportage. The latter has been a legitimate counterblow against idealism, nothing more. For it merely loses its way in the life that idealism cannot find, which is equally unapproachable for both of them. A hundred reports from a factory do not add up to the reality of the factory, but remain for all eternity a hundred views of the factory. Reality is a construction. Certainly life must be observed for it to appear. Yet it is by no means contained in the more or less random observational results of reportage; rather, it is to be found solely in the mosaic that is assembled from s single observations on the basis of comprehension of their meaning. Reportage photographs life; such a mosaic would be its image.” (Kracauer 1998, p. 32) 39  The first occurrence of the term can be traced to the preface of Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materielle Wertethik (Scheler 2014, p. 5). 40  Kracauer 1995, p. 75. 37 38

3  Journalistic vs. Academic Philosophy

147

But this project is itself pursued quite unsystematically in Kracauer, such that the material it aims to synthesize ultimately remains rather heterogeneous and eclectic. Moreover, if Kracauer’s interest in surface phenomena – that is: in peripheral, trivial and minor issues, to the detriment of the major topics of philosophical reflection, which allegedly constitute “the heart of the matter” – indeed corresponds to a certain “reduction” of theoretical attention, which we also find at work in Husserl’s analyses of perceptual adumbrations or in Heidegger’s discussions of everyday life structures, this move to re-focalize the philosophical gaze to the surface is in Kracauer’s case not driven by a mere methodological motivation. Instead, it is primarily motivated by a moral concern, which arises out of a situation wherein the “fundamental issues” are no longer compatible with intellectual probity and the “heart of the matter” is rotten.41 This assessment accounts for the distinctive theoretical perspective of Kracauer’s early essays and their quasi-phenomenological intention of regarding phenomena as if there was no “thing in itself” underneath it. In difference to phenomenology proper, the trivialities of everyday life are for Kracauer not the objects of an individual subject’s experience as in Husserl, or Heidegger,42 but instead the entire sphere of private life-experience is as such already seen as a mere reactive construct, offering relief from the truly immediate sphere of the social world. This argument will, of course, become a characteristic feature of early critical theory, finding a first more sophisticated development in the

 Kracauer 1995, p. 325 f.: “A correct instinct will see to it that the need for entertainment is satisfied. The interior design of movie theaters serves one sole purpose: to rivet the viewers’ attention to the peripheral, so that they will not sink into the abyss. The stimulations of the senses succeed one another with such rapidity that there is no room left between them for even the slightest contemplation. Like life buoys, the refractions of the spotlights and the musical accompaniment keep the spectator above water. The penchant for distraction demands and finds an answer in the display of pure externality; hence the irrefutable tendency, particularly in Berlin, to tum all forms of entertainment into revues and, parallel with this tendency, the increasing number of illustrations in the daily press and in periodical publications. […] This emphasis on the external has the advantage of being sincere. It is not externality that poses a threat to truth. Truth is threatened only by the naive affirmation of cultural values that have become unreal and by the careless misuse of concepts such as personality, inwardness, tragedy, and so on-terms that in themselves certainly refer to lofty ideas but that have lost much of their scope along with their supporting foundations, due to social changes. Furthermore, many of these concepts have acquired a bad aftertaste today, because they unjustifiably deflect an inordinate amount of attention from the external damages of society onto the private individual. […] In a profound sense, Berlin audiences act truthfully when they increasingly shun these art events (which, for good reason, remain caught in mere pretense), preferring instead the surface glamor of the stars, films, revues, and spectacular shows. Here, in pure externality, the audience encounters itself; its own reality is revealed in the fragmented sequence of splendid sense impressions. Were this reality to remain hidden from the viewers, they could neither attack nor change it; its disclosure in distraction is therefore of moral significance.” 42  To be sure, in Heidegger, the inauthenticity of the subject’s public situation is declared to be their initial grounding condition, but this is nevertheless still conceived as but a privative modification of their authentic, that is: individual and autonomous experience. This is all the more disconcerting since, for instance, in the analysis of meaningfulness (Bedeutsamkeit) the same argument of primary precedence is used to ground the ontological preeminence of meaningfulness over spatiotemporal objectivity. 41

148

Kracauer: The Birth of Dialectics from Phenomenological Sociology

famous deconstruction of “interiority” undertaken in Adorno’s book on Kierkegaard (1933). In any case, it is due to this fundamental shift in perspective that the everyday trivialities envisioned in Kracauer’s descriptions are not drawn from the intimacy of the individual subject’s life experiences – be it the theoretical subject of regular perception as in Husserl, the practical subject withdrawn in his solitary workshop as in Heidegger’s Being and Time,43 or the remote subject contemplating historical experience from his own apartment as in the sketches of the Romanian phenomenologist Alexandru Dragomir,44  – but from the various phenomena of the social space, from observations made on the street, or in the no man’s land of newspapers, films and advertisments.

4 Existentialism “Long before Heidegger and Jaspers”, Adorno writes in his essay from the 1960s on Kracauer, “he had planned an existentialist work, though he did not complete it.”45 To get a better grasp of what this actually implies and how it impacts on the mutual relationships between the phenomenological movement at its peak in the 1920s and emerging critical theory, it is necessary to return to an important point in Kracauer’s early book, Sociology as Science. For, if this book indeed tries, as shown above, to bring together Simmel and phenomenology, this move essentially takes place under the auspices of an “existential” theory borrowed from Lukács’ early writings. This theory finds its basic premise in the distinction drawn out by Lukács in his Theory of the Novel between the ages “complete in meaning” and those devoid of it. The latter notion offers a key for describing our contemporary world as a universe, which is no longer held together by meaning, but dissociates into a plurality of objects and subjects alienated from one another. Lukács’ distinction surprisingly underlies the entire epistemological analysis Kracauer undertakes in his Sociology as Science, shaping his relationship to phenomenology as well. In brief, Kracauer thus considers that the phenomenological project of a “material ontology”, deemed capable of obtaining a substantial grasp on concrete reality without recourse to empirical experience proper, is only possible and self understood in an age complete with meaning, wherein the object and the subject pertain to the same intelligible ordo, while it becomes problematic in an age devoid of meaning, wherein the subject can only gain access a priori to formal determinations, which no longer reveal anything relevant about concrete reality as such. Thus, Kracauer explicitly writes:

 It is worth noting that even the analyses of social interaction are described by Heidegger in view of a Dasein enclosed in its own mental universe, despite constant reassurance of its ontological difference to the encapsulated consciousness of husserlian phenomenology. 44  See Dragomir 2017. 45  Adorno 1992, p. 65. 43

4 Existentialism

149

The entire set of difficulties pertaining to phenomenology can only find its resolution by returning to the ideal age of meaning, given that, once one leaves its auspices, the integral man from once dilutes into the mere cognitive subject in general, and the various figures of a fully lived reality become a mere multiplicity of specifications pertaining to extreme generalizations. Phenomenology is, to say this once more, the terminal stop of a process of dissolution and the symptom of an ultimate distancing in relationship to meaning (as well as, presumably, a symptom of our nostalgia for it).46

Picked up briefly on several occasions throughout the book, the topic of the two ages may seem redundant at first all the more since the epistemological reflections of the work could well do without them, at least in the phenomenological perspective in which Husserl must have read them. Nonetheless, the aforementioned opposition is central for Kracauer’s understanding of the existential factors, which ultimately determine the epistemological qualms of the contemporary subject. This comes to the fore most ostensibly in one of Kracauer’s early essays, which tackles the crisis of contemporary science more than a decade before Husserl. In contrast to Husserl (whose Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology focused primarily on mathematical physics and psychology), but in obvious agreement with Heidegger (whose early lectures often engaged in an overt existential criticism of contemporary historiology), Kracauer’s analyses delved into the epistemological-­existential situation of the present day human sciences. To this extent, he confronts two attempts – undertaken by Troeltsch and Weber – to tackle the paradoxical status of these disciplines. In his view, this paradox primarily stems from the fact that, while the aforementioned sciences are qua sciences bound to assume an axiologically neutral stance on the human affairs, they can only obtain a relevant understanding of those affairs, which goes beyond the mere accumulation of empirical data, when they invest them with judgments of value, which help structure the material. If thus Kracauer ultimately concludes by restating that, under the given circumstances, the only viable alternative for philosophy lies in reflecting upon the contemporary situation, which determines our form of scientific knowledge – a conclusion that strongly resembles Husserl’s own later stance – Kracauer himself nevertheless understands this in an entirely different perspective. While Husserl pleas for a thorough historical reconstruction of the decisive moments in the constitution of modern sciences, Kracauer – who only regards the epistemological situation of the sciences as an index for our present day existential situation – frames the entire discussion from the onset in light of Lukács’ theory of the two ages. Of course, it might seem strange to consider Lukàcs, one of the fiercest post-war critics of existentialism, as the main inspiration for Kracauer’s early existentialist musings. Nonetheless, it is a fact that, prior to his engagement with Marxism, Lukács took an interest in Husserl’s phenomenology, while his works were heavily influenced by Simmel’s particular blend of vitalism, and it is precisely these early writings of Lukács – and especially his Theory of the Novel years before his History and Class Consciousness – that left their imprint on an entire generation of later critical theorists like Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch and also Kracauer. Moreover, it is 46

 Kracauer 2006, p. 60.

150

Kracauer: The Birth of Dialectics from Phenomenological Sociology

clear today that the reception of Kierkegaard’s works was of central importance for the intellectual development of this entire group, including Lukács himself, even though many of them would later on arrive at a much more critical stance towards Kierkegaardianism, as this becomes obvious in Bloch’s later writings, or especially in Adorno’s book on Kierkegaard. In fact, this critical stance, which was primarily directed against contemporary versions of existentialism adopting Kierkegaard as their guiding figure, as this was the case with Heidegger and Jaspers or dialectical theology, rather than Kierkegaard himself, follows a first wave of undeniable enthusiasm, stirred by his first German translations shortly after the Great War. This wave left its mark on both Lukács, Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch or Kracauer, as well as Heidegger or Jaspers, and if Adorno or Benjamin didn’t devote any of their earlier essays to a positive reading of Kierkegaard – although their interest in the subject matter can be traced without a doubt in their correspondence –, Lukács himself wrote enthusiastically about Kierkegaard as early as 1911, while in the first edition of his Geist der Utopie (1918) Bloch saw Kierkegaard as nothing less than “a David Hume of our time”, who came to shake us out of the paralysis of objective knowledge.47 Kracauer’s essays from the 1920s are part and parcel of this wave of early existentialism. In his review article to Adorno’s aforementioned book from 1933, Kierkegaard. Construction of the Aesthetic, Walter Benjamin specifically distinguishes the latter’s intention to critically situate Kierkegaard in the context of philosophical idealism from the contemporary efforts of Karl Barth or Heidegger to simply emulate Kierkegaardian impulses. Benjamin’s assessment is doubtlessly correct, but it interestingly ignores Kierkegaard’s earlier reception within the camp of emerging “critical theorists” themselves, and as such it also fails to point out the fact that, for instance, Lukács’ essays constitute a decisive episode in the history of Kierkegaard’s reception by emulation (and not by criticism) in the framework of an already receding “vitalism”. One may call this an “existentialism before existentialism”, a doubtlessly more naïve, but also more inclusive and versatile intellectual platform, which first shaped many of the ideas that would later on be specified in more refined, but also more prejudiced terms, in the existentialisms of the late 1920s, while it is important to see that the later polemical divergences between critical theory and phenomenological existentialism have this common background as an implicit point of reference from the onset. What the various theoretical endeavors, which intersect on this proto-­existentialist platform during the early 1920s, have in common is no doubt the attempt to account for what was then called “concrete life experience”48 not only in contrast to the rigid categories of traditional philosophical discourse  – this was already seen as the crowning achievement of “vitalism” and it was also widely accepted to be the

 With regard to Kierkegaard’s early reception in Germany, especially within the camp of early critical theory, see Theunissen and Greve 1979, especially pp. 76–83, and Fahrenbach 1983. 48  In one of his early essays, which tries to establish a middle ground between historical materialism and Heideggerian phenomenology, Herbert Marcuse also explicitly relates the idea of a “concrete philosophy” to Kierkegaard. See Marcuse 1978. 47

5  The Reform Movements

151

lasting result of Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegel49 –, but more precisely: in contrast to a more substantial concept of experience, against the background of which our contemporary given one presents itself as a mere distortion. This motive is at the core of the first book by Kierkegaard, which benefitted from an ample reception in Germany with its translation in 1914: A Literary Review. Translated into German under the title Kritik der Gegenwart, the book engages in a lengthy discussion of a short novel by Thomasine Gyllembourg titled “Two Ages”, which seeks to give a predominantly ethical characterization of the “reflected” experience of contemporary life (around 1848) in opposing it to the immediate, “passionate” experience of their ancestors from the time of the French Revolution. Similarly, albeit in a different perspective, Lukács also describes contemporary existence as characterized by a “transcendental rootlessness”, which ultimately determines the strong epistemological dissociation between subject and object, in opposing it to the cosmically integrated experience of the Ancient Greeks as its mere privative modification. And this is further on indeed a perspective one finds embraced not only in Kracauer, who explicitly quotes Lukács’ distinction already in his Sociology as Science, but also in Adorno’s early writings, or in Benjamin, who puts forth a similarly minded distinction between the full-fledged notion of “experience” (Erfahrung), which is crumbling in the present, and the mere “lived sensation” (Erlebnis), which tends to replace it. Moreover, rudiments of this early existentialist perspective could also be traced, albeit in a covert ontological guise, in Heidegger’s opposition between an unauthentic or “ruinant” existence, the description of which obviously puts into play a vast morphology of contemporary experience,50 and a counter-ruinant experience, which is circularly defined as authenticity. If instead this opposition – to be more precise: this attempt to account for the concrete experience of the present as a mere privative residue of a full fledged notion of experience, which bares the trace of Kierkegaard’s concept of existence – is indeed the most poignant common feature of the proto-existentialisms of the early 1920s, it is obvious that the theoretical discussions surrounding it were also stimulated by specific historical circumstances in the aftermath of the Great War, which I will now briefly turn to.

 It is interesting to follow this point in the correspondence between Kracauer and Adorno. While both of them gradually shift perspectives on this subject matter during the 1920s, Adorno is still baffled in 1925, when recounting to Kracauer a discussion with Georg Lukács in Vienna, during the course of which the latter already challenges the legitimacy of Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegel. See Adorno & Kracauer, p. 80. 50  For a more detailed interpretation of “inauthenticity” as a covert form of cultural criticism of the present in Heidegger, see especially Adorno’s Jargon of Authenticity. 49

152

Kracauer: The Birth of Dialectics from Phenomenological Sociology

5 The Reform Movements In his book, From Caligari to Hitler. A Psychological History of German Film (1947),51 Kracauer systematically analyses the filmography of the interwar period to retrace the subtle social-psychological shifts that led to Germany’s plunge into fascism. If someone were to write the history of the growing polarization between phenomenology and existentialism, on the one hand, and critical theory, on the other, which occurred roughly around the same time, one would no doubt have to proceed in a similar fashion, by firmly situating this process in that particular social and intelectual context. Thus, the rupture between the phenomenological movement and the emerging Frankfurt school might indeed have visibly culminated with Heidegger’s rectoral address as is widely accepted – since, before that, the critical clashes between the two camps largely kept within the confines of a common theoretical framework and a common vocabulary that easily allowed for authors like Kracauer of Marcuse to slide from the one side to the other – but, in reality, Hitler’s rise to power and Heidegger’s adhesion to fascism only precipitated a far more complex relationship, which can be followed throughout the Weimar period. Thus, one could indeed see how the gap between the two theoretical camps becomes wider and wider from one historical landmark to the next: from the First World War to the Great Inflation, from the rise of advertising and radio to the spread of motorized transportation, from film to the literary highlights of the time. Obviously, the present chapter is not the place to retrace this complex historical process in extenso, but one can nonetheless roughly sketch out its main outlines by at least considering one of the defining elements of this period, which plays an essential role in Kracauer’s early writings preceding his aforementioned book from 1947 and which might put the growing divergences between German existentialism and early critical theorists in a different light: the Lebensreformbewegungen.52 These reform movements first appeared at the end of the nineteenth century in response to the advances of urbanization and mass culture, as well as the heightened rationalization of European life, which came with economic development and scientific progress, as a plea to radically transform the contemporary way of life. To this extent, they simultaneously wanted to reconfigure one’s relationship to the body, to nature and to others in ways which aimed to reverse their contemporary functionalization by bringing about transformations in our style of clothing, hygiene, medical care or nutrition, but also by restoring archaic forms of social organization like communities or confraternities against the backdrop of a growingly impersonal mass society; by reforming pedagogy, by revolutionizing traditional modes of artistic expression or by renewing the traditional religious confessions. When considering these various movements, it is important to note from the onset that – in contrast to their present  See Kracauer 2004.  The following short overview is based primarily on Kerbs and Reulecke 1998 and Buchholz et al. 2001. For an interesting discussion of the Jugendbewegung in particular as a background for the early development of logical empiricism, see also Damböck et al. 2022. 51 52

5  The Reform Movements

153

day versions like contemporary Waldorf nurseries or nudist associations, which seem to have little to nothing in common  – during the interwar period they frequently intersected on common platforms, they were often promoted by the same figures, and they pursued similar overall objectives, concerning the human being in general and its relationship to the world, tradition and society. Thus, their contemporaries often regarded them as a unitary phenomenon despite their ostensive diversity and it is as such that they are today usually treated by historians under the encompassing label Lebensreformbewegungen. Kracauer and the other authors discussed in the present chapter also share this encompassing view. Now, in difference to Benjamin, who was one of the Berlin leaders of the Jugendbewegung, Kracauer himself never officially adhered to any of these movements, but his early writings nonetheless show a clear sympathy for their goals and intentions. Thus, his essay from 1924, “Gestalt und Zerfall”, which explicitly sketches an overview of the aforementioned movements, expresses overt sympathy for their intentions while only voicing slight methodological disagreements. According to Kracauer, the reform movements were by the mid-1920s on the brink of passing from a purely “polemical” or negative phase to a “constructive” phase proper. In Kracauer’s schematic account, the most common targets of their polemical attacks were as follows: the rational and inhuman essence of the contemporary economic system and, closely related to it, the rational structure of contemporary thought, which sterilized our sciences and determined them to lose contact with their real fundament; the neglect of the soul in the midst of a reality exclusively governed by the intellect, as shown by the anarchy of opinions, the eviction of ultimate and even penultimate human problems both from the sphere of language and that of inter-human relationships – in brief, the mechanization of our existence, which is no longer an existence proper, and the degrading of man to a mere atom amongst an infinity of other atoms managed by reason.53

Moreover, these slightly cliché descriptions of degraded contemporary existence, which Kracauer seems to ultimately agree with, are instead, in his view, contrasted by the reform movements to a full-fledged notion of life experience, which Kracauer seems to regard sympathetically as well: They oppose the unmeasured abstract rationalism of today, which disfigures all things human, to a concrete thinking, anchored in the full-fledged human reality. Thus, they remind contemporary science that it is still rooted in a life that encompasses it; and they restore the original weight of religious truths. In taking social relationships in their contemporary form and shape as their point of departure, they want to reinstate the genuine forms of community, and in the midst of decay, they strive to grasp meaning and true forms.54

If Kracauer is thus in principle in a profound agreement with this diagnosis of the present situation, it is important to note that his stance towards the reform movements is initially shared by the key proponents of the phenomenological camp. Indeed, just like Kracauer and Benjamin, who repeatedly object to anthroposophy or the productions of the George circle in constantly distancing themselves from the 53 54

 Werke 5.1, p. 325 f.  Werke 5.1, p. 326.

154

Kracauer: The Birth of Dialectics from Phenomenological Sociology

pseudo-theoretical proposals of the reform movements, while nonetheless showing sympathy for what one may call the implicit ethos of these movements, the same attitude can be traced among contemporary phenomenologists as well. Their affinity to the reform movements is obvious not just in the case of peripheral figures like Gerda Walther, who fancies with occultism and parapsychology from a phenomenological perspective in the 1930s overtly intersecting with the anthroposophical movement, or the Bergzabern circle,55 a community established by several of Husserl’s Göttingen students, who had close ties to both to the Jugendbewegung and to the catholic reform movements, but even in the case of the main proponents like Husserl, Scheler or Heidegger, who had personal links to the reform movements and associated central elements of their philosophy with them. On a biographical note, first, Heidegger seems to have had the closest connections to both the Jugendbewegung and the catholic reform movements. Both his wife and her colleague, Elisabeth Blochmann, who would become one of Heidegger’s most steady correspondents, were officially affiliated with the movement.56 Moreover, according to Safranski’s biography, Heidegger was himself during his professorship in Marburg a member of the local section of the Jugendbewegung, while his conferences at the movement’s events and his partaking in their activities consistently contributed to his reputation among students.57 Without being officially involved with any of their organizations, Scheler was nonetheless widely seen as one of the principle theoretical promoters of the catholic reform movement before distancing himself from them in 1923. In the introduction of his work, The Eternal in Man (1921), subtitled “On Religious Renewal”, he engages at length with the contemporary surge of the reform movements. While he explicitly associates them with the younger generation and situates them in the aftermath of the Great War, he overtly declares his appreciation for them, considering that we owe them the rediscovery of the religious and moral principle of solidarity,58 which represents an indispensible premise for authentic religious renewal. Scheler also sees the Jugendbewegung in a similar light in several of his writings. Thus, for instance, in an earlier article titled “The Future of Capitalism” (1914), Scheler engages the popular belief that capitalism should not be understood merely as an economic system, but especially as an existential and cultural one. As such, it can, in his view, ultimately only be overcome by transforming the human type that serves as its fundament. According to Scheler, we are already witnessing promising signs of such an attempt to uproot capitalism and it is precisely in this  See Feldes 2015.  Their correspondence also shows to what extent Heidegger shared E. Blochmann’s enthusiasm for the core values of the youth movements. Moreover, the correspondence also contains one of Heidegger’s rare references to another important group of the period, namely the circle around the journal Die Tat, which Heidegger held in obvious consideration and which Kracauer discusses extensively in his essay, “Revolt of the Middle Classes” by pointing precisely at their tendency to radicalize into fascist positions. 57  Safranski 1997, p. 153 f. 58  Scheler 1954, p. 121. 55 56

5  The Reform Movements

155

perspective that he comes to address the reform movements of the younger generation. Thus, he explicitly interprets these movements as an effort to reconfigure contemporary human life in placing it on a different basis than the economical one, which is its fundament under capitalism.59 Finally, Husserl seems to have been least close on a personal level to these movements, although numerous passages in his correspondence attest to the fact that he followed their evolution with great interest. Thus, in a letter from 1922, for instance, he offers his former colleague Thomas Masaryk the following astute description of the historic context in Germany at the time: Here, in Germany, philosophy and science are confronted with an entirely novel situation. Science (and the university) have lost their guiding position amongst a large part of the population […], while mystical movements like steinerianism spread at an incredible speed pretending to be the true science of the ‘human spirit’. Tormented for years, people now ache for redemption, and thus they easily fall prey to occultism or seek salvation in a newer or older religion. In intellectual circles, we can notice a considerable tendency for conversion to Catholicism. Aside from the churches, there are also other religious movements, amongst all social classes, even among the workers. Correspondingly, people expect philosophy to bring them redemption, and not just rigorous science; they are looking for a worldview, which elates them and is capable to bring about an ethical renewal of nations, preparing the way for a super-national community, spread over the entire globe. ‘What good is a strictly theoretical logic and a critique of reason, psychology etc.? These are themselves nothing but specialized sciences!’ This is a widespread belief, which is indeed motivated by the terrible moral and physical situation of the German people today.60

This passage may not reveal much about Husserl’s personal sympathies and interests in the reform movements, on the contrary, it only shows Husserl being worried and concerned. However, it is as such nonetheless telling in a theoretical perspective in that it demonstrates how important these developments were for defining the context of his own later philosophical work. Indeed, in his Crisis-project, Husserl picks up on precisely this earlier diagnosis of the contemporary situation, laid out in the letter to Masaryk, in a description which serves as one of the grounding premises of his entire historic reflection and which bares striking resemblances to Kracauer’s assessments in his own essay “The Crisis of Sciences”.61 In fact, two of  Scheler 1972, p. 391.  Hua Dok III/1, p. 114. 61  Here are two extensive quotes to illustrate this resemblance. In his Crisis-work, Husserl writes: “We make our beginning with a change which set in at the turn of the past century in the general evaluation of the sciences. It concerns not the scientific character of the sciences but rather what they, or what science in general, had meant and could mean for human existence. The exclusiveness with which the total world-view of modern man, in the second half of the nineteenth century, let itself be determined by the positive sciences and be blinded by the ‘prosperity’ they produced, meant an indifferent turning-away from the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity. Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people. The change in public evaluation was unavoidable, especially after the war, and we know that it has gradually become a feeling of hostility among the younger generation. In our vital need – so we are told – this science has nothing to say to us. It excludes in principle precisely the questions which man, given over in our unhappy times to the most portentous upheavals, finds the most burning: questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence.” (Hua VI, p. 3 f; En., p. 5 f.) Similarly, Kracauer 59 60

156

Kracauer: The Birth of Dialectics from Phenomenological Sociology

the key elements which define Husserl’s later philosophical project – namely his emphasis on the ethical implications of the phenomenological foundation of the sciences and his desire to restore science as a guiding force for human existence – can be seen as a belated response to the intellectual climate following the Great War, which found its most acute expression in the reform movements. Thus, one might say that, in Husserl’s view, the reform movements ultimately expressed legitimate needs and expectations, which he believed phenomenology was called to fulfill. Indeed, one of Husserl’s most important essays from this period bears the explicit title “On renewal” and it ultimately seeks to show that the popular idea of moral and religious renewal can only receive its full and legitimate meaning if one conceives it a life reshaped under the ethical guidance of phenomenological evidence.62 Similarly, Scheler also wanted phenomenology to tap into the momentum of the reform movements. On the one hand, he explicitly stressed the main points of agreement between phenomenology and the reform movements, which were, in his view, their common interest for a “living contact with the things themselves” and for “absolute evidence”.63 On the other hand, he tried to push the impetus of these movements further by interpreting them as a mere precondition of an authentic renewal, which the phenomenological project was called to bring about. Thus, according to Scheler, the new ethos of the youth movements was in itself a valuable “prime matter” for the future architects of moral and religious renewal. Although the latter are not plainly identified with the phenomenologists, but rather with the homo religiosus, phenomenology – in its dual form: as an eidetic phenomenology of religious acts and objects in general and as a concrete phenomenology of catholic belief  – was nevertheless supposed to fulfill the second most important task in Scheler’s account, namely that of preparing and stimulating our given society’s receptivity for religious matters.64 It is plain to see why Husserl would protest against this confessional instrumentalisation of phenomenology. In his turn, Heidegger shared a similar reaction as Husserl to Scheler’s aforementioned writings, as he accused the latter in one of his early lecture courses of

writes in his aforementioned essay: “The consequences of this dilemma have become quite palpable: senseless amassing or material on the one hand and unavoidable relativism on the other. These alone suffice to explain the ‘hatred of science’ rampant among the best of today’s academic youth. The members of this younger generation demand concepts that are true to life, a comprehensive overall view of the constructs of intellect/spirit, and above all a response to the ‘what for’ question free of any and all skepticism. They are disappointed that the very sciences concerned with intellectual/spiritual being and activities are unable to satisfy their demands. As a result, the rebellion against the specialization being imposed upon them and against the compulsion of relativistic thinking not infrequently escalates into a passionate protest against these very sciences as such. In the process, however, these young people all too often forget that science simply may not be able to satisfy their demands, and that furthermore the sciences themselves are after all only a partial expression of the total intellectual/spiritual situation in which we find ourselves today.” (Kracauer 1995, p. 213 f.) 62  Hua XXVII, pp. 3–94. 63  Scheler 1972, p. 391. 64  Scheler 1954, p. 123.

5  The Reform Movements

157

transforming phenomenology into a mere tool for catholic propaganda.65 However, his own blend of existentialist philosophy, which he developed throughout the 1920s, could itself easily be seen as nothing but an attempt to philosophically capitalize the energies of the reform movements. Heidegger’s early philosophy was indeed explicitly interpreted along these lines not only in Safranski’s aforementioned biography, but also in several of Günther Anders’ essays, which explicitly derive the very concept of “authenticity” from the activism of the Jugendbewegung and their idea of “living for the sake of living”.66 To be sure, as it stands in Anders’ casual and essayistic phrasing, this interpretation may seem rather questionable. However, it is worth noting that Heidegger himself explicitly referenced the activism of the youth movement in one of his early lectures, which indeed seems to contain the first draft of his opposition between inauthentic and authentic life experience, or intensified life, as he calls it here, in a vocabulary which shows far closer resemblances to that of the Jugendbewegung: Depending on the authenticity of his possible motives, we then obtain the phenomenon of life intensification (respectively the diminishing of its intensity). This phenomenon is not determined by the specific content, sensed in that experience. There are people who lived a lot in different (artistic etc.) “worlds”, but who are nonetheless “empty inside”, because they only reached a ‘superficial’ experience. Today, we see various forms of life intensification becoming more and more foregrounded. Thus, contemporary “activism” is based on a genuine motive, but its form is misguided. The Jugendbewegung has a genuine form, but its goals are not sufficiently foregrounded.67

Now, when interpreted in this broader context, Kracauer himself seems to have been up to a point quite sympathetic with this standard view of the reform movements shared within the phenomenological camp. From a certain moment onwards, however, their respective positions begin drifting further and further apart, just like this was highlighted above with the reception of Kierkegaard, insofar as Kracauer, Benjamin, Adorno and the rest ultimately began articulating a much more critical awareness, which aimed for the very ethos of the reform movements, whereas, on the other side, the phenomenological movement  – whose very designation as a “movement” seemed to draw from that ethos – only persevered in emulating it. That said, it is worth noting that none of the concrete critical objections raised in Kracauer’s early essays strikes the reader as particularly sharp or insightful. Nonetheless, they show, on the one hand, a clear and meaningful change of attitude in regard to the contemporary “intellectual climate,” which would later on benefit Kracauer’s far more profound analysis of the pre-fascist period in From Caligari to Hitler or similarly Adorno’s Jargon of Authenticity, while on the other hand they significantly anticipate at least two of the main objections, raised in later critical theory against phenomenology. Thus, Kracauer first accuses these movements of “escapism”, that is: of taking the surrounding real world, which ultimately motivates the revolt of the reform  GA 59, p. 32.  Anders 2001, p. 196 f. 67  GA 56/57, p. 208. 65 66

158

Kracauer: The Birth of Dialectics from Phenomenological Sociology

movements, far too lightly by considering that their own alternative form of organization and the practices of their own minuscule group can indeed bring about a radical transformation of the given society as well. On the contrary, according to Kracauer, such an approach only insulates the reform movement from reality in building oases, which are still fundamentally determined by their surrounding context both in what concerns the defining structure of their world and the mental structure of their members. This enfeebles the very truths they represent and transforms them into mere ideologies, which ultimately only serve to dissimulate reality rather than contribute to its transformation. To be sure, the phenomenological communities of the time like the Bergzabern circle never actually led to such forms of sectarian segregation. But one might nonetheless argue that the very procedure of “phenomenological reduction” ultimately presupposes, as its methodological precondition, a similar insulation from the reality one brackets and regards only in the mode of “as if”. On the other hand, one might even argue that, in close resemblance to the reform movements, phenomenology has constantly tended to isolate itself in something like its own private discursive oasis precisely by its tendency to stick only to “immediate life experience”. For if this realm of immediate experience is itself, as Kracauer shows, ultimately abstracted from a social world which is today structurally systematized, technologized and theorized through and through, no longer allowing the subject any concrete immediacy, a phenomenology which is set on plainly dissecting subjective experience without taking note of how the availability of that experience may have altered historically can be charged with methodological and terminological escapism. Kracauer thus writes about the utopian communities of the reform movements, which dreamed of changing the world while fleeing into a parallel reality: “for it the rotten reality affirms itself forcefully today, we have no other option, if we want to overcome it, than confronting it and approaching it in its own terms: economic mischiefs pretend economic considerations, and political barbarism should be tackled politically”.68 Implicitly, this remark also calls for a form of theory, which no longer flees into the remote spheres of theological or metaphysical truth, or in that of immediate life experience, but which, on the contrary, confronts reality with the specific technical competencies required by its contemporary form and shape, navigating with polytechnic flexibility between economic, political and philosophical considerations. This is, to be sure, one of the main points wherein early critical theory showed an advantage over traditional philosophy and phenomenology in particular, by denouncing the Aristotelian model of the philosopher who knows everything in general, without having any knowledge of the particular, by clearly showing that there can be no field of “immediate experience” completely remote from cultural, scientific, historic, or technical considerations. As a consequence, a phenomenology, which doesn’t shy away from such insights, would necessarily also have to adjust to an interdisciplinary perspective. Secondly, Kracauer accuses the reform movements of only reacting against contemporary rationalized existence by turning back the clock and returning to various

68

 Werke 5.1, p. 327.

5  The Reform Movements

159

forms of pre-modernity. The latter is instead only represented in an idealized form, which neglects the legitimate rational criticism brought against it in the first place. One can clearly follow this argument in Kracauer’s charges against the contemporary “body culture” movements, which promoted popular hygiene, rhythmic gymnastics, nudism, naturism etc. Thus, the topic is frequently touched upon in his short humoristic articles for the Frankfurter Zeitung, which for instance ironically address the nudist campaigns against the swimming trunks, or comically depict the feverish passion of his contemporaries for gymnastics. These analyses find their most consistent formulation in two of his major essays from 1927: “The Photograph” and “The Mass Ornament”, which – among other things – also briefly sketch out a fundamental criticism of rhythmic gymnastics. In this context, Kracauer opposes the holistic understanding of man, his body, and his relationship to nature, promoted by the naturist movements, to their rationalized and technologized interpretation, as put forth in synchronized cabaret dance, taylorist workplace organization or photography, which reflect nature detached from any human investment – and he finally sides with the latter. For, so goes Kracauer’s argument, if the human body is today primarily apperceived in a clinical or medical perspective as a mere organism that needs to be taken care of inclusively by means of physical exercise without any sacral overtone, just as photography surprises the mere physical nature of man without the halo of human meaning added to it in painting, rhythmical gymnastics and art photography on the contrary strive to transfigure their objects in terms that no longer apply to them: in the case of art photography, by imitating a style drawn from painting for the sake of an elation photography could only obtain by taking its own de-stylized grasp of things to its ultimate consequence; in the case of rhythmic gymnastics, by over-interpreting physical movement through the ideological lenses of a relationship between the human body, the soul and nature, which is in fact contradicted by the subject’s own apprehension of their body today. In what concerns phenomenology, it is clear that the standard distinction between Leib and Körper – that is: the lived body vested with subjective meaningfulness and the body as a mere objective residue – perfectly fits the intentions of the “body culture” movements, even if the latter still use the more common notion of Körper. One can best take note of this affinity, first of all, when considering the pervasive tendency among recent phenomenologists following Merleau-Ponty to set the struggle against the contemporary neglect of the body at the core of the phenomenological project. In that, contemporary phenomenology overlaps in several regards with the nudist manifestos discussed by Kracauer.69 Moreover, the phenomenological conception of the body and those of the body culture movements intersect perhaps even more overtly in the belief that our contemporary experience, marked by technological and industrial rationalization, by fashion, mass culture and social convention, can willfully be reversed at any time by simply returning to an original experience of the self, and of the self’s relationship to others and to nature. And if nudism tries

 See for instance the parallels a contemporary phenomenologist of the body like Hermann Schmitz draws between his phenomenology proper and oriental, naturist practices; cf. Brenner 2009. 69

160

Kracauer: The Birth of Dialectics from Phenomenological Sociology

to practically materialize such a reversion be it only in its secluded enclaves, one might argue that phenomenology also practices its own blend of epistemological nudism by considering that it can at any time, simply performing certain methodological steps, remove the “garb of ideas”70 that usually dresses up the “life-world” and uncover our original experience of it. On the contrary, critical theory no longer allows itself to speak about the human being’s relationship to nature or to its own body without explicitly taking note of the fact that at present the constructed artificial social world has become its second nature.

6 Authenticity According to Adorno, Kracauer’s early existentialism derives directly from his interest in Kierkegaard and finds its most consistent materialization in his early project of a book on the detective novel, a fragment of which is included as a chapter in The Mass Ornament. This existentialism transpire foremost in the vocabulary Kracauer uses to describe what one might call “authentic experience”. In The Detective Novel (1925), this description is still visibly articulated in categories borrowed from Kierkegaard, whom Kracauer quotes approvingly on several occasions. In this context, Kracauer opposes the contemporary experience of emancipated rationality, which he sees as a mere residue, to a total concept of human experience, wherein the self enters into relationship with the “superior spheres”  – this is the euphemism used by Kracauer to designate the individual’s relationship to God in Kierkegaard. Owing to this relationship, the subject’s experiences partake at reality and his knowledge acquires ultimate human validity. In another essay written roughly around the same time, “Travel and Dance” (1925), Kracauer briefly contrasts the “real man,” living both spatially and temporally in a tension between immanence and transcendence – a tension best illustrated for Kracauer, just like for Kierkegaard, by means of analogy with the work of art, which structures its mere anecdotal content by putting it in relationship with a transcendent meaning –, and the human being seen as a mere “wheel” in the machine that is society, which has lost all contact to transcendence, while being completely immersed in the endless and empty time and space of the contemporary world. In taking these rough descriptions as his starting point, Kracauer is primarily interested in showing that some traces of the “superior spheres” are still visible throughout the inferior spheres as well. One can easily see the resemblances to Heidegger here, for instance, where inauthentic existence appears as but a modification of authentic existence, which still attests to the latter’s ontological structure. Similarly, for Kracauer, the inferior spheres can ultimately only be understood in projecting them back against the backdrop of the superior spheres. To be more precise, in Kracauer’s view, the concepts and phenomena of the inferior spheres are fundamentally equivocal insofar as they

70

 Hua VI, p. 51; En., p. 51.

6 Authenticity

161

are, on the one hand, perfectly intelligible in view of their own immanent logic; on the other hand, they also express intentions, which can only be fully understood when they are put in relationship to the superior spheres – and it is precisely this ambiguity that Kracauer wants to unearth both in his Detective Novel (which attempts a theological reading of apparently trivial details in contemporary consumer novels), as well as in his essay on “Travel and Dance” (which applies the same logic in discussing mass tourism and dance parties). Of course, in the meanwhile, such theologically inflected interpretations of everyday trivialities – from the devotion to certain brands to social networking and Internet addiction – have grown banal, by often serving conservative intellectuals to express savvy condescension with regard to the contemporary secular world. Such suspicions can hardly be raised against Kracauer’s early essays. Nonetheless, the slight outmodedness of his reflections presumably comes from his eclectic use of a classical philosophical vocabulary, which predates the conceptual innovations of later existentialisms. His distinction between photography and authentic recollection (in “The Photograph”), for instance, obviously draws from Proust’s theory of an “involuntary memory,” which is deemed capable of accessing recollections able to structure the entire lived past. Thus, his account arrives at entirely different perspectives than Heidegger, who similarly reinterprets the authentic relationship to the past only following Husserl’s account of retention. Moreover, Kracauer’s outmodedness perhaps also comes from the fact that he still naively treats authentic experience in its original sacral categories, which later existentialisms will mask better by translating Kierkegaard into the profane language of pure immanence.71 Aside from such terminological discrepancies, and in spite of everything that otherwise separates their theoretical programs, Kracauer and Heidegger or Jaspers intersect overtly in how they conceive the very structure of the relationship between authentic and inauthentic or everyday experience. Thus, Walter Benjamin’s brief observation, in his second essay on Baudelaire (1940), that “[s]ince the end of the nineteenth century, philosophy has made a series of attempts to grasp ‘true’ experience, as opposed to the kind that manifests itself in the standardized, denatured life of the civilized masses”,72 retrospectively points at a much further reaching tendency than indicated in the essay. To be more precise, Benjamin only explicitly refers to vitalist philosophers like Bergson and Simmel, but his remark can easily be related not only to Heidegger or Jaspers as well, whom Benjamin indeed interprets along the same lines elsewhere, but also to Kracauer or even himself, as far as his early writings inspired by Lukács go. However, despite this important point of intersection between Kracauer and Benjamin, and Bergson, Simmel, Heidegger or Jaspers, there is at least one decisive difference between them, which probably best comes to view when comparing Kracauer’s analysis of boredom, in his text from

 The specific difficulties of secularizing Kierkegaard’s theological conceptions in existentialism was discussed extensively not only by Adorno, but already by Jaspers and Rudolf Bultmann. 72  GS 1, p. 608; En., p. 314. 71

162

Kracauer: The Birth of Dialectics from Phenomenological Sociology

1924 (“Boredom”) to the famous phenomenology of boredom sketched out by Heidegger in his 1929/1930 lecture, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. In his lecture course, Heidegger distinguishes two superficial forms of boredom (one of which is also briefly indicated as the grounding motivation for entertainment) from what he terms “profound boredom”. The latter is interpreted, much like anxiety in Being and Time, as the existential path to authentic experience.73 Similarly, Kracauer also distinguishes between (a) a superficial form of boredom, (b) entertainment as organized by advertising, cinema and radio in the attempt to fight superficial boredom, and (c) profound boredom. In this context, he briefly also plays with the idea of vesting profound boredom with the radical existential function of reconfiguring human experience in its entirety on a more authentic basis. In an interesting twist, however, he finally rejects this idea, which he ultimately only considers as a mere fleeting mirage born out of boredom, and concludes his essay on a doubtful note. This may seem a marginal point in case, but it nonetheless attests to a relevant theoretical difference. For, if Kracauer indeed also contrasts authentic experience to the contemporary form of rationalized mass existence – as does Benjamin himself with his opposition of Erfahrung and Erlebnis  – they both ultimately no longer consider that these substantial modes of experience, which originated in a specific historic context, can still be fully restored today. On the contrary, with the same optimism as the reform movements, later supporters of existentialist motifs like Heidegger or Jaspers will disregard the historic conditionalities of authentic experience in posting it instead as a moral objective, which can be realized at once by means of sheer “resoluteness”, or by some idealized version of emotional shock (anxiety, terror, extreme boredom). When read in this light, Kracauer’s essay on boredom ultimately attests to a growing skepticism towards the accessibility of anything like authentic experience for the individual living under the given circumstances of the contemporary erosion of experience, an idea that will also be picked up by Adorno in his famous aphorism: “There is no right life in the wrong one”.74 Profound boredom is in any case not capable of eliciting such a radical change. Instead, in Kracauer’s view – whose critical reference here is the “existential intensity” of the reform movements, rather than its abstract distillates in existentialist philosophy –, such extreme affects can only offer the fleeting illusion of emotional fulfillment in the guise of emotions that feed precisely on its lacking, as are boredom, anxiety or desperation.

73 74

 GA 29/30, p. 222 f.  GS IV, p. 19; En., p. 39.

7 Dialectics

163

7 Dialectics Walter Benjamin’s One Way Street, Adorno’s Jargon of Authenticity and Kracauer’s The Mass Ornament are three books that ultimately form a constellation. Published in 1963, the latter is in certain regard simultaneous to both the former two, despite the time lag of almost 40 years between them. Kracauer’s essays were, on the one hand, written at the same time as the One Way Street (1920–1926). On the other hand, the collection of essays was published as a volume during the time Adorno was preparing for print his Jargon of Authenticity (1963), a book that also focuses mostly on literary phenomena in pre-fascist Germany. Moreover, given that each of the aforementioned books also involves a more or less overt criticism of the preceding one – The Mass Ornament contains Kracauer’s critical review of the One Way Street, while the Jargon of Authenticity is explicitly conceived as a response to one of the essays in The Mass Ornament –, these mutual echoes are certainly more than just a strain of puzzling coincidences. If, according to Adorno’s assessment from 1964, “[a]lmost all the many reviews he wrote during his lifetime, some of which are quite biting, represent Kracauer’s breaks with aspects of himself,”75 this observation certainly applies for his review of Benjamin’s two works from 1926: The Origin of the German Tragic Drama and One Way Street. From the onset, Kracauer reads both works in view of the epistemo-­ critical prologue of The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, with its striking phenomenological undertone, as parallel attempts to extract from the contingencies of the historic material the dialectics of the “essentialities” (Wesenheiten), which determine them. In the case of the Origin of the German Tragic Drama, this approach is applied retrospectively on historic phenomena of the past, which are rendered transparent in regard to their essentialities precisely by their demise. In Kracauer’s view, such an approach was able from the onset to purge away all that pertains merely to the sphere of “superficial life”. This is instead not the case with the One Way Street. In applying a similar approach to the present, which is bound to lack the same transparency of its essentialities, the results are ultimately far less convincing. Interestingly, in his effort to pinpoint the main differences between Benjamin’s two aforementioned works, Kracauer arrives at motives that he will later on himself use overtly in his essay “The Photograph” in order to set apart recollection and painting from photography. While the objects of the former gain in transparency with their representation, the latter works with an object that shares the opacity of actual reality. As a consequence, Benjamin’s attempt to apply the methodological tools of his Origin of the German Tragic Drama to the present day life-­ world in his One Way Street can only lead to something like “art photography”: an endeavor which ultimately lacks a firm grip on reality and which Kracauer deems as merely “aesthetical” in precisely the same Kierkegaardian acceptation of the term that he will also employ in his criticism of Buber and Rosenzweig’s translation of the Bible. Thus, one might say, Kracauer indeed seems, when discussing Benjamin’s 75

 GS XI, p. 395; En., p. 64.

164

Kracauer: The Birth of Dialectics from Phenomenological Sociology

works, to generally question the legitimacy of a plainly “phenomenological” approach to the contemporary life-world, by contrasting it – as one is lead to understand – with an approach more akin to his own, which closely resembles the practices of photo-montage in its capacity to extract meaning from objects which are not immediately transparent in view of their “essentialities”. In what concerns Benjamin himself, this criticism is of course not entirely cogent be it only because it may well be that Benjamin does not engage in the type of philosophical reportage envisioned by Kracauer following the example of photographic montage, but his approach in the One Way Street nevertheless doesn’t entirely loose touch with the contemporary life-world of immediate experience. In fact, according to his own account, Benjamin was more inspired when writing it by contemporary street advertising, rather then by the contorted methodology of his Baroque-book. Moreover, in the final paragraphs, Kracauer’s review becomes even more unfair in claiming that Benjamin “neither records the impressions of any form of that immediacy nor ever gets involved with the dominant abstract thinking.”76 Instead, if the two objections implied in this passage – (1) that Benjamin avoids confronting the concrete phenomena of contemporary reality and (2) that he doesn’t try to account for its dominant intellectual paradigm  – are not really accurate with regard to Benjamin, they are nevertheless relevant, if we follow Adorno’s aforementioned comment, as indices for the evolution of Kracauer’s own thought. 1. Among the two, the first objection is for sure the most disconcerting. For, if we consider the fact that most of Kracauer’s own writings analyzing concrete details of the contemporary life-world engage in a sort of philosophical “street journalism” (which Benjamin saw as the social basis of flânerie77) and take the everyday reality of the metropolitan street as their main field of research – by devoting minute attention to how a passerby perceives words heard on the street, to the meaning of traffic lights (recently introduced in Berlin), to cigarette advertisments on pillars, to the new professions in street commerce (like the paid ­costumer or the newspaper shouter), or to the way cab drivers greet the traffic police –, these essays seem so rich in correspondences with Benjamin’s own emphasis on contemporary street experience in the One Way Street (a book itself named after a recently introduced traffic sign) that the objections is difficult to comprehend. But while such contemporary phenomena are indeed frequently referenced in Benjamin’s aphorisms, they are indeed only rarely analyzed for their own sake. Instead, Benjamin seems, at least according to Kracauer’s interpretation, to prefer translating such phenomena into mere allegories, not unlike Kracauer himself in his earliest writings, when interpreting the objects of the “inferior spheres” (like the hotel lobby or contemporary tourism) as mere indices of the “superior spheres”: the sacred hidden in the profane. Instead, if Kracauer is perhaps entitled to polemicize against a merely symbolic reading of such contemporary phenomena, his essays ultimately meet with Benjamin in their con76 77

 Kracauer 1995, p. 264.  See GS V, p. 559.

7 Dialectics

165

stant effort to overcome this interpretive schema and establish a novel and more insightful relationship to the contemporary life-world. This latter effort finds its expression in several of Benjamin’s aphorisms, which favor the mercantile gaze of advertising against traditional “critique”, the cinema against classical painting, or amusement parks against high-brow art and theatre, just as Kracauer ­himself will ultimately come to defend photography in front of traditional painting, or mass culture phenomena like vaudeville theatres or stadiums shows to intellectually pretentious drama. 2. Similarly, Kracauer’s second objection to Benjamin also proves revelatory with regard to his own position. If Kracauer’s review thus accuses Benjamin of insufficiently engaging with the intellectual paradigm that primarily determines our contemporary life-world – which is, in his view, “abstract rationality” –, it is less important to see whether this is rightfully imputed to Benjamin, as it is to ­recognize that Kracauer’s analyses of abstract rationality in essays like “The Mass Ornament,” written around the time of his criticism of Benjamin’s work, specifically part ways with his earlier conceptions of the relationship between abstract and concrete thinking in at least three regards. (a) First of all, Kracauer no longer identifies abstract rationality, as he did earlier, with an idealist philosophy that fails to get hold of concrete reality with its “widemeshed general concepts,” but instead he identifies it, more specifically, with “capitalist thinking,” that is: rationality put in the service of sheer efficiency. Thus, Kracauer now generally regards capitalism as the leading intellectual paradigm, which presently determines concrete reality in all its various aspects. It defines a specific form of reasoning, which he designates as “abstract” primarily because its formal equivalences and directives evacuate the entire spectrum of human content. (b) Nonetheless – and this is the second main point of his criticism – Kracauer is careful to avoid too hastily identifying his critique of capitalist thinking with the criticism of rationality promoted by the reform movements, in explicitly preferring capitalist rationalization over the latter’s regressive plea for an irrational “return to nature”.78 Finally, (c) Kracauer now tries to also account for the positive counterpart of abstract thinking – namely: “concrete thinking” – by sharply delineating it from the “concreteness” pursued in contemporary vitalist or existentialist philosophy, as well as from his own earlier “phenomenological” considerations. This pseudo-concreteness, which is now explicitly termed as “mythological” or “regressive”, is opposed by Kracauer to a thinking that no longer simply rejects abstraction, but instead tries to render it rich with content,

 Kracauer 1995, p. 81: “[…] this does not mean that capitalist thinking should cultivate man as a historically produced form such that it ought to allow him to go unchallenged as a personality and should satisfy the demands made by his nature. The adherents of this position reproach capitalism’s rationalism for raping man, and yearn for the return of a community that would be capable of preserving the allegedly human element much better than capitalism. Leaving aside the stultifying effect of such regressive stances, they fail to grasp capitalism’s core defect: it rationalizes not too much but rather too little.” 78

166

Kracauer: The Birth of Dialectics from Phenomenological Sociology

while he is now visibly uncomfortable with even terming such an approach as “concrete” proper. To be sure, Kracauer is not very specific when outlining the methodology underlying this approach and his conceptual distinctions here are quite hazy. One would perhaps be inclined to term his approach as “dialectical,” but Kracauer himself doesn’t use the term and his essays only partially fit the precise meaning it will acquire with the later development of critical theory. Regardless of such differences, however, Kracauer certainly intersects with Adorno’s later blend of dialectics – and this is the fourth feature that sets his writings of the late 1920s apart from his earlier reflections – in that (d) his criticism of abstract thinking is now no longer rooted in the idea of “transcendental homelessness”, as in his first essays, but instead it primarily focuses on the intricate process of man’s emancipation from nature. Thus, Kracauer now no longer sees the existential cleavage between the subject and the object as a mere deficiency, which characterizes an “age devoid of meaning”, but on the contrary he now interprets it as the unavoidable result of man’s progressive mastery over nature. As a consequence, abstract thinking tends to become a positive moment in man’s effort to emancipate from nature and from a mythical-symbolical thinking, which originates in his enslavement to nature. In a second step, however, this itself becomes problematic, since the apparent progress in rationality tends to revert into a regress, such that abstract rationality, in its effort to blindly render the world more and more useful for its own goals, relapses into a state of nature, which negates reason. It is plain to see that Kracauer’s description of these ambivalences in the process of emancipation from nature already anticipates in nuce several of the central points from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectics of Enlightment:79 the self-­ contradictory process of enlightenment, which constantly relapses under the spell of nature; the understanding of the “culture industry”; the idea that subjecting nature to an autocratic subject ultimately leads to strengthening the blind objectivity of nature80 etc. All of this of course sounds far more simplistic here than in Horkheimer and Adorno’s analyses – just as Kracauer’s Kierkegaardian blend of existentialism sounds more naïve then Heidegger and Jasper’s later versions –, but the importance of Kracauer’s early reflections relies primarily in its function as a sort of missing link between existentialist phenomenology, on the one hand, and the dialectics of the Frankfurt school, on the other. Moreover, several of his early essays like the one devoted to Kafka or the one on boredom – where we frequently find striking reflections like the following: “[t]he measures provoked by existential fear are themselves a threat to existence”81 – seem to derive key insights of later critical theory directly from the premises of phenomenological existentialism. Given this strange agglutination of existentialist and critical motives in Kracauer’s early essays, the almost simultaneous publication of The Mass Ornament (1963) and The Jargon of Authenticity (1964) is bound to stir tensions. While Adorno  See for this also Honneth 2014.  Horkheimer and Adorno 2003, p. 16. 81  Kracauer 1995, p. 268. 79 80

7 Dialectics

167

makes no direct reference to Kracauer in his essay, the implicit connections are numerous. Indeed the very first paragraph of the essay contains a veiled reference to Kracauer, as Adorno himself discloses in their correspondence. Evoking a friend who in the 1920s felt close to the religious reform movements, but was ultimately rejected because he “hesitated before Kierkegaard’s leap”,82 Adorno presumably hints at Kracauer’s early essay “Those who wait” (1922), which makes an inventory of the religious reform movements in Germany at the time, while choosing not to adhere to any one of them, but rather “wait”. Further on, in a letter dated July 1963, Adorno writes to Kracauer pointing at the convergence between The Jargon of Authenticity and The Mass Ornament: “My essay will probably evoke memories to you just as your work did with me.”.83 To be sure, the two overlap not just in that they ultimately ground in an assessment of the same historic period, but instead Adorno explicitly regards Kracauer’s essay from 1926, “The Bible in German”, included in The Mass Ornament, an essay that ridicules the linguistic idiosyncrasies of Rosenzweig and Buber’s translation of the Bible, as one of the primary sources of inspiration for his Jargon of Authenticity. On the other hand, however, Kracauer’s essays are not just a precursor to Adorno’s criticism in the Jargon of Authenticity, but instead they are also part of what is criticized therein. Thus, one can readily find in them most of the stylistic items of the existentialist jargon Adorno deconstructs in his essay, as is the case with the central notion of Bindung, which Kracauer still uses straightforwardly, the concept of the “total man”, or even that of “authenticity” itself, not to speak of the “real man”, which turns a mere reinforcing adverb into a real predicate just as Adorno noted with regard to “authentic existence” in Heidegger. Moreover, even the key motives, which we may be tempted to identify in Kracauer as anticipations of later critical analyses like the aforementioned dialectics between rationalism and irrationality, are not actually conceived here in a dialectical perspective at all. Instead Kracauer rather tends to address them in Kierkegaardian terms like “equivocity”, “dilemma” or “alternative”  – or even more overtly, in “The Photograph”, as a “wager” – by ambiguously connecting critical and existentialist impulses. In his letter to Kracauer, Adorno ultimately only draws a brief critical comparison between The Jargon of Authenticity and “The Bible in German”. He suggests that, while Kracauer duly noted the same linguistic phenomenon Adorno himself also came to address in the Jargon of Authenticity, he was still unable to capture the said phenomenon in its full scope and thus unearth the common intellectual ground of contemporary existentialism and the reform movements in pre-fascist Germany. This may be true. However, and this was my main intention in the present chapter, a closer look at Kracauer’s early essays may also help us understand how that insight itself gradually grew out of the very same intellectual landscape it came to critically diagnose.

82 83

 Adorno 1973, p. 3.  Adorno and Kracauer 2008, p. 602.

168

Kracauer: The Birth of Dialectics from Phenomenological Sociology

References Adorno, Th.W. and Kracauer, S. 2008. Briefwechsel 1923–1966. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Th.W. 1992. Notes to Literature. English Translation by S.W.  Nicholsen. New  York: Columbia University Press. Adorno, Th.W. 1973. The Jargon of Authenticity. English Translation by K. Tarnowski and F. Will. Evanston: NU Press. Adorno, Th.W. 2003a. Die Aktualität der Philosophie. In Philosophische Frühschriften. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2003, p. 325–344. Adorno, Th.W. 2003b. Minima moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. English translation by E.F.N. Jephcott. 2006. Minima moralia: Reflections on a damaged life. London, England; New York, NY: Verso. Anders, G. 2001. Über Heidegger. München: Beck. Benjamin, W. 1987. Briefe an Siegfried Kracauer. Mit vier Briefen von Siegfried Kracauer an Walter Benjamin. Marbach: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft. Benjamin, W. 1991a. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. I–VII. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp (cited as GS I-VII). Benjamin, W. 1991b. Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire. In GS I, pp 607–655. English Translation by H.  Zohn. 1968. On Some Motifs in Baudelaire. In Illuminations. New  York: Shocken, pp. 155–200. Benjamin, W. 1991c. Das Passagen-Werk. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp (cited as GS V). English Translation by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin: The Arcades Project. Cambridge MS: Harvard University Press, 2002. Bratu Hansen, M. 2012. Cinema and Experience. Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brenner, A. 2009. Schmitz, Hermann: Die Neue Phänomenologie, In Information Philosophie: http://www.information-­philosophie.de/?a=1&t=2843&n=2&y=4&c=83 (accessed 13.12.2020). Buchholz, K.; Wolbert, K.; Latocha, R. & Peckmann, H. (eds.). 2001. Die Lebensreform: Entwürfe zur Neugestaltung von Leben und Kunst um 1900. Ludwigsburg: Hausser. De Warren, N. 2017. Quand l’esprit sacrifie sa raison. Eucken et la Kriegsphilosophie. In: Éthique, politique, religions. Les transformations du concept de guerre (1910–1930). N° 10/1, pp. 29–48. Damböck, Ch; Sandner, G. & Werner, M.G. (eds.). 2022. Logischer Empirismus, Lebensreform und die deutsche Jugendbewegung. Dordrecht: Springer. Dragomir, A. 2017. The World We Live In. English translation by J.C. Brown. Dordrecht: Springer. Fahrenbach, H. 1983. Kierkegaards untergründige Wirkungsgeschichte (Zur Kierkegaardrezeption bei Wittgenstein, Bloch und Marcuse). In Die Rezeption Søren Kierkegaards in der deutschen und dänischen Philosophie und Theologie. Kopenhagen/München: Fink, pp. 30–69. Feldes, J. 2015. Das Phänomenologenheim. Der Bergzaberner Kreis im Kontext der frühen phänomenologischen Bewegung. Nordhausen: Bautz. Ferencz-Flatz, Ch. 2018. Das Experiment bei Husserl. In Philosophisches Jahrbuch 125/2, pp. 170–198. Heidegger, M. 1993a. Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (WS 1919/1920). Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann (cited as GA 58). Heidegger, M. 1993b. Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks. Theorie der philosophischen Begriffsbildung. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann (cited as GA 59). Heidegger, M. 1999. Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann (cited as GA 56/57). Heidegger, M. 2004. Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt – Endlichkeit – Einsamkeit. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann (cited as GA 29/30). Hering, J. 1921. Bemerkungen über das Wesen, die Wesenheit und die Idee. In Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung. Nr. 4, pp. 495–543.

References

169

Honneth, A. 2014. Der destruktive Realist. Zum sozialphilosophischen Erbe Siegfried Kracauers. In Vivisektionen eines Zeitalters. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 120–142. Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, Th.W. 2003. Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. English translation by G. Noeri. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Husserl, E. (1976): Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1976 (cited as Hua VI). English Translation by D. Carr. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston: NU Press. Husserl, E. 1977. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff (cited as Hua III/1). English translation by F. Karsten. 1983. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology.. The Hague: Nijhoff. Husserl, E. 1989. Fünf Aufsätze über Erneuerung. In Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937). Dordrecht: Kluwer (cited as Hua XXVII), pp. 3–94. Husserl, E. 1994. Briefwechsel, vol. 1 (Die Brentanoschule). The Hague: Kluwer (cited as Hua Dok III/1). Kerbs, D. & Reulecke, J. (eds.). 1998. Handbuch der deutschen Reformbewegungen: 1880–1933. Wuppertal: Hammer. Koch, G. 1996. Kracauer zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius. Kracauer, S. 2004–2012. Werke. Vol. 1–9. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp (cited as Werke 1-9). Kracauer, S. 1995. The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays. English translation by Th.Y.  Levin. Cambridge Ms.: Harvard University Press. Kracauer, S. 1998. The Salaried Masses. Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany. English translation by Q. Hore. London/New York: Verso. Kracauer, S. 2004. From Caligari to Hitler. A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kracauer, S. 2006. Soziologie als Wissenschaft. Eine erkenntnistheoretische Untersuchung. Werke. Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Kracauer, S. 2013. Ginster. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Marcuse, H. 1978. Über konkrete Philosophie (1929). In Schriften. Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 385–406. Safranski, R. 1997. Ein Meister aus Deutschland. Heidegger und seine Zeit. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Scheler, M. 1954. Vom Ewigen im Menschen. Bern: Francke. Scheler, M. 1972. Die Zukunft des Kapitalismus. In Vom Umsturz der Werte. Bern: Francke. Scheler, M. 2014. Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik. Hamburg: Meiner. Schlüpmann, H. 1987. Phenomenology of Film: On Siegfried Kracauer’s Writings of the 1920s. In New German Critique 40, pp. 97–114. Schütz, A. 2004. Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt. Eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie. Konstanz: UVK. Simmel, G. 1992. Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Simmel, G. 2008. Briefe 1912–1918. Jugendbriefe. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Theunissen, M. & Greve, W. 1979. Kierkegaards Werk und Wirkung. In Materialien zur Philosophie Søren Kierkegaards. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Sancho Panza and the Dialectics of Historic Film

1 Theory of Film Whoever pays close attention to the main questions that shape Kracauer’s engagement with phenomenology throughout his early writings, will be surprised to discover the extent to which these questions also determine his later treatment of cinema and especially his Theory of Film. This becomes obvious already when considering the foreword of the latter work, which defines its intentions in ostensive continuity with the well-known phenomenological project of “material ontologies”. Just as Scheler’s early book from 1916, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik, opposed his own material ethics of valuing to Kant’s understanding of ethics as a mere formal discipline, Kracauer’s Theory of Film aims for a “material aesthetics [of film], not a formal one”.1 Of course, this is not understood in an entirely rigorous phenomenological acceptation, as an attempt to bluntly derive the material properties of the cinematographic medium a priorily. But, as amply shown in the previous chapter, Kracauer had already demonstrated in his early book Sociology as Science, that a “material ontology” in this narrow acceptation would be outright impossible unless it at least tacitly involved concrete acquaintance with the empirical material. On the other hand, the entire methodological gist of Kracauer’s Theory of Film resides in its intention to arrive at those essential features of the medium, which would have been the object of a purely phenomenological approach, in drawing a posteriorily from the entire history of cinema. This methodological scope is visible both from Kracauer’s persistent attempts to set his endeavor apart from an inductive treatment of the subject matter, which only dwells on the sheer quantity of cases offered as illustration, and it is also visible from the scarcity of his own examples. Indeed, Kracauer claims that, when looking for the essential features of the cinema, the purpose of setting aside its “inessential ingredients” is  Kracauer 1960, p. IX.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Ferencz-Flatz, Critical Theory and Phenomenology, Contributions to Phenomenology 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27615-6_10

171

172

Sancho Panza and the Dialectics of Historic Film

best served when one focuses primarily on a few selected early films, rather than by engaging numerous contemporary ones. But one doesn’t even have to delve into lengthy speculations to find concrete proof of how Kracauer’s theory of film evolved out of the tribulations of his early relationship with phenomenology. This is spelled out explicitly in a letter Kracauer wrote to Erwin Panofsky describing an early draft of his book as follows: “The great omission of phenomenology is to have forgotten, over their atemporal ‘essentialities’ their historic quality. On the other hand, the historian is unable to arrive at the systematic shaping of the essentials, which are necessary in my case. Thus, I am forced, to express this in brief, to interfuse the historical approach with the phenomenological one”.2 As shown in the previous chapter, Kracauer’s early reflections on sociology, as well as his discussions of Simmel and Scheler, ultimately made the case for an empirically flexible, eclectic version of phenomenology. Moreover, these methodological concerns, which occasionally shine through in the later published version of the Theory of film as well, are explicitly highlighted throughout the first draft of the work, known as the Marseille sketchbooks. Here, the concept of intentionality plays a central part. Thus, the core argument of Kracauer’s Theory of film – according to which the filmic medium has an essential propensity for physical reality, while its aesthetic success depends on its capacity to harmonize its two defining tendencies: that of documentarily capturing the real and that of aesthetically shaping or articulating it – is already present in the Marseille sketchbooks. In difference to his later work, however, the opposition is here still framed by contrasting “intentional construction,” on the one hand, that is: the meaning induced into the material by the subject, to the pure givens of the material, on the other hand, which are still unintentional, lack meaning and defy a clear cut epistemic apprehension in claiming to be registered by means of sheer bodily reactivity instead. Thus, the Marseille sketchbooks arrive at the following poignant characterization of the cinematic medium: “By the persistence with which film draws attention to the material, to mere being, it might be called the Sancho Panza, which lays bare the donquijotteries of purely intentional construction. If film is indeed film, it has the task of confronting intention with reality, and eventually even unveil the former.”3 In other words: the criticism, raised in Kracauer’s early works against phenomenology, is also a defining feature of the cinematic medium as such.

2 Adorno Among Kracauer’s critics, it was presumably Adorno who best saw the in depth affinities connecting his theory of film with his early engagement with phenomenology. Without ever explicitly mentioning this point, his criticism of Kracauer’s

 Kracauer and Panofsky 1996, p. 55  Werke 3, p. 534.

2 3

2 Adorno

173

film-­book nonetheless overtly follows similar arguments as his consistent critical dealings with phenomenology. Thus, according to Adorno’s account, phenomenology first established itself on the German philosophical scene as an Ausbruchsversuch, a tentative escape from idealism. This was from the onset a paradoxical endeavor, for, in Adorno’s view, Husserl “rebel[ed] against idealist thinking while attempting to break through the walls of idealism with purely idealist instruments, namely, by an exclusive analysis of the structure of thought and of consciousness.”4 According to Adorno, this project culminated in the conception of “material ontologies”, which were meant to overcome the sheer formalism of idealist thinking by granting a priori access to concrete material determinations. Instead, this project was bound to fail and its failure is, in Adorno’s view, epitomized by the latest evolutions of the phenomenological movement itself and most notably by Heidegger, who tacitly performed a covert return to formalism: “ontology is repentant, but returns to formalism ashamed when it elaborates a ritual of the pure concept which denies that it is one.”5 It is precisely this set of arguments that Adorno also picks up in his critique of Kracauer’s film theory. Thus, Adorno’s main charge here  – which he spells out both in his letters to Kracauer and in his later essay “Transparencies on Film” – is that one cannot draw essential aesthetic claims about film from its sheer technological features, as Kracauer wants, because both its technology and its aesthetic content are far too dependent on economical and social constraints. In Adorno’s view, the aesthetic features of film can not be set apart from its functioning as an industry and as a business. While nonetheless attempting to outline the aesthetics of the cinematic medium in abstracting from its sociology, Kracauer’s endeavor ultimately relapses into the same sort of formalist aesthetics it first sets out against. In this context, Adorno explicitly associates Kracauer’s realist film aesthetics with the Jugendstil: Kracauer ironically plays with the resolve of his earliest youth to celebrate film as the discoverer of the beauties of daily life: such a program, however, was a program of Jugendstil just as all those films which attempt to let wandering clouds and murky ponds speak for themselves are relics of Jugendstil.6

Significantly, the same comparison is frequently brought up by Adorno in his criticism of phenomenology as well, both when discussing Husserl’s notion of essences in comparison to the ethereal ornaments in Jugendstil, as well as when tackling his use of fantasy or the peculiarities of his language.7 While, in Kracauer’s view, “realistic” cinema performs the same balancing act between concrete reality and intention that phenomenology should also try to negotiate in its own field, Adorno’s criticism ultimately rejects both as equally hopeless endeavors. To be more precise, the problem is, in Adorno’s view, not just that Kracauer approaches film in a markedly phenomenological perspective. That this  GS 20/1, p. 133.  Adorno 2013, p. 36. 6  Adorno 1981/82, p. 202. 7  See for instance Adorno 2013, p. 90. 4 5

174

Sancho Panza and the Dialectics of Historic Film

latter is indeed the case could be easily shown, for instance, by following his central intention in the Marseille sketchbooks of defining the filmic medium via a description of the “filmic subject,” in its contrast to the theatric subject. But this is ultimately a perspective that Kracauer shares with Adorno himself, who concludes one of his famous early essays on jazz with an analysis of what he explicitly terms “the jazz subject,”8 identified with the eccentric. Instead, the problem for Adorno is rather that, when understood in Kracauer’s terms, the filmic medium ultimately faces the very same difficulties as the phenomenological project itself, despite all of Kracauer’s moderate adjustments: they both only amount to an illusionary escape from the sphere of pure immanence and intentionality.

3 History In one of the most piercing passages of his essay on Kracauer, Adorno writes: [Kracauer] renounced the task that his awareness of the nonidentity of the thing and its concept led him to the edge of: the task of extrapolating the idea from something refractory to it, extrapolating the general from the extreme of particularity. Dialectical thought never suited his temperament. He contented himself with the precise specification of the particular for use as an example of general matters. He hardly felt a need for strict mediation within the thing itself, the need to demonstrate the essential within the innermost core of particularity. In this he held, conservatively, to subsumptive logic. He would have dismissed the idea of an intellectual splitting of the atom, an irrevocable break with phenomena, as speculative, and would have stubbornly taken Sancho Panza’s side.9

Don Quijotte and Sancho Panza, the two main characters of Cervantes’ novel, illustrate an obvious contrast of typologies: on the one hand, the absolute idealist hopelessly fighting windmills, on the other hand, the commonsensical realist, with his earthy wit as his helper. A reader familiarized with Adorno’s work on Husserl  – whom he also explicitly associates with Sancho Panza in a manuscript notation10 – will immediately see what this argument implies. Summarized in brief, Adorno’s main charge against Husserl’s eidetics is that, while his phenomenology first saw its key procedure of categorial intuition as a tool meant to break with traditional generalization by allowing for a direct access to general structures on the grounds of singular individual cases, Husserl’s later philosophy basically recanted this ambition. Thus, in Adorno’s view, Husserl’s late work returns to a more conventional understanding of the subsumptive relationship between the general and the individual, insofar as it tacitly both reintroduces a comparative procedure of generalization

 Adorno 1989/90, p. 66.  Adorno 1992, p. 63. 10  “Held against the Don Quijotte of panlogism, Husserl is Sancho Panza.” Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt a. Main, Ts 2959 ff. The point of this is quite obvious as Adorno basically sees Husserl serving the cause of idealism (that is: helping Don Quijotte) with the tools of empirical science (that is: the realism of Sancho Panza). 8 9

3 History

175

(with eidetic variation) instead of the direct intuition of the general within the individual, while at the same time it reduces the individual to a mere “example” (that is: a mere exemplary instantiation of the general).11 When considering this particular aspect of his criticism of Husserl, Adorno’s comment on Kracauer can be read as an implicit acknowledgement of his close proximity to phenomenology. Kracauer read Adorno’s essay in the fall of 1964 and explicitly rejected his aforementioned comment in a letter from the 3rd of November. In his response, Kracauer fails to see how he could have neglected the relationship between individual experience and phenomenological generality, given that the effort of mediating between the two had been one of his core preoccupation throughout his entire work: it already played an important part in his first book, Sociology as Science; it was also at the center of his argument in The Salaried Masses as well as in his Theory of Film, while his final book, History. The Last Things before the Lasts, was supposed to culminate in an attempt to give a definitive solution to that precise dilemma. This latter solution can be found in the final chapter of the book, titled “The Anteroom”. While it doesn’t offer any entirely novel insights, it can be read as an interesting addition to Kracauer’s reflections in Sociology as Science, taking history instead of sociology as its object. Somewhat more precisely perhaps than in Sociology as Science, Kracauer here insists on the disparity between a “top down” approach, which characterizes a philosophy of history seeking to deduce its concrete details from an abstract understanding of the historic process as a whole, and a “bottom up” approach, which seeks to obtain universal insights by taking the empirical details of history as its point of departure. Just as in Sociology as Science, the two approaches fail to overlap, insofar as, on the one hand, the abstract deduction of history proves illusionary, while, on the other hand, Kracauer is not prepared to renounce generality entirely either in favor of a sheer positivist approach. Thus, the historian should in his view, just like the sociologist in his early work, take the individual case as his point of departure and engage it in multiple transversal connections, i.e. perform an “eidetic variation” of sorts, in order to thus unearth its typical structure and its possible generality. In brief, Kracauer interprets history as a discipline, which should be stimulated by philosophical generality, while nonetheless refusing its full-blown conversion to a philosophy of history by resting faithful to the empirically individual. The chapter concludes with a new reference to Sancho Panza, whose “utopia” Kracauer now opposes to that of Don Quijotte: a utopia of the in-between – between the generality of concepts and the numeric individuality of empirical science – usually scorned by both the philosopher and the positivist scientist.12 It is doubtful that Adorno would have been impressed by this argument. Kracauer himself seems to only anticipate the latter’s disagreement when conceding, in the final paragraph of his work, that his position ultimately comes down to a mere

 For a more detailed account of these points, see chapter “Eidetic Intuition and Physiognomic Interpretation” in the present book. 12  Kracauer 1994, p. 217. 11

176

Sancho Panza and the Dialectics of Historic Film

compromise. Its most interesting aspect, however, resides in Kracauer’s attempt to think through the analogy between, on the one hand, his plea for conceiving the human sciences in general as sciences of the in-between in close connection to his assessment of phenomenology and, on the other hand, his own earlier reflections on the cinema in Theory of Film: In this treatise, I consider it my task to do for history what I have done for the photographic media in my Theory of Film: to bring out and characterize the peculiar nature of an intermediary area which has not yet been fully recognized and valued as such. This implies that, from the angle of philosophy or art, we, so to speak, stop in the anteroom when coming to terms with history on its own grounds. But what is the significance of our stay in the anteroom? Had we not better directly tackle the last things instead of idly focusing on the last before the last? Evidently, my task is not completed unless I speculate on the meaning of anteroom insight. I have pointed out in Theory of Film that the photographic media help us to overcome our abstractness by familiarizing us, for the first time as it were, with “this Earth which is our habitat” (Gabriel Marcel). They help us to think through things, not above them. Otherwise expressed, the photographic media make it much easier for us to incorporate the transient phenomena of the outer world, thereby redeeming them from oblivion. Something of this kind will also have to be said of history.13

This is instead precisely why Kracauer’s treatment of the former is also indicative for the latter, such that one could ultimately hope to gain insights with regard to Kracauer’s assessment of phenomenology by following through his more detailed analysis of film, or even more so: by taking note of how history, film and phenomenology come to interrelate most notably in his treatment of historic film.

4 Documentary and Fiction In Kracauer’s view, film as a medium essentially shares its ambivalent, intermediary status with the human sciences. Just as the latter are, in their effort to comprehend the human Life-world, constantly bound to negotiate between philosophical generality and phenomenological “intentionality”, on the one hand, and blind faithfulness to empirical reality, on the other, such that none of the alternatives can ultimately be satisfactory in itself, film as a medium is also supposed to negotiate between its realist and its formative or constructive aesthetic tendencies. That this does not go without difficulties becomes particularly obvious, in a film-theoretical perspective, when considering Kracauer’s treatment of the documentary-fiction divide.14 On the one hand, Kracauer sees the filmic medium as having an intrinsic affinity for unstaged reality, which grounds on the camera’s ability to capture the external physical world in all its defining moments and nuances. Consequently, documentary film seems to appear as the most faithful realization of the medium’s potential. However, Kracauer himself is as reserved with regard to the capacity of pure

13 14

 Kracauer 1994, p. 192.  Kracauer 1960, p. 201 f.

4  Documentary and Fiction

177

documentary or reportage film to effectively penetrate the field of external reality, as he is – in his discussion of the relationship between sociology and phenomenology  – with regard to the ability of a purely empirical or positivist approach to account for the social world. Thus, in his view, a purely documentary approach ultimately lacks the necessary intensity and insight for being truly enlightening, just as it also lacks access to the entire realm of subjective experience, which it can only include by turning to what he terms “story”, that is: narrative construction, in other words: “intentionality”.15 On the other hand, if both moments thus need to be balanced for a satisfactory result and neither absolute fiction nor pure documentary ultimately work by themselves, it is important to note that, due to the camera’s implicit propensity for capturing physical reality, the cinematic representation constantly leads to unearthing documentary features even in fictional or staged materials. As such, it involuntarily brings to the fore the unstructured empirical material to the detriment of the structuring intention. This is the case, in Kracauer’s view, because, when seizing its object, the camera implicitly also registers a myriad of infinitesimal details, which escape our explicit perception, but which nonetheless implicitly make all the difference between the genuine object captured unawares and its mere staged representation. Thus, according to Kracauer, reality in its full concrete scope is ultimately impossible to reconstruct artificially in the cinema because, insofar as the camera captures reality in its most fine-grained nuances by registering that je ne sais quoi that characterizes the authentic empirical detail, it also tends to expose any artificial reconstruction as fake insofar as it lacks that subliminal mark of authenticity. In following through this observation, Kracauer draws two remarkable consequences, which both shed light on the ambivalent relationship that pertains between documentary and fiction and further on: between phenomenological intentionality and the empirically given. First of all, in his view, the camera’s propensity for unstaged reality implies a constant attraction for using documentary elements in films of fiction as well  – hence, for instance, the tendency to cast unprofessional actors. The latter are not supposed to compose a “role”, or “play-act” in general, but instead they should only “act naturally” in front of the camera. Indeed, insofar as the accent, gestures or the general behavioral style of a specific human individual amass an entire halo of infinitesimal details, which pertain solely to their authentic reality here and now as it can be faithfully rendered by the camera, while they are not truly analyzable in full and thus cannot be reproduced convincingly in a staged performance, Kracauer explicitly notes that the use of unprofessional interpreters, which he considers as eminently medium-specific, automatically entails a documentary feature which also translates to films of fiction regardless of whether those interpreters are directed to perform scripted situations, or simply observed in their free doings and dealings. Similar remarks can ultimately be made with regard to various elements of the cinema – just think of location shooting, with everything this entails in regard to natural

15

 For this particular understanding of intentionality, see above in this chapter, pp. 172 f.

178

Sancho Panza and the Dialectics of Historic Film

light, weather, seasons, or the sheer atmosphere and breadth of a place – so that we could generally claim that, in Kracauer’s view, the cinematic dispositive as such always involuntarily foregrounds reality to the detriment of intention. As such, it is the natural born corrective for phenomenology. The second consequence of this is that, according to Kracauer, in every filmic attempt to reproduce an entirely staged or counterfeit world, the camera ultimately also shows not only the fictional characters in their diegetic situation, but also the documentary real world, which underlies them, that is: mere actors in costumes moving about between props. Thus, the camera’s capacity to capture unstaged reality ultimately also arrives at unmasking any attempt to construct a purely illusionary filmic representation by, so to say, laying bare its disenthralled back-stage perspective. The very moment a film tries to fully fictionalize its material, it implicitly runs the risk of reverting to a purely documentary posture, offering something like a documentary X-ray of the fictional presentation. In Kracauer’s view, this is illustrated most convincingly by the case of science-fiction films, but significantly also by historic films, which both appear as highly problematic genres in his perspective. Given that, with the latter, the two key topics of history and film, which Kracauer considers in analogy with his treatment of phenomenology, come to intersect overtly, it is useful to pursue its analysis in further detail.

5 Historic Film In Kracauer’s view, historic film as a genre of fictional cinema faces a fundamental difficulty, which can be summed up in brief as follows: insofar as the filmic medium tacitly pretends to be taken by the viewer as an unmediated recording of reality, while it itself bears the trace of its historically indexed technology, materials etc., historic films can ultimately only be plausible when they not only convincingly reproduce their historic period of reference, but instead also adapt their own medial properties of representation.16 In other words: a historic film should necessarily look as if it were a direct documentary recording of the historic moment it depicts. Now, this already poses serious difficulties in the case of films shot only 10 or 20 years after their depicted historic period of reference, but of course it becomes entirely problematic in the case of films that deal with a period prior even to the invention of the cinema, say the Middle Ages, or Ancient Rome. Therefore, such films are, in Kracauer’s view, structurally anachronistic regardless of how minutely they reproduce that historic world in all its details. Consequently, Kracauer only sees two ways in which a historic film can overcome this difficulty: it can either focus on atemporal aspects of its dramatic material thus blurring the historical perspective entirely, as in Dreyer’s Jeanne d’Arc (1928) by foregrounding facial physiognomies, or it can cinematographically imitate other media like classical painting,

16

 Kracauer 1960, p. 201 f.

5  Historic Film

179

which can be taken by analogy as contemporary documents of the depicted period, as in Day of Wrath (1943, again Dreyer), or Barry Lyndon (1975, d. Stanley Kubrick). Put in a nutshell, historic films according to Kracauer either need to pass as immediate documentary recordings of their depicted historic world, or else they have to pretend not being historic films at all. To be sure, the standard viewer may not be aware of this contradiction at all when watching a regular historic production, given that, on the one hand, numerous genre films like peplums or westerns are not even apperceived as historic reconstructions proper, whereas historic drama as a distinct genre itself already has its well accepted clichés and conventions (like for instance actors speaking in English with a German accent to suggest we are in Germany). Thus, Kracauer’s claims must be narrowed down from the onset to the quite restricted class of films that seriously set out to offer a nuanced depiction of a specific historic period in minutely reproducing costumes and props, customs and atmosphere, or even particularities of language. It is in the case of these films primarily that, according to his account, we are immediately irritated by the aforementioned discrepancy, which tacitly ruins the historic reconstruction despite all efforts to attain veracity. And indeed it is no doubt a similar belief – that a cinematographic depiction of history also depends on the historic ascertainment of the cinematographic medium itself – which determines numerous filmmakers, even when representing a world set only 20 or 30 years ago, to try and equally reproduce the precise qualities of film stock at the time, thus mimicking a documentary simultaneity with their subject.17 Now, when considering this interpretation of historic film, its connections to the broader framework of Kracauer’s conception of history, as presented in his History. The Last Things Before the Last (1969), are plain to see. This conception dwells from the very onset on the central analogy between the historicist approach to history, on the one hand, and film and photography as contemporary media, on the other. The parallel is already at the core of Kracauer’s earliest reflections on history in the 1920s, as they come to the fore for instance in his essay on “The Photograph”. To be sure, at this point, the comparison still appears in a predominantly negative light, insofar as, according to Kracauer’s early essay, the photographic medium and the historicist conception of history both capture lived reality exclusively in its exterior, inessential aspect. Ever since Proust’s famous reflections on photography in his In Search of Lost Time, this appears as a shortcoming against the backdrop of our interior, selective and transfigurative access to the past by means of true recollection. In his later analyses, however – for instance, in his book on history – Kracauer tends to reinterpret this entire framework by shedding new light on the analogy between historicism and film or photography as well. Thus, both film and the historicist treatment of history are now seen to share a similar “realist” tendency, for as the filmmaker delves into the details of empirical reality presented to the camera  On the contrary, a more recent film like Boyhood (2014), which aimed to cinematographically capture the flux of history itself in shooting its actors for over a decade, was obviously impoverished by its decision to level out all such medial differences between the different episodes of its diegesis. 17

180

Sancho Panza and the Dialectics of Historic Film

without imposing his own meaning, so too does the historian, according to a historicist perspective, in that he allows his materials to speak for themselves bracketing his subjectivity and his preconceptions, in order to thus finally arrive at regarding the past as it presented itself initially to its immediate contemporaries. Indeed, it is precisely this perspective that ultimately also determines Kracauer’s conception of historic film, which has its obvious defining standard in the perspective of the immediate contemporary witness as epitomized by the simultaneity between the filmic recording and its object. In this perspective, archival footage becomes the manifest guiding standard for the cinematic representation of the past, if not even  for the apprehension of history in general.

6 Actualization and Empathy To be sure, this “realist” view of history was challenged both by contemporary historians influenced by the “New Radicals” or the „Annales” school, who called into question its micro-historical focus, as amply shown by Ingrid Belke (2009), as well as, more importantly, by fellow critical theorists in the perspective of a more sophisticated philosophy of history. Indeed, a radical alternative to Kracauer’s historicist view of history can already be found in Walter Benjamin’s works. According to Benjamin, the entire gist of the historicist approach to history, as it is encapsulated by Ranke’s famous statement that the historian should elucidate the past “as it really was” (wie es eigentlich gewesen), resides in its central use of empathy (Einfühlung). Empathy thus serves the historians as the central methodological tool for transposing themselves into their period of reference in the past in order to ultimately understand it through the eyes of its immediate contemporaries.18 Benjamin rejects this approach to history outright in considering it purely illusionary and proposes in its stead a historiography which grounds on actualization, rather than empathy. Thus, in his view, the aim is no longer for the historian to transpose himself into the past, but rather to transpose the past into the historian’s immediate present.19 Thus, according to Benjamin, “[t]he true method of making things present is: to represent them in our space (not to represent ourselves in their[s])”.20 Benjamin terms this approach “actualization” and finds its traces everywhere: in the reception of historic architecture (which integrates into the contemporary cityscape), in the practices of citation in general (with its displacement of passages into new contexts), or likewise in “modernizations” of traditional plays (like Hamlet played with contemporary characters), or surrealist montage (with its shocking clashes of divergent historic  GS I, p. 1237.  The same contrast between empathy and actualization is also touched upon in one of Benjamin’s literary essays. Here, he opposes sheer narration, as a procedure trying to asume the position of the immediate witness in relation to a past event, to actualization, seen as a narrative technique, which conjures up the representation of that past in the context of the present. See GS II, p. 331. 20  GS V, p. 273; En., p. 846. 18 19

6  Actualization and Empathy

181

references). If none of these offers a faithful representation of the past, Benjamin ultimately shows that such faithfulness is itself but an illusion anyhow, which tacitly resides on the presupposition that the contemporary witness of a historic phenomenon is the one best situated for understanding it historically as such. In Benjamin’s view, however, this is not the case. Instead, the true meaning of a historic phenomenon only derives from its relationship to an ever-changing present. But if the past begets a new shape with every new present that considers it, the main point is for Benjamin that it finally gains its optimal intelligibility only at some specific later point in time, which constitutes its moment of legibility. In Benjamin’s view, therefore, it is this latter moment, and not the immediate perspective of the contemporary witness, which defines the ideal position for considering history. If this is indeed the case, however, then the main standard for understanding history is no longer just the “authenticity” of its materials, that is: the exact reproduction of the past, but on the contrary the constellation which entails between that past and the present and thus its “actuality”. To be sure, such a historiographic approach, which goes against Kracauer’s realist and historicist views, can also find its cinematographic illustration, while referring to such examples brings an interesting addition to the discussions of historic film. This is the case, for instance, with several of Peter Watkins’ docufictions, like Edvard Munch (1974) or La commune (2000). These films challenge the primacy of direct recording (and thus of archival footage in general) as the main means for a filmic treatment of history – a primacy upheld, according to Kracauer, not only by most historic documentaries, but also by historic films of fiction –, in reconstructing various episodes of the historic past in the fictional guise of contemporary television news reports (with obviously impossible and anachronistic interviews of the participants, for instance). The fruitfulness of such an approach questions the legitimacy of Kracauer’s realist view of historic film. For, if according to the latter, historic films are generally problematic insofar as they structurally present themselves as filmic documents of a reality, in relation to which the filmic medium itself and its properties strike as anachronistic, Watkins’ films show, on the contrary, that it is only by means of a systematic use of anachronisms that we can gain a truly relevant access to history. Such an understanding of historic film would correspond to a Benjaminian theory of history in contrast to the one put forth by Kracauer and it complicates the initial discussion as it doesn’t simply side with intentionality to the detriment of the sheer historic material, but instead it takes the concrete dialectics between the two as its primary object of interest. To be sure, it is Kracauer’s theory rather than Benjamin’s, which defines the standard paradigm of historic film today. Thus, most such films indeed more or less successfully strive to immerse their viewers as completely as possible into a lived environment of the past. Nonetheless, it is clear that even the most standardized historic films of this sort also try to at least implicitly account for the tensions that arise between that specific past and the immediate present. Thus, for instance, biopics about musicians are most often successful when they anticipate a revival of that particular musical genre or style in the musical tastes of the present, just like the costumes of successful historic films most often stylize the clothes worn in their

182

Sancho Panza and the Dialectics of Historic Film

historic period of reference in accordance with the sensibilities of present day fashion.21 As such, it is no coincidence that Benjamin himself saw fashion, with its constant actualization of vintage elements in new fashionable configurations, as a guiding model for his own historiographical method and it is certain that filmic historiographies generally share a similar trend. Instead, if such a Benjaminian approach to history – which is not interested primarily in the faithful reconstruction of the past per se, but rather in its interferences with the present – is only implicit in the aforementioned features of standard historic films, this approach becomes explicit in the case of films which decidedly go against Kracauer’s principle of synchronization and make a striking and ostentatious use of anachronism in their treatment of the past. This can occur at a merely profilmic level, that is: inside the frame, as is the case for instance in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986), where the protagonist walks past a modern truck at one point. But it can also occur at a purely filmic level, by manipulating the properties of the medium itself, as this is the case in several of Peter Watkins’ aforementioned docufictions, which employ features of modern day TV news coverage to depict say eighteenth century battles. Ultimately, Kracauer’s own position is – at least in what concerns his History-­ book  – not entirely  consistent in this regard either. Thus, in his brief portrait of Jakob Burckhardt, which concludes the book, he overtly appreciates the latter’s “wavering between the antiquarian and the present interest”,22 that is: between the historicist concern for engaging the past in its own terms and for its own sake and the guidance of his own present-day interests – and it is precisely this methodological inconsequentiality that again determines Kracauer to invoke Sancho Panza as a guiding model. Moreover, in a convoluted reflection of his Theory of Film, Kracauer seems to touch upon a similar idea in evoking a fantasy by Élie Faure. The latter imagined a documentary depiction of the passion of Christ, which would be recorded today by means of a special telescope from a distant galaxy and broadcasted live by means of an interplanetary projection.23 Such a film, Kracauer claims, would be unlike a plain restaging of those events “in that it does not convey the impression of probing a universe at the film maker’s free disposal.”24 On the contrary, in the case of a restaged historic film “[t]here is no potential endlessness in it. The spectator will admire it for showing things as they could have happened, but he will not be convinced, as he would be when watching Faure’s documentary, that things actually happened this way.”25 While it may seem absurd to even consider this awkward example, it nevertheless proves highly relevant for our present discussion insofar as it involves a conflation of camera authenticity and structural anachronism, which is moreover highly  One finds a good illustration of both aspects in a film like the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), which is on the one hand a faithful reconstruction of the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s, while on the other hand several of its original songs became present day chart hits. 22  Kracauer 1994, p. 209. 23  Kracauer 1960, p. 78. 24  Kracauer 1960, p. 78. 25  Kracauer 1960, p. 78. 21

7  Digital Colorization: A Case-Study

183

topical today in view of the more recent advances in the digital manipulation of archival footage. One finds an exemplary illustration of this in contemporary film colorizations. Insofar as contemporary colorizations indeed put forth the same paradoxical combination of features one finds in Faure’s fictitious example, in that they are at the same time profoundly anachronistic and photographically authentic, it will be useful, for settling the aforementioned dispute between a Benjaminan and a Kracauerian approach to historic film and all its convoluted philosophical implications, to conclude the present reflection on history, film and phenomenology in this chapter by engaging in a brief case study of this issue.

7 Digital Colorization: A Case-Study (a) To be sure, when considering the contemporary surge in colorizations of black and white photographic images and films, it is useful to look back at the prior history of this phenomenon, which overlaps with that of photography and film plain and simple. At the end of the nineteenth century, the rising popularity of photographic portraiture first threw the social function of the portrait artist into obsolescence, by making the portrait  – priory reserved to the social and economic elite – accessible to everyone. Soon, however, the commercial exploitation of photographic portraits began regarding color as one of the most stimulating effects for ensuring their long-term salability. Thus, the miniature portrait artist, put out of business with the advent of photography, was reinstated to manually color and stylize the photographic portraits now produced wholesale. Of course, several early critical theorists of the interwar period like Kracauer and Benjamin charged this endeavor as kitsch. In their view, it ignored the specific assets of the photographic medium in reducing it to an aesthetic standard which was undermined by its very invention. Thus, colorization was in their view, just as pictorial retouching, a mere technique for falsifying and embellishing the nude reality captured by the camera, and as such it retrospectively appeared, against the backdrop of the traditional dispute between painting and photography, as a betrayal of both. However, while this criticism of colorization was directed primarily against its use in photography, it only vaguely touched upon similar endeavors in the cinema of that time, as initiated by early pioneers like Edison or Méliès. For, if the latter involved more or less the same procedure – namely: manual painting frame by frame – it is nevertheless clear that the mere extension of a feature film made such a project unrealizable in full, too costly and plodding under the given modes of production. As a consequence, early colorized films indeed look more like mere sketches of color film, in showing striking imperfections throughout: they are only partially colored, lack chromatic continuity, and often have colors pouring out of shape, thus attaining experimental qualities, which are not that easily dismissed as a mere regression to the outdated canons of traditional painting. Although in the following decades, colorization was no longer pursued with the same intensity in film, the cinema never truly resigned with the lack of color. When

184

Sancho Panza and the Dialectics of Historic Film

color film thus finally gained commercial traction at the end of the 1940s, following a long string of technical experiments, the second great wave of colorizations came as an attempt to actualize, by means of subsequent retouching, recent films made following a technical standard that became obsolete over night. This brief episode is worth mentioning here only because, given the high production value of these films and the new technologies available for colorization, these films could actually aspire at passing in the eyes of their audience as shot in color from the onset. The true difficulties appeared, instead, around the mid 1980s once several American television producers decided to use cheaper VHS technology to colorize the entire stock of classical American black and white films, the commercial rights of which they had bought. The debates surrounding this initiative, which reached their peak in the tremendous scandal stirred by the colorization of Casablanca, was carried out primarily in juridical terms and they led in 1989 to a bill of law, which gave US artists the “moral right” to forbid the alteration of their work even when they no longer held commercial rights, with the striking argument that buying the Mona Lisa doesn’t yet give the owner a right to draw a mustache over it.26 Given that this second significant episode in the history of film colorization also led, just like the first, to a categorical moral defeat for the colorization camp stopping work at a colorized version of Citizen Kane just shortly after it was initiated, the growing tide of present day colorizations may come as a surprise, if it weren’t for three points, which give digital colorization today an entirely different scope than its earlier versions. Thus, it is clear, first of all, that the technical ease of the procedure at present makes it not only gradually, but qualitatively different from earlier forms of colorization, given that, on the one hand, the colorization of photographs is now a universally accessible feature provided for free via online applications, while on the other hand, technical development will presumably soon allow the fully automated colorization of films with the aid of neural networks and deep learning at a quality that should at some point be undistinguishable from color film stock. Secondly, colorization is no longer performed today, as it was earlier, by means of external interventions on the film stock, that is: by means of a procedure which is at core alien to the photographic medium itself, but instead it is accomplished by operating within the very same medium, in “redacting” the photographic image as it were in the very language it was first written in. Finally, the new wave of colorizations today no longer concerns the tradition of fictional black and white film and its actualization, which was at the center of earlier controversies, but mainly documentary archival footage, and it is precisely this aspect that makes it worth considering philosophically, in view of Kracauer’s and Benjamin’s respective conceptions of film and history. (b) As is well known, the accelerated transition from traditional film stock to digital support was the object of one of the most intense film theoretical debates during the early 2000s. The process was frequently interpreted as a transformation, which shook the ontological foundation of documentary film and photography.

26

 For a good summary of this dispute see Edgerton 2000.

7  Digital Colorization: A Case-Study

185

Such pessimist assessments came from the fact that the documentary value of the photographic image, that is: its “indexicality” was traditionally seen to depend on the causal relationship, which connected the photograph with its real reference. In this regard, the former was never considered to be just a mere representation of the latter, but literally its physical imprint, branded into film by exposure. However, once this elementary photochemical process was eliminated with the advent of digital images – so the argument goes – the entire narrative of the intrinsic ontological authenticity of photography crumbled.27 While the photochemical process once ensured a “reality transfer” between the object that once was in front of the camera and its photograph, in the case of digital images, the information obtained by direct recording is not intrinsically different from its mere synthetic reconstruction, and thus one ultimately loses the main criterion for even distinguishing between documentary images and animation. To be sure, one might object to such arguments in regarding them as mere vane theoretical ruminations. For, despite all such concerns, the digital camera is nonetheless also, or perhaps even better suited to immediately capture what occurs in front of it, while the digital support now moreover allows both for a prolonged uninterrupted recording and for an economically more accessible mode of film-­ making. Both latter aspects obviously advance documentary film practices. Nonetheless, the concerns of the early 2000s soon proved well grounded with the advent of a plethora of new possibilities for hybridization, which derived directly from digitalization both in the field of fiction and that of documentary film-making: from the introduction or deletion of objects or characters in photographic footage, to digital rejuvenation, animation of photographic clichés, deep fakes or even the resurrection of actors, “brought back” from the dead to “act” in new film projects. To be sure, the traditional distinction between documentary film and animation was somewhat overstated from the onset. For indeed both ultimately resided on the illusion of movement produced by the rapid succession of static images. While sharing this common foundation, however, the two were nonetheless from the onset easy to contrast in virtue of their entirely different ontological claims: at the one end of the spectrum, there was the observational documentary seen as a pure audio-­ visual recording of a real event; at the other, animation, regarded as a mere drawing, a fabrication through and through, which was precisely why early film theorists often tended to interpret the latter even as artistically superior to film.28 Thus, photographic film and animation demanded from the onset entirely different reading patterns: the one was seen as showing people in flesh and blood and real objects, while the other only contained mere graphic figures. Consequently, they also involved diametrically opposed stylistic and aesthetic standards, in the light of which it would have been non-sensical for an animation to claim the verisimilitude of photographic reproduction. This certainly doesn’t mean that there were no  This narrative was of course already undermined with video as early as the 1970s, but since the latter never seriously challenged the primacy of photographic film stock for the use of mainstream cinema, the point only truly became pressing with the digital revolution. 28  See for instance Luther 1931. 27

186

Sancho Panza and the Dialectics of Historic Film

significant interferences between the two, as this was indeed the case with stopmotion animation, for instance, which basically implied reading photographic reproductions figurally, or likewise with the numerous procedures normally branded as “special effects” (from painted elements of décor to movements induced by means of montage), which often came close to animation, while nonetheless being read photographically as sheer additions to the indexical image. Such effects no doubt cover a broad range of phenomena and it suffices to think of matching shots or the use of sound effects to realize that they certainly affect documentaries as well, and not just films of fiction. Despite their universal presence in film, however, until the advent of digital images, one might claim, they never really undermined the guiding photographic legibility of these images. This is instead obviously the case with digital images, as they simultaneously bring about two decisive mutations. On the one hand, with the use of CGI graphics (developed primarily under the impulse of video games), animations acquired the density of photographic documents proper. In now being able to successfully compete with photographic images, they opened the gate for the most adventurous mixtures between the two. On the other hand, the digitized photographic document itself now acquired a plasticity, which originally only defined animation proper thus becoming editable and “animable” in all its details. These new forms of hybridization set the necessary context for considering contemporary digital colorization as well. (c) Of course, the procedures employed today in the colorization of film footage are still far from perfect. Thus, in a recent essay on Peter Jackson’s documentary They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) – a film which “brings back to life” colorized and sonorized archival footage from the Great War  – film scholar Tom Livingstone (2019) aptly criticized a series of obvious discrepancies in the film’s reconstruction of colors. Thus, Livingstone notes for instance that, due to the use of orthochromatic film stock in the original recordings, which reduces intense red and black to indistinction, the automatic colorizing process initially lead to images, wherein everything that should have been interpreted as red was seen as black instead. This had to be corrected manually and it finally led to overemphasizing the color red and overcharging it symbolically, by only applying it where it could be meaningfully identified: in the case of wounds, blood, and poppies in the field. Similarly, Livingstone criticizes the spatial incongruities that derive from colorization, as well as the washed-up nuances of pink used in most cases for the faces of the soldiers, arguing that the facial colors are here reconstructed more simplistically and uniformly even when compared to the rich and layered chromatic toning one finds in contemporary digital animation. In his view, it is precisely due to such aspects that the film ultimately fails its purpose of “revivifying” those archival recordings. Instead, it arrives at foregrounding the very fact of their digital colorization as such, its effects and its rhetorics. In brief: the procedure proves not only unable to further raise the “authenticity” of its materials, as claimed, but it rather tends to divert attention from them towards its own technical performances. Despite such sharp observations, however, this critique is nonetheless insufficient in at least two regards. On the one hand, the fact itself that the film’s imperfections allow the viewers to acknowledge the process of colorization as such by

7  Digital Colorization: A Case-Study

187

forcing them to regard the material as an altered document and not as the “living original” is not necessarily a fault per se. On the contrary, one might say that this bestows the film from the onset with a good sense of self-reflexivity, not so unlike the effect obtained traditionally in fictional cinema by alternating black and white with color images without any diegetical excuse. Of course, fictional films can handle this effect quite diversely,29 but the procedure is in any case in most of its possible uses valued as a self-reflexive and anti-illusionary device, whereas Jackson’s film obviously strives to establish a more immediate relationship with the represented past, despite also using unaltered archival footage in its first 20 minutes as a negative term of contrast for the enriched digital material that follows. Secondly, Livingstone’s criticism is also insufficient because, in focusing exclusively on the correctable errors of Jackson’s experiment, it seems to suggest that, lest such inconsistencies, its guiding intention to “humanize” those materials in restoring their immediacy would be perfectly unproblematic. Instead, questions can be raised in this regard as well as soon as one takes note of any of Jackson’s interviews, wherein he provocatively defends his endeavor by claiming that it is in the end nothing but a “restoration” of the original archival material.30 This claim is certainly disconcerting. For how could we speak of restoration here since the process is obviously not intended to simply return the aforesaid materials to their initial form and shape, but instead it bestows them with entirely novel features? Of course, one might suggest that photographic images allow for a wider acceptation of the term “restoration” than say classical painting insofar as technological progress can in principle allow extracting information, which was implicit in the film stock from the onset, but which could not yet be delivered initially – however, color does not range among such properties. For indeed chromatic information can still only be approximated from shades of grey in the monochromatic material, even if such deductions can further be advanced, as was the case with Jackson’s own film, by means of extended historic research. A more plausible defense of his claim could perhaps have referred to the fact that, in the contemporary deployment of colorization, one already works with deep learning technologies, which identify the color of objects with some precision by confronting the image with an expanded database of color images. Of course, this is not simply the same as extracting implicit information from the black and white material either, as it rather resides on a mere external conjecture, but since this process nonetheless also occurs automatically, one could simply regard it as a co-substantial extension of the initial “technical reproduction.” More plainly, Jackson himself justifies his talk of restoration in interviews by bluntly declaring that the soldiers of the Great War did not live in a  Quentin Tarantino, for instance, introduced short sequences of black and white film in several of his recent pictures like Death Proof (2007) or Kill Bill (2003/4) as a disruptive element, meant to break the diegetic continuity and stylistically flash out the medium itself; on the contrary, in the first season of Heimat (1984), Edgar Reitz used short color sequences to produce Brechtian moments of disruptions, breaking the viewer’s immersion into the illusionary black and white, quasi-documentary reconstruction of early twentieth century Germany. 30  See for instance Jackson 2019. 29

188

Sancho Panza and the Dialectics of Historic Film

black and white “Charlie Chaplin world”31 and that colorization simply returns the images to the authentic initial aspect of their real-life referent. Of course, Charlie Chaplin did not live in a black and white world either, but despite the obvious scandal of Jackson’s description, which practically justifies updating the technology employed in making a documentary recording by means of retroactive completions, his endeavor may nevertheless ideally still hold some legitimacy. For if colors could indeed be determined with absolute precision in a photograph and since the digitalization of analogical images itself already updates the photograph ontologically anyhow, what results from such a colorization is literally the enactment of an impossible color photograph of the past as in Faure’s absurd mental experiment discussed by Kracauer. It is a photograph which was certainly not taken as such at its time of origin, but which is now so to say brought to fulfill its initial photographic intention – it is the past as if it was literally photographed today. Ultimately, Jackson’s film may indeed be disappointing and implausible, as Livingstone aptly shows. But its implausibility rests on a paradox, namely the fact that it bestows authentic archival footage with a feeling of anachronism and artificiality one normally only experiences  – according to Kracauer’s aforementioned analyses – in the case of those historic films of fiction, which attempt to realistically immerse the viewer into a past world. The point is relevant if one considers that contemporary apologists of colorization frequently defend the procedure in claiming that it ultimately only helps a younger generation of viewers, which reject black and white film from the onset, gain an otherwise difficult access to the archival footage and thus to history. For, indeed, the very same argument is constantly also brought up to legitimize remakes of fictional films no older than a few decades, as if the cinema as a medium in general only allowed being received in the mode of utmost actuality, and this is presumably also why historic films themselves clinger on contemporary trends in fashion or music, as already pointed out earlier. When interpreted in this perspective, the contemporary revival of film colorization seems primarily driven by a need for actualization, which is the precise opposite of sheer restoration. While the former would correspond to a Benjaminan, the latter corresponds to a Kracauerian perspective on history. But the issue is perhaps even more contorted here. For, on the one hand, in reinstating its object as it initially was, every restoration in general simulates its novelty here and now, be it only by the freshness of its paintwork, and therein lies its implicit element of actualization. On the other hand, the actualization involved in the colorization of archival footage is as such quite unlike the one put forth by theatrical or cinematographic modernizations, since the latter plainly adapt historic materials to present day circumstances, whereas in the former case the materials themselves remain untouched, while the procedure only updates the medium of its reception, as if one could indeed capture the past itself in a snapshot made today. (d) Contemporary critics tend to dismiss the colorization of filmic and photographic archival footage by holding that the procedure radically alters our apprehension of history in preparing it for an improper form of consumption. In their view,

31

 Jackson 2019.

7  Digital Colorization: A Case-Study

189

colorization no longer allows the film stock to respectfully preserve the past, as this was still implicit with the metaphor of “mummified time” used by Bazin or Barthes.32 Instead, it turns it into a circus sensation, something that more closely resembles a stuffed animal or a figure in the wax museum, than a mummy. Interestingly, however, it was precisely this argument that interwar critical theorists used to bring up initially with regard to photography as a medium. This was the case with Kracauer himself, in his early essay on photography, but also with Benjamin, who extensively elaborated the idea that photographic reproduction as such uproots historic consciousness from the onset.33 As is well known, Benjamin’s reflection was primarily grounded on the rather trivial observation that the features which help us determine a work of art historically  – namely its material properties, which can be subjected to a physical and chemical analysis, or its given status of ownership, which allows tracing back its prior owners  – depend exclusively on the unique presence of the original hic et nunc, while a mere reproduction, regardless how perfect, could not serve the purpose of such analysis. This does not mean much per se, according to Benjamin. But insofar as, with the pervasive spread of technical reproduction, our reception of artworks indeed soon came to be predominantly intermediated by photographs, this implicitly led to a devaluation of those very features, which formerly allowed us to situate artworks historically – and, of course, not just artworks. For if, according to Benjamin, photography first taught us to regard objects un-historically, this process obviously impacted on our apprehension of history in general, and not just art, as Benjamin himself suggests when speaking of how the contemporary flood of historic films, which present history as accessible in a mode of sensational immediacy, liquidates our traditional relationship to that past.34 Such an interpretation no doubt challenges the standard theory of photographic indexicality and its value for history as defended by Kracauer in his later work. Thus, for the later Kracauer, photography appears as the perfect tool for capturing and depicting history. Since photographic reproduction involves a direct causal relationship between the historic realities it depicts and the photographic image itself, its testimony is from the onset guaranteed with absolute certainty. In truth, however, such a direct causality only pertains, if at all, with regard to the original negative, whereas the actual photographic image we regard is already just its reproduction, indefinitely deferred from that causality and sprung from a forgotten process of post-production. Consequently, the concrete photographic image is as an object far more profoundly disconnected from its original reference than a historic remain or souvenir proper, which are both bound by real causal traces to the historic moment they depict, whereas that trace is, in the case of the concrete photograph, only an ideal intention with no material continuity. As such, the original present moment of the photographically reproduced past does not really overlap immediately with the intentional present of the photographic image itself, produced and reproduced  See for instance Bazin 2005, p. 15.  Benjamin 1968, p. 220 f. 34  Benjamin 1968, p. 222. 32 33

190

Sancho Panza and the Dialectics of Historic Film

according to a constantly actualized technical standard. Put in a nutshell: when regarded in this perspective, the photographic image weakens the historic index of its object while at the same time it applies its own index of renewed actuality as if the two were immediately identical. This observation should be taken into account when considering the question of documentary colorization today. For, if the photographic image indeed structurally undermines historic distance in its treatment of history, it nonetheless allows for a certain secondary form of historic consciousness, which comes – as formerly noted with regard to memory: in virtue of the photographic souvenir’s folds and deteriorations – with the wearing of the medium itself, its forms, procedures and technical possibilities. Thus, despite classical theories of indexicality, we might say that a photographic image is only truly contemporary with its object insofar as it is itself historically indexed by its own outdated medial and technological properties – and this is again where Kracauer’s ascertainment of historic film finds its ultimate confirmation. If however these signs of the medium’s historic erosion may not always be legible in detail for an uninstructed eye, most often incapable of precisely dating a photographic image strictly on ground of its medial properties, they are nonetheless apperceived roughly by anyone – and this is perhaps most obvious in the case of black and white footage. When interpreted in this perspective, black and white is thus not primarily an indifferent stylistic or aesthetic option, but a historic index, which results involuntarily from the obsolescence of a medium that suspends historic indexicality. In return, colorization only accomplishes the complete liquidation of this residue of traditional historicity, which photography itself as a medium already set to undermine. Thus, as a retroactive fulfillment of the photographic intention, colorization may ultimately well be termed a “restoration”.

8 Historic Intentionality To be sure, Kracauer’s account of phenomenology may ultimately appear as rather trivial. His plea for a “bottom up” approach, which engages concrete empirical experience while only investing eidetic claims with a regulatory function, is today presumably viewed as a common-sense relativization of Husserl’s initial foundationalist claims at philosophical aprioricity. Ultimately, the same also applies for his parallel accounts of film (considered as a balancing act between aesthetic form and realism) or history (as wavering between documentary accuracy and meaning). However, what makes these considerations relevant in the end is the fact that, in Kracauer’s view, the three aforementioned fields  – phenomenology, history and film – are not only bound by some vague analogy, but instead they are variously interconnected in ways which complicate their initial plain descriptions. Thus, the historic perspective obviously complicates the case for an amended form of phenomenological analysis, as Kracauer shows with his own plea for a complementary use of both in the initial project of his Theory of film. Similarly, the advent of film and photographic reproduction in general bring further complications to our historic

References

191

consciousness, as Kracauer again amply demonstrates already in his early essay “The Photograph”. In the present chapter, however, I was primarily interested in following another particular strain in this string of complications, which leads all the way from the plain analogy between the filmic medium and history, through the aporias of historic film and finally to the historicity of the filmic medium itself, as illustrated by the striking case of contemporary documentary colorizations. What this reflection ultimately attests to is the complex intertwining between two dialectics: that of past and present in the consideration of history, on the one hand, and that of objective reality and medial representation in its photographic and filmic reproduction, on the other. While phenomenology might in the end not benefit too much from Sancho Panza’s lessons in common-sensical relativism, such reflections could ultimately nonetheless prove fruitful for an effort to rethink intentionality itself along the lines of its historic and medial present day complications.

References Adorno, Th.W. 1981/82. Transparencies on Film. English translation by Th.Y.  Levin. In New German Critique 24/25, pp. 199–205. Adorno, Th.W. 1989/90. On Jazz. English translation by J.O. Daniel. In Discourse 12/1, pp. 45–69. Adorno, Th.W. 1992. Notes to Literature. Vol. 2. English translation by S.  Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia University Press. Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund. 2003. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 1–20, Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp (cited as GS 1-20). Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund. 2013. Against Epistemology: A Metacritique. English translation by W. Domingo. Malden: Polity. Bazin, A. 2005. The Ontology of the Photographic Image. In What is Cinema? Vol. 1. English translation by H. Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 9–16. Belke, I. 2009. Kracauers letzte Lebensjahre (1959-1966) und sein Buch Geschichte. In Werke 4, pp. 435–627. Benjamin, W. 1968. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. English translation by H. Zohn. In Illuminations. New York: Schocken, pp 217–251. Benjamin, W. 1991. Gesammelte Schriften I-VII. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp (cited as GS I-VII). Edgerton, G.R. 2000. “The Germans Wore Gray, You Wore Blue”: Frank Capra, Casablanca, and the Colorization Controversy of the 1980s. In Journal of Popular Film and Television 27/4, pp. 24–32. Jackson, P. 2019, interview by Mark Kermode from BFI London Film Festival. DVD Special Feature: They Shall Not Grow Old (Warner Brothers). Kracauer, S. 1960. Theory of Film. The Redemption of Physical Reality. New  York: Oxford University Press. Kracauer, S. and Panofsky, E. 1996. Briefwechsel 1941-1966. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Kracauer, S. 1994. History. The Last Things before the Last. New York: Oxford University Press. Kracauer, S. 2004–2012. Werke. Vol. 1–9. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp (cited as Werke 1-9). Livingstone, T. 2019. Colorization and the Archive: Repurposing World War One. In Frames. Cinema Journal 15, online: http://framescinemajournal.com/article/colourisation-­and-­the-­ archive-­repurposing-­world-­war-­one/ (accessed 15.12.2020). Luther, Fr. 1931. Ästhetische Werte des Films. In Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 15/1, pp. 263–266.

Conclusion

The present book reflects on the relationship between phenomenology and critical theory, but since the conjunction of these two terms has drawn substantial interest over the past few years, it is worth-wile to use these concluding remarks for situating the book in relation to some other contemporary efforts. Two positions in particular seem to currently dispute the field. On the one hand, one finds the recent attempts made by authors such as Lisa Guenther, Sara Ahmed, Alia Al-Saji, Amy Allen and others to use phenomenological descriptions under the catchy label of “critical phenomenology” in the service of social criticism, in particular to tackle issues like racism, sexism, the colonial heritage, or various other forms of discrimination and social injustice. While criticism is in this context understood, in the programmatic statement of the journal Puncta. Journal for Critical Phenomenology, as “an ongoing process of revealing and interrogating the concrete conditions, institutions, and assumptions that structure lived experience”,1 such a critical turn of phenomenology can in the eyes of most authors associated with it only be obtained by integrating the methods of phenomenology with those of traditional critical theory, be it in the line of a Foucauldian analysis of power structures, or in that of the Frankfurt School. While these authors reclaim some form of continuity with the phenomenological tradition, despite criticism of classical Husserlian phenomenology, methodological issues are seldom given extended attention. Instead, the main focus is more on overtly engaging concrete issues of the social life-world, like for instance solitary confinement, queer experience, discrimination and so on. Other phenomenologists, on the other hand, have taken issue with this tendency. A work like the recently published volume by Aldea, Carr and Heinämaa, Phenomenology as Critique: Why Method Matters (2022) is highly representative for such a response. In contrast to the methodological laxity and eclecticism of critical phenomenology, the three editors explicitly hold that critique is in a ­

 https://journals.oregondigital.org/index.php/pjcp/index (last accessed 22.11.2022).

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Ferencz-Flatz, Critical Theory and Phenomenology, Contributions to Phenomenology 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27615-6_11

193

194

Conclusion

phenomenological perspective above all a question of method. In their view, phenomenology in no way requires any external addition, or the integration with the tools of other philosophical directions in order to develop its full critical potential. As such, there is no need for a “critical turn” of phenomenology as phenomenology is from the onset critical through and through by its very definition and method. In taking this stance, the authors, who primarily defend the potential of Husserlian phenomenology in regarding later developments like existential or feminist phenomenology as its unproblematic extension, mainly want to “make explicit and accessible – to a wide philosophical and interdisciplinary audience – the rich and powerful methodology that classical and existential phenomenology offers to critical investigations into human relations and relationality while at the same time emphasizing the rigorous aims of this philosophy”.2 Whereas the editors themselves do not explicitly take aim at critical phenomenology in this context, several contributors to the volume do so, most explicitly Lanei M.  Rodemeyer. In her selfexplanatorily titled chapter “A Phenomenological Critique of Critical Phenomenology”, she explicitly sets out to show that most of the objections brought up by critical phenomenologists against classical phenomenology are unfounded. In contrast, she argues both for accepting Husserl’s philosophy as critical from the onset, due to its significant methodological emphasis on criticism and self-criticism, and for more methodological rigor when using phenomenology for critical tasks, a suggestion obviously directed at “critical phenomenology”. The reflections put forth in the present book do not belong to either of these two directions. In following a mainly historical path, however, they explicitly touch on both, in showing, on the one hand, that the integration of phenomenology and critical thought is by no means a novelty, but has been going on since the days of early critical theory in the interwar period in ways that should not be simply cast out, but reflected rigorously by phenomenologists; on the other hand, by showing a far greater interest in methodological issues than contemporary critical phenomenology not only in insisting upon the classical heritage of Husserlian phenomnology and its methodological principles, but primarily also by showing how early critical theorists themselves have struggled with these methodological points and worked out alternative research tools, that could to some extent also still count as part of the “phenomenological heritage”. In working through these issues, the work of course intersects with other recent endevors by authors such as Andrew Feenberg, Richard Westerman or Ian Angus, working especially on Marcuse and Lukács.3 Among these recent publications, the present work distinguishes itself primarily by focusing on several key issues in phenomenology – the eidetic method for most part, but also questions related to experience and historicity – which come to bear in the complex interplay of critique and appropriation that characterizes their reception within the camp of the Frankfurt School. This is illustrated throughout the chapters of this book with regard to three authors: Adorno, Benjamin and Kracauer.

 Aldea, Carr & Heinämaa 2022, pp. 7–8.  Feenberg 2005, Westerman 2019 and Angus 2021.

2 3

Conclusion

195

The first four chapters of the book thus deal with various aspects of Adorno’s relationship to phenomenology. The first chapter concerns Adorno’s understanding of “unregimented experience” and its tensions to the phenomenological notions of “pre-theoretical experience”. By addressing Adorno’s attempts to balance between empirical research and philosophical aprioric reasoning, the chapter shows how he comes to elaborate an entirely different understanding of experience, that could also be relevant for phenomenologists. The second chapter primarily tackles Adorno’s criticism of the eidetic method, but also his attempts to appropriate key elements of that method in his own procedure of physiognomic analysis, a conception that proves relevant for negotiating some of the incongruities of phenomenological eidetics itself. The third chapter dwells on Adorno’s surprising early engagement with genetic phenomenology, by interpreting his scattered remarks on the subject matter and extensively outlining some of their useful insights for contemporary phenomenological research as well. The fourth chapter finally situates Adorno’s early reflections on Radio within the ongoing debates between “administrative” and “critical” research in media scholarship, showing how a phenomenology conceived along Adorno’s lines could become a useful methodological tool for reflecting on the mutual entanglement between the study of media and their production today. In a similar vein, the next four chapters are devoted to the intricacies of Walter Benjamin’s reading of phenomenology. The fifth chapter again focuses mostly on Benjamin’s interest in phenomenological eidetics. By tackling some of his references to works by early phenomenologists like Paul Linke or Moritz Geiger, the chapter shows how these influences come to shape something like an alternative phenomenology of the relationship between concept and idea. The sixth chapter is then devoted to a particular aspect in Benjamin’s understanding of experience, namely his concept of “tactile reception”, which shares striking resemblances to Heidegger’s idea of a “life-worldly circumspection”, interpreted by him as a specific form of sight guiding everyday praxis. By extensively contrasting these two theoretical positions, the chapter finally allows for a better understanding of both and for a more profound insight into their main points of contention. The seventh chapter further pursues this point by addressing the question of history as treated by both Benjamin (who associates himself with the Surrealists’ in this regard) and by Heidegger. Seen in this perspective, Benjamin’s critique boils down to the fundamental contrast between an existential and a political approach to the philosophy of history, a distinction that could be suggestive for contemporary phenomenologist working in this field as well. The eighth chapter focuses on some of the consequences that stem from Benjamin’s historisation of experience. By analyzing one of his remarks concerning the transformation of contemporary perception, which develops in ways analogous to the rise of statics in theoretical thinking, the chapter shows how this can be seen to also involve a radical transformation in the field of social relationships, which can be illustrated with the example of television audiences. This reflection also leads to some methodological suggestions for a phenomenology of hybrid sociality. The last two chapters focus on Kracauer’s engagement with phenomenology, by first addressing his early interest in phenomenological sociology and especially,

196

Conclusion

again, his nuanced criticism of a material eidetics of the social world. An interesting aspect of this discussion concerns the fact that it is situated from the onset within an existentialist horizon. By addressing the early reception of Kierkegaard among critical theorists like Lukács, Bloch, or Adorno, in contrast to Heidegger and Jaspers, and the divergent stances towards the reform movements of the interwar period within the phenomenological and the critical camp, the chapter arrives at interpreting Kracauer as a fertile intermediary link between the methods and questions of phenomenology and those of critical theory. Finally, the last chapter further develops the analysis of Kracauer’s engagement with phenomenology by focusing on a strain of analogies, which connect his early critique of a material ontology of the social world in Husserl and Scheler with his theory of film and his understanding of history. In Kracauer’s view, phenomenology, history, and film all require a “bottom up” approach, which engages concrete empirical experience while investing eidetic claims only with a regulatory function. At the same time, they are also interconnected in ways, which complicate their initial plain descriptions. The chapter follows through one particular set of such complications, which leads all the way from the plain analogy between the filmic medium and history, through the aporias of historic film, and ultimately to the historicity of the filmic medium itself, as illustrated by the striking case of contemporary documentary colorizations. What all of this finally amounts to is for sure relevant for readers interested in the development of critical theory and the Frankfurt School in general as it outlines little known aspects in the works of these authors and their connections to a broader field of contemporary philosophy. But it is also – and perhaps even primarily so – of interest for phenomenologists, who can find here the presentation of some alternative paths for phenomenological thought and research, which are important to consider. This is the case most overtly with the question of the potentialities of phenomenological eidetics, which play such an important role within the contemporary debates concerning the relationship between phenomenological eidetics and empirical research, as all three authors discussed above come to indeed develop alternative readings of something that could be called a “materialist eidetics”. In stressing that point, the present book tries to suggest some of the ways in which this approach could enrich a phenomenological inquiry with regard to the social world, history, everyday life – and, of course, the all pervasive presence of media.

References Aldea, Smaranda Andreea; Carr, David & Heinämaa, Sara (ed.). 2022. Phenomenology as Critique: Why Method Matters. New York/London: Routledge. Angus, Ian. 2021. Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism. Crisis, Body, World. Lanham, MA: Lexington. Feenberg, Andrew. 2005. Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History. London: Routledge. Westerman, Richard. 2019. Lukács’s Phenomenology of Capitalism: Reification Revalued. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Index

A Abstractions, 45, 46, 71, 95, 96, 142, 165 Administrative and critical research, 53 Adorno, Th. W., v–xxi, 1, 4–16, 19–37, 41–51, 54–62, 65, 66, 68, 73, 74, 76, 77, 80, 85, 95, 96, 103, 125, 135, 139, 143, 144, 148–151, 157, 160–164, 166, 167, 172–175, 194–196 Architecture, x, xix, 83–86, 88–90, 92–94, 98, 102, 123, 180 Authenticity, vii, xiv, 104, 105, 134, 151, 157, 160–163, 166, 167, 177, 181, 182, 185, 186 B Benjamin, W., v, vii, ix, x, xii, xvii, xviii, xx, xxi, 24, 29, 30, 65–81, 83–87, 89–94, 96–114, 117–129, 138, 142, 145, 146, 149–151, 153, 157, 161–165, 180–184, 189, 194, 195 C Colorizations, 183–191, 196 E Eidetic intuition, xvii, xxi, 19–37, 46, 50, 71, 72, 118, 138 Eidetics, v, xv–xviii, 46, 47, 49–51, 58, 68–74, 77–79, 95, 137–139, 142, 143, 156, 174, 175, 190, 194–196

F Film phenomenology, 133, 134 Films, xxi, 83, 85, 89–94, 117, 118, 125, 129, 133, 134, 140, 145, 148, 152, 171–191, 196 H Heidegger, M., vi, ix, xii, xiv, xvi, xix, xx, 2–5, 9, 10, 13, 15, 16, 19, 21, 25, 37, 51, 55, 85–89, 92–114, 124, 139–141, 144–152, 154, 156, 157, 160–162, 166, 167, 173, 195, 196 History of vision, 118, 119 Husserl, E., viii–xi, xv–xvii, xix, 2–8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 19–34, 36, 37, 41–51, 54–56, 58, 65–72, 74, 76, 77, 79–81, 86, 95, 112, 117, 119, 120, 123, 126, 127, 130, 133–143, 145–149, 154–156, 161, 173–175, 190, 194, 196 I Ideologies, ix, x, 53, 113, 158 Intentionalities, xvii, 71, 74–76, 81, 172, 174, 176, 177, 181, 190–191 Intersubjectivity, vi, x, xi, 24, 44, 45, 112, 117–130, 136 K Kitsch, 99–101, 183 Kracauer, S., v, xvii, xviii, xx, xxi, 5, 30, 133–167, 171–184, 188–191, 194–196

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Ferencz-Flatz, Critical Theory and Phenomenology, Contributions to Phenomenology 125, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27615-6

197

198 L Lazarsfeld, P., 14, 15, 29, 54, 55, 60 Life-world, 88, 92, 99, 101, 103, 104, 133–135, 145, 160, 163–165, 176, 193 M Material ontologies, v, xvi, 137, 139, 140, 148, 171, 173, 196 Media phenomenology, 57 P Phenomenological aesthetics, 77, 118 Philosophy of history, ix, 114, 175, 180, 195 Physiognomics, xvii, xx, 28–37, 55–62, 125, 195 Pre-theoretical experience, 1–16, 195

Index R Reform movements, 134, 152–160, 162, 165, 167, 196 S Second nature, 26, 28, 31, 43, 46–49, 160 Simmel, G., 8, 21, 118, 119, 133, 136, 140–145, 148, 149, 161, 172 Social phenomenology, viii, 9, 11, 12, 87, 130, 196 Static and genetic phenomenology, 12, 20, 26–28, 31, 41–51, 195 Surrealism, 95–114 T Television, vi, xxi, 53, 117–130, 181, 184, 195 U Unregimented experience, xx, 195