Dialectic of Enlightenment in the Anglosphere: Horkheimer and Adorno's Remnants of Freedom 9811535205, 9789811535208

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
1 Introduction
References
2 Composing Dialectic of Enlightenment
2.1 The Frankfurt School’s Origins
2.2 Frankfurt’s Peculiarities
2.3 Collaborating for Reason
2.4 Conclusion
References
3 Reading Dialectic of Enlightenment
3.1 Dialectic of Enlightenment’s Argument
3.2 Critique of Instrumental Reason
3.3 Myth of Enlightenment
3.4 Enlightenment Morality and Culture
3.5 Enlightenment and Others
3.6 Conclusion
References
4 Reviving Dialectic of Enlightenment
4.1 Towards a New Left
4.2 Marcuse as Mascot
4.3 Authoritarian Personalities
4.4 Frankfurt School’s American Influence
4.5 A Critical Telos
4.6 Conclusion
References
5 Championing Dialectic of Enlightenment in America
5.1 After the New Left
5.2 Another ‘Sort-Of’ Marxism
5.3 From Dialectic of Enlightenment to Communicative Action
5.4 Conclusion
References
6 Reconsidering Dialectic of Enlightenment in America
6.1 The Rise of the Habermasians
6.2 Back to Adorno?
6.3 A Right-Wing Critical Theory?
6.4 Modernist Antidote to Postmodernism
6.5 Conclusion
References
7 Dismissing Dialectic of Enlightenment Among Britain’s New Left
7.1 New Left Review Versus the Frankfurt School
7.2 Skipping Frankfurt
7.3 Cultural Marxist Parallelism
7.4 Beyond the British New Left
7.5 Conclusion
References
8 Reconciling Dialectic of Enlightenment with Postmodernism
8.1 From Post-structuralism to Postmodernism
8.2 Enlightenment as Domination
8.3 Dialectic of Textuality
8.4 A Question of Subjectivity
8.5 Conclusion
References
9 Confronting Dialectic of Enlightenment via Cultural Studies
9.1 The Rise of Cultural Studies
9.2 Beyond Frankfurt and Birmingham
9.3 Consolidating Cultural Studies
9.4 Frankfurt’s Limited Defences
9.5 Fortifying Frankfurt
9.6 Conclusion
References
10 Predicting Dialectic of Enlightenment’s Future
References

Citation preview

Howard Prosser

Dialectic of Enlightenment in the Anglosphere Horkheimer and Adorno’s Remnants of Freedom

Dialectic of Enlightenment in the Anglosphere

Howard Prosser

Dialectic of Enlightenment in the Anglosphere Horkheimer and Adorno’s Remnants of Freedom

123

Howard Prosser Monash University Melbourne, VIC, Australia

ISBN 978-981-15-3520-8 ISBN 978-981-15-3521-5 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3521-5

(eBook)

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved 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 Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Enlightenment is more than enlightenment, it is nature made audible in its estrangement. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno Books have their destinies. They can be lost, forgotten, and then reappear. Even books that remain in circulation for a while have their own destinies. New editions are like shorelines, against which, with every change of situation and the appearance of every new generation of readers, a new stratum of unexpected reactions surfaces. Jürgen Habermas

For my parents, Henry and Mary

Acknowledgements

Habermas’s epigraph on textual destinies applies as much to my book as Dialectic of Enlightenment. Its fate in print was never certain and its materialisation is due, in no small part, to the support of colleagues, friends, and family across many years. This encouragement is now likely forgotten by them. But not by me. Careering through precarious odd jobs while child-rearing afforded little opportunity to bed down this study. Such excuses are not regarded as acceptable by academia’s accelerating demands. But now, with legitimation crisis at least partially over, this first work’s late appearance has been somewhat goaded by, ironically, institutional instrumentality. A personal desire for some irresolvable resolution played a part too. This ‘process of decomposition’, as Adorno would say, means the book is a product of a fertile intellectual season long passed. But it is still important to say that I am truly grateful to: Rob Stuart for your scrupulous guidance of my doctoral research and genuine faith in my abilities as a historian of ideas; Esther Leslie, James Schmidt, and Stephen Bronner for examining it as a thesis and those reviewers of the text in its pre-publication phase; Wade Matthews, Nick Harney, David McNally, Manzur Malik, Luke Hockley, Danielle Micich, Ashley de Prazer, and Peter Beilharz for tangible kindnesses at various junctures; Ilaria Walker and Nick Melchior at Springer for their belief in the text’s worthiness, and to their team for assistance in preparing the manuscript; Samara, Anouar, Leticia, and Bodhi for your endless love, patience and laughter; And Henry and Mary Prosser, my parents, for your foundational and ongoing blessings.

ix

Contents

1 9

1

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

2

Composing Dialectic of Enlightenment 2.1 The Frankfurt School’s Origins . . . 2.2 Frankfurt’s Peculiarities . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Collaborating for Reason . . . . . . . . 2.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

11 12 14 19 26 27

3

Reading Dialectic of Enlightenment . . . . . . 3.1 Dialectic of Enlightenment’s Argument 3.2 Critique of Instrumental Reason . . . . . . 3.3 Myth of Enlightenment . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Enlightenment Morality and Culture . . 3.5 Enlightenment and Others . . . . . . . . . . 3.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

29 30 31 34 36 39 42 43

4

Reviving Dialectic of Enlightenment . . . . . 4.1 Towards a New Left . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Marcuse as Mascot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Authoritarian Personalities . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Frankfurt School’s American Influence 4.5 A Critical Telos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

45 48 51 54 56 61 63 65

5

Championing Dialectic of Enlightenment in America . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 After the New Left . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Another ‘Sort-Of’ Marxism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

69 70 72

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

xi

xii

Contents

5.3 From Dialectic of Enlightenment to Communicative Action . . . . 5.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

80 86 88

6

Reconsidering Dialectic of Enlightenment in America 6.1 The Rise of the Habermasians . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Back to Adorno? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 A Right-Wing Critical Theory? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4 Modernist Antidote to Postmodernism . . . . . . . . . 6.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

91 92 98 101 105 110 112

7

Dismissing Dialectic of Enlightenment Among Britain’s New Left . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1 New Left Review Versus the Frankfurt School . . . . . 7.2 Skipping Frankfurt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3 Cultural Marxist Parallelism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4 Beyond the British New Left . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

115 117 120 122 124 129 130

8

Reconciling Dialectic of Enlightenment with Postmodernism . 8.1 From Post-structuralism to Postmodernism . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2 Enlightenment as Domination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3 Dialectic of Textuality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.4 A Question of Subjectivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

133 135 139 147 153 155 157

9

Confronting Dialectic of Enlightenment via Cultural Studies . 9.1 The Rise of Cultural Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.2 Beyond Frankfurt and Birmingham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.3 Consolidating Cultural Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.4 Frankfurt’s Limited Defences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.5 Fortifying Frankfurt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

161 162 164 165 168 171 178 181

. . . . . . .

10 Predicting Dialectic of Enlightenment’s Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190

Chapter 1

Introduction

What we had set out to do was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism. Horkheimer and Adorno

In 1944, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno circulated a mimeographed manuscript of the work, titled ‘Philosophische Fragmente’, among friends and associates. As an experimental work composed during a civilisational nadir, its approach and argument captured much that had gone wrong for a modernity that promised everything would be better. Believing their text to be of considerable importance, the authors wished to gauge the reaction of like-minded colleagues. The immediate response by select readers was marked by confusion. After some revisions, the authors managed to find a small émigré publishing firm in Amsterdam, Querido Press, to print the text in 1947. This time the work appeared under the title of its first chapter: Dialektik der Aufklärung. Yet Horkheimer and Adorno’s belief in the text’s importance was not shared for more than 20 years. And by that time even their enthusiasm for it had waned. The exiguity of the initial publication meant that Dialektik der Aufklärung remained largely unread until pirated copies reappeared among West German student activists of the mid-to-late 1960s. By 1969 the text had been officially re-released in German and 3 years later appeared in an English translation as Dialectic of Enlightenment. A small number of Anglophone scholars championed the text from that time on. These scholars are largely responsible for the sustained interest in the book and the Frankfurt School in general. Indeed, once Dialectic of Enlightenment was ‘englished’ in 1972, Frankfurt School scholarship became an expanding cottage industry in Anglophone academia: Horkheimer’s Critical Theory, a collection of essays from the 1930s, appeared in 1972; Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and Minima Moralia in 1973 and 1974 and Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason in 1974. Forgotten works by other Frankfurt School members were also revived by young graduate students, while Martin Jay’s 1973 history of the School provided an intellectual context for all those interested. Hence, assessments of the book’s significance, or its worthlessness, came long after its original publication. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 H. Prosser, Dialectic of Enlightenment in the Anglosphere, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3521-5_1

1

2

1 Introduction

The chapters below constitute a work of intellectual history that explores Dialectic of Enlightenment’s significance and reception among Anglophone intellectuals at the end of the twentieth century. This period is book-ended by the two English-language versions of the text: John Cummings’ 1972 translation and Edmund Jephcott’s of 2002. (It is the latter from which all quotations in the text are taken.) As such, I survey the way that Dialectic of Enlightenment, and the Frankfurt School more broadly, intersected with important intellectual strands of the post-1960s period: namely, the New Left, Cultural Studies, Postmodernism and a ‘third-generation’ Frankfurt School, based primarily in the United States. The text’s specificity is explored in the works of these groupings, but there is also a story told of how German social philosophy travelled to influence Anglophone scholars keen to make connections between culture, politics and society in ways that their local traditions did not obviously permit. Horkeimer and Adorno’s rational critique of reason appealed to young leftist scholars in North America, Britain and Australasia who recognised its value in challenging conservative orthodoxies, social democratic complacencies and neoliberal fantasies. Consequently, my book, while offering some sketches of Dialectic of Enlightenment’s origins and future, concentrates on the post-1970s moment up until around the turn of the new millennium when the apparent solidity of the aforementioned strands had frayed and dispersed to become the contemporary theory industry that adopted an original Frankfurt School term—Critical Theory—for itself. The history of Dialectic of Enlightenment’s reception consists of varied interpretations within the constellation of contemporary intellectual positions. Put simply, the context in which it was written was quite different from the context in which it was received. The embroiled period that framed Horkheimer and Adorno’s central concern—‘the self-destruction of enlightenment’ (2002: xvi)—provided little evidence that the Enlightenment project was manifesting itself in anything but a corrupt form. Politically, Horkheimer and Adorno’s experiences in a tottering Weimar Republic and a brash, though economically recovering, United States contributed to Dialectic of Enlightenment’s outlook. Similarly, revolutionary Marxism’s failure in Western Europe and the horrific reports about socialism’s development in the Soviet Union swayed the Frankfurt School towards philosophy and away from political theory. Intellectually, interwar Germany’s scholarly climate was dominated by an outpouring created by the rich scholarship of the preceding half-century—from Marx to Weber, Nietzsche to Freud, Husserl to Heidegger. All such work was dogged by a fundamental uneasiness about the speed at which industrialised modernity had colonised the Western mind. To put it schematically, the modern self as influenced by science and technology split intellectuals of the day into two distinct groups: those for and those against the claims of reason and science. That these groups did not fall neatly into the ideological enclaves of Right and Left is clearly expressed in Dialectic of Enlightenment’s pages. For unlike the orthodox Marxists of the Second or Third International, for whom economic growth and technological innovation was almost always a good thing, Horkheimer and Adorno distrusted scientific claims to control nature. Modernity was at once embraced and abhorred. At a time when barbarism seemed History’s likely outcome, Dialectic of Enlightenment was a convergence—point for both Enlightenment and

1 Introduction

3

anti-Enlightenment streams of modern thought. Horkheimer and Adorno sought to explain not just why the Enlightenment had gone awry, but what was inherently wrong with rational thought per se. As political scientist Zeev Sternhell pithily captured, they were showing how human domination of nature through reason had ‘ended by including himself [sic] in the totality to be dominated, and so lost his individuality and freedom’ (2010: 356). Decades later came the spectrum of opinion that arose from the post-1970 reception of Dialectic of Enlightenment. After the 1960s uprisings, the intellectual Left was coming to terms with yet another defeat at the hands of a dynamic capitalist system. Even the combined effect of the United States’ failed intervention in Vietnam, the 1973 economic crisis and numerous political misadventures did not destabilise capitalist hegemony. Instead capitalism managed to shore up its defences and mutated into today’s foundering neo-liberal system. At the same time, the Left underwent a transformation of its own. Some threw themselves headlong into defending and/or revising Marxism; others were attracted to new open-ended postmodern theories or to questions of culture. Some left-wing theorists, however, sought refuge in Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the Enlightenment. This turn to the Frankfurt School manifested a combination of hope and despair. Dialectic of Enlightenment was novel in that it offered an indictment of capitalism’s effects, but also explained how progressive forces—liberals, socialists or even soixante-huitards—also manifested dominating impulses. These younger thinkers were ready to believe, at least for a while, that ‘Enlightenment is totalitarian’ (Horkheimer and Adorno: 4). Those who disagreed with this supposition rejected the text as either apolitical, ahistorical hogwash or elitist, outmoded pretence. To most of these observers, Horkheimer and Adorno’s approach was a mixed bag of speculative social science and Romanticist anti-reason. The Frankfurt scholars’ claims were not substantiated by empirical evidence or thorough comparative research. Thus, Dialectic of Enlightenment’s Anglophone reception is entwined with the complicated intellectual developments of the post-1968 era. The richness and at times baffling nature of the text has meant that it is open to varying interpretations. Aspects of the work could be extrapolated to justify or disprove various theoretical interests whether in debates over Marxism’s practical application, post-structuralism’s ‘foundations’, interpretations of popular culture or the value of the Frankfurt School’s approach. Examining English-language engagements with Dialectic of Enlightenment in the last 30 years not only illuminates the text’s mutability, but also reveals the multifaceted nature of contemporary theory. Clearly, Dialectic of Enlightenment’s impact cannot be accurately gauged without attention to these ‘histories’ of interpretation. Examining the text’s advent and legacy not only establishes the difference between the context in which the work was written and that in which it was read—the modernist versus the postmodernist, perhaps. It also, somewhat paradoxically, suggests continuity between these two related periods, especially their common questioning of modernity. Horkheimer and Adorno’s attention to the dangers of capitalism and of instrumental reason finds a qualified resonance with those less benighted by, though certainly not fully beyond, the shadow cast by the first half of the twentieth century.

4

1 Introduction

This book outlines a history of Dialectic of Enlightenment in the English-speaking world. What follows focuses more on texts about the Frankfurt School rather than texts by it. It follows the lead of other approaches within the history of ideas (i.e. Ascheim 1992 and Eley 1984) and while listening in on discussion about the history of the book (i.e. Darnton 2007). I have assembled a study that ‘chews the cud’, as Eric Hobsbawm (1997: vii) put it, of other peoples’ work. Such grazing aims to develop a ‘historiographical’ understanding of Dialectic of Enlightenment in a context quite different from that in which it was written. This claim deserves some further elaboration. First, Dialectic of Enlightenment’s publication, whether in the 1940s or 1970s, was not an event with momentous social ramifications like the French Revolution, nor did Horkheimer and Adorno influence subsequent generations in ways like a major thinker such as Marx or Nietzsche. But that is not to say that their co-authored work has been insignificant in its effects. Indeed, it may be argued that Dialectic of Enlightenment is one of the twentieth century’s most important texts—it is certainly, as one historian has observed, the Frankfurt School’s ‘best-known fruit’ (Davies 1996: 953). Not only does the book’s thesis comprise conflicting theoretical viewpoints, but its interpretation and appropriation by Anglophone scholars reflect the intellectual Left’s shifting attitudes from 1968 onwards: radicalism, academicism, postmodernism and/or culturalism. Second, unlike most historiographical studies, my book is not exclusively focused on historians’ work. Other scholars, from varying disciplines, are also present. This is a sign of both the interdisciplinary approach and influence of Horkheimer and Adorno’s book—from History to Philosophy, Political Science to Cultural Studies. I have decided to examine texts which have concerned themselves, either wholly or partially, with interpretation of Horkheimer and Adorno’s work. Different interpretations of Dialectic of Enlightenment are examined within specific contexts—be they academic or socio-political—to elucidate the viewpoints advanced. As a result, sometimes the book shows a continuity of Horkheimer and Adorno’s ideas in the English-speaking world; other times it reveals the peculiarities of academic leftism during the late twentieth century. This is therefore an intellectual history of social theory (or what has simply come to be called Theory). In particular, the by-product of the textual focus on Dialectic of Enlightenment is a history where the particular camps were far more partisan than they have now become. The history of the book, within intellectual history (or the history of ideas), will always reveal different ways of seeing the past, present and future at various moments. Attitudes towards Dialectic of Enlightenment allowed post-1960s leftist intellectuals to articulate their attitudes to modernity’s ongoing domination or opportunities for liberation—what Horkheimer and Adorno called critical thoughts ‘remnants of freedom’ (2002: xi). Since the 1960s, followers of Critical Theory, New Leftism, Cultural Studies and Postmodernism have all had something to say about these vestiges. Many of these labels now seem quaint, only a few decades later. Still, issues around freedom persist. And so to do discussions of Horkheimer and Adorno’s work. My book is part of this discussion as much as it is a work of historical thinking. That is not to say I am in complete agreement with Horkheimer and Adorno. Rather, like those of whom I speak in this book, the Frankfurt scholars’ book is generative to

1 Introduction

5

think with given that modernity, especially in digital present, continues to struggle with the same issues surrounding nature’s domination by humans. My own affinities for the Critical Theory tradition lay with its reflective awareness, interdisciplinarity and conscious grappling the human experience and meaning-making in the natural world. Affiliations aside, there was a methodological complication confronting this study: Horkheimer and Adorno’s desire to challenge history writing. To a large extent my historiographical method transgresses the imperative of Dialectic of Enlightenment: classifying interpretations of the work is a form of rationalism against which Horkheimer and Adorno argued. Dialectic of Enlightenment’s deliberate modernist style criticises both the method of narrative history and the role such history has in sustaining enlightenment’s supposedly negative effects. Even a decade after the book’s release Adorno continued to complain, in a 1954 letter to Leo Löwenthal, about the ‘kind of modernity that consists in making abstract chronology the standard for relevance and that thus represents the exact opposite of the truly progressive’ (Löwenthal 1989: 145). Such a stance means that most attempts to write human history ultimately would fall short of Horkheimer and Adorno’s demanding intellectual standards. To be true to their method (or anti-method), the best approach to a history of Dialectic of Enlightenment would be constellational: to place the text alongside all of its authors’ other works, as well as that of their contemporaries and forebears and then proceed to read at random. From such a reading, flashes of the past would beam out to illuminate the present. But to apply such a technique would also be an uncritical acceptance of Horkheimer and Adorno’s ideas. Such kow-towing would be an outrage to Critical Theory’s precepts. Under the magnifying glass of history Dialectic of Enlightenment has to be read with attention to the ideas expressed within it, but also with mindfulness to the criticisms that it has elicited from subsequent commentators. Two terminological clarifications are also necessary. First, the terms Frankfurt School and Critical Theory are often contentious both on their own and when used interchangeably. There is a brief explanation of their histories, meanings and differences in the first chapter. Moreover, whether Horkheimer and Adorno can be seen as the key representative of both these categories is also open to as it diminishes other members’ contributions to the group’s oeuvre. Nonetheless, throughout the text that follows I do tend to regard ‘Horkheimer and Adorno’ as interchangeable with the terms Frankfurt School and Critical Theory, which also serve as synonyms for each other. This approach is conventional among many of the scholars discussed and may illegitimately conflate the particularity of each ‘term’—not least by amalgamating Horkheimer and Adorno themselves. Suffice to say that where ‘Horkheimer and Adorno’ is the signifier, the reader can rest assured that the reference is to Dialectic of Enlightenment, where the authors are mentioned separately it is in discussions of their own work and lives, and where Frankfurt School and Critical Theory are mentioned the meaning is more open-ended. Second, the adjectival use of ‘Anglosphere’ (and ‘Anglophone’ or ‘Englishspeaking world’) is a necessary, if problematic, limiting device. In many respects, Anglosphere is an ambiguous designation because the English language’s current global hegemony has increased the number of scholars and settings that could be

6

1 Introduction

included in this schema (Vucetic 2011). Its appearance in the title is largely pragmatic and I have not overused it as an analytical concept. This study’s focus is on the Frankfurt School scholarship produced in the United States and Britain—the English language’s imperial metropoleis—from the 1970s till 2000. Work done on the Frankfurt School in other Anglophone nations during the late twentieth century has been small though not insignificant: Canadian scholars’ proximity to the United States means much of their work, rightly or wrongly, appears under the rubric (North) American; Australasia has produced little work on Critical Theory apart from that appearing in the journal Thesis Eleven from the 1980s until today and India’s rich radical tradition has found no real use for the Frankfurt School. Of course, the Frankfurt School was read in non-Anglophone nations, but a consideration of these viewpoints is beyond this study’s framework. Thus, this book focuses primarily, though not exclusively, on the Dialectic of Enlightenment’s interpretation in Britain and America. One caveat must be added to this assertion: nationality is not considered a determinant of great theoretical influence. That is, Anglophone scholarship, especially where it concerns the Frankfurt School, is treated as a significant whole, not something defined by imagined national communities. The international links between contemporary scholars—through the circulation of books, journals and symposia—now constitute a specific language-limited (and usually class-defined) identity in a similar vein to nationalism. In some ways, this reduces the importance of making national distinctions between scholars, though I am not such a cosmopolitan as to believe that these cultural categories do not count at all. The Frankfurt School’s encouragement of interdisciplinarity has meant that its theories’ effects have been widely felt. There are few subjects in the humanities and social sciences that have not had something to say about Critical Theory. Such ubiquity has been a problem for this study. I originally perceived the analysis as extending beyond Dialectic of Enlightenment to incorporate a general survey of literature on Critical Theory. This gargantuan undertaking is impossible (Marchand 1995). Hence, I resolved to focus the topic on Dialectic of Enlightenment, mainly because of this text’s centrality to Critical Theory. This focusing was still going to be difficult. Not everything written on Critical Theory relates directly to Dialectic of Enlightenment. I was faced with a massive pile of works to read and the task of determining which were appropriate for inclusion. Reviewing this literature led me from one fascinating body of texts to another in an all-consuming bibliographical investigation. Thus, from a large body of research I have tried to select texts that are appropriate for each chapter. My survey ultimately provides a picture of latetwentieth-century social theory’s travails within academia more than it explicates specific disciplinary or theoretical questions broached by Critical Theory. As that great Dutch historiographer Geyl (1965: 10) put it: ‘I do not claim to give a complete survey, but I do believe I may say that the omissions do not affect the general outline of the picture’. Based on the texts selected the argument centres on a series of questions about Dialectic of Enlightenment’s interpretation and appropriation. What was Horkheimer and Adorno’s thesis and why did they argue it? Does Dialectic of Enlightenment have a core thesis? What was its subsequent interpretation in the English-speaking world,

1 Introduction

7

especially with the New Left in Britain and post-New Left in America? How was Dialectic of Enlightenment interpreted by a small number of—mainly American— intellectuals who backed Critical Theory during and after the 1970s? Was a proFrankfurt turn a partial dismantling of the Left in the post-sixties era? How did Dialectic of Enlightenment—and by association, Critical Theory—stand in reference to other contemporary discourses like postmodernism and Cultural Studies? And, finally what can be said of Dialectic of Enlightenment’s future? Answering these questions has relied upon the assumption that Dialectic of Enlightenment is particularly open to multiple interpretations. The basis of this assumption is the fact that Dialectic of Enlightenment is such a rich text. It affords itself to different readings. In particular, the text’s unique fusion of Marxist and Nietzschean themes has made it particularly appealing to the post-1970s theory industry. Within this context, Dialectic of Enlightenment’s future was assured. The epistemological axis on which the post-1970s academic Left has rotated has Marxist and Nietzschean poles. The tension between these two outlooks is largely a result of the competing discourses of the New Left and postmodernism, respectively. As a result, Dialectic of Enlightenment—or at least parts of its thesis—was useful for many scholars as an example of how to, or how not to, rethink modernity. It was on the issue of modernity that the text has caused most contention. This was the same issue which drove much post-1970 debate, especially that surrounding questions of postmodernism. Dialectic of Enlightenment’s supposed pessimism puts into question whether its authors were actually for or against modernity, or, more precisely, whether they were for or against reason. Despite the confusion, the text was nevertheless the first instalment of their attempt to redeem human rationality. But analysis of authorial intent is only one of many issues that influenced my survey. The more general proposition is not about what Horkheimer and Adorno meant, but what they have been taken to mean and how these interpretations fit within a late-twentieth-century context. The chapters that follow foreground and outline readings of Dialectic of Enlightenment and in so doing sketch out a reception of Critical Theory and the travails of recent social theory. It roughly falls into two parts. The first three chapters work to offer some background—historical and theoretical—for the remainder. Chapter 2 considers the origins of the text as well as the authors’ relationship from their time in Germany and the United States, where they collaborated to write the text. It does not purport to add anything new to the already thorough corpus describing the Frankfurt School’s history and theories. Instead, these historical and theoretical texts are used to reveal a significant relationship between the Frankfurt School’s history and Dialectic of Enlightenment’s content. This analysis serves two purposes. First, it illuminates the context in which the book was written. Such an enterprise assumes, of course, that the text is better understood if the times in which it was produced are elucidated. In other words, Dialectic of Enlightenment’s original meaning is considered to be dependent on the circumstances in which Horkheimer and Adorno found themselves in the years leading up to their text’s publication. This may undermine the very critique of history implicit to their work, to which I can say only I am aware of this contradiction. The same can be said of Chap. 3 which offers a synopsis of the text’s

8

1 Introduction

approach and main points. Whether there is an unintentional narrative about how it ought to be read—or, as one critic has put it, how it ought not to be read (McCormick 2002)—is up to the reader to decide. Chapter 4 then positions Dialectic of Enlightenment in its post-war reception—the limited influence of Critical Theory in post-war English-speaking world and the re-emergence of the book during the late 1960s. The subsequent chapters outline the ways the text was read in academic circles from the 1970s onwards. They overlap in many ways and follow a similar temporal progression: most begin around the 1970 and end with the turn of the century. Chapter 5 discusses the focus on Critical Theory among young scholars in postNew-Left America—especially around the journal Telos—and how this work led to enthusiasms for Dialectic of Enlightenment as well as the Frankfurt tradition in general. The real bastion of the Frankfurt School after 1970 was built by younger scholars who translated and appropriated its work in the United States. Often these scholars were outsiders in an academy still suspicious of Critical Theory. As time passed, however, Critical Theory became more acceptable within academia. The figure of Habermas looms large within this trajectory as a corrective to such reception as well as a legitimating force. Chapter 6 continues this story of Critical Theory in America during the 1980s and 1990s where Habermas’s influence is felt strongly. Affiliations for Dialectic of Enlightenment continue, but with qualifications that see groupings from the 1970s diverge to both the right and left. Chapter 7 considers a similar tale in Britain among its ‘second’ New Left, where the reception of Horkheimer and Adorno was much cooler among Marxists oriented to structuralism and revolutionary hope, but when faced with political resignation by the end of the 1990s, the remnants of this New Left take up a position similar to Dialectic of Enlightenment’s authors. Chapter 8 outlines the way that Horkheimer and Adorno’s work is regarded as proto-postmodernist or post-structuralist. Strong and important affinities between these lineages are considered alongside critiques that hold to the different logical consequences of both approaches. The chapter focuses on three main themes of that discourse—domination, textuality and subjectivity—and how these have related themselves to Dialectic of Enlightenment or the Frankfurt School more generally. Chapter 9 examines the rise of the discipline of Cultural Studies and its representatives’ hostile attitude towards Horkheimer and Adorno’s discussion of the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Such hostility was, for the most part, articulated around by a facile division between Adorno and his colleague Walter Benjamin. Cultural Studies scholars at that time almost uniformly regarded the debates between these two men as evidence of Adorno’s elitist antipathy to popular culture and Benjamin’s cultural populism. It is only recently that other scholars have sought to debunk this misconception. And, finally, Chap.10 works as a conclusion to the text. It offers key findings as well as some speculations about Horkheimer and Adorno’s book in the future.

References

9

References Ascheim, S. E. (1992). The Nietzsche reception in Germany, 1890–1990. Berkeley: University of California Press. Darnton, R. (2007). What is the history of books? (Revisited). Modern Intellectual History, 4(3), 495–508. Davies, N. (1996). Europe: A history. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eley, G. (1984). Reading Gramsci in English: Observations on the reception of Antonio Gramsci in the English-speaking world, 1957–82. European History Quarterly, 14(4), 441–477. Geyl, P. (1965). Napoleon: For and against. London: Peregrine. Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment (Edmund Jephcott, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hobsbawm, E. (1997) On History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Löwenthal, L. (1989). Critical theory and the Frankfurt theorists: Lectures-correspondenceconversations. New Brunswick: Transaction. Marchand, S. (1995). Problems and prospects for intellectual history. New German Critique, 65, 87–96. McCormick, J. P. (2002). A critical versus genealogical ‘Questioning’ of technology: Notes on how Not to read Adorno and Horkheimer. In J. P. McCormick (Ed.), Confronting mass democracy and industrial technology: Political and social theory from Nietzsche to Habermas (pp. 267–294). Durham: Duke University Press. Sternhell, Z. (2010). The anti-enlightenment tradition (David Maisel, Trans.). New Haven: Yale University Press. Vucetic, S. (2011). The Anglosphere: A genealogy of a racialized identity in international relations. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Chapter 2

Composing Dialectic of Enlightenment

Each advance of civilization has renewed not only mastery but also the prospect of its alleviation. However, while real history is woven from real suffering, which certainly does not diminish in proportion to the increase in the means of abolishing it, the fulfilment of that prospect depends on the concept. For not only does the concept, as science, distance human beings from nature, but, as the self-reflection of thought—which, in the form of science, remains fettered to the blind economic tendency—it enables the distance which perpetuates injustice to be measured. Horkheimer and Adorno

In late 1942, Horkheimer wrote excitedly to his colleague, and old comrade, Friedrich Pollock about a continuation of their old thinking in his present work. Horkheimer characterised the studies he was undertaking as ‘the fulfilment of what we have dreamt to be our raison d’etre’ (cited in Wiggershaus 1994). His sentiment harked back the political possibilities of their youth: the post-1917 moment when he and Pollock shared an enthusiasm for a revolutionary socialism that they believed would take humanity beyond capitalism’s trammels. The studies of which Horkheimer spoke would eventually become Dialectic of Enlightenment. The German version was initially circulated among friends in 1944 as the mimeographed Philosophische Fragmente. These fragments were dedicated to Pollock on his fiftieth birthday and were then released, in 1947, as Dialectik der Aufklärung by Querido Verlag. Yet scholars who have read the text in concert with Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School’s earlier works regard it as anything but a continuation, let alone a realisation of youthful dreams. Rather, Dialectic of Enlightenment’s apparently overt pessimism is said to be symptomatic of a severe bout of melancholy such that only totalitarian modernity could bring on. Many interpreters have continued this line of thinking about the text. Horkheimer and Adorno are seen to have given up on humanity and dug themselves into a philosophical hole without hope for escape. As a consequence, the text is often read as indicating a distinct shift in the Frankfurt School’s approach— from critical hopefulness to outright despondency (Wolin 1992). Accepting Dialectic of Enlightenment as a clear break with the Frankfurt School’s earlier thought would fail to acknowledge important continuities. Most scholars interested in the Frankfurt School have recognised this point (Alway 1995). The Second © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 H. Prosser, Dialectic of Enlightenment in the Anglosphere, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3521-5_2

11

12

2 Composing Dialectic of Enlightenment

World War may have accentuated Horkheimer and Adorno’s glumness, but it was not the only cause of their despair. Nor, moreover, was their despair without hope for salvation. To them, modernity was overcast by a unfreedoms, but they still held out for clearer days. With this outlook in mind, Horkheimer’s sentiments in this letter to Pollock are easier to understand. Dialectic of Enlightenment can thus be seen as both a desperate and hopeful lament for modernity. The text’s quixotic nature reflects its paradoxical position in the Frankfurt School’s history. Part of what makes the text so interesting is the differing degrees to which it ruptured and continued Critical Theory’s development. Hence, it would not be too outlandish to suggest that a history of the Frankfurt School could be written around Dialectic of Enlightenment. Since many useful histories of the School already exist this book is more about the School’s interpretation, specifically through this one text and its quizzical thesis. This chapter therefore outlines the history and theory surrounding Dialectic of Enlightenment’s construction, thereby establishing a foundation for the chapters that follow. This task is not so much a matter of deciding whether the text altered or reinforced Critical Theory, but questioning why and how it did both. In other words, how did Dialectic of Enlightenment reflect a change, if any, in its authors’ (and, by association, the Frankfurt School’s) outlook? What experiences, knowledges and individuals determined its strange thesis?

2.1 The Frankfurt School’s Origins The Frankfurt School emerged immediately after the First World War during the new Weimar Republic’s period of early radicalism. In a policy aimed at fostering socialist and social democratic thought, the new German government founded universities in cities that the previous regime believed too seditious to warrant tertiary education (Ringer 1969). In 1923, the creation of Frankfurt’s Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute of Social Research) coincided with this moment. But it was not until the early 1930s that ‘the Frankfurt School’ began to take shape. By then, Germany was radically different. The socio-economic stability that the Weimar Republic had finally established after its painful birth proved deceptive and the Depression, which hit Germany before the late 1929 Wall Street Crash, made way for the National Socialists. Faced with this destabilisation, Left intellectuals rallied to defend the political and cultural renaissance in the new republic from the increasingly influential political solutions of the Right (Herf 1984). It was from this environment that the Frankfurt School emerged. Like the designation of most intellectual coteries, the term ‘Frankfurt School’ is a posthumous and often unhelpful name. The title originated during the mid1960s following increasing interest in the 1930s Institute. Once this title was coined, Adorno took it up and used it, as one of the School’s chief historian notes, with pride (Wiggershaus 1994). Since then the term Frankfurt School has been used to include all the intellectuals associated with the Institute of Social Research. More specifically, it describes those figures closest to Max Horkheimer during his first

2.1 The Frankfurt School’s Origins

13

period as the Institute’s director during the thirties and forties. The group’s nucleus included the philosopher Horkheimer, economist Frederick Pollock, literary sociologist Leo Löwenthal, philosopher Herbert Marcuse and philosopher/musicologist Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno.1 Of course, the grouping of so many important scholars under a single title always creates an illusion of cohesion. Such an illusion is often perpetuated by the interests of those who propagated it in the first place—in this case, the sixties’ New Left. Thus, because the Frankfurt School was never one thing at any one time, anomalies abound in its supposedly cohesive history. Martin Jay’s classic 1973 history of the Frankfurt School went a long way to cementing the group’s title. However, as Jay (1996) conceded, his study not only proved coherency in the School’s thought, but also showed how disparate the group actually was. For example, not all of these figures got along: Marcuse’s early phenomenological upbringing (he was Martin Heidegger’s assistant for a spell) and enduring Marxism made him suspect to others at different stages (Feenberg 2005), while Adorno was seen as something of a pompous eccentric who never quite reconciled himself to the rest of the group (Claussen 2008). Conversely, not all of the School’s figures have been regarded as brilliant individual scholars by those outside of Critical Theory’s heritage: both Pollock and Löwenthal are said to have worked in Horkheimer’s shadow (Jay 1996), and even Horkheimer has been called a ‘secondary-rank thinker’ when compared to Adorno and Marcuse (Anderson 1976: 93). Definitional anomalies aside, scholars tend to agree that these figures warranted being called a ‘School’. Such accord means that the term ‘the Frankfurt School’ remains useful for the study at hand for two reasons. First, the separation of these figures would obscure the influence they had on each other. Indeed, the difficulty involved in defining this group of scholars epitomises one of Critical Theory’s key insights: that individual particularity is often, if not always, at odds with bourgeois society’s attempt to impose universality. The second reason follows from the first: all those intellectuals mentioned played some role in Dialectic of Enlightenment’s development. Obviously Horkheimer and Adorno are the credited authors of the book. But, as with all texts, the influence of others on the work—both direct and indirect—was significant. Part of the book’s final chapter was co-written by Löwenthal (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002); Pollock determined the text’s latent economic theory (Hohendahl 1995); Walter Benjamin had a large effect on the work’s epistemological foundations (Jay 1984a) and even Marcuse and Fromm were significant in the early stages of the project (Wiggershaus 1994). In other words, the Institute fostered an exchange of ideas that impacted on Dialectic of Enlightenment’s eventual production. Indeed, the text’s ‘philosophical fragments’ contain many of the strains of the thought that had motivated the Frankfurt Institute during the 1930s tumult. These fragments exist as such chiefly because of the authors’ modernist sympathies 1 Although such nominal descriptions misrepresent the interdisciplinary nature of the Institute, these

were the areas of greatest interest to each individual. Other adjectives could be added, for example, Adorno could easily be described as a sociologist. Moreover, other individuals can be added to the group—Erich Fromm, Siegfried Kracauer, Otto Kirchheimer, Franz Neumann, Karl Wittfogel and, perhaps, Walter Benjamin. In his overview of the School, Helmut Dubiel (1985: 157) used a neat diagram to show the ‘patterns of influence’ between each of the Institute’s scholars.

14

2 Composing Dialectic of Enlightenment

and method of writing, but also because the short-lived intellectual moment that Horkheimer had cultivated was smashed to smithereens by the Nazi takeover. The initial years of Horkheimer’s directorship—or ‘dictatorship’—as the Institute’s first director, Carl Grünberg, had it (Dubiel 1985: 180)—saw philosophical considerations slowly erode the Institute’s more orthodox Marxist approach. When the Institute was established in 1923—through funds that Felix Weil, who in 1973 deliciously described himself as a ‘salon Bolshevik’, solicited from his millionaire father—the initial direction followed the more rigid scientism of historical materialism. This situation was largely due to Grünberg. Being at least one generation older than those who would constitute the Frankfurt School, Grünberg was a Marxist of a more determinist ilk. He regarded empirical investigations into the operations of society as the most efficacious means of establishing the economic laws that govern social life. Added to this scientific approach, the Institute maintained close ties with the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. It is because of these ties that most of the Institute’s work during the twenties can be best described as Marxist theory heavily focused upon economics—which was where Fredrick Pollock, the link between the twenties and thirties Institute, found his niche (Wiggershaus 1994). As a result of this unabashed approach, Grünberg’s Institute earned itself the title of ‘Café Marx’ during the 1920s—a title which was altered to ‘Café Max’ in the 1950s when the Institute was re-opened under Horkheimer’s directorship (Jay 1996). In his 1931 inaugural lecture, however, Horkheimer sowed the seed that grew into Critical Theory: the possibility of qualitatively improving individual existence by better understanding the relationship between subject and society. In the address, Horkheimer betokened a renewed programme of social transfiguration that sought to put into practice the concept of rational transcendence advocated by the German Idealists—particularly Hegel. It was an agenda that was to ‘juxtapose’ philosophical constructs of ‘man’s essence’—especially that of Heidegger’s existentialism—with a social theory that used empirical investigation of society, mostly of the working class, to indict the bourgeois status quo (Horkheimer 1989). Essentially this critique was aimed at Hegel, but Horkheimer also criticised Martin Heidegger’s inert concept of ‘Being’ for reinforcing resistance to human emancipation. Horkheimer also called for an extension of the Institute’s interdisciplinary nature so that it would become a place where ‘philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians and psychoanalysts unite in lasting co-operation’ (Horkheimer 1989). As Martin Jay (1996: 25) has summarised it, Horkheimer’s social philosophy ‘would not be a single Wissenschaft (science) in search of immutable truth. Rather, it was to be understood as a materialist theory enriched and supplemented by empirical work, in the same way that natural philosophy was dialectically related to the natural sciences’.

2.2 Frankfurt’s Peculiarities Despite Horkheimer’s sanguine prescriptions for the Institute, the Frankfurt School’s movement from social science to social philosophy was symptomatic of the broader historical conjuncture. The reasons for this transition can be explained through three

2.2 Frankfurt’s Peculiarities

15

major factors. First, the Frankfurt School had an important part in the development of so-called Western Marxism which arose after the First World War. The term Western Marxism, said to be an invention of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is accepted to describe continental Marxist philosophers of the mid-twentieth century (Anderson 1976; Jacoby 1981; Jay 1984b). ‘Western Marxism’, like the ‘Frankfurt School’, is a problematic term. Not only does it force an odd geographical (not to say hierarchical) label on a group, but it implies an at least roughly coordinated programme. That was far from the case. Many of its representatives were unaware of each other or never met. Those who did know of other Western Marxist’s work were not necessarily in agreement. Moreover, it was a cross-generational phenomenon which extended from Karl Korsch in the 1920s to (arguably) Guy Debord in the 1960s. The Frankfurt School’s approach was heavily indebted to the Hegelian Marxism expounded, and then retracted by Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch during the 1920s (Arato and Breines 1979). But unlike Lukács and Korsch, who linked their humanist Marxism to proletarian revolution, the Frankfurt School proposed a philosophical Marxism (or a Marxism of sorts) that was marked by quietism rather than praxis. Such quietism reversed Marxism’s previous development. The fin-de-siècle witnessed increasing socialist agitation as a direct challenge to reform-based Marxism. These programmes for social and political revolution culminated in the revolts and revolutions that characterised European politics in the early twentieth century. By the 1930s, however, all did not bode well for this new communism. On the one hand, Central Europe’s failed soviets signalled capitalism’s resistance to the socialist threat (and, depending on one’s outlook, exposed either a fickle or thoroughly oppressed working class), while the Bolsheviks’ ‘success’ in Russia seemed to have brought nothing except civil war, famine and terror (though its apologists and faithful abounded in the West). As the Frankfurt School saw it, the possibility of social revolution in Europe appeared to have been missed. By the 1930s, fascism was on the rise throughout Europe and the Left’s Popular Front seemed unable to stop it. With this situation on the Frankfurt Institute’s doorstep, its members pointed towards philosophy for a solution to the impending calamity. The discovery of Marx’s early humanist manuscripts encouraged this transferral. Almost overnight, Marx became as much a humanist philosopher as he was an economic or political theorist (Löwy 2003). The Frankfurt School adapted perfectly to this changed perspective— Horkheimer and his colleagues chose to interpret the world rather than change it. Or, better, they felt that interpreting the world would help them understand why it had not changed and assist them in changing it in the future. A philosophical approach to Marx resonated with Horkheimer’s overall vision. Marxism’s presence at the Institute alerted most of its scholars to the fact that the philosophical was always already political. Nonetheless, most members of the Frankfurt School recoiled from political activism. Such apparent apoliticism managed to estrange the Frankfurt School from any sort of organisational Marxism. The Frankfurt School’s political sophistication should not be rejected for its lack of praxis, however. On the contrary, its members still sought to demolish the market-oriented society, if only in theory. To Horkheimer and his acolytes, bourgeois capitalism

16

2 Composing Dialectic of Enlightenment

was based on a logic which literally turned humans into things. This Lukácsian diagnosis was found on more than a Marxist critique of commodity fetishism. For in their minds the Marxist critique of objects-as-commodity failed to criticise the over-arching rational systems which allowed such commodification to flourish. To the Frankfurt School, Marx had overlooked this important epistemological factor, namely, the ‘dictatorship of reason’ in almost all thought. Consequently, Marxism, as part of the Enlightenment discourse Horkheimer and Adorno criticised, suffered from the same surplus of rationality seen in bourgeois society. Instead of renewing the theory of commodity fetishism, the Frankfurt School attempted, as the historian Richard Wolin (1987) noted, to resuscitate philosophical rationalism’s legacy. Horkheimer and Adorno desired a return to a type of philosophy that examined reason’s nature so as to better comprehend its totalising effects of domination and reification (Bewes 2002). To them at least, Dialectic of Enlightenment revived the questioning of rationality’s foundations. Second, the 1930s also presented the Frankfurt School’s members with evidence that it was not only Marxism but the Enlightenment’s very foundations that were being undermined. It was these precepts that had to be defended from what Horkheimer and Adorno considered the forces that sought to destroy them. Instead of a formulaic Marxism, they turned to the fundamentals of Enlightenment philosophy—namely, reason and culture—to defend ‘man’ from modernity’s destructive forces. However, their text’s originality lay in the claim that these fundamentals, although potentially liberating, also contained the germ of domination. As a result, their use of the term ‘enlightenment’ was ambiguous. It could be taken to mean either the transhistorical process of humans understanding themselves and their surroundings—that is, enlightenment in general. Or, it could be limited to the works and projects associated with the Enlightenment—a collective discourse that can be read as responsible for and bearing witness to modernity’s positive and negative effects.2 This ambiguity was especially evident at their time of writing. In Europe, the early thirties’ economic crises were followed by a reactionary counter-revolution. The Frankfurt School had perhaps the best seat from which to observe this trend. To them, the Nazi ascendancy in Germany proved that the current Left could not contain this antiEnlightenment wave. Indeed, this wave closed the Institute’s doors less than 6 weeks after Hitler became chancellor in January 1933. As intellectuals with leftist views and Jewish backgrounds, members of the School were utterly alien to Hitler’s new regime (Jay 1980). Consequently, Horkheimer and his colleagues left Germany in the early months of 1933, most of them settling in Geneva where they set up shop and organised their journal’s publication. But Switzerland’s proximity to Germany, as well as many Swiss citizens’ Nazi sympathies, made it a far from comfortable refuge. It was these forbidding circumstances that led Horkheimer to negotiate a sanctuary for the Institute at Columbia University, New York (Wheatland 2009).

2 Following Horkheimer and Adorno’s lead I capitalise the term ‘enlightenment’ only when referring

to the historical period/movement. All other usages will refer to human enlightenment in general—as a process whereby reason is applied.

2.2 Frankfurt’s Peculiarities

17

The decision to move to New York was recognition of the School’s mistrust of the Soviet Union. Marxism with a Stalinist punch was obviously less attractive than capitalism with a social democratic palm. In a volte face from the twenties, when the Institute maintained ties with comrades in Moscow, the move to the United States implied a critique of the Bolsheviks’ malefic transformation of Russia. It was clear to Horkheimer and his cronies which of the alternative systems to fascism— the capitalist or the communist—afforded the greater liberty. And yet, there is a certain ambiguity in the Frankfurt School’s attitude to the USSR because its members remained largely silent on the matter. Assuming that they believed the disagreeable reports about Russia, the Frankfurt theorists possibly equated the Nazis’ policies with Stalin’s. Stalin’s Machiavellian abuse of Marxism was something with which they did not wish to identify (Jay 1985). On the other hand, by remaining silent about the oppression taking place in the East they, like many others, expressed tacit agreement of sorts with figures like Georg Lukács (1981: 181) for whom ‘the worst sort of socialism was better to live in than the best form of capitalism’. Indeed, Rolf Wiggershaus (1994) noted a wait-and-see attitude on Horkheimer and Adorno’s part towards Stalinism. Yet in choosing to move westwards—even so far as California’s beaches—their actions spoke louder than their words. Unlike Bertolt Brecht and Georg Lukács—both of whom loathed Horkheimer and Adorno, with the feeling reciprocated (Lunn 1985)—none of the Frankfurt School’s core members opted to settle in Communist states either during or after the war. The United States, for its part, hardly endeared itself to the Frankfurt School. To the Institute’s members, New Deal America exemplified the masses’ pacification. All aspects of its citizens’ lives—from the factory floor to the cinema—were colonised through organisational techniques that supported an over-arching capitalist system. The supposed cultural choices presented to individuals by Hollywood and Madison Avenue were nothing but a further extension of the reifying conditions of the Taylorist labour process. But this dour look at their experiences also ignores the range of ‘American’ experiences the emigres undertook, as David Jenemann (2007) Adorno in America brilliantly revealed. It was Horkheimer and Adorno’s experiences in this situation which led to their scathing critique of the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Israel 2000). That said, the American government did not oppose the Frankfurt School’s desire to defend German Kultur. For example, Horkheimer’s demand that the house journal be published in German—to challenge the identification of the language of Goethe with Nazism—was fulfilled throughout the beginning of the Institute’s stay and the American government did not censor any of its research projects (Wiggershaus 1994). Moreover, Horkheimer and Adorno even showed their identification with the US by becoming citizens. This was not the action of individuals fundamentally at odds with the country in which they lived. Nevertheless, the apparent luxury of their new home did not make them blind to its problems. The challenges to human enlightenment in 1940s America were much more pervasive, and in some senses more beguiling, than what had taken place in interwar Europe. Thus, by the time they came to write Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno had experienced how reason stifled itself on both sides of the Atlantic.

18

2 Composing Dialectic of Enlightenment

The third reason for the Institute’s move from economics to philosophy was more subjective. Its members’ personal proclivities tended towards speculative philosophy rather than historical materialism. In Horkheimer and Adorno’s case, their interest had always been first with Idealism and then Marxism. The similarities between the lives and intellectual foundations of both men are remarkable. Both Horkheimer and Adorno, like so many members of the Institute for Social Research, came from affluent secular Jewish families. Horkheimer, born in Stuttgart in 1895, was the son of a conservative industrialist who owned several textile factories and achieved some fame within the region for his contributions to the arts, charity and government (Wiggershaus 1994; Jay 1996). Likewise, Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund in Frankfurt am Main in 1903, was the son of a successful wine merchant who had converted from Judaism to Protestantism around the time of his son’s birth (Wilcock 2000). Responsibility for raising Teddie, however, fell to his Catholic mother, the mellifluously named Maria Calvelli-Adorno della Piana, and her sister-in-law, Agathe. His adoption of Adorno as a single surname was supposedly at Horkheimer’s request to downplay the Institute’s Jewishness in exile (Jay 1996: xii), but it was something he was using from the early 1930s (Müller-Doohm 2005). This has meant his attitude to Judaism, or indeed Roman Catholicism, has been a point of contention (Wilcock 2000). As Susan Buck-Morss (1977: 2) has observed, the cosmopolitan mix of his heritage meant that he was ‘baptised a Catholic, confirmed a Protestant—no doubt as a matter of expediency—and (except for a brief interest in Catholicism during the twenties) he was, throughout his life, an affirmed atheist’. Both Horkheimer and Adorno had an interest in philosophy from an early age. Horkheimer rebelled against his presumed role as successor in the family business, due in no small apart to his best friend Frederick Pollock’s radical influence, and turned his attention instead to philosophy and literature’s social implications. Horkheimer did enter the family business in 1910 and, with the outbreak of the First World War, became a junior manager which exempted him from participation in a war to which he was opposed. He was eventually conscripted in 1917, but ill health, which had plagued him since he was a child, made him unfit for service (Wiggershaus 1994). After one semester at the University of Munich—where he had first-hand exposure to Marxism at work with the short-lived Munich Soviet Republic—he transferred to the newly found University of Frankfurt am Main. There Horkheimer read philosophy and psychology, but it was the tutelage of the chair of philosophy, Hans Cornelius, which greatly influenced his future direction. Horkheimer took up doctoral studies under Cornelius and, by 1925, had completed his Habilitation (a lecturing qualification) with a thesis on Kant. It was at this point that the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment met. While studying for the doctorate, Horkheimer presented a paper on Husserl in one of Cornelius’s seminars (Wiggershaus 1994). Adorno, who was astounded by the brilliance of Horkheimer’s argument, presented himself to his future collaborator: ‘Spontaneously I went to you and introduced myself. From that time on we were together’ (cited in Buck-Morss 1977: 10). Adorno arrived at this moment via a not altogether different route. His mother and aunt had immersed him in the world of music which, along with philosophy, became his passion. Adorno was too young for war service so he divided his time

2.2 Frankfurt’s Peculiarities

19

between general lessons at school, private classes in musical composition and, on Saturday afternoons, reading Kant with his tutor, Siegfried Kracauer (Jay 1996). By the time he had completed his secondary schooling, Adorno already had a strong philosophical foundation on which to build an incipient interest in Georg Lukács and Ernst Bloch. In 1921, Adorno enrolled at the University of Frankfurt where he read philosophy, psychology, sociology and music—a programme strikingly similar to that taken by Horkheimer. He progressed swiftly through his tertiary education and, like Horkheimer, took his doctorate under Cornelius which he completed in 1924 (Claussen 2008; Müller-Doohm 2005). But far from them being ‘together’ from that point on, Horkheimer and Adorno’s lives intersected rather haphazardly until the late 1930s. Horkheimer entered academia by teaching philosophy at the University of Frankfurt and intensified his association with the Institute for Social Research (Jay 1985). Adorno, by contrast, swung between his dual interests of music and philosophy. In 1925, following his doctorate, he moved to Vienna to study composition with Alban Berg, returning to Frankfurt 2 years later to complete his Habilitation with Cornelius. But his thesis— an amendment of Kant’s philosophy using Freud (and Marx) to establish a theory of the unconscious—was rejected for its unorthodoxy. Following this setback, Adorno turned to music criticism and spent more time with his newly formed circle of friends in Berlin (Buck-Morss 1977). His involvement with these mostly left-wing aesthetes—particularly Walter Benjamin—led him to believe that a fusion of Hegel and Marx was the most effective approach to linking philosophy and aesthetics. With this in mind Adorno returned to Frankfurt in 1929 to complete his Habilitation thesis, on Kierkegaard, with the new chair of philosophy, Paul Tillich. When it was completed in 1931, Adorno began to teach philosophy at the university and contributed articles to the Institute for Social Research’s Zeitschrift (Wiggershaus 1994). He was not, however, a formal member of Horkheimer’s research centre. So when the Institute fled to New York, Adorno chose to move to Vienna for a brief period and then to England where he became an ‘advanced student’ at Merton College, Oxford (Wilcock 1996). It was not until February 1938, when Adorno finally joined Horkheimer in the United States, that he became an official Institute member. Furthermore, it was only when Horkheimer earmarked Adorno for collaboration in his ‘dialectics project’— a project which would eventually produce Dialectic of Enlightenment—that their relationship was consolidated.

2.3 Collaborating for Reason Horkheimer regarded his work throughout the thirties as background research to a larger magnum opus on ‘dialectical logic’ (Wiggershaus 1994). This text was to be an answer to the opaque metaphysical fashions of the day as well as a critique of presumptuous scientific, or positivist, thought. Horkheimer saw dialectics as standing somewhere between these two extremities and regarded it as the only means

20

2 Composing Dialectic of Enlightenment

by which social theory could overcome the purposelessness that characterised idealism and positivism. In his classic 1937 essay, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, Horkheimer elaborated on his analytic vision by juxtaposing the two theories in the title. It was a manifesto of sorts that foreshadowed Dialectic of Enlightenment. The proponents ‘traditional theory’, according to Horkheimer (1972), sustained the arrest of reason by fetishising objective and scientific verifications of ‘reality’. Such explanations managed to separate the important dialectical relationship between the subject and object and thereby understated the importance of social conditioning’s effect on them both. Traditional theory sustained traditional (read: bourgeois) society because rational objectivity required clear systems of order. Contrary to such a closed conception of reality, ‘Critical Theory’ denied the objectivity of the natural and social sciences. Horkheimer believed that it could transform the social world, rather than reinforcing that which already exists, by ‘transcend[ing] the tension and abolish[ing] the opposition between the individual’s purposefulness, spontaneity, and rationality, and those work-process relationships upon which society is built’ (Horkheimer 1972: 210). Horkheimer was combining the individual transcendental philosophy of Kant with the more socially applicable work of Marx in order to subvert determinism. Whether this actually undermined Marx’s purpose remains open to interpretation; nonetheless, constant reference to the proletariat’s plight was indicative of Marxism’s continued presence in the philosopher’s thought (Jay 1982). Yet Horkheimer was only mildly optimistic about social revolution’s likelihood. The proletariat’s ability to become conscious of its own plight was tenuous because the apparatuses needed to achieve such class consciousness ‘would fall into slavish dependence on the status quo’ (Horkheimer 1972). This meant that the onus of social change was placed on those able to instil Critical Theory via this ‘founding document’ (Bottomore 1984: 16). Such intellectuals, Horkheimer argued, could preserve truth only by severing themselves from the defeated proletariat. In what could be seen as the opposite of Gramsci’s ‘organic intellectual’, this hermetic formulation of intellectual endeavour would enable the Marx-ish scholar to pursue truth without a direct relationship with the masses. The two propositions contained in this argument revealed the juncture at which the Frankfurt School found itself. On the one hand, the essay was a further journey on the path away from the previous Institute’s orthodox attitude and towards more contemplative social investigations (albeit with philosophical Marxism’s élan). On the other hand, and perhaps more significantly, Horkheimer expressed a commitment to the virtues of rational thought—virtues that must be saved from the variety of forces claiming to act in reason’s name. There was a distinct ‘rationalist turn’ for the Frankfurt School towards a concern for reason rather than revolution (Wolin 1992: 26). After this point, the Frankfurt School was considered to be ‘doing’ Critical Theory. By the early forties, Horkheimer had further honed his theory and he started to look for collaborators for his ‘dialectics project’. He believed the work Adorno was producing came closest to his own. After arriving in America, Adorno began working on a sociological study of radio. During that time he wrote ‘Philosophy of Modern Music’—an essay which as an ‘extended appendix’ to Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno, 1973: xiii). In the essay, Adorno outlined a theory of Arnold Schoenberg’s

2.3 Collaborating for Reason

21

twelve-tone technique whose ‘cacophonous sound’ exposes ‘the fraud of today’s culture’ (Adorno 1973: 30). Adorno’s enthusiasm for the Schoenberg circle’s music was well known, but his assessment of the arch-modernist in this particular essay was not mere sycophancy (Hullot-Kentor 1997; Witkin 1998). He replaced adulation with an argument that outlined the tension between emancipation and domination, progression and regression, which haunted human reason. Adorno contended that Schoenberg’s atonal method provided an opposite, or negative, alternative to bourgeois music’s polished harmonies and, by association, bourgeois art. Schoenberg’s music was nihilistic chaos to listeners normally attuned to the orderliness of premodernist classical music. But to Adorno the rationality of the twelve-tone technique was clearly delineated by not allowing a note to be restruck until the other eleven had been played. In this sense, the permutations produced were perfect examples of reason that was free from the burdens of convention. Adorno also recognised, however, that the twelve-tone technique’s rationality embodied an inherent form of domination. That is, the musician believes himself to have complete control over the method and thus ‘reflects a longing present since the beginnings of the bourgeois era: to “grasp” and to place all sounds into an order, and to reduce the magic essence of music to human logic’ (Adorno 1973: 64–65). The paradox of human interaction with Nature is clearly outlined in this theory of music: reason is used to provide meaning and order to the threatening disorder of the surrounding environment, but in doing so rational technique’s domination threatens to destroy Nature’s specificity through logic. For Adorno, Schoenberg’s technique precisely illustrated how reason could function when in control of itself, while at the same time revealing itself as a ‘schema of fate’ in a systematic application that is tantamount to domination. Adorno identified modern music as both a means of escaping instrumental reason as well as a method contributing to Nature’s subjugation. Modern music, Adorno concluded in his characteristically equivocal style, ‘is the surviving message from the shipwrecked’ (Adorno 1973: 133). Horkheimer had just moved to Los Angeles when he read ‘Philosophy of Modern Music’. He was impressed by Adorno’s criticisms of bourgeois rationalism, believing that they could usefully articulate his own reworking of the materialist dialectic. As a result, Horkheimer invited Adorno to come and work with him in California. Adorno jumped at the chance. He and his wife Gretel moved to Pacific Palisades in late 1941 hoping to finally start on a great work with Horkheimer (Wheatland 2009). But Adorno’s arrival was indicative of the Institute’s underlying politics and back-biting. While Horkheimer’s invitation was certainly intellectually sincere, the flattery of Adorno was also a classic example of Horkheimer’s knack for reinforcing his own pre-eminence. Rolf Wiggershaus’s study of the Institute emphasises how Horkheimer was a dab hand at manipulating the Frankfurt School’s members (Eagleton 2003). Horkheimer was well aware of Adorno’s intellectual narcissism and that ‘Teddie’ had always been eager to be his only collaborator in the dialectics project. Wiggershaus noted that as early as 1935, after Horkheimer had initially selected Marcuse to be his chief assistant on the work, Adorno wrote to Horkheimer in ‘raptures about “our real, common theoretical task, namely dialectical logic”… and he dreamed of writing the book somewhere in the south of France, alone with Horkheimer’ (Wiggershaus 1994:

22

2 Composing Dialectic of Enlightenment

160). It should be remembered that at this stage Adorno was still a peripheral figure at the Institute, but this outsider status did not prevent him from criticising others in the inner circle. Such criticism veiled an obsequiousness that was not opposed by Horkheimer. Any infighting only assisted him in breaking up the School (a process he was undertaking largely due to wartime financial difficulties). By the end of 1942, a campaign of financial attrition had forced most of the School’s key members to find employment elsewhere. Apart from his admiration for Adorno’s ‘Philosophy of Modern Music’, another textual development also convinced Horkheimer that he and his younger colleague were of one mind—Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. Horkheimer and Adorno’s mutual zeal for this work established Dialectic of Enlightenment’s epistemological basis. In June 1941, Hannah Arendt gave Adorno a copy of Benjamin’s ‘Theses’ that she had acquired after her own escape from France (Brodersen 1996). As Benjamin’s ‘first and only disciple’ (Arendt 1992: 8) Adorno recognised the document’s importance and forwarded a copy to Horkheimer, who was similarly impressed by its implications. Benjamin’s work had long been controversial among the Frankfurt School’s members, but in the years immediately preceding his suicide they began to warm to it (Brodersen 1996). Those who caught a glimpse of his intellectual labours on nineteenth-century France, the so-called Arcades Project (Passagen-Werk) was thrilled by its implications for a critique of modern society. Similarly, the letters exchanged between Benjamin and Adorno, which formed their relationship’s bedrock, proved to the latter that there was an yet untapped depth to the Parisian exile’s thought. Such affinity allowed Benjamin to influence Horkheimer and Adorno’s apocalyptic rendering of enlightenment, but it was Arendt’s transmission of the ‘Theses’ to Adorno—who she despised (Safranksi 1998) that proved the decisive moment in shaping Dialectic of Enlightenment. Yet the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ are both inspired and incoherent. Benjamin’s intention remains a debated issue both inside and outside contemporary Critical Theory circles. To Adorno and Horkheimer, however, the work clearly criticised positive conceptions of ‘progress’ with its ‘angel of history’ motif (Benjamin 1992). This sentiment resonated with their pessimistic estimates of the era. By fusing Judaic messianism with Marxist revolutionism (as well as surrealist exoticism), Benjamin invoked a notion of deliverance that indicted ‘progress’—progress that had permitted both the rise of Hitler and the subjugation of the working class via social democracy’s conciliatory politics. Such a fusion also meant that he reinforced a mysticism that was so often emblematic of his work and which was the one thing that always forced Adorno to restrain his ardour for Benjamin (Jay 1996). Nonetheless, Dialectic of Enlightenment eventually owed much to Benjamin’s theses. Horkheimer and Adorno appropriated Benjamin’s critique to such an extent that perhaps his best-known adage—‘there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’ (1992: 248)—could easily be regarded as Dialectic of Enlightenment’s motto. In their own words, Horkheimer and Adorno (2002: xiv) enunciated their explicit purpose as ‘to explain of why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism’. They also employed Benjamin’s suggestion that the fragments of the past should be used to

2.3 Collaborating for Reason

23

‘explode’ the sum of the present. Dialectic of Enlightenment’s historical hopscotch— which, in true modernist fashion, jumps from the Odyssey to Kant to Nietzsche to de Sade to Nazism to Hollywood—denied the kind of periodisation that promotes continuity (progress) and instead regarded time as, literally, a dialectic between domination and freedom. Such selective history took Benjamin’s prescriptions beyond the historical approach implied in the esoteric ‘Theses’. Dialectic of Enlightenment became a modernist collage consisting of texts and moments from both modernity and pre-modernity. Such an inchoate methodology resulted in accusations of ahistoricism—the same sort of charges that later dogged Michel Foucault throughout his career (Habermas 1987). But it was exactly this sort of criticism that Horkheimer and Adorno were dispelling in their method. Theirs was a history opposed to the dominant certainty of ‘traditional theories’ like historicism or positivism. Their method, or antimethod, implicitly criticised the formulaic arguments that they believed reinforced reason’s instrumentalisation. As Simon Jarvis (1998: 39) put it in his examination of Adorno: Dialectic of Enlightenment needs to be understood as a simultaneous construction and denial of history. It is not built on the fantasy of the certain arrival of a better world. Instead it aims against the closure of the possibility of new historical experience which it sees both in an affirmative metaphysic of history and in the mythical redundance and invariance of positivist historiography. The work rejects the pessimistic theory that human nature is irrevocably founded on domination. But it also rejects the cultural idealist denial that there can be anything natural in social life, the insistence that social life is cultural ‘all the way down.’

Horkheimer and Adorno did not agree with everything in Benjamin’s later oeuvre. Against their positive reading of Benjamin’s ‘Theses’ went an opposite reaction—especially from Adorno—to his now famous 1935 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Indeed, criticising Benjamin’s optimism in this text was one of the motivations for Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the ‘culture industry’ in Dialectic of Enlightenment’s penultimate chapter. In the essay, Benjamin approved of certain developments in cultural technologies—especially film—because they held revolutionary, or, at least, critical potential. The ‘aura’ of art, Benjamin contended, had been removed from cultural artefacts in the twentieth century because they were so easily reproduced. Spurred on by his association with Brecht, Benjamin foresaw the removal of art’s aura as an opportunity for the aesthetic to become the modus operandi of emancipatory politics. To Adorno this was anathema. ‘Benjamin’s argument’, Susan Buck-Morss (1977: 148) put it, ‘managed to tread on all ten of Adorno’s intellectual toes’. To be sure, in later works Adorno moderated his doubts about mass cultural technologies (Adorno 1975), but because he tended to align himself on the side of sophisticated modernism, a rejection of Benjamin’s more proletarian argument was true to form. When it came to writing directly about the reproduction of popular culture, particularly in ‘The Culture Industry’ chapter, Adorno further developed his argument in favour of ‘autonomous’ art and against Hollywood and advertising’s mesmerising contrivances. Adorno’s two-sided opinion of Benjamin complicates the perception of the two men as opposites. They are often played against each other with Adorno portrayed as

24

2 Composing Dialectic of Enlightenment

a stuffy elitist and Benjamin a visionary populist. One critic described their friendship as a ‘mixed collaboration-cum-running battle’ (Wollen 1982: 183). This may be true, but there was certainly more accord than sparring. Like Adorno, Benjamin was disgusted by the deliberate obfuscation of meaning which led to politics’ aestheticisation—epitomised by the Nuremberg rallies and the Berlin Olympics. Such obfuscation was an assault on the aspects of philosophy—from the rational to the spiritual—that Benjamin defended and believed would be redeemed through a renewed historical vision. Thus, rather than being completely at odds with Adorno’s aesthetic critique, Benjamin held mostly complementary attitudes. Adorno’s own critique of modern aesthetics—from Wagnerian walls of sound to Hollywood’s screens of vision—centred on his indictment of those art forms which glamorised sensual (uncritical) experience (Roberts 1991; Huhn and Zuidervaart 1997). In this respect, the appeal of Benjamin’s supposedly pro-technology stance must be aligned with the reservations he shared with Adorno about the limits and dangers of anaestheticised experience. If Benjamin’s influence on Adorno has been an issue of some controversy, so too has the sway that Adorno held over Horkheimer during their work on Dialectic of Enlightenment. Once the work was finished there was a conception among the Frankfurt School’s members that Adorno had radically altered Horkheimer’s philosophical outlook (Wiggershaus 1994). Such perceptions were largely based on the fact that their collaborative work had a distinct Adornian stamp—especially in contrast to Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason which argued much the same thing as Dialectic of Enlightenment, but in plainer language. The work was based on a series of lectures and was originally published in 1947. In the preface to the work Horkheimer (1974: vii) stated that ‘these lectures were designed to present in epitome some aspects of a comprehensive philosophical theory developed by the writer during the last few years in association with Theodore [sic] W. Adorno. It would be difficult to say which of the ideas originated in his mind and which in my own; our philosophy is one’. Given that both men dictated Dialectic of Enlightenment’s original manuscript to Gretel, with certain chapters being attributable to one more than the other, the issue of who was the text’s main author has been contentious.3 It is also important to mention that Gretel Adorno, whose role extended beyond stenography, got no authorial credit beyond being called a ‘precious helper’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: x). Historian Anson Rabinbach (1997) deduced how the sections of the text can be separated between the two men: Horkheimer was responsible of the ‘Introduction’, ‘The Concept of Enlightenment’, ‘Excursus II: Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality’ and the concluding ‘Notes and Drafts’, while Adorno is seen to have written ‘Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment’, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as 3 Historian

Anson Rabinbach (1997) has outlined how the sections of the text can be separated between the two men: Horkheimer was responsible of the ‘Introduction’, ‘The Concept of Enlightenment’, ‘Excursus II: Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality’ and the concluding ‘Notes and Drafts’, while Adorno is seen to have written ‘Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment’, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ and, with Leo Löwenthal, ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment’. Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment, Berkeley 1997, p. 167.

2.3 Collaborating for Reason

25

Mass Deception’, and, with Leo Löwenthal, ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment’. Still, there is an obvious danger in absolving either Horkheimer or Adorno from responsibility for what was written. Indeed, part of the reason why the book was presented as a co-authored manuscript was to avoid such authorial fetishisation. Yet to define each man’s influence on specific parts of the text does not deny them equal responsibility for its overall thesis. Quite obviously, Horkheimer’s role was significant and the notion of Adorno leading Horkheimer astray, as Habermas alleged, should not be over-stressed (Dews 1992). Horkheimer had an already well-developed mistrust towards objectivism, scientism and reason before the 1940s. Moreover, as James Schmidt’s essay on Dialectic of Enlightenment attests, Horkheimer’s directorship still meant he controlled the work’s overall direction (Schmidt 1998). There was thus an undeniable continuity with his earlier work as well as that of his colleagues (Bronner 2002). That said, Adorno’s overall influence on the work is undeniable. Richard Wolin noted the Adornian ‘proclivities’ that beset the overall text. He contended that ‘its fundamental argument tended to contradict not only the Institute’s previous positions on Western philosophy, metaphysics and so forth, but also its philosophy of history, which had been, in the Marxist tradition, basically progressivist’ (1992: 41). Dialectic of Enlightenment not only explicates his earlier arguments, it was directly inspired by his late 1930s and early 1940s work—from his response to Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art’ essay to ‘The Philosophy of Modern Music’. Adorno almost always saw modernity as both a confining and liberating era; for him transgressing such confines, without over-exaggerating liberties, was the problem of modern life (Jarvis 1998). Such a concern was to be the theme of Adorno in his subsequent work, especially Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, and captures the crux of his own confrontation with modernity: specifically his later negative identity theory. Furthermore, the language in which Dialectic of Enlightenment was written—so-called Adorno Deutsch (Jay 1984a: 9)—overwhelmingly supports arguments for Adorno’s heavy hand in the text’s construction. In particular, the use of aphorisms reflected his quasi-Nietzschean and modernist desire to transcend the convoluted prose of German philosophy. Peter Uwe Hohendahl (1995: 250) argues that ‘the philosophy of history presented in Dialectic of Enlightenment, insofar as it follows a narrative form, partakes of the very mythic structure it means to criticise’. In one respect this terse style reveals Nietzsche’s influence, especially his On the Genealogy of Morals. Conversely, it shows how Adorno’s written work, including Dialectic of Enlightenment, can be seen as an extension, or example, of his own modernist obsessions. Indeed, as Jay (1996: 175–76) quipped, Adorno’s work is very much like Jean-Luc Godard’s characterisation of his films: it has a beginning, middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order. Like Adorno’s own synopsis of Schoenberg’s music, the text was written as a modernist expression of a desire to escape conventional scientific methods and prose. One further explanation of why Dialectic of Enlightenment appears to have a more Adornian feel should also be stressed: most scholarly references to the text arise from the two sections which are more attributable to Adorno than to Horkheimer—‘Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment’ and, to a greater extent,

26

2 Composing Dialectic of Enlightenment

‘The Culture Industry’. The similarities of these sections with arguments Adorno made elsewhere have often made him seem Dialectic of Enlightenment’s primary author. Because quotations often function to represent whole arguments, Adorno is often given credit for the overall text and the subtleties of his differences with Horkheimer are obscured. A case in point is their treatment of Nietzsche: Horkheimer kept his distance from Nietzsche’s amorality, while Adorno was more indeterminate in his view of the philosopher’s usefulness (Rabinbach 1997).

2.4 Conclusion It is clear, therefore, that Dialectic of Enlightenment was a conspicuous move away from the type of ‘social philosophy’ that Horkheimer and his associates outlined during the 1930s (Jay 1996). Frederic Jameson (1991: 108) took issue with this portrayal of the text, arguing that it is unnecessary ‘to suppose that because Dialectic of Enlightenment mobilises non-Marxist forms of explanation, it thereby constitutes a move beyond Marxism or a renunciation of the Frankfurt School’s essentially Marxist programs of the 1930s’. For the most part, the text can be simply seen as a direct response to the catastrophic events of the thirties and forties. Horkheimer and Adorno were not alone in believing that the light of reason had been eclipsed. Interpretations of the intellectual period are largely in agreement on this fact. However, in the case of Dialectic of Enlightenment’s specificity, it is clear that Adorno was crucial in determining the text’s distinctive thesis. A combination of his engagement with Benjamin and high modernism resulted in a text which appears more commensurate with his other works than with those produced by Horkheimer. To get a better understanding of the ideas expressed in Dialectic of Enlightenment, it should be read as part of four or five texts produced by either Horkheimer or Adorno in the mid-1940s. Dialectic of Enlightenment was the only one co-authored by the men, but the influence on each other was so pronounced that works like Eclipse of Reason (1947), Philosophy of Modern Music (1949) and Minima Moralia (1951) have the hallmarks of the Critical Theory they were then developing (even Hanns Eisler’s Composing for the Films [1947]—which Adorno helped write—has a Critical Theory tinge). It is no mistake when scholars suggest that 1947 was pivotal in Critical Theory’s development: it was the year in which many of these works were either written or became available. What Dialectic of Enlightenment principally represents is an intersection of Horkheimer and Adorno’s thoughts. And, like all intersections, it was only a brief moment before the vectors of their philosophies diverged once again.

References

27

References Adorno, T. W. (1973). Philosophy of modern music (A. G. Mitchell & W. V. Bloomster, Trans.). New York: Seabury Press. Adorno, T. W. (1975). The culture industry reconsidered (A. Rabinbach, Trans). New German Critique, 6, 12–19. Alway, J. (1995). Critical theory and political possibilities: Conceptions of emancipatory politics in the works of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas. Westport: Greenwood Press. Anderson, P. (1976). Considerations on Western Marxism. London: New Left Book. Arato, A., & Breines, P. (1979). The young Lukács and the origins of Western Marxism. New York: Seabury Press. Arendt, H. (1992). Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940. In W. Benjamin (Ed.), Illuminations (H. Zohn, Trans.) (pp. 1–55). London: Fontana. Benjamin, W. (1992). Theses on the Philosophy of history. In W. Benjamin (Ed.), Illuminations (H. Zohn, Trans.) (pp. 246–255). London: Fontana. Bewes, T. (2002). Reification, or the anxiety of late capitalism. London: Verso. Bottomore, T. (1984). The Frankfurt School. London: Tavistock. Broderson, M. (1996). Walter Benjamin: A biography (M. R. Green & I. Ligers, Trans.). London: Verso. Bronner, S. E. (2002). Of critical theory and its theorists. New York: Routledge. Buck-Morss, S. (1977). The origin of negative dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt institute. Hassocks: Harvester Press. Claussen, D. (2008). Theodor W. Adorno: One last genius (R. Livingstone, Trans.). Cambridge MA: Bellknap Press. Dews, P. (Ed.). (1992). Autonomy and solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas. London: Verso. Dubiel, H. (1985). Theory and politics: Studies in the development of critical theory (B. Gregg, Trans.). Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Eagleton, T. (2003). Figures of dissent: Critical essays on Fish, Spivak, Žižek and others. London: Verso. Feenberg, A. (2005). Heidegger and marcuse: The catastrophe and redemption of history. New York: Routledge. Habermas, J. (1987). The philosophical discourse of modernity: Twelve lectures (F. Lawrence, Trans.). Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Horkheimer, M. (1974). Eclipse of reason. New York: Seabury Press. Herf, J. (1984). Reactionary modernism: Technology, culture, and politics in Weimar and the third reich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hohendahl, P. U. (1995). Prismatic thought: Theodor W. Adorno. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Horkheimer, M., & T. W. Adorno. (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment (E. Jephcott, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Horkheimer, M. (1972). Traditional and critical theory (M. J. O’Connell, Trans.). In M. Horkheimer (Ed.), Critical theory: Selected essays (pp. 188–243). New York: Continuum. Horkheimer, M. (1989). The state of contemporary social philosophy and the tasks of an institute for social research (P. Wagner, Trans.). In S. E. Bronner & D. M. Kellner (Eds.), Critical theory and society: A reader. New York: Routledge. Huhn, T., & Zuidervaart, L. (Eds.). (1997). Semblance of subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s aesthetic theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hullot-Kentor, R. (1997). The philosophy of dissonance: Adorno and Schönberg. In T. Huhn & L. Zuidervaart (Eds.), Semblance of subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s aesthetic theory (pp. 309–319). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Israel, N. (2000). Outlandish: Writing between exile and diaspora. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

28

2 Composing Dialectic of Enlightenment

Jacoby, R. (1981). Dialectic of defeat: Contours of Western Marxism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jameson, F. (1991). Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the persistence of the dialectic. London: Verso. Jarvis, S. (1998). Adorno: A critical introduction. New York: Routledge. Jay, M. (1980). The Jews and the Frankfurt School: Critical theory’s analysis of anti-Semitism. New German Critique, 19, 137–149. Jay, M. (1982). Positive and negative totalities: Implicit tensions in critical theory’s vision of interdisciplinary research. Thesis Eleven, 3, 72–88. Jay, M. (1984a). Adorno. London: Fontana Press. Jay, M. (1984b). Marxism and totality: Adventures of a concept from Lukács to Habermas. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jay, M. (1985). Permanent exiles: Essays on the intellectual migration from Germany to America. New York: Columbia University Press. Jay, M. (1996). The dialectical imagination: A history of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jenemann, D. (2007). Adorno in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Löwy, M. (2003). The theory of revolution in the young Marx. Leiden: Brill. Lukács, G. (1981). Record of a life: An autobiographical sketch (R. Livingstone, Trans.). London: Verso. Lunn, E. (1985). Marxism and modernism: An historical study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno. Berkeley: University of California Press. Müller-Doohm, S. (2005). Adorno: A biography (R. Livingstone, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity. Rabinbach, A. (1997). In the shadow of catastrophe: German intellectuals between apocalypse and enlightenment. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ringer, F. K. (1969). The decline of the German mandarins: The German academic community, 1890–1933. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Roberts, D. (1991). Art and enlightenment: Aesthetic theory after Adorno. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Safranski, R. (1998). Martin Heidegger: Between good and evil (E. Overs, Trans.). Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Schmidt, J. (1998). Language, mythology and enlightenment: Historical notes on Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Social Research, 65(4), 807–838. Wheatland, T. (2009). The Frankfurt School in Exile. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wiggershaus, R. (1994). The Frankfurt School: Its history, theories, and political significance (M. Robertson, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wilcock, E. (1996). Adorno’s uncle: Dr. Bernard Wingfield and the English exile of Theodor W. Adorno, 1934–1938. German Life and Letters, 49(3), 324–338. Wilcock, E. (2000). Negative identity: Mixed German Jewish descent as a factor in the reception of Theodor Adorno. New German Critique, 81, 169–185. Witkin, R. (1998). Adorno on music. London: Routledge. Wolin, R. (1987). Critical theory and the dialectic of rationalism. New German Critique, 41, 23–52. Wolin, R. (1992). The terms of cultural criticism: The Frankfurt School, existentialism, poststructuralism. New York: Columbia University Press. Wollen, P. (1982). Readings and writings: Semiotic counter strategies. London: Verso.

Chapter 3

Reading Dialectic of Enlightenment

What is at issue here is not culture as a value, as understood by critics of civilization such as Huxley, Jaspers, and Ortega y Gasset, but the necessity for enlightenment to reflect on itself if humanity is not to be totally betrayed. What is at stake is not conservation of the past but the fulfillment of past hopes. Horkheimer and Adorno

This chapter offers a synopsis of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Obviously, in a text that is arguing there are different ways that Horkheimer and Adorno’s work has been interpreted such a synopsis can be open to debate. Yet, I am not suggesting that Dialectic of Enlightenment has an infinitude of possible meanings. Borgesian logic is fun, but only to a point which postmodern nihilism marked out during the period at the heart of my study. By contrast, Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument, though contentious, can be contained by what they have said. That is, they largely focused on how that humans dominate the world around them and as a consequence themselves as individuals as well as each other. This argument was positioned in a history of philosophy and human activity that extended back to Homer’s Iliad and forward to the Holocaust and Hollywood. For Horkheimer and Adorno, instrumental reason has dominated the whole of human history. The present conditions of modernity and capitalism show a particularly insidious variant of this predilection. There are, however, remnants for freedom worth nurturing as a way of combatting this will to power. This paradox is illustrated in numerous ways. What follows, then, is an exposition of Dialectic of Enlightenment’s five chapters—the final fragmentary ‘Notes and Sketches’ are excluded—as they appear in the final edition of the work. In doing so, aspects of the text taken that up that by the English-language scholars, and addressed in pages hereafter, are illuminated if not set in stone.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 H. Prosser, Dialectic of Enlightenment in the Anglosphere, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3521-5_3

29

30

3 Reading Dialectic of Enlightenment

3.1 Dialectic of Enlightenment’s Argument Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique was explicitly aimed at the inadequacies of Western society and its culture. They were not conservative critics of modernity and mass culture as the end of civilisation. They were, by contrast, eager to promote critical reason’s precepts to assist human’s in avoiding their propensity to dominate each other and the world around them. Their point, however, was that this was no easy task. Ever since antiquity (and perhaps even before then), all human attempts to understand the world carried both emancipatory and oppressive potentials. Enlightenment was always ambiguous. On the one hand, the desire to make sense of animate or inanimate surroundings had served human society through developments in science, politics and aesthetics. On the other hand, such attempts to understand the world were inherently fraught with a desire to dominate the object of investigation. Following Spinoza, Horkheimer and Adorno agreed that self-preservation rather than self-understanding was the ‘true maxim of all Western civilization’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 22). Such a tension had prevailed throughout Western civilisation: from Odysseus to Oppenheimer. This broad historical scope separated enlightenment from its usual association with the eighteenth century’s intellectual renaissance—the Enlightenment—and expanded the definition to the inexorable ‘movement of thought itself’ at any stage in human history. Their thesis therefore radically claimed that the Enlightenment’s scientific and objective rationality—what they called instrumental reason—was no different in function from the ‘irrational’ myths of magic and religion which preceded it. To Horkheimer and Adorno, reason and myth were cut from the same cloth because they attempted to understand the world through its mastery. And so the twentieth century’s faith in science, especially as applied through totalitarianism, was a paradox of irrational rationality that was steering towards barbarism. As one critic has suggested, Horkheimer and Adorno’s ‘critique of enlightenment is directed not at the transcendence of myth but at the failure to transcend myth successfully. The problem with progress is that it hasn’t progressed, it is trapped in a constant repetition of the savagery it claims to oppose’ (Berman 1989: 7). Consequently, Horkheimer and Adorno could declare that ‘myth is already enlightenment; and enlightenment reverts to mythology’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: xviii). Of course, such historical fatalism was driven by a critique of the capitalist system that they believed had precipitated fascism. But rather than a straightforward Marxist attitude, they combined a number of differing, even conflicting, approaches to modernity. Listing the names of those regarded as influencing the direction of the text reads like a who’s who of German social thought—including, among others, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Weber, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Lukács and Benjamin. This farrago of philosophers—some pro-Enlightenment, some anti-Enlightenment, some both—made Dialectic of Enlightenment seem ambivalent about humanity’s future. Similarly, it allowed different inflections within the text (Freudian, Nietzschean, etc.) to be highlighted at the expense of others. Indeed, the text’s many layers of influence defy summation, especially in the small space afforded here. Nonetheless, it can be said that to Horkheimer and Adorno enlightenment was a problematic concept, not

3.1 Dialectic of Enlightenment’s Argument

31

an obsolete one. Though reason appeared treacherous, it was not a valueless concept. Rather, Horkheimer and Adorno’s underlying point was that reason must extricate itself from myth, especially the bourgeois subject’s claim to act in humanity’s favour. In the text, therefore, Horkheimer and Adorno sought to outline past instances in which rational short-sightedness denied humanity’s identity and potential. But this critique as not political prescription. Horkheimer and Adorno merely pointed towards a qualitative improvement in enlightenment, one beyond instrumental reason. As Martin Jay (1996: 262) has claimed, ‘the Frankfurt School’s unwillingness to outline a utopian vision reflected its members’ conviction that a true reconciliation could never be achieved by philosophy alone. As Marx argued, the “realm of freedom” could not be envisaged by men who were unfree’. The authors themselves put it rather more simply when they argued that enlightenment must examine itself. That is, for enlightenment to elevate itself beyond the realm of merely instrumental existence it had to understand that which makes it possible. Without such self-reflection, enlightenment is merely a force for domination (or, as Adorno would later say, ‘identity thinking’)1 which destroys the relationship between the particular and the universal. Horkheimer and Adorno feared instrumentally rational systems like science or industry (or fascism) precisely because they steamrolled the subtleties of this important relationship: without the particular there could be no universal, and vice versa. Horkheimer and Adorno knew that reason’s antinomies made the particular and the universal’s relationship problematic, but this did not preclude the possibility of progressive enlightenment. Indeed, they intended to rescue it themselves with the sequel to their text, Rettung der Aufklärung (‘Rescue of Enlightenment’), but this text was never written and so their portrayal of enlightenment as an impasse remained their thought’s archetype (Rabinbach 1997).

3.2 Critique of Instrumental Reason Thus, with a view to rescuing reason in the future, Horkheimer and Adorno began Dialectic of Enlightenment with reason’s indictment. The first chapter, ‘The Concept of Enlightenment’, presented instrumental reason as the cause of humankind’s descent into barbarism. For Horkheimer and Adorno, instrumental reason was that faculty for survival which was said to have existed in the minds of humans for

1 ‘Identity

thinking’ is a concept which grew out of Dialectic of Enlightenment and goes hand in hand with Adorno’s later ‘negative dialectics’. It is perhaps the most difficult aspect of Adorno’s notoriously difficult thought. In a glossary to her text on Adorno, Rose (1978: 151) paired identity theory with negative dialectics. ‘Identity thinking’, Rose argued, ‘consists in the use of a concept [real objects, not mere ideas] as if the individual which it denotes instantiates it when it does not. For example, the concept of “free” is not fulfilled when the individual to which it is applied does not possess the attribute of freedom. Such a veiling use of a concept is called “identity thinking”. The criteria which specify when a concept is not fulfilled are given by a theory of society. This theory is called “non-identity thinking”, or “negative dialectic”’.

32

3 Reading Dialectic of Enlightenment

millennia. It was therefore central to ‘man’s’ domination of Nature. This anthropological approach owed as much to social scientists like Weber and Durkheim as it did to Freud. The belief systems and social systems of pre-modern man arose from the same desires for self-preservation and ‘disenchantment’ (in Weber’s phrase) of the world as those which directed the constitution of bourgeois societies from the seventeenth century (Wellmer 1985). It is not just that enlightenment has reverted to mythology; it is that it never really managed to find a way out of a mythological form. It is worth mentioning that Horkheimer and Adorno used the term myth in its broad anthropological meaning. To them, myths were stories which were used as explanatory tools in pre-modern times and thus denoted a form of rationality no different to scientific analysis. This construction also served to conflate modern and pre-modern times. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the bourgeoisie’s positivist notion of enlightenment is problematic because it retains the same sort of limits that mythology placed upon itself—in fact, mythology was said to hold some advantages over bourgeois thought precisely because it did not presume to know everything. The point of this chronological collapse was to show that the human desire for knowledge through either magical or scientific explanations both mythologised Nature and thus further alienated the individual from nature (Aronowitz 1988). Or, to put it metaphorically, Francis Bacon was no different from a shaman or priest. For Horkheimer and Adorno, both science and magic reduce Nature to mere utility, something that is to be dominated through violence and manipulation. ‘What human beings seek to learn from nature’, they argued, ‘is how to use it to dominate wholly it and other human beings. Nothing else counts. Ruthless toward itself, the Enlightenment has eradicated the last remnant of its own self-awareness’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 2). Although this statement was an obvious condemnation of reason, it also implies an opposite form of reason to that which they regarded as destructive: critical reason versus instrumental reason. The Hegelian discussion of reason (Verstand) is useful in elucidating this point. On the one hand, there is reason which is instrumental in form—for example, mathematical explanations of actual phenomena, the biological sciences specific ordering methods or the utilitarian precepts of liberal thought. Without a critical or reflective logic to temper its assuredness, this form of reason is undialectical because it merely interpreted reality as it actually was or, rather, as it was perceived to be by such formulations. On the other hand, reason could also take the shape of thought which was reflective and moral in its intent—Vernunft—and therefore transcendent in application to the natural world. This is regarded as critical reason. A reason that was dialectical, one that recognised a relationship and a possible reconciliation, between the individual and nature— subject and object—could function as an immanent critique of instrumental reason (Jay 1996). In other words, reason can function in different modes: Vernunft is Verstand reflecting on itself. Thus, critical reason was the key to overcoming, or keeping in check, instrumental’s domination of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Conceptual thinking about the natural world, through scientific abstraction and economic reductionism, almost inevitably alienates humans from Nature, of which they are a part. To Horkheimer and Adorno, self-reflection on such conceptual thinking, as critical reason, facilitates a ‘remembrance of nature in the subject, a remembrance which

3.2 Critique of Instrumental Reason

33

contains the unrecognized truth of all culture, enlightenment is opposed in principle to power’ (2002: 32). Most of human history, argued Horkheimer and Adorno, had been governed by instrumental reason (Verstand) and as such most of Western culture was little more than an imposed system of dominance. Reason, be it myth or science, was a calculated violation of nature which falsely separated humans from their environment: ‘Myth becomes enlightenment and nature mere objectivity. Human beings purchase the increase in their power with estrangement from that over which it is exerted. Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extent he can manipulate them’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 6). This separation’s outcome was a psychological development characterised by struggles for domination and therefore a crisis of identity. Horkheimer and Adorno argued that such a predicament—as Hobbesian as it was Freudian—has become more pronounced since the industrial revolution. The bourgeois subject’s advent legitimised alienation as an indicator of entrepreneurial individuality. The institutionalisation of truth, objectivity and quantification brought about a ‘positivism’ which dissolved reflective thought. Such positivism imposed totalising systems on thought that denied the possibility of other (or what Adorno would later call ‘negative’) truths—everything had to be explained, which left little room for the source of critical reason’s dialectical future: that which was not yet explained or even the inexplicable. Instead of accepting a Socratic position of ignorance within the process of human understanding, instrumental rationalisations purported to know all. What had previously been ritualised as myth was being ritualised as the rational. Indeed, at least myth had some semblance of humility in the face of the unknown; modern rationalisation, in contrast, deemed everything knowable within its positivist schemas. Within this rationalisation process, Horkheimer and Adorno contended, the critical self was lost. Modernity’s obsession with science and production had been taken to such extremes that instrumental reason had produced the unthinking individual: ‘Thought is reified as an autonomous, automatic process, aping the machine it has itself produced, so that it can finally be replaced by the machine’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 19). The outcome was a domination (rather than a mastery) of a divided self which led to the desire to dominate others. As Simon Jarvis (1998: 27) has described it, ‘Adorno and Horkheimer take mastery over nature to be indissolubly entangled not only with the mastery over human nature, the repression of impulse, but also with mastery over other humans’. Thus, Nazism’s organisation of German society, for example, was not a fulfilment of some primeval longing for order; rather, it was the perfect example of enlightenment’s ‘repressive égalité, the degeneration of the equality of rights into the wrong inflicted by equals’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 9). Such repressive equality was also the foundation of bourgeois society. This pervasive social system—largely based on private property, but also scientific proof—dominated individuals in a way which manifested itself as an anxiety that atrophied critical thought, let alone resistance or revolution. As Horkheimer and Adorno suggested, ‘the mythical scientific respect of peoples for the given reality, which they themselves constantly crave, finally itself becomes a positive fact,

34

3 Reading Dialectic of Enlightenment

a fortress before which even the revolutionary imagination feels ashamed as utopianism, and degenerates to a compliant trust in the objective tendency of history’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 33). Horkheimer and Adorno’s first chapter therefore explained humankind’s palpable descent into barbarism as being implicit in the goals of enlightenment. ‘Enlightenment’, they conclude, ‘is totalitarian’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 4).

3.3 Myth of Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno attempted to prove their point in two excursuses that follow the introductory chapter. The first of these, ‘Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment’, is perhaps the most difficult part of the text since it portrays Homer’s Odysseus as the ‘prototype of the bourgeois individual’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 35). Horkheimer and Adorno’s interpretation of The Odyssey is often exasperating in its attempt to elucidate their take on reason and its capacity for both instrumental and critical thought. Nevertheless, they chose Odysseus as their metaphor for two reasons. First, he represents Western thought’s founding canon and thus extends Horkheimer and Adorno’s history of enlightenment’s modern period. Second, Odysseus challenges mythical explanations of nature through cunning and avoidance rather than exposing these myths’ deceitfulness. ‘In myth each moment of the cycle pays off the preceding moment and thereby helps to establish the continuity of guilt as law. Against this Odysseus fights. The self represents rational universality against the inevitability of fate. But as it finds the universal and the inevitable already inextricably entwined, its rationality necessarily takes a restrictive form, that of exception’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 46). Odysseus’s confrontations with the mythical—be it in the form of the Scylla, Circe, Polyphemus or the Sirens—are examples of how reason acts as a means of self-preservation that demands a renunciation of the self. To Horkheimer and Adorno, there is paradox in such survival. Odysseus’s survival, and the survival of the modern individual, requires a sacrifice of the self as nature. In one of Dialectic of Enlightenment’s most memorable passages, Horkheimer and Adorno revealed how Odysseus’s escape from the Sirens’ song is a forerunner to the bourgeois denial of this selfhood. Knowing that the terrible beauty of their music had caused every seafarer within earshot to wreck his ship on the surrounding rocks, the technically enlightened Odysseus managed to listen to the Sirens’ while evading such a disastrous consequence. He ordered his men to fill their ears with wax and strap him to the mast so that he could listen while they rowed to safety without distraction from either the captivating arias or his own calls to be released. To Horkheimer and Adorno, the result of this ruse was more lamentable for humankind than if Odysseus and his crew had perished. First, the hero’s successful attempt to listen required him to restrain his freedom and thereby deny his own identity. Second, Odysseus had instituted a separation of labour that allowed him, the privileged, to listen to the song while the oarsmen continued their task. Finally, his listening to the song had

3.3 Myth of Enlightenment

35

disenchanted the nature of art in a way that was irrevocable for Western civilisation. As a result, functionalist thought had not only crippled the self and founded the bourgeoisie, it had demystified the Stendhalian promesse du bonheur that all art was supposed to embody—art contained the possibility of rational becoming beyond current rational explanation. In doing so, the possibility of self-reflective reason, or ‘negative’ critique, had been forsaken. Horkheimer and Adorno took the theme of Odysseus-as-bourgeois-prototype further by relating his confrontation with the Cyclops to the foundation of positivistic thought and capitalist exchange. When the giant asked ‘who is there?’ Odysseus responded with ‘Udeis’, which translates as ‘nobody’, and thereby managed to avoid his captor’s wrath. For Horkheimer and Adorno, such hubris was a perfect example of self-preservation’s primacy in instrumental reason’s application. By deeming himself ‘nobody’, Odysseus lost control of his own identity. That is, ‘he declares his allegiance to himself by disowning himself as Nobody; he saves his life by making himself disappear’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 47–48). Odysseus’s self-assertion is also self-denial. For Horkheimer and Adorno, this symbolic death of the individual translates into the malevolence at the heart of the capitalist exchange system. Under capitalism, individuals must sell their labour in order to survive—an exchange which denies the individual’s particularity. The inherent deception of this exchange means that ‘the contract is fulfilled and yet the other party is cheated’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 48). Yet here, as elsewhere in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the metaphor becomes confused. It is not clear how Odysseus’s escape from the Cyclops constitutes an exchange, nor who represents what modern class in this exchange. To Horkheimer and Adorno, Odysseus’s escape from the Cyclops is capitalist opportunism’s embodiment. In the face of an external threat, against which he is rendered powerless, he must take a risk to succeed. Consequently, Odysseus goes from being the proletarian who denies his identity in exchange for survival to the bourgeois capitalist whose survival is based on speculation. In the latter case, it can be argued that it is the Cyclops who ends up being exploited. Such confusion points to the two major problems that dog Horkheimer and Adorno’s thesis. Their ambiguity on both reason and class goes some way to explaining why their work’s sequel remained unwritten, but such ambiguity also explains why the text was so appealing to subsequent generations. First, instrumental reason is regarded with so much disdain by the authors that they ignore any possible good that comes from its application—Odysseus’s survival, for example. It is unimaginable what Odysseus could have done to avoid his fate without resorting to such instrumental measures against both the Sirens and the Cyclops. If the Sirens and Cyclops were mythical then surely Odysseus and his men should have just ignored them? But then isn’t the hero also a mythical figure? How, in other words, could Odysseus have acted with critical reason? The distinction between reason manifesting as self-reflective and instrumental is unclear since both are part of the same thing—critical reason is instrumental reason’s self-reflection and must rely on some form of instrumental action (a rationalisation) to achieve a desired outcome.

36

3 Reading Dialectic of Enlightenment

The second problem is Horkheimer and Adorno’s lack of an adequate theory of class. As already mentioned in this chapter, Horkheimer and Adorno were obviously more concerned with a theory of rationality than with class. But the implicit Marxism of their work—obscured upon publication in 1947 (van Reijen and Bransen 2002)— demanded much more elaboration on modernity’s social peculiarities. Horkheimer and Adorno’s point about a division of labour on the Odysseus’s boat is insightful, but they did not question the fact that such a division existed prior to the encounter with the Sirens. As a result, the text’s deliberate ahistoricism becomes apparent. Dialectic of Enlightenment contains little, if any, discussion of how the modern individual’s situation is determined by an interaction with capital. Instead, reason becomes existence’s determining factor. This emphasis goes a long way to supporting Wolin’s claim that Dialectic of Enlightenment represents Horkheimer and Adorno’s ‘rationalist turn’. What they write is closer to Hegel than Marx or at least closer to the young Marx than the old. This was certainly something that was being discussed among the Frankfurt School during the 1940s, during which time Horkheimer and Adorno toyed with the idea of ‘racket theory’ as an alternative to class as a useful category for analysis (Wiggershaus 1994: 318–19). As shall be seen in subsequent chapters, Horkheimer and Adorno’s emphasis on reason at the expense of class goes some way to explaining the work’s popularity in the last 30 years. Clarifying the authors’ discussion of reason’s instrumentalisation has concerned Frankfurt School scholars far more than any desire to challenge their limited class analysis. Ultimately, all of Odysseus’s adventures describe a process of alienation and the further breakdown of any dialectic between subject and object. As an allegory of the individual, Odysseus is alienated from Nature in his failure to dominate the mythical, he is alienated from others in his own construction of the division of labour and his dominant position in it, and he is alienated from himself in his repetition of unreflective thought. His return to Ithaca was not an arrival at the self, an overcoming of the pain of homesickness in which Hegel believed truth can be found. Rather it was a return to a bourgeois situation which reinforced the alienation he had experienced on his voyage: ‘If the fixed order of property implicit in settlement is the source of human alienation, in which all homesickness and longing spring from a lost primal state, at the same time it is toward settlement and fixed proper, on which alone, the concept of homeland is based, that all longing and homesickness are directed’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 60–61). For Horkheimer and Adorno, domination pervades the everyday life of all individuals and as such there is little un-instrumental about most manifestations of reason.

3.4 Enlightenment Morality and Culture The second excursus, ‘Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality’, showed how instrumental reason’s logical conclusion was devoid of morality. Such a proposition could not only be demonstrated in the work of the Marquis de Sade and Frederick Nietzsche, but was evident in the work of the consummate Enlightenment thinker Immanuel

3.4 Enlightenment Morality and Culture

37

Kant. De Sade’s portrayal of sexual exploits in Histoire de Juliette and Justine described how instrumental thought could be taken to its extreme form of domination: human bodies can be used for whatever purpose is seen fit. Horkheimer and Adorno saw this behaviour as just another form in which the industrial production line could manifest itself. But Nietzsche was seen as going even further than de Sade—he reversed enlightenment. For in denying God, Horkheimer and Adorno contended, Nietzsche expounded an ‘irresolvable contradiction’: knowledge or truth negates itself through a process of domination (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 90). Such a conclusion eliminates value judgements and replaces morality with instrumental reason. Thus, to Horkheimer and Adorno, both Nietzsche and de Sade’s instrumentalisation of Nature transforms everything into material that exists only to be exploited. This situation exposed the failure of Kant’s efforts to ground ethics solely for practical reason. Horkheimer and Adorno actually welcomed this exposure of Kant’s weakness. As Jay has argued, ‘One of [the Frankfurt School’s] key criticisms of idealism was levelled against the implicit, and sometimes explicit, notion that consciousness could create the world. Horkheimer and his colleagues saw the ego cogito from Descartes to Husserl as an organ of that domination of nature by man which was at the root of the dialectic of the enlightenment. The Frankfurt School certainly did not encourage passivity or resignation, yet at the same time it was highly sceptical of man’s ability to create the social world ex nihilo’ (Jay 1986). In a reality determined largely by instrumental reason, Kant’s ambiguous critique of reason would arrive at the same secular conclusion as de Sade and Nietzsche—there was nothing except utility upon which to base action. Kant’s liberalism could therefore be just as totalitarian in its individualism as the ‘will to power’ or ‘sadism’. Horkheimer and Adorno did not replace Kant with Nietzsche, however. They still felt affiliation with Kant. But Nietzsche accepted philosophical problems which Kant or even Hegel would never have considered. Simon Jarvis outlines the outcome of Horkheimer and Adorno’s position between German Idealism and Lebensphilosophie. According to Jarvis, ‘they want not only to show up, like Nietzsche, the extent to which whatever is presented as pure or disinterested rationality is entangled with domination, but also, like Hegel, the distorted rationality implicit in whatever is presented as sheer irrational coercion’ (Jarvis 1998: 44). In the following chapter, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, Horkheimer and Adorno criticised the totalising presence of instrumental rationality in their place of exile. Since the book’s republication in the 1960s, the chapter has been the most referenced part of the text and therefore the most controversial. Its polemical tone and largely unsubstantiated premises are clearly open to criticism. At its heart, however, is a critique of the industry producing a ‘aesthetic barbarism’ and a culture of unthinking ‘obedience’ that reinforces the themes framed in earlier chapters (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 103–104)—in this sense, it is the one section of the book the most obviously determined by the authors’ stay in Los Angeles. Horkheimer and Adorno chose to use the term ‘culture industry’, rather than ‘mass’ or ‘popular culture’, because it differentiated an imposed ideologically charged culture from that which has more popular or indigenous origins. Andreas Huyssen (1975) pointed out

38

3 Reading Dialectic of Enlightenment

that the origins of the concept of the culture industry are to be found in Horkheimer and Adorno’s own experience with the new, technologised anonymous mass culture of the Weimar era, Nazi pseudo-folk culture and America popular culture of the 1930s and 1940s. They set out to portray the culture industry as a monolithic entity which created uniformity in not just its products but in those who consumed them. The culture industry, Horkheimer and Adorno argued, deciphered the secret mechanism of personal intuition that Kant believed existed in every person and used it to martial a homogenous consumer system. Consequently, ‘the whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 99). The culture industry is therefore a tool with which the workers’ minds are conditioned so that capitalism can function more smoothly as a form of domination. ‘Entertainment is the prolongation of work under late capitalism. It is sought by those who want to escape the mechanized labour process so that they can cope with it again. At the same time, however, mechanization has such power over leisure and its happiness, determines so thoroughly the fabrication of entertainment commodities, that the off-duty worker can experience nothing but after-images of the work process itself’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 109). But more than just replicating the production process, the culture industry’s aesthetics also deny art’s ‘negative’ effects. Negativity is the aspect of art which provides a determinate criticism of society. In other words, society’s improvement relies upon the ability to theorise such improvement; when such an explanation has not yet arrived, society must rely on art for the promise of something better. Horkheimer and Adorno believed ‘negativity’ to be the chief characteristic of ‘autonomous’ art— exemplified by the modernist avant-garde—which negates the ‘enlightened reality’ presented to society. The culture industry denies this possibility of happiness by forcing its viewers to believe that it has already been fulfilled. The culture industry’s consumers are given an ideology of amusement that allows them to avoid thinking critically about more equitable and fulfilling ways of living in or organising society: ‘the liberation which amusement promises is from thinking as negation’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 116). The culture industry’s products become art’s only social representation and as such art’s critical potential is eliminated. Art with an exchange value is subordinated to the utility principle from which it is supposed to liberate people. The culture industry’s assault on critical thought brings an end to individual particularity. Horkheimer and Adorno therefore concluded that capitalism standardises the individual like any other product. More worryingly, however, the individual becomes standardised through a willing participation in the production process— from manufacturing to purchasing. Where this acceptance was most obvious was in the fact that the culture industry no longer felt it necessary to disguise that its artefacts existed solely for the purpose of commerce. The case in point was advertising. With advertising, the culture industry produced ‘the compulsive imitation by consumers of cultural commodities which, at the same time, they recognize as false’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 136). It was such idiotic consumerism that led Horkheimer and Adorno to link the culture industry’s uniformity with what had occurred in Nazi Germany. The meaningless jingles and slogans that the advertising world drilled into

3.4 Enlightenment Morality and Culture

39

its consumers were similar to the jingoistic phrases planted in German society by Goebbels and his cronies. To Horkheimer and Adorno, such totalitarian repetitions were unconsciously heard on both sides of the Atlantic and, as a result, ‘the violence done to words is no longer audible in them’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 135).

3.5 Enlightenment and Others The final chapter, ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment’, continued Horkheimer and Adorno’s indictment of enlightenment’s limitations as well as pointing to some positive potentialities. The moment at which the chapter was written makes it perhaps the last piece of work to be written on anti-Semitism that was not directly influenced by the images of the Holocaust. Of the seven theses that made up the chapter, it was only its final parts (which were later added to the original Philosophische Fragmente) that indicated any knowledge of the extent of the Nazi’s extermination of European Jewry. In one account of the intellectual period, Anson Rabinbach (1997: 167) argued that ‘its seventh “thesis” alone registers the authors’ realisation that Hitler’s barbarism had exceeded even the most melancholy prognoses of the twentieth century’s most melancholic thinkers’. The rest of the text referred, therefore, to anti-Semitism in a way similar to that expressed by many other opponents of its fashionability in nineteenth and twentieth centuries: as a scourge with homicidal potential. But Dialectic of Enlightenment’s explicit epistemological theme directed their remarks on the issue. That is, they used anti-Semitism to reveal ‘the limits of enlightenment’. Horkheimer and Adorno regarded anti-Semitism as a psychological product of instrumental reason.2 Nazism was not the architect of anti-Semitic behaviour—to concede this fact would give credibility to the fatuous conception that it was a historical aberration. Rather, anti-Semitism had to be seen as an outcome of a rational society that had produced the bourgeois individual as well as the fascist (see also Bauman 1989). On the one hand, the anti-Semitism of fascism—or what Adorno elsewhere called ‘Fazism’ (Wiggershaus 1994: 122)—was a particular expression of a racist doctrine in the attempt to define the self as much as the other: ‘In the image of the Jew which the racial nationalists hold up before the world they express their own essence’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 137). On the other hand, the movement of the modern bourgeoisie towards an identity positioned in the racialised nation state consciously excluded the ‘assimilated’ Jews. In turn, the Jews’ portrayal as the ‘other’ within this nationalist doctrine made anti-Semitism an acceptable, rational 2 Explaining fascism was an understandable obsession at the Institute. At the same time as Dialectic

of Enlightenment was being written, Franz Neumann was working on Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (1942) and Erich Fromm had completed The Fear of Freedom (1942). At around the same time, Herbert Marcuse released his big book on Hegel, Reason and Revolution (1941), and Siegfried Kracauer, though not an ‘official’ member of the School, also released his From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947).

40

3 Reading Dialectic of Enlightenment

response. Moreover, Horkheimer and Adorno (2002: 138–139) argued that racial prejudice was actually an inherent part of the European social system: Race today is the self-assertion of the bourgeois individual, integrated into the barbaric collective. The harmonious society to which the liberal Jews declared their allegiance has finally been granted to them in the form of the national community. They believed that only anti-Semitism disfigured this order, which in reality cannot exist without disfiguring human beings. The persecution of the Jews, like any persecution, cannot be separated from that order. Its essence, however it may hide itself at times, is the violence which today is openly revealed.

The illusion of equality within the liberal system was upheld by the reality of inequity endured by the marginalised. By associating Jews with the control of capital, as well as denying them positions of influence in the state, the bourgeois system had created its own scapegoat. The capitalist system could not be blamed for the alienation caused by the modern labour process, but the Jews could be. Once the Jews were associated with money, property and entrepreneurship they ‘earned the hatred’ of all the reified individuals who suffer under the capitalist system. Horkheimer and Adorno saw the Jews’ persecution as a symptom of capitalist society in which commerce had become their fate rather than their vocation (Rabinbach 1997). But rather than finding a Marxist solution to the problem via proletarian revolution, Horkheimer and Adorno explained Judaism’s peculiarities as a source of thoughtful reason that instrumental reason always seeks to quell. The Jews are regarded as an integral part of civilisation for ‘they converted taboos into maxims of civilization while the others were still enmeshed in magic’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 153). Horkheimer and Adorno described Judaism as unique in comparison to other religions, Christianity in particular, in its treatment of God as unmentionable. The Jews made no objectified claims in their understanding of God, whereas Christianity had ‘intellectualised magic’ in the Jesus cult that claimed God to be a man. This proJewish stance implied that Judaism carried the type of negativity that Horkheimer and Adorno felt necessary for a revitalised enlightenment. Such an argument could easily be misconstrued as a form of mysticism itself, but Horkheimer and Adorno were not advocating Judaism per se—they remained, in Isaac Deutscher’s (1968) memorable phrase, ‘non-Jewish Jews’. Rather, they merely posited Judaism as containing the seeds of determinate negativity: the possibility of something better than what was already known. There was nevertheless a relationship between this aspect of Judaism and the social particularity of modern anti-Semitism. Classic socio-economic examinations of antiSemitism argued that it was a jealousy towards wealth without labour. The Jews were perceived as having much by doing little. Horkheimer and Adorno augmented this social analysis by marrying Marx and Freud’s thought. Anti-Semitism, they argued, was also a projected antipathy to the closed system of the rationalised self which did not, like Judaism, have a belief in the negative. To escape the confinement and misery of the capitalist labour system, not to mention instrumental thought, the anti-Semite wants to imitate his or her mental image of the Jew. There is a complexity to this argument which is not apparent at first glance. The desire to imitate is not mere mimesis, although the reintroduction of this theme is clearly

3.5 Enlightenment and Others

41

one intention of the authors (Taussig 1993). Rather it is, in Freudian terms, false projection: ‘If mimesis makes itself resemble its surroundings, false projection makes its surroundings resemble itself’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 154). This false projection is the ultimate ruin of thoughtful, or critical, reason. By attributing the impulses of the self (the subject) to the other or Jew (the object), the anti-Semite is circumventing the most important aspect of the subjective thought process: the link, or dialectic, between the particular and the universal. Human capacity for accommodating difference is denied; so too empathic understandings of others. Human’s perception of Nature as something external to their image of themselves— as something to be feared rather than understood—quickly collapses nature’s particularity into dominating systems of rationality. Violence ensues. The individual’s ability to reflect—reflection being the ‘life of reason’—ensures ‘humanity’s sharpened intellectual apparatus is turned once more against humanity, regressing to the blind instrument of hostility it was in animal prehistory, and as which, for the species, it has never ceased to operate in relation to the rest of nature’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 156). Ostensibly, such a situation was identified by Horkheimer and Adorno as one of individual paranoia on a collective scale. The rationality of the positivist, capitalist system hypostatises knowledge into a poor infinity; the rationality of the spiritual idealists lacks the materiality of objective understanding and results in the repetition of rituals. Fascism is related to both of these tendencies. Fascist violence embodied the domination implicit in this false projection because its advocates tried to uphold a rational system by destroying all that does not fit into it. In so doing, fascism expresses the desire of all instrumental reason to escape the system in whose name its actors act. But fascism was only one extreme form of this desire. For Horkheimer and Adorno, all modern systems reinforce themselves by destroying or excluding that which does not fit. As Jay (1986: 97) argued, for Horkheimer and Adorno, ‘the content of fascist propaganda, indeed of fascist action itself, is less important than its source in the paranoid false projection that characterises the domination of nature’. The authors did, however, go some way to providing a way of escaping this impasse. The anti-Semitism chapter originally contained six ‘theses’ and the final theses ended on an encouraging note prefiguring the proposed sequel to the book. They initially concluded that the immutable cycle of evil violence—perpetrators and persecuted—could be stopped when humans beings became reflective of their position as nature and the ‘false projection’ of their own image (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 165). But this heartening vision was overshadowed by a final sobering section added in 1947. In this new conclusion, anti-Semitism became the pretext for their argument against the homogenising forces of ‘economic rationality’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 167). In many respects it was a summation of the whole text, with specific similarities to the chapter on the culture industry. After the war, the target of Horkheimer and Adorno’s ire extended to the anti-individual proclivities of those systems which had combined to defeat the Axis powers. With such a change there is a noticeable tendency in their writing towards the ‘totalitarianism’ rhetoric that was beginning to gain speed in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.

42

3 Reading Dialectic of Enlightenment

As a consequence, the liberal democratic states, the apparent bastions of freedom at that time, were the unnamed subject of their closing remarks. To them, the standardising system of democracy did not ensure the representations of the differences it supposedly endorsed, for the individuals that contributed to it lacked the reason necessary to embrace difference. In fact, so-called progressive forces (meaning liberals) obfuscate the inequities which are patent in society so as to uphold their own position and therefore stultify the masses they purported to represent. Consequently, widespread antipathy to the liberal system ensues and ideas like fascism, racism and ultimately barbarism begin to resonate. This was the final warning of Horkheimer and Adorno’s text which, in its penultimate lines, outlined a situation of almost complete domination by instrumentalist thinking. This situation’s monstrous absurdity, they concluded, kept possible alternatives alive, if out of reach, to humans. And so, the faith remained only with critical reason’s self-perpetuation: ‘Enlightenment itself, having mastered itself and assumed its own power, could break through the limits of enlightenment’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 172).

3.6 Conclusion This hopelessly hopeful conclusion gained little traction for many years. When the text appeared in its mimeographed manuscript form, Philosophische Fragmente, in 1944 and then as a published book, Dialektik der Aufklärung, in 1947, the radicalism and antinomies of its critique met with little of the enthusiasm that has surrounded the book since the late 1960s. The confusion it elicited saw it soon collecting dust alongside other works that the Institute’s members produced in the 1940s. To be sure, there were other factors that combined to ensure its short-term obscurity—the small initial circulation of the text, its publication in German, the post-war recovery of Europe and the small market for such books at that time—but the fragmentary nature of the work itself and its confusing thesis assisted in ensuring its obscurity. Horkheimer’s clearer articulation of the themes of his and Adorno’s text in Eclipse of Reason (which Adorno also had a hand in writing) was far more accessible to his contemporaries. Indeed, when Dialectic of Enlightenment is read in tandem with Eclipse of Reason—as well as Adorno’s more personal masterpiece, Minima Moralia—the themes that Horkheimer and Adorno were trying to articulate become much clearer. Horkheimer and Adorno felt that they had said something important. But was their equivocal rendering of enlightenment too facile? Were they too eager to assume a distinction between critical and instrumental reason? Does such a simple bifurcation of reason into these two forms oversimplify the foundations of human thought? In many respects, Horkheimer and Adorno are guilty of this oversimplification and they have been duly criticised for it by, among others, their own protégé Jürgen Habermas. How is a line to be drawn between reason that is instrumental in its function and that which is thoughtful in its purpose? Why can reflective reason not also be instrumental, and instrumental reason not reflective? If ‘enlightenment is totalitarian’ then how are any distinctions between fascism, capitalism and communism to be made?

3.6 Conclusion

43

What role does aesthetics have to play in Enlightenment’s utopian moment? To what extent has instrumental reason’s dominating effects increased since the industrial revolution? These are the questions that remain unanswered upon reading Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophically, one of the text’s greatest frustrations remains its failure to elaborate what distinguished these modes of reason from each other and how instrumental reason could somehow dialectically make up for its deficiency. If instrumental reason was rational, then surely it had the potential to become more of a force for freedom rather than domination. If de Sade could be salvaged as a figure in the service of reason, then surely Francis Bacon could be found a place in the schema too? Or conversely, who was to say that the critical reason, or negativity, to which Horkheimer and Adorno assigned so much hope, would not fall victim to the very sort of dominating effects as its instrumental counterpart? Under further examination, the ostensible acumen and inventiveness of Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of enlightenment therefore revealed a concept of enlightenment that was curt and unsystematic. Resolving such epistemological problems is not the issue here, however. Historically, the text remains a manifestation of the pessimism of its time both in the immediate Second World War context and that of the larger German intellectual assault on science that had been taking place for more than half a century. Nonetheless, the ambiguity of the text’s meaning afforded a rich array of possible interpretations. Horkheimer and Adorno left enough loose ends to ensure their work’s longevity. Marxists could focus on its Marxism, Weberians on its Weberianism, Nietzscheans on its Nietzscheanism, cultural theorists on its theory of culture and so on. Deciphering the authors’ actual meaning seems, if not irrelevant, then somewhat beside the point. In short, Dialectic of Enlightenment’s difficulty provided a diversity of possible trajectories for those who read it more than 20 years after its original publication.

References Aronowitz, S. (1988). The production of scientific knowledge: Science, ideology, and marxism. In L. Grossberg & C. Nelson (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 519–537). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Bauman, Z. (1989). Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity. Berman, R. A. (1989). Modern culture and critical theory: Art, politics and the legacy of the Frankfurt School. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Deutscher, I. (1968). The non-jewish jew and other essays. London: Oxford University Press. Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment. In E. Jephcott (Ed.) Trans. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Huyssen, A. (1975). Introduction to Adorno. New German Critique, 6, 3–11. Jarvis, S. (1998). Adorno: A critical introduction. New York: Routledge. Jay, M. (1986). Permanent exiles: Essays on the intellectual migration from Germany to America. New York: Columbia University Press. Jay, M. (1996). The dialectical imagination: A history of the Frankfurt School and the institute of social research, 1923-1950. Berkeley: University of California Press.

44

3 Reading Dialectic of Enlightenment

Rabinbach, A. (1997). In the shadow of catastrophe: German Intellectuals between apocalypse and enlightenment. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rose, G. (1978). The melancholy science: An introduction to the thought of Theodor W. Adorno. London: MacMillan. Taussig, M. (1993). Mimesis and alterity: A particular history of the senses. New York: Routledge. van Reijen, W., & Bransen, J. (2002). The disappearance of class history in “Dialectic of Enlightenment”: A commentary on the textual variants (1944 and 1947). In M. Horkheimer, & T. W. Adorno (Eds.) Dialectic of Enlightenment (pp. 248– 252). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wellmer, A. (1985). Reason, Utopia, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment. In R. Bernstein (Ed.), Habermas and modernity (pp. 35–66). Cambridge: Polity. Wiggershaus, R. (1994) The Frankfurt School: Its history, origins, and political significance. (Michael Robertson, trans.) Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Chapter 4

Reviving Dialectic of Enlightenment

Our prognosis regarding the associated lapse from enlightenment into positivism, into the myth of that which is the case, and finally of the identity of intelligence and hostility to mind, has been overwhelmingly confirmed. Our concept of history does not believe itself elevated above history, but it does not merely chase after information in the positivist manner. As a critique of philosophy it does not seek to abandon philosophy itself. Horkheimer and Adorno

On 22 April 1969, student radicals from Frankfurt University invaded a lecture being presented by Adorno. The commotion that followed overwhelmed the ageing director of the Institute for Social Research and forced the lecture series’ cancellation. This infamous and bathetic event—in which three leather-jacket clad female students confronted Adorno with flowers, kisses and breasts—remains engrained in the minds of those who hear of it. This ‘symbolic patricide’ (Jay 1984a: 55) has even been implicated in Adorno’s death a few months later (Hughes 1975: 169) although other factors were likely at play. In the late 1960s, such an intervention was not an isolated event at Frankfurt University. The campus, one of the most radical in Germany, was a hotbed of late sixties student activism. The boisterous students had confronted Adorno on numerous occasions in the previous year and this particular intervention’s notoriety was only a consequence of its farcical ‘success’. Yet, beyond the anecdote’s drollness lies the act’s historically instructive nature: some of Adorno’s West German students were discontented with his work’s lack of concrete politics. More illustrative of this complaint than the women harassing Adorno at his lectern are the words another student wrote on the blackboard that day: ‘Whoever gives dear Adorno control will preserve capitalism for the rest of his life’ (Leslie 1999). The warning identified Adorno with the very forces he had always purported to criticise. Adorno’s response to the incident was characteristically insightful: ‘when I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would have tried to realise it with Molotov cocktails’ (cited in Jay 1996: 279). But such an argument also unwittingly confirmed the students’ belief that his thought lacked revolutionary praxis. To them, Adorno’s philosophising betrayed his early radicalism and ensured continuance of the status quo. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 H. Prosser, Dialectic of Enlightenment in the Anglosphere, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3521-5_4

45

46

4 Reviving Dialectic of Enlightenment

Not all West German students considered Adorno their adversary, however. The stunt pulled at Adorno’s expense divided the student movement (Leslie 1999). For some the opposite was true: he and other Critical Theorists were regarded as guiding lights for any renewed critique of capitalism and modernity. Some students considered a traditional diet of Marxist-Leninism to be inadequate in a changed historical context. Fresh ingredients were required. Many students found sustenance in the pirated copies of early Critical Theory that littered German universities’ student stalls (Connerton 1980). Reading the Frankfurt School’s early work introduced the post-war generation to a Left-wing approach quite different from that of the communist or social democratic parties (Mewes 1973). The Critical Theorists, and those who took up their mantle, decided that social(ist) action could only be embodied at the critical moment. As a result, Marxism’s accepted political tenets were turned on their heads: critiques of social domination replaced organisational questions, individual psychology substituted for proletarian solidarity, and analysis of political economy was exchanged for cultural evaluation. This new approach’s appeal made the Frankfurt School’s primary text on these issues, Dialectic of Enlightenment, the student bible of the day. The intellectual controversy surrounding Critical Theory’s early work soon migrated from Germany to universities in Britain and America. During ‘the sixties’— roughly the period of America’s official involvement in Vietnam (1963–1975)— Anglo-American students were as radicalised as their German counterparts and asked the same questions of left-wing thought (Bronner 1992). The civil rights and antiwar movements proved instrumental in the re-emergence of American radicalism (Diggins 1992) while British radicalism was rehabilitated by the first New Left and subsequent social movements like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (Kenny 1995; Chun 1994). During the 1960s such radicalism was further reinforced by new theoretical foundations. A segment of the Anglophone Left—largely graduate students on the road to academia—translated and published the continental Left’s works at an unprecedented rate. These works’ popularity reflected student demands for new radical thought. Thus, John Cumming’s 1972 translation of Dialectic of Enlightenment appeared in Britain and America as part of a trend to comprehend, and apply, the so-called Western Marxisms. However, Western Marxism was not the sole representative of left-wing intellectual enterprise. Alongside the works of Gramsci, Lukács, Horkheimer, Adorno, Sartre, Althusser, etc. stood numerous other translations of European thought which extended from pre-1914 classical Marxism to post-1960 offerings of structuralism, post-structuralism and second-generation Critical Theory. The interest in all-things continental reflected the English-speaking Left’s disposition at the beginning of the 1970s. It was assumed that European thought provided a fertile alternative to the pragmatism and positivism of the Anglo-American tradition. The perception was that a thorough dose of the twentieth century’s premier European left-wing philosophers could alleviate liberalism’s weight in Britain and America. These works’ sheer volume formed an intellectual labyrinth from which many scholars have only just begun to emerge. A situation arose in which any complete understanding of these ‘new’ works was nearly impossible. The 1970s and 1980s

4 Reviving Dialectic of Enlightenment

47

were, therefore, characterised by an interpretive process which sought to flesh out the differences and similarities between each thinker within a socialist schema. Almost inevitably, the deciphering led to factionalism among the Anglophone Marxist intelligentsia. Alliances were formed around specific Western Marxist approaches and competition ensued. Some scholars were more effusive than others about the ability of the Frankfurt School to provide the New Left with sharpened tools of critique. Those in favour of Critical Theory, for example, were usually at odds with Althusser’s followers, and vice versa. Yet, alliances were often fickle and soon undone by internal disputes. Irrespective of such fracturing, the Frankfurt School reappeared at a moment of defeat for the Left. By the mid-1970s, the previous decade’s protest movements had only partially succeeded. Criticism of conservative social policies petered out as Western liberal democracies increasingly understood how to frustrate their opponents. The rights of workers, women, racial minorities, homosexuals and students struggled to make progress during the more reactionary neo-liberal consensus that began in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Even the Vietnam War’s conclusion was an almost empty victory for those who had protested against it: the region remained at war until the end of the 1970s and much American culture continued to view the war as virtuous (Kellner 1995). As a result of the capitalist system’s ability to continually outmanoeuvre or co-opt leftist tactics and causes, many critics on the Left either acquiesced or found solace in academia’s supposed intellectual freedoms (Boggs 1993). It was in such scholarly ghettoes that the Frankfurt School continued to be explored. Strictly speaking, initial debate for and against the Frankfurt School in the Anglophone world was defined along national lines. The New Left in the United States was far more enthusiastic about the Frankfurt School’s writings than its British counterpart. This difference in opinion circumscribed Critical Theory’s treatment in the following decades. In Britain, the Frankfurt School had a brief career as a NewLeft hobby horse. In the US, by contrast, the Frankfurt School inspired a renewed Critical Theory that has sustained itself to this day. This ‘American’ Critical Theory’s epicentre extended outwards from the young New-Left scholars associated with the journal Telos. Critical Theory’s significance for this group, as well as for other unaffiliated scholars, arose from a moment of consolation in which would-be revolutionaries resolved that if the world could not be changed, then at least it could be interpreted more accurately. This ‘generation of 1968’ gave Critical Theory its English voice by translating works and applying certain aspects from them to the contemporary world (Jay 1984b: 19).1 Thus, those who read Critical Theory today 1 The

characterisation ‘generation of 1968’ comes from Martin Jay’s introduction to Marxism and Totality. Jay lists those ‘non-dogmatically leftist intellectuals’ who have been defined ‘by reference to the absorption of themes from Western Marxism’ as: Walter Adamson, Frank Adler, John Alt, Andrew Arato, Stanley Aronowitz, Ronald Aronson, David Bathrick, Jessica Benjamin, Russell Berman, Seyla Benhabib, Carl Boggs, Samuel Bowles, Paul Breines, Stephen Bronner, Susan BuckMorss, Jean Cohen, Fred Dallmayr, Robert D’Amico, Andrew Feenberg, Todd Gitlin, Herb Gintis, David Gross, Jeffrey Herf, Dick Howard, Andreas Huyssen, Russell Jacoby, Frederic Jameson, Douglas Kellner, Karl Klare, Joel Kovel, William Leiss, Eugene Lunn, Thomas McCarthy, James Miller,

48

4 Reviving Dialectic of Enlightenment

are more determined by the sixties than they are by the period in which the Frankfurt School was originally formed. In short, understanding Critical Theory’s post-1970 career requires an appreciation of the New Left’s rise and fall.

4.1 Towards a New Left Nazism always defined the Frankfurt School’s history. Hitler’s rule imposed the Institute’s theoretical direction, the Second World War seemed to confirm its members’ fears, and the post-war ‘peace’ did little to change their minds. This was to be the case for many scholars of that generation. The twentieth century’s key philosophical debate over science’s ills and virtues continued at a new pace after 1945. To this extent, the Frankfurt School’s interpretive history must be read as one of continuity rather than disjuncture. The gap between Dialectic of Enlightenment’s release and re-release in German—from 1947 to 1969—was filled with writings similar to Horkheimer and Adorno’s. If anything, the period after the war saw an increase in the number of scholars eager to find an answer to the central question of the text: why does barbarism appear to have overcome enlightenment? Such questions were the natural consequence of Second World War horrors. As had been the case after 1918, the global carnage the war inflicted, captured in the horrific immensity of both the Axis and Allied grand finales, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, forced many to question civilisation’s rationality. Moreover, the barbarity of the Second World War’s cold sequel provided more than enough grist for the mill run by those seeking to either end such cruelty or merely comprehend its existence. In Europe, a remarkable number of thinkers followed Heidegger’s lead, despite his prewar Nazi affiliation, in seeking explanations for humanity’s supposed decline. This Heideggerianism was particularly pronounced in France, where three of the nation’s intellectual celebrities—Sartre, Foucault and Derrida—owed more than a footnote to the German philosopher (Kearney 1994; Megill 1995). Relative understandings of different civilisations were to replace previous hierarchical presumptions. In the United States, the process of scientific certainty came under scrutiny from a stateideological perspective: as communism was the new fascism, totalitarianism became the catch-cry (Gleason 1995). Many of those concerned with reason’s transformation into dogma were European exiles wary of fascist and communist excess. While much of this American literature spent little time criticising the possible excesses of liberalism, it was akin to that appearing on the other side of the Atlantic. Debate continued over whether science was dominating or liberating—a debate which began in the mid-eighteenth century, but which gained momentum in the interwar period when Horkheimer and Adorno were forming their thought (Cook 1998).

Paul Piccone, Mark Poster, Moishe Postone, Anson Rabinbach, James Schmidt, Morton Schoolman, Trent Schroyer, Jeremy Shapiro, Paul Thomas, Shierry Weber, Joel Whitebrook, Richard Wolin, Erik Olin Wright, Jack Zipes and Sharon Zukin.

4.1 Towards a New Left

49

The apparent irony was that these critiques of science coincided with the biggest scientific boom since the mid-nineteenth century. This fact is less ironical when viewed in the history of modern science’s critics. Indeed, those to whom modernity had first appeared potentially disastrous—Nietzsche, Weber, Husserl, Simmel—all wrote during periods of massive industrial production and bureaucratic organisation. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the left-wing heirs of these thinkers—in this case, Lukács and the Frankfurt School—directly inspired the sixties New Left. Neither the debris of war nor critical outrage hindered modernity’s advance. Economic certainty and scientific assertion were seen as the solution to the world’s problems. By the late 1940s, any possible socio-economic crisis in the West was precluded by the robust US economy. America carried a crippled Western Europe and Japan into an era of unprecedented economic success. Yet such support was based on fighting communism rather than global altruism. America believed it was vigorous enough to counter Soviet ambitions through a simple policy of military-industrial innovation—a policy which assisted the Western bloc’s economic recovery. The same was true of Soviet policy in Eastern Europe where industry and technology ruled as a bulwark against capitalist ‘fascism’. Increased expenditure on research and development presented scientists with enormous opportunities. In the West, the entwined outcomes of this prosperity—economic and scientific growth—filtered into other areas of society. Most obviously there was a rapid increase in personal consumption. On the one hand, scientific research’s by-products made available a surfeit of consumer goods—automobiles, televisions and household appliances—as new technologies were transformed into means of improving life. On the other hand, increased production meant increased individual incomes with which the worker could afford to buy consumer items. Slowly but surely Western and Westernised nations adopted this self-regulating economic model. Thus, government pump-priming was proposed to legitimate production and consumption as solutions to social ills—from personal unhappiness to the global communist threat. The combination of Keynesianism and Fordism expounded expenditure as ideology so that by the sixties’ end the impulse to spend replaced interwar frugality. However intense this tryst between science and commerce may have been, its critics’ potential increased along with it. Many believed, as others had before them, that the further commodification of life intensified the alienation of individuals from themselves and others. Such an argument played a central role in the rise of the sixties New Left. As Caute (1988a) explained in his history of the late sixties uprisings, the New Left and the Old Left differed in the emphasis each placed on the terms alienation and exploitation. The Old Left’s formation in the workhouses of the industrial revolution directed its politics towards reformist issues like workers’ rights or to revolutionary purposes such as worker control of the forces of production. Its goal was to end workers’ exploitation, not to transform the production process itself. In this sense, the Old Left, insofar as the New Left defined its maturity, was associated with either social democracy or communism. The Old Left continued to believe in the mobilisation of science and technology as essential to a successful socialist revolution. Most workers’ parties, be they reformist or revolutionary, agreed on this point. Science was not only believed to be on the side of socialism, but socialism became

50

4 Reviving Dialectic of Enlightenment

a science itself. The Comintern’s dialectical materialism exemplified this scientific Marxism. After the First World War, however, some Marxists disagreed with these assumptions—a critique which paved the way for Western Marxism. According to these critics, Marx’s critique of capitalism was said to condemn not only commodity fetishism, but the domination of the individual through technological, or scientific, rationalisation. Karl Korsch and Georg Lukács initiated this post-1918 stance, and the Frankfurt School exemplified it. Yet such critiques obtained little influence within the leviathan of Soviet and Western communist orthodoxy. A view of Marxism as applicable to both the social and natural world held sway over the Old Left’s outlook until at least the mid-1960s (Caute 1988b). The New Left, on the other hand, was a ‘Blakean, pastoral, ecological, mediaconscious counterculture’ (Caute 1988a). Instead of accepting the certitudes of scientific analysis, the New Left sought answers to the existential questions that arose from the twentieth-century extremes of carnage and bureaucratisation. The New Left drew its support from predominantly middle-class university students whose time was occupied by mental rather than manual labour. Naturally, such a distinction is reductionist, overlooking the numerous exceptions to the rule. Yet, it does go some way to defining the New Left’s outlook: its members often interpreted the world in theoretical rather than practical (or organisational) terms. The ‘science’ that defined the working class—embodied in factory or trade solidarity—was not central to the sixties students’ definition of themselves as Leftist (Breines 1982). In a way, therefore, the New Left was grappling with a question Gramsci posed more than a quarter-century beforehand: ‘Are intellectuals an autonomous and independent social group, or does every social group have its own particular specialised group of intellectuals?’ (Gramsci 1971). The post-war boom changed universities from places of privileged learning to institutes of research and development. Student numbers increased as never before and a new class of educated youth challenged pre-existing social inequities (see Miller and Gilmore 1965). Many young students wished to find their place within the struggles of the Left, identifying with both social movements (especially the American civil rights campaign) and Old Left activism (in particular trade union groups) (Aronowitz 1996). The costs of capitalism’s ‘golden years’ (1950–1973) did not go unquestioned by some of those reaping those years’ benefits. In spite of the students’ freedom from want, they became suspicious when being told that civilisation had reached its culmination (Jacoby 1999). In other words, an apparently triumphant modernity came under the scrutiny of its inheritors. Student solidarity with workers confirms that the critique of exploitation did not disappear with the New Left (however indifferent or unreceptive workers were to the students’ efforts). But a focus on exploitation was deemed inadequate if socialist goals were to be achieved. The New Left placed its faith in theories of alienation as explanations of why no proletarian revolution had taken place in the West. According to this logic, a theory of alienation revealed how current production and consumption modes stultified individual and, thus, social consciousness. It was in this context that Dialectic of Enlightenment appealed to so many.

4.1 Towards a New Left

51

The sixties’ student protests had both global universality and national specificity. For this reason it is difficult to generalise about their meaning or effect. In 1968, the complaints of the Mexican students slaughtered by police were not necessarily the same as their pavé-throwing comrades in Paris’s Latin Quarter, while the Czech students in Wenceslas Square were demanding something different from the demands of Australian anti-Vietnam activists decrying their government’s involvement in South East Asia. In this sense, there was no unanimity among the New Left’s members; there was no pensee’68. Nevertheless, certain motifs of their ideological positions can be broadly defined as combining a desire for improvement in the civil rights of the oppressed, a discontent with continued labour exploitation, a distaste for the ongoing bureaucratic rationalisation of society, a desire for more participatory democracy at all levels of society and an ongoing support for the process of decolonisation, especially in Vietnam. These issues galvanised students and other left-wing sympathisers into a rough-knit entity and a (seemingly) global movement of revolt. The political spectrum extended from militants desiring a violent, anarchic, social revolution to hippies and other counter-culture types seeking freedom through drugs, free-love and fashion. Some were just middle-class kids who could choose to drop out—in varying degrees—to show just how much they rejected their bourgeois parents’ lives. The New Left was, therefore, a motley crew with its own internal divisions and differing raison d’etres. Yet those governed by political activism, rather than the vogue for teenage rebellion, believed their actions and demands would change the world. To many other observers, however, it was unclear just what the young protestors stood for. This was especially the case among the Old Left which reservedly supported those youthful activists. As Hobsbawm (2002: 249), a card-carrying member of the previous generation’s radicals, put it, ‘we seemed to be using the same vocabulary, but we did not appear to speak the same language’.

4.2 Marcuse as Mascot One member of an earlier generation did seem to understand the New Left’s language. Herbert Marcuse, the former Frankfurt Institute member, rose to prominence among students for his earlier critique of industrial society and his support of the New Left. Marcuse’s decision to stay in America after the war made his more recent writings readily available to English-speaking audiences. In these texts, he mixed anti-capitalist, anti-establishment philosophy with an ambiguous call for social transformation that resonated across the revolutionary spectrum. His works became compulsory reading for young radicals and thus his centrality to the New Left should not be underestimated. Those who read his works, or pretended to have done so, championed his views, making him an international celebrity (O’Neill 2001). As West German students held banners denouncing Horkheimer and Adorno as traitors to the revolution, placards in America read ‘Marx, Mao, Marcuse’ (Jay 1996: xii). Marcuse came close to outstripping even Sartre’s title as the most recognisable philosopher.

52

4 Reviving Dialectic of Enlightenment

The reasons behind his appeal are open to debate. Yet, it seems that his work combined both theory and practice in a manner that was bound to excite those seeking harmony between the two. Douglas Kellner pointed out that, ‘from his first published essays, Marcuse sought the unity of theory and practice which he believed was the mark of genuine Marxism and sought to reinvigorate and reconstruct Marxian theory during an era when Marxism was degenerating into sterile orthodoxy’ (Kellner 1984: 5). This reinvigoration was just what members of the New Left believed necessary as an alternative to Soviet Marxism and American liberalism. Marcuse also endeared himself to the students by siding with them on numerous issues, even when other older leftists, like Horkheimer and Adorno, berated their actions. Indeed, he even believed that their criticisms of society, despite their outlandish actions, were a scruffy form of Critical Theory (Adorno and Marcuse 1999). The cult of personality surrounding Marcuse set in motion a hunt for his earlier works and those of his colleagues at the Frankfurt Institute. Thus, as the new radicalism’s grandfather, Marcuse was almost single-handedly responsible for inspiring a revival of interest in the Frankfurt School’s work. The two textual pillars of Marcuse’s career, Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964), echoed Dialectic of Enlightenment’s critique of reason.2 Both texts regarded the individual as dysfunctional as a result of social being having been transformed into ideology and domination. Eros and Civilization sought to fuse Freud and Marx by appropriating psychoanalytic categories of the individual and relating them to the social. But just as Marx’s name is absent from Dialectic of Enlightenment’s pages, so too is it missing in Eros and Civilization. As Wolin (2002: 74) has pointed out, this was a ruse on Marcuse’s part. ‘In McCarthyism’s aftermath and at the height of the Cold War, he presented an impassioned indictment of the spiritual and libidinal deprivations of modern capitalism’. Marx is present in spirit, but it is Freud who is holding, albeit unwittingly, the revolutionary flag. Thus, the bourgeois individual’s psychological ‘disorder’ (irrationality) was reflective of capitalism’s failure to embrace critical reason. This approach, which, unlike Dialectic of Enlightenment, acknowledges its major debt to Freud, coincides with Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument that the mind’s capacity to evolve beyond instrumental reason is unfulfilled. Marcuse’s solution, however, transcended Freud. The Viennese doctor’s theory that instinctual repression was inevitable in civilised societies had to be surpassed by an alliance between sexuality (the pleasure principle) and culture (the reality principle). That is, human instincts and the faculties of critical reason could be freed simultaneously. Marcuse even quoted the original 1947 edition of Dialektik der Aufklärung—probably the text’s first English citation—to herald this Freudo-Marxian emancipation: ‘Pleasure contains an element of selfdetermination which is the token of human triumph over blind necessity: “Nature does not know real pleasure but only satisfaction of want. All pleasure is societal—in

2 Marcuse’s

earlier Reason and Revolution (1941) can be added as the third pillar of his career. In this text, Marcuse explained that dialectical analysis, of the Hegelian and Marxist type, was central to any social analysis.

4.2 Marcuse as Mascot

53

the unsublimated no less than in the sublimated impulses. Pleasure originates in alienation”’ (Marcuse 1966: 227). As in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the self’s struggle with Nature remained central to Marcuse’s analysis of mid-twentieth-century society. One critic has even gone so far as to say that Eros and Civilization is Marcuse’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (Wiggershaus 1994: 499). Marcuse further developed these thoughts in One-Dimensional Man where, as in the culture industry chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, the individual is seen as defined, and thus confined by the industrial world’s rationalisation. In the text, subtitled Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, Marcuse claimed that capitalist society’s ‘sweeping rationality, which propels efficiency and growth, is itself irrational’ (Marcuse 1972: 12). In contrast to Eros and Civilization’s psychological utopianism, the work’s tone is very much one of resignation. Capitalism, it appeared, had managed to overcome the inherent problems that Marx foresaw as bringing about its downfall. According to Marcuse, an economics based on overproductivity now blurred the line between ‘real’ and ‘false needs’. The individual’s ability to think of life without continual consumption and accumulation is neutralised, and the ultimate result is ‘moronization, the perpetuation of toil, and the promotion of frustration’ (Marcuse 1972: 190). But One-Dimensional Man is not a re-write of Dialectic of Enlightenment. In the first place, it differs by being written far more coherently than Horkheimer and Adorno’s modernist fragments. Marcuse’s lucid philosophical prose continued as he began to write in English. This fact alone endeared him to Anglophone leftists. A more significant difference between One-Dimensional Man and Dialectic of Enlightenment, however, rests in their opposed outlooks. Marcuse, like Horkheimer and Adorno, has often been unfairly accused of displaying pessimism (MacIntyre 1970). But he did not argue that it was currently impossible to comprehend the self-realisation needed to escape the current impasse. Rather, Marcuse believed that unoppressive forms of social co-ordination could save humanity from its plight at the hands of Western capitalism. Admittedly these formulas remained little more than veiled references to individual refusal, distribution of social wealth and population control. In that sense, his work can be described neither as idealism nor pessimism, but as a realistic anti-capitalism. It is on this point that Marcuse and Horkheimer and Adorno were furthest apart in the 1960s. While Marcuse struggled to keep the thought of Marx alive, and did so perhaps even more in his writings after 1965, Horkheimer and Adorno had, by that stage, moved further away from Marx than ever before. Nevertheless, when Dialectic of Enlightenment was read in the 1970s it exuded a feeling of being a companion piece to Marcuse’s own work. Many New Leftists regarded Marcuse’s and Horkheimer and Adorno’s movement away from communism’s stifling orthodoxies as a worthy path to follow. Thus, thanks to Marcuse’s work, when Frankfurt ideas appeared on the Anglophone radical scene they were not completely foreign to their readership. The popularity of Marcuse’s key works provided a critical context in which Dialectic of Enlightenment, as well as other Frankfurt School texts, could flourish. The passion for Marcuse soon abated with Critical Theory’s other arrivals. This shift was a sign

54

4 Reviving Dialectic of Enlightenment

of the times. By the time sixties radicalism had passed into eighties quietism, interest in Marcuse’s ‘Great Refusal’ or other political stances was eclipsed by an attraction to Horkheimer, Adorno and Benjamin’s less overtly ‘political’ works.

4.3 Authoritarian Personalities The shift towards the pre-war and wartime writings of other Critical Theorists ran contrary to Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s wishes. Both men were reluctant to release any of their early work because they felt it would be misconstrued in a different context. Habermas’s (1984: 58) famous recollection that ‘a complete set of the Zeitschrift [für Sozialforschung] was kept in the institute’s cellar, crated, nailed shut, and out of grasp’ summed up their attitude. Horkheimer and Adorno re-established the Frankfurt Institute as part of the postwar reconstruction (Horkheimer returned in 1949 and Adorno in 1951). The idea behind their return was to continue to work in close connection with each other, furthering Critical Theory after the death of Nazism. This idea did, to an extent, come to fruition. Their personal relationship stayed essentially the same, with Adorno remaining in a subordinate role. After 1955, however, it was as if Horkheimer had decided to slowly remove himself from his dictatorial role at the Institute, eventually passing the position on to Adorno. Adorno, by contrast, was making a public name for himself as a philosopher and cultural critic. Yet, despite these changes in circumstance, Horkheimer and Adorno continued to collaborate on social theory at the restored Institute. Two more collaborative texts were written, Soziologische Exkurse (1956) and Sociologica II (1962), when the influence of sociology on their work demanded greater clarification, and they also taught courses in philosophy together. Nevertheless, their philosophical and political views diverged as time passed. In his three major post-war works—Minima Moralia, Negative Dialectics, and Aesthetic Theory—Adorno maintained a version of the Critical Theory he and Horkheimer had articulated in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Horkheimer, on the other hand, produced little in this vein. Indeed, after his accessible Eclipse of Reason appeared in 1947, Horkheimer did not publish any other major works on social philosophy (Wiggershaus 1994). Ever since their return to Germany, both men had endorsed their previous works’ suppression. It is clear that Horkheimer intended Dialectic of Enlightenment to remain hidden. Some, like Habermas, suggest that this attitude has something to do with his fear of fascism’s return (Dews 1992), while others see it as little more than his complicity with the conservative Federal Republic (Žižek 2001). A combination of these two positions seems a plausible explanation: Horkheimer feared vilification from those in power. But he also expressed a telling sentiment in the preface to a collection of his early essays, Critical Theory, which appeared in 1968. ‘I have always been convinced’, Horkheimer (1972: v) argued, ‘that a man should publish only those ideas which he can defend without reservation, and I have therefore

4.3 Authoritarian Personalities

55

hesitated to reissue these long-out-of-print essays from the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. These early philosophical efforts would require a more exact formulation today. More than that, they are dominated by economic and political ideas which no longer have any direct application; to relate them properly to the present situation requires careful reflection’. Despite such uneasiness, interest in Dialectic of Enlightenment grew with its fabled reputation. Many knew of the work only as a hard-to-find text but one which was full of original ideas. That such a text existed was sure to fuel imaginations and inspired many to seek it out. Horkheimer eventually yielded to pressures to have it published in the 1960s. It was not a straightforward release, however. Horkheimer had allowed an Italian version of Dialectic of Enlightenment to appear in the early 1960s, which contained some alterations, but he vetoed its republication in German (Wiggershaus 1994: 624). To Horkheimer, Germany was not ready for such a text. One attempt to publish the work in 1961 was halted. In a letter to Marcuse, Adorno explained Horkheimer’s reason for refusing its appearance: ‘The situation is simply this, that on the one hand, because of certain high-profile statements in it—particularly those connected with institutionalised religion—we are apprehensive of what to expect if the thing were seen by so many people; while on the other hand we would like to preserve the text intact and not water it down with this or that qualification’ (cited in Wiggershaus 1994: 624–625). Horkheimer finally permitted a new edition in 1969, after frustration at its appearance in pirated forms throughout West Germany. By this time Horkheimer and Adorno conceded that the text had something more to offer dissident youths than it did the dust mites of time. They described their reasoning in a new preface: ‘We have been induced to reissue it after more than twenty years not only by requests from many sides but by the notion that not a few of the ideas in it are timely now and have largely determined our later theoretical writings’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: xi). For them, their thesis on reason’s ongoing domination meant ‘The conflicts in the third world and the renewed growth of totalitarianism are not mere historical interludes any more than, according to the Dialectic, fascism was at that time. Critical thought, which does not call a halt before progress itself, requires us to take up the cause of the remnants of freedom, of tendencies toward real humanity, even though they seem powerless in face of the great historical trend’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: xi). Even though Horkheimer and Adorno gave into demands for their early works’ rerelease, they both responded with hostility to the sixties’ social upheaval. Horkheimer viewed the German protests from his Swiss dotage, where he and Pollock had retired in the late fifties. He baulked at the students’ anti-American, pro-Vietnamese stance, believing the movement’s purpose was little short of totalitarianism (Wiggershaus 1994: 624). Likewise, Adorno, still teaching at Frankfurt University when the groundswell began, piled disdain on the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS) and its sympathisers (Fraser 1988). Echoing Habermas’s characterisation of these students as childish ‘left fascists’, which he later retracted (Dews 1992), Adorno accused them of acting in a way that ‘inflames an undiminished fascist potential in Germany, without even caring about it’ and ‘breeds in itself tendencies which … directly converge with fascism’ (Adorno and Marcuse 1999: 131).

56

4 Reviving Dialectic of Enlightenment

According to both Horkheimer and Adorno, the students who marched with the Frankfurt School’s early works in hand, and under banners emblazoned with quotes from these texts, completely misunderstood Critical Theory’s dialectical purpose. Even though Adorno conceded privately that the student movement had ‘interrupted the smooth transition to the totally-administered world’ (Adorno and Marcuse 1999: 136), Horkheimer and Adorno’s overall criticism of this radicalism only furthered student disgust with them. Adorno’s infamous run-in with the female anarchists was such loathing’s denouement. The students justified their opposition to Critical Theory’s doyens via the classic split between theory and practice. The student movement, with its ethos of spontaneity, believed itself to embody the revolutionary moment— the Lukácsian ‘leap’, the Benjaminian ‘shock’, the Marcusean ‘refusal’. Horkheimer and Adorno, on the other hand, exemplified the philosopher’s quiescent retreat. In contrast to their former colleague Marcuse, Horkheimer and Adorno were, in one of the most bandied about terms of abuse of that time, bourgeois intellectuals.

4.4 Frankfurt School’s American Influence It is difficult to assess Horkheimer and Adorno’s overall effect on the American intellectual scene after they left the United States. On the one hand, the Institute’s hermeticism—for example, its members continued to publish most work in German—did not lend itself to open interaction with American academics. If anything, American scholarship left a greater impression on the two men’s outlook than they did on it. Peter Uwe Hohendahl points to the fact that Horkheimer and Adorno’s 1940s work developed in accordance with contemporary American thought: for example, their shift away from Marx in Dialectic of Enlightenment coincided with the American Left’s retreat to liberalism (Hohendahl 1995). Moreover, by the time Horkheimer and Adorno returned to Europe, both men had decided to fuse their speculative approach with the scientific pragmatism of American sociological techniques to prove, or improve, the accuracy of their claims (Wiggershaus 1994). On the other hand, it can be argued that Horkheimer and Adorno had some influence, albeit limited, on American thought. Above all else Horkheimer and Adorno became synonymous with the Studies in Prejudice project and, more specifically, with its main constitutive text, The Authoritarian Personality (1950). The book used empirical methods to identify the anti-Semitic and fascistic psychological type (the so-called F-scale). As such, the book is representative of their American sojourn: Frankfurt social philosophy meets American social science. If Dialectic of Enlightenment offered a purely theoretical view of the times, The Authoritarian Personality sought to ground theory with evidence (McDonald 1998). Strictly speaking, therefore, 1940s America influenced Horkheimer and Adorno but they did little to effect 1940s America. Their relative obscurity during their stay meant that few people were aware of their presence, let alone their work. Nevertheless, the Frankfurt School’s move to the United States certainly played a role in initiating its later renaissance. Once Nazism had been defeated there seemed no

4.4 Frankfurt School’s American Influence

57

reason for its members to remain in America. Still, majority of them stayed. The Institute’s break-up, largely the result of Horkheimer’s own doctrinaire leadership, forced its members to find work elsewhere. Marcuse, Löwenthal, Fromm, Kirchheimer and Neumann made the USA their home, often employed in non-academic positions. The School’s American legatees generated their own oeuvres, but still remained heavily influenced by their association with the Institute during the 1930s (Löwenthal 1989). As time passed, each necessarily deviated further from the original premises of Horkheimer’s Critical Theory. Students’ enthusiasm for these figures’ writings and teachings then precipitated an interest in their earlier incarnations. The American Frankfurt theorists empowered a broader appropriation of the School. Yet the Frankfurt School’s renown cannot be placed simply at the feet of these ‘permanent exiles’ (Jay 1985). As has been argued earlier, Marcuse’s works held a great deal of sway over leftists during the sixties, as did that of the Institute’s other émigrés. Each man took separate paths to other fields of influence and allowed their works to be read (in English) within an American academic context. In this sense, the Frankfurt School’s Americanisation remains decisive for its enduring legacy there. But the fact of their residency does not explain fully the Frankfurt School’s post-1970 affect. Other contextual factors had to be at play. American intellectual culture must have been amenable to the ideas that Marcuse expounded; otherwise, the apparent obscurity Horkheimer and Adorno experienced in the thirties and forties, albeit partially self-imposed, would have continued. One explanation for this later openness to Critical Theory lies with other escapees from war-torn Europe. The Frankfurt School was not alone in its decision to flee from Germany to America. Many Central European intellectuals—especially those of Jewish origin—found wartime refuge in the United States and stayed on after the allied victory (Helibut 1997). These scholars’ successful post-war careers introduced contemporary continental thought to American minds. First and foremost was the introduction of Hegel and Marx to the university curriculum. As one critic put it, ‘in the cool English light of 1950s American philosophy’ German thought ‘ended with Kant’ and ‘Hegel was a joke’ (Wartofsky 1982: 117–118). By the 1970s, however, the humanities and social sciences welcomed, or rather tolerated, Marxism. Moreover, many émigré scholars were interested in the same questions as the Frankfurt School— namely, those surrounding reason, subjectivity and fascism. For example, Hannah Arendt’s critique of totalitarianism and her Heideggerian bias can be equated, to an extent, with some of the motifs expressed in Dialectic of Enlightenment and OneDimensional Man (Berman 1983; Wolin 2001). Weimar intellectuals’ in the New World introduced much new continental thought to America’s anglicised academy. Wartime intellectual immigration was therefore an investment from which the New Left reaped high dividends. It is likely that the intellectuals taking part in the sea change taught the sons and daughters of those with whom they shared passage from Europe. Large numbers of Central European émigrés provided students with an intellectual heritage that enabled the future success of the Frankfurt School in the United States. The Leftist or Jewish backgrounds of many students, as well as their language capabilities, facilitated the Frankfurt School’s accessibility when its works began to appear on American campuses. Of course, too much can be made of this

58

4 Reviving Dialectic of Enlightenment

fact, as confirmed in Martin Jay’s (1998: 33–34) reflection on the remarkable number American ‘Jewish’ scholars working in intellectual history, especially Critical Theory. The fact that these intellectual historians’ student careers coincided with the Frankfurt School’s English translation seems important. Moreover, many of those interested in continental thought were taught either by European émigrés or by those who had contact with them. A second explanation for the Frankfurt School’s American resonance can be found within indigenous left-wing thought. Despite common assumptions to the contrary, America has a bold tradition of organised left-wing radicalism which stemmed from well before the Russian revolution (Buhle 1991). The unprecedented increase in trade union and Communist Party membership in the ‘red thirties’ gave rise to an American Marxist intelligentsia (Diggins 1992). From this Old Left position works on Marx proliferated. Of these works, Sidney Hook’s Towards an Understanding of Karl Marx published in (1933) and From Hegel to Marx published in (1936) were instrumental in introducing American audiences to Marxist thought. By giving a ‘John Dewey twist to Marxism’ (Jacoby 1987: 103) and mapping Marxism’s Hegelian roots, Hook set in place a context from which Marx could be later read. As a result, the Hegelian Marxism that was to become fashionable in the 1960s was not without some local heritage. Outlining Marx’s relationship to Hegel also became chic following the early 1930s release of the former’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. This event had particular ramifications for European Marxists like those of the Frankfurt School, but in America, where Hegel was even more obscure than Marx, few took up the responsibility of explaining the link. Hook was an exception to this rule. When Karl Korsch visited America in the late twenties, as Jacoby (1981: 92) has pointed out, ‘Hook attended Korsch’s lectures’ and ‘his Towards an Understanding of Karl Marx thanked Korsch and testified to his thought’. That is not to say Hook was a Hegelian Marxist in the early Lukács, Korsch or Frankfurtian sense. In fact, he was, like many of his generation, more interested in understanding the political Marxism of his day— a politics on which he eventually turned his back (Phelps 1997). His texts were broad overviews, of the type currently in vogue today, rather than Marxist critiques of Marx. As a result, Hook’s books were not as sophisticated as the Western Marxists’; but, unlike many Western Marxist texts, they were accessible to working-class readers who were eager to learn more about Marxism. In this sense, they remained part of the Old Left orthodoxy that was far away from the Frankfurt School’s thinking. The Frankfurt School had a more amenable ally in American radicalism’s pinker incarnation—left-liberal cultural criticism—than in hardcore communism or trade unionism. This tradition, which arguably extends back to America’s bourgeois revolutionaries, reached its zenith in the 1950s with the work of intellectuals like Irving Howe, Lewis Mumford, Gore Vidal, Daniel Bell or Jane Jacobs. American capitalism was entering its most successful phase and seemed indestructible. As a consequence, those who remained on the American Left all but conceded defeat. Many chose to shift analysis of society to meet what, in their eyes, was a changed situation. Some moved away from organised political radicalism to a critique of capitalism’s cultural manifestations (Hohendahl 1995). In essence, this was the American New Left’s beginning. It appeared to replicate the Frankfurt School’s own transfer from politics

4.4 Frankfurt School’s American Influence

59

to culture in the 1930s, when the Janus-face of Nazism and capitalism seemed to have stared down the possibility of revolution. In the 1950s, some of these thinkers found value in the limited Critical Theory texts available to them (usually the texts that the Frankfurt School published in English) and included intimations of Critical Theory in their writings. Those who welcomed its ideas wished to change the way that American society was studied. The well-known cultural critic Dwight MacDonald, for example, included a quote from Adorno’s ‘On Popular Music’ (1941) in his classic essay ‘Masscult and Midcult’ (1960). In this work, MacDonald replicated Adorno’s own sentiments on the culture industry by indicting American society’s love affair with mass culture. Another heavyweight of the fifties’ American Left, sociologist C. Wright Mills, whose posthumous impact on the New Left has been regarded as greater than Marcuse’s (O’Neill 2001), was well aware of Critical Theory’s prior presence in America’s intellectual landscape (Horowitz 1983). His 1959 classic, The Sociological Imagination, used Horkheimer’s critique of positivism as a warning against the assurances of scientificity. In a chapter entitled ‘Philosophies of Science’, Mills quoted Horkheimer’s 1950 essay the ‘The Lessons of Fascism’ in which the German philosopher argued that ‘the constant warning against premature conclusions and foggy generalities implies, unless properly qualified, a possible taboo against all thinking’ (Mills 1959: 122–123). By doing so, Mills appropriated Critical Theory’s central tenet that all scientific claims to truth should be treated with suspicion, without necessarily rejecting the belief that truth could be reached via social scientific, that is, rational, means. In the mid-1950s, Mills also called for a new sociology ‘to that practiced by the “scientists” and “grand theorists” then dominating the profession’ and proposed the Frankfurt Institute as the model for this new design (Jay 1985: 46). Calling for a more self-reflective sociology, Mills argued that ‘I know of no better way to become acquainted with this endeavour in high form of modern expression that to read the periodical, Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences, published by the Institute for Social Research. Unfortunately, it is available only in the morgues of university libraries, and to the great loss of American social studies, several of the Institute’s leading members, among them Max Horkheimer and Theodore [sic] Adorno, have returned to Germany’ (Mills 1963: 572). He was certainly impressed by the volume of theory which had arrived in America after the European intellectual exodus. Mills arguably owed his substantial reputation to this body of work which he managed to cogently interpret and adapt to form a new sociology of the sort he desired. A remarkable feat given the brevity of his life. Just as these theorists were proclaiming the Frankfurt School’s virtues, a simultaneous critique appeared from the Right. Edward Shils, a liberal sociologist who had shifted further to the Right during the post-war anti-communist malaise, was one of MacDonald and Mills’s chief interlocutors. In debates surrounding the ills and virtues of popular culture, Shils was a forceful critic because, in an implicitly Hegelian stance, he attacked his opponents’ arguments at the source. In this respect, he was well aware of the Frankfurt School’s effect on certain American scholars. In the early 1950s, he had some contact with the Institute’s work via his contribution to Christie and Jahoda’s review text on The Authoritarian Personality

60

4 Reviving Dialectic of Enlightenment

(Shils 1954). In 1957, however, Shils published ‘Daydreams and Nightmares’, an essay which more clearly displayed his acquaintance with the Frankfurt Institute’s work. The work was fundamentally a populist defence of American liberal culture’s possibilities and a critique of Marxist-socialist attempts to accelerate this dream through revolution or critique. Included in this purpose was arguably the first English synopsis of the Institute’s position. Devoting a few pages to this explanation, Shils argued that the Frankfurt School’s Marxism owed more to Hegel, Freud and bourgeois critics of mass culture than it did to Lenin or Trotsky. The combined effect of Horkheimer, Adorno, Neumann, Fromm and Marcuse’s works was the promulgation of ‘an ingenious, courageous, and unrealistic point of view’ which was incongruous with modern reality (Shils 1957: 600). The conclusion Shils drew then prefigured later criticisms of Critical Theory—that is, the Institute’s obsessive attempt to understand fascism’s appeal prejudiced their social analyses outside that context. By labelling America a proto-fascist society, Shils contended, the Frankfurt School overlooked the effectiveness of liberal democracy’s bulwarks against tyranny. The debates in which the American Left were involved and their ability to position Critical Theory in these debates, albeit in small ways, paved the way for a reception of the Frankfurt School’s work at a later date. A strong tradition of intellectual writing developed in the United States during the 1950s over the very issues which concerned the Frankfurt School in the preceding decades: disputation over the division between high and low culture, a great unease at culture being dictated by industry, and an aversion to the bureaucratic and technological rationality of the industrial economy. Much of this thought responded to social and cultural change. Intellectuals like MacDonald and Mills and Canadian cultural critic Marshall McLuhan, for example, established a North American version of Horkheimer and Adorno’s 1940s cultural critique. That Horkheimer and Adorno’s work rates a mention in both Mills and MacDonald’s texts is evidence of the Frankfurt theorists’ pre-1960s influence (Wheatland 2009). Whether those appropriating Critical Theory completely understood the works they were quoting is another issue. Certainly, Critical Theory’s limited English circulation would have restricted the Americans’ understanding. But even so, MacDonald, Mills and their colleagues criticised capitalism’s dehumanising effects for the same reasons as Horkheimer and Adorno. Hence, the Frankfurt School intersected rather than inspired American cultural criticism. Those liberal critics who quoted Critical Theory imbued their work with a Frankfurtian hue and also established a position for Frankfurt theory in the United States. This development goes some way to explaining Horkheimer and Adorno’s attractiveness after 1970. It was only a few years later that some of these critics’ university students were inspired by the same ideas. In the midst of the late sixties political unrest, what had previously been disparate murmurs about the Frankfurt School became concentrated outbursts. In America, such outbursts came mainly from graduate students eager to introduce the Frankfurt School to the Anglophone New Left. American students studying in Germany brought back samizdat copies of Horkheimer and Adorno works and circulated them among the New Left. Doug Kellner was one such student. Kellner purchased pirated copies of the major works of Critical Theory—as well as Lukács and Korsch—from student tables and radical bookshops while studying in Tübingen between 1969 and

4.4 Frankfurt School’s American Influence

61

1971 (Kellner 1989). To him, Horkheimer and Adorno’s works were integral to sixties’ radical politics in both Germany and the United States (and determined his subsequent career). Many students were aware of early Critical Theory’s work via Marcuse’s popularity and interaction with German New Leftists. These texts, however, were inaccessible. The thirst for the Frankfurt School’s early texts subsequently inspired a concerted effort by young scholars to translate and publish its works (see Adorno 1967, 1968, 1969/70). Many graduate students began to seriously introduce Frankfurtian theory into their university studies via the license afforded by doctoral theses. The diligence of such studies also meant they were working only proximately to the activism of the time (Gitlin 1987). By the 1970s’ beginning, however, these students’ labours increased the Frankfurt School’s momentum in North America (Berman 1996).

4.5 A Critical Telos Two significant textual moments consolidated this drive. First, the release of one of these theses as a book: Martin Jay’s pioneering history of the Institute for Social Research, The Dialectical Imagination (1973), grounded the understanding of the Frankfurt School in English. The title of the work replicated C. Wright Mills Sociological Imagination, but also one of the classic catch cries of the Parisian New Left: ‘All Power to the Imagination’. The book was initially written as a dissertation at Harvard University under the direction of H. Stuart Hughes, a colleague of Marcuse’s at the Office of Secret Services (OSS) during the war and subsequent chronicler of the European intelligentsia’s emigration (K¯atz 1982). Jay’s purpose was to examine the Institute’s travails from its 1923 inception to its German return. The Dialectical Imagination’s major purpose, however, was to explain the Frankfurt School—that is, the intellectual circle under Horkheimer’s directorship. To achieve this goal, Jay blended a fastidious empirical history of the Institute with theoretical explanations of Critical Theory, producing a work that gave insight into the School’s workings. But instead of depicting the Frankfurt collective as a coherent group with shared agendas, Jay revealed it to be a multifaceted and sometimes contradictory melange. Other American texts made reference to the Frankfurt School. Most obviously, Frederic Jameson’s Marxism and Form published in (1971) introduced the names Adorno, Marcuse and Benjamin to literary theory—but Jay’s was the first complete assessment of the Institute’s output. When first published in 1973, The Dialectical Imagination provided an accessible introduction to the breadth of the Frankfurt School’s work which, at that time, was a boon for those eager to find out more about these obscure German theorists.3 As a result, The Dialectical Imagination proved an enormous success. The text positioned Jay as the foremost historian 3 The

effect of Jay’s history of the Frankfurt School was not reserved to Anglophone scholars. His text was translated into a number of languages and even brought Critical Theory to the attention of Michel Foucault. For example, in his ‘Preface to the 1996 Edition’, Jay referenced a conversation he

62

4 Reviving Dialectic of Enlightenment

of Critical Theory, a title which he continued to live up to throughout the 1970s and 1980 s as he published more works on the Institute’s key members. The second event to consolidate the Frankfurt School in North America preceded and exceeded the release of Jay’s work. In May 1968, a group of students associated with the State University of New York at Buffalo established the journal that was to become the voice of Critical Theory in North America—Telos. The journal was just one of a number found in the wake of New Left’s heyday. As Stanley Aronowitz (1996: 51), a key contributor to late sixties radicalism, reflected, those who established these journals were ‘a small but not unimportant group of intellectuals who… maintained the deep-seated beliefs of the New Left, i.e., its reverence for decentralisation, communitarian goals and democratic renovation of American society’. While Telos agreed with these beliefs in theory, more intellectually arcane pursuits governed its purpose. Thus, it was (and remains) a marginal periodical—‘a journal definitely outside the mainstream of American Philosophical Thought’ read an early subtitle—which, paradoxically, became remarkably well known. Founding members originally focused on German phenomenology and its inheritors, specifically Husserl and Sartre, but after the first few issues contributors moved towards Critical Theory. The journal was not overtly Marxist; unearthing philosophical Marxism’s genealogy, however, remained a central topic until the mid-1980 s when this concern was eclipsed by issues supposedly of more contemporary relevance. An interest in Marxism’s history allowed Telos’s contributors to vet different Marxisms’ merits in comparison with other, largely European, social theories. Thus, Telos nurtured a heterogenous political approach to both philosophical and social problems. It was sympathetic to dialectical techniques but severely scrutinised their effectiveness. In this sense, the journal’s purpose remained an unwavering criticism of the political status quo through rigorous intellectualism (see Fekete 1981/82; Piccone 1988; Breines 1988; Adler 1988). Paul Piccone, Telos’s formidable editor throughout its existence, directed this project. Piccone was eager to use Western Marxism to criticise American pragmatism’s provincialism. This intention entailed the translation of the Frankfurt School, Lukács, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and others who could challenge the ‘objectivism’ of most American philosophy and social science. However, Telos’s writers also criticised Western Marxism’s simultaneous appropriation by the British Marxists at New Left Review (NLR). While NLR certainly provided a guide for Telos’s propagation of continental theory, Piccone and his colleagues found its Althusserianism to be little more than an unwitting attempt to ‘re-legitimate Stalinism for a post-Khrushchev political market’ (Piconne 1988: 7). These theoretical critiques were complemented by Telos’s misgivings about the American and Soviet regimes—most obviously for their policies in Vietnam and Czechoslovakia—and the increasingly technocratic nature of Western societies—where individuals were increasingly reified in work and culture. These matters all contributed to the journal’s stance. Almost from the outset, therefore, Telos was the Frankfurt School’s North American house journal. It was had with Michel Foucault in which the French philosopher explained how reading the 1977 French translation of The Dialectical Imagination first exposed him to the Frankfurt theorists.

4.5 A Critical Telos

63

responsible for Critical Theory’s translation and application from the 1970s onwards. The late sixties were years of paradox in America—a time of socio-economic triumph and crisis. Telos seized upon this moment to introduce Marxist theories from Europe’s interwar crisis years in order to expose ‘totalising’ ideologies’ consequences. The Telos group was instrumental in nurturing Anglophone intellectuals’ interest in the Frankfurt School—an interest that grew for the next 20 years. This germination process remained peripheral to the mainstream of academia, however. In spite of enthusiasm for the work of the Frankfurt School among Marxist theorists like Jameson and Leftish historians like Jay, the movement towards Critical Theory remained marginal. The political movement that had bolstered the interest in continental theory among intellectuals had all but disappeared and the influx of another continental theory—post-structuralism—was loosening the hold of Critical Theory in America even before it was able to get a firm grip. Indeed, like the Frankfurt Institute both before and after the war, the neo-Critical Theorists of the United States became one part of the multifaceted Left that was housed in academia. Nonetheless, the Telos group, along with contributors to its sister journal, New German Critique, celebrated the heterogeneity of its members’ interests. New German Critique was found in 1973 to focus more exclusively on topics of German import—from politics to art. It was published through the same house as Telos. There were a few other journals which were beginning to deal with similar issues as well—especially Theory and Society and Social Research. Not all at Telos were in favour of the first generation of Critical Theorists. It was believed that this ambivalence remained true to Horkheimer’s definition of Critical Theory and gave the Telos group the right to label themselves the ‘third generation’ of Critical Theory. This claim was underwritten by the fact that almost all of the authors who published texts on the Frankfurt School in the United States have also written articles for the journal. Names that are now synonymous with Critical Theory in the United States often first appeared among Telos’s pages: Martin Jay, Douglas Kellner, Russell Jacoby, James Schmidt, Russell Berman, Susan Buck-Morss, Robert Hullot-Kentor and Richard Wolin, to name but a few. It was the belief that Critical Theory, especially Adorno, provided a means of criticising the form that Western societies had taken since the Second World War which inspired much of the work that appeared in Telos.

4.6 Conclusion Significant number of interest had gathered around the Frankfurt School by the time John Cummings’ translation of Dialectic of Enlightenment appeared in 1972. This interest, concentrated within the post-1968 academic left, resulted in a sustained engagement with Critical Theory, in North America especially, from that time on. Certainly an interest in Marxist thought, though always peripheral, had not been lacking from scholarly or public discussions by intellectuals in the United States. And curiosity about the Frankfurt Schools works expanded from those who knew its figures during the 1940s and 1950s, like Horkheimer and Adorno before they

64

4 Reviving Dialectic of Enlightenment

returned home, to those who worked actively with those, like Marcuse and Fromm, who remained in the US till their deaths. The upsurge of interest during the early 1970s, however, was marked because young graduate students, equipped with impressive intellect as well as linguistic dexterity, were thirsty for sustained critiques of the society that had raised them as consumerist patriots with limited cultures of political criticism. To be sure, the public intellectuals that they looked to in the past, especially figures affiliated with proud American socialist traditions, offered a starting point for their critique. But the sophisticated philosophical and sociological work on Critical Theory added a sharper edge to these younger scholars’ analytical tools. On the one hand, Horkheimer and Adorno portrayed a sustained and sophisticated critique of the capitalism’s cultural production, especially based on American experiences, that could be transferred easily to the new incarnations of this industrial process. On the other hand, they permitted a left-wing critique without affiliation to communism or simple theories of totalitarian equivalence while also engaging directly with key philosophical traditions, particularly from Germany, that had not been given much attention in North American thought. This rich opportunity to invest in countercultural thinking at various levels was an attractive option. Telos provided a home for this venture in a way that previously disparate connections to Critical Theory—from Hook to McDonald to Mills—had not. Consequently, the New Left that emerged during the 1960s allowed for a proliferation of alternative ways of thinking of which Critical Theory was one. Others—like postmodernism, post-structuralism and Cultural Studies discussed in future chapters—also emerged. The Frankfurt tradition proved particularly popular in the United States because of the initial engagement of public intellectuals with their work as well as the role that Marcuse had played in the late 1960s revolutions. His ideas inspired young people who sought out the earlier works of him and his colleagues in much the same way as German students dusted off texts like Dialektik der Aufklärung. Others in the English-speaking world were similarly intrigued and emboldened by a global 1968 revolt and also turned to Critical Theory. The other pole to Telos, the British New Left Review, offered the most sustained interaction, if ultimately fairly a cold response. But what it meant was that the radical thought of the Frankfurt School from the 1930s and 1940s, which had softened somewhat during the post-war years, now emerged into philosophical discussions in the English-speaking academic and activist circles in ways that it had never before. Dialectic of Enlightenment proved the central focus of this discussion. Readings of Horkheimer and Adorno’s text within these new leftist circles took a number of different directions—those who agreed wholesale with their thinking, others who thought to be useful to a point, those who changed their mind and those who rejected it wholesale. The subsequent chapters outline these different avenues of interpretation.

References

65

References Adler, F. (1988). 1968 and Now. Telos., 75, 52–55. Adorno, T. W. (1967). Sociology and psychology (Part 1). New Left Review, 46, 67–80. Adorno, T. W. (1968). Sociology and psychology (Part 2). New Left Review, 47, 79–97. Adorno, T. W. (1969/70). Society. Salmagundi, 10–11, 144–153. Adorno, T. W., & Marcuse, H. (1999). Correspondence on the German student movement. New Left Review, 233, 128–130. Aronowitz, S. (1996). The death and rebirth of American radicalism. New York: Routledge. Berman, M. (1983). All that is solid melts into air: The experience of modernity. London: Verso. Berman, P. (1996). A tale of two utopias: The political journey of the generation of 1968. New York: WW Norton. Boggs, C. (1993). Intellectuals and the crisis of modernity. Albany: SUNY Press. Breines, W. (1982). Community and organization in the new left: 1962-1968. The great refusal. New York: Praeger. Breines, P. (1988). Recalling Telos. Telos, 75, 36–47. Bronner, S. E. (1992). Moments of decision: Political history and the crises of radicalism. New York: Routledge. Buhle, P. (1991). Marxism in the United States: Remapping the history of the American left. London: Verso. Caute, D. (1988a). The year of the barricades: A journey through 1968. New York: Harper and Row. Caute, D. (1988b). The fellow-travellers: Intellectual friends of communism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Chun, L. (1994). The British new left. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Connerton, P. (1980). The tragedy of enlightenment: An essay on the Frankfurt School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cook, D. (1998). Adorno on late capitalism: Totalitarianism and the welfare state. Radical Philosophy., 89, 16–26. Dews, P. (Ed.). (1992). Autonomy and solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas. London: Verso. Diggins, J. P. (1992). The rise and fall of the American left. New York: WW Norton. Fekete, J. (1981/82). Telos at 50. Telos. 50, 1981-82, 160-171. Fraser, R. (1988). 1968: A student generation in revolt. London: Pantheon Books. Gitlin, T. (1987). The sixties: years of hope, days of rage. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gleason, A. (1995). Totalitarianism: The inner history of the cold war. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. In Q. Hoare, & G.N. Smith (Eds.) And trans. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Habermas, J. (1984). The Frankfurt School in New York. In J. Marcus & Z. Tar (Eds.), Foundations of the Frankfurt School of social research (pp. 55–65). New Brunswick: Transaction. Helibut, A. (1997). Exiled in Paradise: German refugee intellectuals in America from 1930s to the present. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hobsbawm, E. (2002). Interesting times: A twentieth-century life. London: Allen Lane. Hohendahl, P. U. (1995). Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Horkheimer, M. (1972). Critical theory: Selected essays. In M. O’Connell et al. Trans New York: Herder and Herder. Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment. In E. Jephcott (Ed.) Trans. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Horowitz, I. L. (1983). C. Wright Mills: An American utopian. New York: Free Press. Hughes, H. Stuart. (1975). The sea change: The Migration of social thought, 1930-1965. New York: Harper and Row.

66

4 Reviving Dialectic of Enlightenment

Jacoby, R. (1981). The dialectic of defeat: Contours of western marxism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jacoby, R. (1987). The last intellectuals: American culture in the age of academe. New York: Basic. Jacoby, R. (1999). The end of utopia: Politics and culture in an age of apathy. New York: Basic Books. Jay, M. (1984a). Adorno. London: Fontana. Jay, M. (1984b). Marxism and totality: The adventures of a concept from Lukács to Habermas. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jay, M. (1985). Permanent exiles: The intellectual migration from Germany to America. New York: Columbia University Press. Jay, M. (1996). The dialectical imagination: A history of the Frankfurt School and the institute of social research, 1923-1950. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jay, M. (1998). Cultural semantics: Keywords of our time. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. K¯atz, B. (1982). Herbert Marcuse and the art of liberation: An intellectual biography. London: Verso. Kearney, R. (1994). Modern movements in European philosophy. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kellner, D. (1984). Herbert Marcuse and the crisis of Marxism. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Kellner, D. (1989). Critical theory, Marxism and modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kellner, D. (1995). Media culture: Cultural studies, identity, and politics between the modern and the postmodern. New York: Routledge. Kenny, M. (1995). The first new left: British intellectuals after Stalin. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Leslie, E. (1999). Introduction to Adorno/Marcuse correspondence on the German student movement. New Left Review, 233, 118–123. Löwenthal, L. (1989). Critical theory and the Frankfurt theorists: Lectures–correspondence–conversations. New Brunswick: Transaction. MacDonald, K. (1998). The culture of critique: An evolutionary analysis of Jewish involvement in twentieth-century intellectual and political movements.Westport CT: Praeger MacIntyre, A. (1970). Marcuse. London: Fontana. Marcuse, H. (1966). Eros and civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon Press. Marcuse, H. (1972). One-dimensional man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. London: Routledge. Megill, A. (1995). Prophets of extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mewes, H. (1973). The German new left. New German Critique., 1, 26–29. Miller, M. V., & Gilmore, S. (Eds.). (1965). Revolution at Berkeley. New York: Dial Press. Mills, C. W. (1959). The sociological imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Mills, C. W. (1963). IBM plus Reality plus Humanism = Sociology. In I. L. Horowitz (Ed.) Power, politics, and people: Collected essays of C. Wright mills (pp. 568–576). New York: Oxford University Press. O’Neill, W. (2001). The new left. Wheeling: Wiley-Blackwell. Phelps, C. (1997). Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and pragmatist. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Piccone, P. (1988). 20 years of Telos. Telos, 75, 3–25. Shils, E. A. (1954). Authoritarianism: “Right” and “Left”. In R. Christie & M. Jahoda (Eds.), Studies in the Scope and Method of The Authoritarian Personality (pp. 24–49). Glencoe: Free Press. Shils, E. A. (1957). Daydreams and nightmares: Reflections on the criticism of mass culture. Sewanee Review, 65(4), 587–608. Wartofsky, M. W. (1982). Marx among the Philosophers. In B. Ollman & E. Vernoff (Eds.), The left academy: Marxist scholarship on American campuses. New York: McGraw Hill.

References

67

Wheatland, T. (2009). The Frankfurt school in Exile. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Wiggershaus, R. (1994). The Frankfurt School: Its history, theories and political significance. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Wolin, R. (2001). Heidegger’s children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wolin, R. (2002). Herbert marcuse: A critical retrospective from Berlin to Berkeley. In J. P. McCormick (Ed.) Confronting mass democracy and industrial technology: Political and social theory from Nietzsche to Habermas (pp. 71–86). Durham: Duke University Press. Žižek, S. (2001). Did somebody say totalitarianism?: Five interventions into the (Mis)use of a concept. London: Verso.

Chapter 5

Championing Dialectic of Enlightenment in America

In this country [America] there is no difference between a person and that person’s economic fate. No one is anything other than his wealth, his income, his job, his prospects. In the consciousness of everyone, including its wearer, the economic mask coincides exactly with what lies beneath it, even in its smallest wrinkles. All are worth as much as they earn, and earn as much as they are worth. Horkheimer and Adorno

Dialectic of Enlightenment arrived in the hands of the Anglophone scholars after the smoke of 1968 had settled. This take up was understandable in terms of the text’s migration from West German universities to those in the US via its 1972 publication by Herder and Herder. Its strong sentiments of philosophical disappointment readily transferred from one post-revolutionary context. Scholars rather than activists were the Frankfurt School’s champions in North America during the 1970s. Such exponents sought to find, interpret and disseminate Critical Theory’s works as well as appropriate them for their own circumstances. The outcome was North American Critical Theory centred around journals like Telos and, later, New German Critique. Working in this lineage was complicated by the fact that there was so much material for these enthusiasts to work their way through. Certainly their sophisticated understanding of the political and philosophical traditions from which Critical Theory had emerged was remarkable. It was certainly inflected by strong Marxist affiliations as well as connections to German Idealism and Lebensphilosophie. But there was the added confusion, or benefit, of other newer works from post-war Critical Theory appearing at the same time (to say nothing of other post-structuralist theories). Here the key figure was, of course, Jürgen Habermas. While the Frankfurt School during the 1970s was generally associated with Horkheimer, Adorno and their colleagues, by the early 1980s, they were being displaced in the English-speaking world by Habermas’s dexterous and comprehensive reconsideration of the lifeworld. That is not to suggest that Dialectic of Enlightenment was shelved. Rather the promotion of it as an urtext during the early 1970s was slightly corrected by Habermas’s rereading of the work. This chapter outlines the arc of that criticism as Dialectic of Enlightenment, and the Frankfurt School became more widely known. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 H. Prosser, Dialectic of Enlightenment in the Anglosphere, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3521-5_5

69

70

5 Championing Dialectic of Enlightenment in America

5.1 After the New Left The Frankfurt School’s American renaissance is best explained by the malaise which followed the New Left’s disintegration. With the Vietnam War over, the civil rights movement petering out, and the Nixon-Ford administration giving way to Carter’s soft-touch Presidency, dissenting voices quietened. It was in this context that the Left began its retreat into the university. If radicals found themselves as rebels without a cause to follow, then they consoled themselves by becoming rebels with a course to teach. This careerism diluted the vitriol with which these students-cum-teachers had showered their professors and academia only a few years earlier. Contrary to right-wing fantasists, this Left academy’s creation was far from a new reds-underthe-bed (or reds-at-the-lectern) threat to American civilisation. Apart from a few diehards, most left-wing agitators of the sixties were quickly installed in fields that are either supplementary, or at least not directly confronting, to the state or economy— namely, the social sciences and humanities. In reality, these ‘tenured radicals’, to use Kimball’s (1990) derogatory description, became, often against their will, tethered dissenters. Of course, this academic retreat exists as only a small part of the broader ‘crisis in Marxism’ taking place since at least 1970. Although this crisis arguably extends back to debates in Marx’s time, after 1968 the Left’s already troubled history began to worsen (McCarney 1990). To be sure, Marxism’s main opponents remained the dominant liberals and conservatives who had long been pointing to the USSR as proof of Marxism’s consequences—a viewpoint vindicated, in the minds of those who held it, in 1989. However, the Left was facing an even greater problem at that time: internal corrosion. Most identifiably socialist organisations or groupings began to self-destruct through a combination of self-loathing, internal bickering or ideological abandonment (Elbaum 2002). The New Left’s idealism was only one manifestation of the Left’s general disarray in Western democracies. Politically, monetarist policies began to undermine social democracy and the post-war welfare system. Traditional working-class parties were subsequently seen to be out of step with post-1973 economic policy and thus clambered to the Right (Brenner 2006). Socially, this shift was reinforced by what Gramsci, or even Adorno, might have described as the adoption of neo-liberalism as common sense. The now widespread belief in the irrelevance of distinctions between Left and Right, and an associated political apathy, exemplifies this trend. Intellectually, ideological whiteanting was fostered by a new breed of academic leftists who were growing discontented with Marxism: left liberals decried its false idealism, feminists berated its patriarchy dominance and postmodernists denounced its oppressive meta-narrative. In the face of a hegemonic liberal culture, American leftists began to analyse power in linguistic and symbolic terms: gestures which were far from real challenges to real power. Rather than professing ideas about the need for unity between theory and practice, as so many had done in the sixties, the latter was sacrificed to the former. Theory became the new radicalism. The authority of class in social analysis was replaced by discussions of language, culture and symbolic domination. Marxism,

5.1 After the New Left

71

which has always been open to varied interpretations, was being transformed by the American academy. With the Left on the back foot, its intellectuals were attracted to theories which explained capitalism’s apparent triumph. In this sense, Critical Theory, with its political resignation and promesse du bonheur, provided a perfect refuge for many caught in this anti-Marxist drift. Indeed, the context in which this transformation took place was remarkably similar to that which inspired the Frankfurt School’s thought. In the United States, the economic crisis which followed the sixties revolts led to feigned, or at least partial, social and political reforms. Instead of real change within the American polity, these social gains were soon rolled back during the 1980s. This political transition had echoes of the plight of interwar Germany: the post-1918 revolutions were eventually put down by a Weimar Republic struggling for legitimacy, but the government ultimately came undone through an economic depression which made way for National Socialism (Jacoby 1981). That is not to say that Weimar Germany was the same as seventies America, nor that 1980s Republicans were Nazis—such equations diminish historical understanding. When, however, the Frankfurt School and its American advocates are compared within these two contexts it is easy to see Critical Theory’s post-1970 appeal. The Frankfurt School was convinced that its non-party, universitybased leftism was a valuable critique during a reactionary period. This attitude was precisely that taken up by forlorn soixante-huitards in the 1970s. Many regarded themselves in much the same way that Horkheimer and Adorno, among others, had in the 1940s—as social change’s intellectual guardians. Theories of enlightenment as domination, the culture industry, reified individuals, non-identity, negative dialectics and late capitalism were ready-made to explain one-dimensional man’s persistence. If Critical Theory was an intellectual response to Marxism’s defeat in Europe during the thirties, then the seventies American appropriation of the Frankfurt School reproduced this reaction. If Horkheimer’s Institute was the first step in Marxism’s academicisation, then the generation of North American scholars who appropriated Critical Theory reinforced this process. If the Frankfurt School’s work was captured in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung and Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, then it was reincarnated with Telos and New German Critique. In this sense, Critical Theory’s North American development must be read as a sequel to Western Marxism—resigned responses to failed revolutions. David Beran has made a similar argument when he suggested the similarities between post-revolutionary movements like British Romanticism, Critical Theory and post-structuralism. What all three had in common, according to Beran, was that they all appeared after revolutionary upheavals and all decided that aesthetics was a more important realm of inquiry than politics (Beran 2001). The Frankfurt School’s appropriation and interpretation was not, however, a uniform affair. Its advocates were sophisticated in their argumentation and recognised the problem of investing wholesale in a theory forged in another era. Critical Theory’s American renaissance has its own narrative of changing opinions and shifting alliances. Much of this narrative centres on Telos and New German Critique—journals which determined the Frankfurt School’s North American career. This chapter

72

5 Championing Dialectic of Enlightenment in America

thus takes up where the discussion of ‘The Frankfurt School in America’ in the previous chapter left off. Content in the journals often overlapped because both were distributed by the same publishing group, although each definitely had its own agenda and thus its own trajectory. These different courses were taken as many of Horkheimer and Adorno’s most enthusiastic supporters of the 1970s converted to Habermasian communication theory, postmodern criticism or right-wing social theory. Ultimately, the pessimistic logic of Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument repelled its advocates’ original devotion. Some scholars continued to defend Critical Theory—indeed, today there is something of a new Adornian upsurge based largely on his affiliation with Benjamin. But, for the most part, that section of American academia which first revived the Frankfurt School strayed from its precepts. Thus, Critical Theory’s history is, like that of so many other academic fashions, one of transformation and refutation. Those who had read the Frankfurt School as a student in the late sixties read it quite differently, if at all, as an academic in the eighties and nineties.

5.2 Another ‘Sort-Of’ Marxism During the 1970s, Telos’s treatment of the Frankfurt School was part of a larger endeavour to understand Western Marxism. In the post-New-Left era, the journal’s approach was diagnostic as political alternatives were sought and trialled. Appropriations of German, French, Italian, American and Central European Lefts vied for dominance with no particular programme crystallising. That said, the approach to these subjects was uniform: the journal remained committed to radical criticism, dialectical logic and an anti-academism which alienated it from mainstream scholarship. Some of these approaches survived—namely, Critical Theory—while others—Korsch or Gramsci—fell by the wayside. Nevertheless, the Frankfurt School’s place within this melange was characterised by consistent discussion rather than dominance. A perusal of the journal in the seventies reveals that every Telos issue contained at least one article on Critical Theory, but no more than six. In this sense, Critical Theory remained more a notable influence than the guiding force. The same can be said of New German Critique which, following its arrival in 1974, augmented Telos’s German content. But Critical Theory was not NGC’s sole concern. Other modern German interests, especially from the Weimar period, held the stage. In both periodicals, therefore, Critical Theory was regarded as part of a larger realm of political understanding. Yet most articles on Critical Theory in the 1970s contended that it was the most versatile neo-Marxism. Here was a theory which proceeded to criticise capitalism and modernity and did so with attention to psychological and cultural means of domination. Critical Theory’s scholars nearly all agreed that these categories—all of which were central to Horkheimer and Adorno’s thesis—could revitalise Marxism. Disagreement emerged, however, over just how much rethinking of Marx should be done. An early exchange in Telos between Martin Jay and James Schmidt exemplifies these differing approaches to the Frankfurt School. In 1974, Jay published an essay in

5.2 Another ‘Sort-Of’ Marxism

73

Telos on the Frankfurt theorists’ criticism of Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge. It was, more or less, a straightforward piece outlining the relationship between the two approaches and how the Frankfurt critique set about proving that Mannheim’s method was, as might be expected, undialectical (Jay 1974). In the following issue, Schmidt replied that Critical Theory was thus being turned into a period piece and academic careerism was displacing political praxis. Needless to say, the issue of Mannheim’s sociology became secondary. According to Schmidt, ‘the grounding of critical theory must not be sought in terms of ways in which we can provide the explanations which will enable academics to “bank on” its arguments. We should look for its foundation in a reflection of our own origins and not through the use of a language which is as clever and as ironic as Jay’s or as sterile and de-eroticised as Habermas’s. In that regard Benjamin might not serve as the worst of guides, and … Marcuse is not the worst of our possible teachers’ (Schmidt 1974: 180). It should be said that Schmidt was not totally dismissive of Jay’s work. In his conclusion, Schmidt argued that ‘we need a history of the [Frankfurt] school. But as Nietzsche notes (in the motto of Benjamin’s XII Thesis), “We need history, but not the way a spoiled loafer in the garden of knowledge needs it.” To his credit, Jay has produced works which have moved any number of people out of the garden; the criticisms I placed here will, I hope, serve to prevent too many from turning back at the wicket gate in fear that the entire journey has been ill advised’ (Schmidt 1974: 180). Nevertheless, Schmidt was stressing—in a manner similar to some German New Leftists of the 1960s—that Frankfurt theory’s political purpose lay beyond its philosophy. Jay responded to Schmidt’s analysis. Not only had Schmidt misunderstood Jay’s argument on several levels—including his apparent apoliticism (Jay 1975)—but the former’s belief in a ‘thoroughbred’ Marxism made him mistake the Frankfurt School’s use of Marx as a declaration of outright support. This assumption, according to Jay, was far from a historical approach to Critical Theory. For him, the School’s work was undoubtedly influenced by Marx and Lukács, but there were others—Freud, Schönberg, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Benjamin— who persuaded Horkheimer and Adorno that Marx’s theory was too closed for comfort. Once Critical Theory distanced itself from Marx’s critique of the commodity form, it surrendered a great deal of his historical materialism. Indeed, Adorno’s Negative Dialectics was a problematic ‘attempt to work himself out of the dilemma of a Hegelian Marxism with no faith in history’ (Jay 1975: 115). But, as Jay argued, the Frankfurt School’s critique of Marx was, paradoxically, also its greatest contribution to Marxism. Those who failed to see this were merely using its work as a ‘crutch’ for critical thought. Thus, Jay concluded, in a manner remarkably similar to the aged Horkheimer, that the Frankfurt School’s legacy is ‘not a body of sacred texts that can be plundered to manufacture a uniform and impregnable Critical Theory with answers for every question, but rather the imperative to think critically so that intellectual crutches will some day no longer be necessary’ (Jay 1975: 117). In other words, even though historical particularity limits the subsequent applicability of works like Dialectic of Enlightenment, it is such Critical Theory’s central tenet—critical reason’s propagation—that remains urgent.

74

5 Championing Dialectic of Enlightenment in America

Despite the differences between Schmidt and Jay’s outlook, both assumed a place for Critical Theory within the promotion of social change. Most of those who treated the Frankfurt School with respect saw it as a supplement to Marxism without, to use one of Adorno’s favourite English sayings, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. For some this meant a reworking of Dialectic of Enlightenment’s thesis. This first phase of Critical Theory’s American revival was characterised therefore by subscription to Frankfurt concepts with a view to altering them for an American environment. Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination was certainly influential in historicising the Frankfurt School, but his empirical outlook, despite his protestations, sought to describe, rather than apply, its method. Other works to appear in the mid-seventies took a more engaged approach. These attempts were manifestations of Critical Theory’s sixties’ appeal: graduate students who had invested time in reading the Frankfurt School’s works began to publish books on them. Two texts from the period stand out, in particular, in their attempts to reinstate Critical Theory’s usefulness: Trent Schroyer’s The Critique of Domination (1973), which sought to rework Marxism via Frankfurt theory, and Russell Jacoby’s Social Amnesia (1975a, b), a Horkheimer-Adornian critique of post-war Freudians. Both texts reflect the Frankfurt School’s appeal to those searching for the means to criticise what they saw as an increasingly benumbed American society. Like Jay’s monograph, Schroyer’s text was among the first fruits of the New Left’s Frankfurt School interest. Schroyer’s work expresses Marxism’s enduring appeal to young scholars when it still seemed a likely alternative to ‘the American-dominated world capitalist system’ (Schroyer 1973: 18). Thus, The Critique of Domination is redolent of its own context: an anti-Vietnam, New Left, ‘Woodstock nation’ vernacular governs the text. The denial of ‘cultural sovereignty’ and the stifling of people’s ability to ‘interpret their own needs’ are said to foster domination and coercion (Schroyer 1973: 22). It is the ruling capitalist system which enforces the dialectic of enlightenment in everyday life. ‘We are wedded’, Schroyer (1973: 21) contended, ‘to an instrumental concept of reason whose one-sidedness blocks our capacity to recognise the socio-cultural significance of our acts and lowers our ability to act intelligently in novel situations’. As a solution, Schroyer proposed uniting Marx and the Frankfurt School. Marx’s emancipatory method, devoid of its labour theory of value, would lift the Frankfurt School from its academic mire, while the Frankfurt School’s cultural theory would refresh Marx’s reductionist materialism. Underlying this hopeful rearticulation is Horkheimer and Adorno’s fundamental criticism of instrumental reason in which Marx’s ‘critique of political economy is transformed into a more general critique of technical civilization’ (Schroyer 1973: 136). Schroyer applied their critique to his assessment of the citizen within what he called ‘state’ or ‘interventionist’ capitalism: ‘today’s technocratic ideology is “beyond ideology”, having reduced all utopian components of societal legitimation to the single goal of self-preservation’ (Schroyer 1973: 245). This belief in an instrumental reason stripped down to its survival instinct is pure Dialectic of Enlightenment. Unlike Horkheimer and Adorno, however, he was more optimistic about overcoming modernity’s repetitive cycle of domination and emancipation. Renewing Critical Theory was, according to Schroyer, the first theoretical step in reducing the system of

5.2 Another ‘Sort-Of’ Marxism

75

coercion. Schroyer was thus able to conclude his argument with a something slightly more sanguine than even the sunniest of Frankfurtian optimism: ‘given the closure of the political sphere by state-guided instrumental rationalisation, the viability of electoral politics as an agency for radical social change is blocked at present. However, in the contradictory social consequences of this new dynamic there is a negative dialectic that shapes an objective possibility for social change’ (1973: 251). For him, the locus of opposition, and accordingly of Critical Theory, begins in the context of sixties movements like ‘free schools, clinics, food co-ops, the urban community control movements, ecology and alternative technology’ (Schroyer 1973: 252). Critical Theory, Schroyer concluded, was alive and well in radical America. In this respect The Critique of Domination is a perfect example of the New Left’s influence on young scholars during the early 1970s. Schroyer’s attempt to use Critical Theory to overcome social and individual repression was paralleled by the theme of Russell Jacoby’s Social Amnesia (1975a, b). At the time Jacoby was a regular contributor to Telos and held a strong Marxian, pro-Frankfurt line (see Jacoby 1971 and 1975a, b). Unlike Schroyer’s, Jacoby’s conclusion was much closer to Horkheimer and Adorno’s in Dialectic of Enlightenment. It was the psychoanalytic aspects of Critical Theory’s Marxism which excited Jacoby because he believed that it held the key to social transformation. What made the study unique at the time was that the Frankfurt School’s psychoanalytic reserves were largely untapped by scholars or practitioners. (In many respects, this remains true: Joel Whitebrook (1995), a practicing psychoanalyst and sometime Telos contributor, is an exception.) Post-war developments in American psychology had queried Freud’s relevance and, as a result, inspired an interest in Freud among New Leftists like Jacoby. According to him, mainstream ‘conformist psychology’ completely ignored psychoanalysis’s insights about human nature and depth psychology’s emancipatory potential. Moreover, for Jacoby conformist psychology’s denial of the dialectic between the social and the individual meant it could only ever be a partial science. In this context, conformist psychologists are neo- and post-Freudians. Jacoby accused both groups of superficially treating Freud’s insights about the selfconflicted nature of the individual. On the one hand, the neo-Freudians introduce existentialist themes of ‘authenticity’, ‘the real self, personality, [and] actualization’; to the post-Freudians, on the other hand, ‘the subject is affirmed and confirmed’, ‘where psychoanalysis delves and dissects, [the post-Freudians] accepts and combines’ (Jacoby 1975a, b: 46). All of these misgivings reveal Adorno’s influence on Jacoby: there was nothing which irked the German philosopher more than claims to authenticity and resolution (except maybe jazz). Jacoby suggested Critical Theory as an alternative to this orthodoxy because of its understanding of this society–individual relationship. To him, all previous attempts to combine psychoanalysis and Marxism had failed because they did not adequately handle the divide between the two approaches. Freud’s essentially bourgeois thought always tended towards psychologism because it reduced the social to individual and psychological concepts, while Marxism was predisposed towards sociologism as individuals were regarded as mere parts of a larger history and society (Jacoby 1975a, b: 78).

76

5 Championing Dialectic of Enlightenment in America

Critical Theory, Jacoby postulated, avoids both of these quagmires. The Frankfurt School was able to see the relevance of Freud’s thought to their own critical approach because Western Marxism—specifically Lukács and Korsch—reintroduced the human subject to Marxist analysis. By examining subjectivity with an eye on both Marx and Freud, Critical Theory discovered that the individual was saturated with the social. Jacoby’s (1975a, b: 80) rather opaque explanation saw Critical Theory as having developed an ‘objective theory of subjectivity’ which ‘is “twice” objective, not only does it explore subjectivity till it reveals its social and objective determinants, but it reveals a society that had administered the subject out of existence… Hence the theory of subjectivity is also a theory of bourgeois society that has eradicated the subject’. This essentially Adornian position suggested a ‘negative’ psychoanalysis as an alternative to conformism. The (bourgeois) belief in a complete human subject had to be exposed as the key manifestation of social oppression. For Jacoby, this is a ‘psychoanalysis refracted through Marxism’ which uncovers the means through which class consciousness—at the individual and social level—has been ‘diverted, impeded, or dissolved’ (1975: 99). Both Jacoby’s and Schroyer’s arguments proposed theoretical distinctions similar to those underpinning Horkheimer’s 1937 essay on critical and traditional theories. On the one hand, ‘traditional’ theories—in the sense of being conservative or unprogressive rather than long-standing—were seen as descriptions of the individual and society which do nothing to overcome social domination. For this reason, they play a part in the individual’s ongoing subjugation. Authentic ‘critical’ theories, on the other hand, function dialectically to deliver social change and freedom. The young Marx underpins this outlook. A utopian theory of emancipation, based on social consciousness, is perceived as being as much a viable alternative to capitalism in mid1970s America as it was in 1840s and 1940s Germany. Both Jacoby and Schroyer worded their arguments in revolutionary terms and both argued that domination is implicit within the capitalist system. But Jacoby’s text remains closer to the pessimistic shift that Horkheimer and Adorno took with Dialectic of Enlightenment. He did not share Schroyer’s New-Left confidence. Where Schroyer attempted to overcome the dialectic of enlightenment’s impasse, Jacoby was imitating Horkheimer and Adorno’s description of an almost universal dumbing down of the individual—change was possible, but its chances seemed slim (D’Amico 1975; Sherover 1975). It was a position Jacoby was to reiterate in many subsequent stunning polemics against complacent thought (Jacoby 1983). Jacoby’s thought was also complemented by that of his teacher, Christopher Lasch, a radical academic, who was also publishing post-Critical Theory texts like The Culture of Narcissism (1978). Lasch even wrote the introduction to Social Amnesia, in which he argued that: the defeat of the New Left gives added urgency to the questions raised by the Frankfurt School and by other Marxists in the twenties. The renewed interest in culture and the family, the revival of feminist activism, even the vogue of psychology, testify to a growing awareness of the inadequacy of a purely objective analysis of capitalism at the same time they reveal society’s success in diverting political criticism to cultural issues that too often lead to mere harmless personal rebellion and so-called consciousness-raising (Lasch 1975: xv).

5.2 Another ‘Sort-Of’ Marxism

77

Jacoby’s method, prose and examples in Social Amnesia—‘the damaged self’, ‘the cult of subjectivity’, ‘the negative relationships’—all revealed the extent to which he shared Horkheimer and Adorno’s belief in the subject’s reification at all levels of everyday life. The text is full of statements which imitated Dialectic of Enlightenment and Jacoby sometimes took their words as his own. Other works at the time also attempted to prove that Dialectic of Enlightenment and Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man were relevant to American society. Stanley Aronowitz’s False Promises (1973) and Mark Poster’s Critical Theory of the Family (1978), for example, presented arguments closer to Marcuse than to Horkheimer and Adorno. Nonetheless, both Aronowitz and Poster criticised systems of reification and conformity they believed to be at the heart of American society. Aronowitz, a veteran of both the New-Left and American unionism, described the historical construction of the American working class. Much of the work was Marxist sociology, but it was ensconced in a Critical Theory idiom. The American industrial worker, Aronowitz argued, had been made an automaton by a system specifically designed to neuter critical thought. This had been most successfully achieved through the colonisation of leisure time from the nineteenth century onwards. By the mid-twentieth century, new information technologies—especially television—were successfully homogenising the individual. The parallels with Horkheimer and Adorno are obvious. Yet, unlike the Frankfurt scholars, Aronowitz did point to working-class solidarity as a means of resisting this imposition. Poster’s argument, on the other hand, was more focused on the construction of the bourgeois family. Hence, the effect of the Frankfurt School on this argument relied more on the findings of the Institute’s Studies on Authority and the Family and Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization than on Dialectic of Enlightenment. For Poster, the Frankfurt School had been all-important in bringing awareness to the issue of family and capitalism. Its concept of family as dominance—and the link to fascism’s rise—elucidated Freudian conceptions. By combining socio-economic and familial elements in the construction of the self, Critical Theory revolutionised the sociology of the family. But outright emulation of Horkheimer and Adorno was an uncommon approach among Critical Theory’s American admirers. Some appropriations were more subtle. They regarded the Frankfurt School’s work as a means to develop greater critical capacity, not as a formula to be imitated. Thus, Horkheimer and Adorno’s work was used as a springboard from which to assess culture and society. Telos continued to publish new translations of works by Horkheimer, Adorno and others. Many of these texts were taken from the Frankfurt School’s post-war oeuvre—a notable amount being Adorno’s musicology—which meant that deciphering their meaning was particularly difficult without some prior contextual knowledge. Many of America’s neo-Critical Theorists, therefore, sought to elucidate the Frankfurt School’s complexity by couching its theory in understandable, or at least more contemporary, terms. This commitment was reflected in the appropriation and alteration of two associated concepts of Critical Theory’s radical Kulturkritik: negativity and the culture industry.

78

5 Championing Dialectic of Enlightenment in America

For the most part, these terms were used carefully. The Adornesque critiques which pervaded the journal were not completely derivative. In a 1978 issue, for example, Telos chief Paul Piccone introduced the concept of ‘artificial negativity’ with the intention of bettering Adorno’s own prescriptions and fusing phenomenology with the Adornian critique of Enlightenment rationality. After Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno used the concept of negativity to ‘describe’ that which is beyond the current (meaning instrumental) rationality. The negative, therefore, escapes the tyranny of instrumental reason because implicit in such a notion was a concept of utopia—something that remains to be seen. Piccone, on the other hand, coined ‘artificial negativity’ to describe how capitalist systems regulated protest and dissent as a means of ensuring capitalism’s survival. He conceded that some opposition existed within American society so that it was far from one dimensional. But such opposition only existed in a form that could not challenge larger capitalist structures or interests. As Piccone (1978a, b: 48) put it, far from being persecuted, the lingering opposition now needs to be supported to keep functional a bureaucracy in a state of systematic involution. Counter-bureaucratic bureaucracies become one of the paradoxical expressions of artificially generated negativity. The problem with the system-generated negativity is that, to the extent that it is itself bureaucratically sanctioned, it tends to become an extension of the very bureaucracy in need of control. Consequently, caught in the paperwork of funding, reporting, justifying, etc., it simply extends the bureaucratic logic it was meant to challenge and becomes counter-productive.

Unlike Horkheimer and Adorno, who merely described the development of uncritical individuals, Piccone wanted to show how contemporary society functioned to stifle and/or co-opt alternative—or ‘negative’—thought. According to Piccone, rationalising forces like the culture industry managed to construct their own criticism and thus created an artificial negativity. Not only was thought manufactured through instrumental reason, but so too was dissent. As Piccone claimed at a later date, Horkheimer and Adorno ‘sought to explain how it was that the workers would rather drink Pepsy [sic] than make a revolution’, whereas artificial negativity ‘sought to explain why such a brave new world of manipulable subindividuals would result in an increasingly crisis-ridden society whose survival hinged on its ability to reconstitute a minimal internal conflictuality needed to regulate the system, thus requiring precisely that subjectivity that the culture industry sought to eliminate’ (1994: 193). This conclusion accepted the culture industry’s totalising logic, in which oppositional sparks were all but extinguished, but argued that this logic could be overcome by invoking the individual’s dialectical importance to the system’s future. By promoting subjective experience within a circumscribed society, Piccone’s (1971) phenomenological Marxism—a term from which Horkheimer and Adorno would have no doubt distanced themselves—supposedly escaped the impasse in which Critical Theory had been trapped since the 1940s. Yet this rearticulation of Critical Theory did not lead to any greater insights than those that had been achieved by Horkheimer and Adorno. Piccone’s attempt to escape the dialectic of enlightenment ended in disappointment—his conclusions much the same as Horkheimer and Adorno’s. Both Piccone and his Frankfurt forebears were arguing that the culture industry is detrimental to subject and society and that the

5.2 Another ‘Sort-Of’ Marxism

79

only way to overcome this damage is through the qualitative reason of a knowing subject. Neither the Frankfurt School nor its America reincarnations discovered how this rational change was to take place. Therein lays the frustration of many, especially more orthodox Marxists, with Critical Theory (Heydebrand and Burris 1984). The desire to reinstate the subject in Marxist or dialectical analysis—either through psychoanalysis or in Piccone’s phenomenology—occurs at the expense of any focus on the social structure. Any consideration of class within this subject-centred critique is abolished and thus generates a one-sided assessment. To be sure, the identification of the social within the fragmented individual—as Jacoby pointed out in Social Amnesia—was Critical Theory’s most important contribution to social theory. But without any serious understanding of how this individual then functioned within a larger social whole the critique, like the modern subject, remains incomplete. After the Second World War, Horkheimer and Adorno could only retreat further into a philosophy of the damaged subject. Such implicit emphasis on the individual took them further away from the so-called determinism of classical Marxism. As in so many of modernity’s philosophies, individuals’ actions were promoted above society’s dynamism. By assuming this position, their later thought was not resistant to liberal or neo-conservative appropriation. This latter position was just the shift which Telos took in the late 1980s when Piccone’s Telos posse quite easily transformed themselves from promoting the individual within society to promoting individualism per se. This sort of argument eventually led to the journal’s abandonment of a neoMarxist critique (D’Amico 1980/81). Other alternatives were sought to overcome what was considered to be Marxism’s redundancy and Critical Theory’s theoretical impasse (see Piccone et al 1977). Those who had previously assumed the Frankfurt School’s potential were, by the late 1980s, asking whether Critical Theory had a future. Piccone (1978), despite his ‘artificial negativity’, was showing signs of antiFrankfurtism. Consequently, Telos followed, as we shall see, the turn of many away from Marx and into a self-confessed ‘conservative involution’ (Piccone 1994: 173). Even though Telos’s editorial interest in Critical Theory was slowly diminishing, the early 1980s saw a small publishing boom on the subject (Kellner and Roderick 1981). For the most part, these texts were more complete explanations of Critical Theory within its theoretical and political context (Buck-Morss 1977; Howard 1977; Held 1980; Jacoby 1981; McCarthy 1978). Yet they were also representative of two developments in left-wing theory. First, all such works appeared as part of Critical Theory’s role in disentangling the ‘crisis of Marxism’ which was coming to a head. At this time, Marxism had been discredited to such an extent that its reconstruction led to an almost complete realignment of its original intention. Of course, much of this impetus stemmed from the influence of Western Marxism upon Anglophone theory. Culture replaced class as the key point of reference for left-wing analysis (Eagleton 2000). As part of this view, Russell Jacoby’s major work from this period, Dialectic of Defeat, defended Western Marxism from complaints that it manifested an apolitical wrong-turn for the Left. ‘The myth of a heroic Marxism, harmonising philosophy, economics, science, and praxis’, Jacoby (1981: 7) argued, ‘overwhelms the feeble attempts to rethink Marxism’. The Frankfurt School was seen as central to this reevaluation. Second, and contradictorily, the flurry of works on Critical Theory also

80

5 Championing Dialectic of Enlightenment in America

reflected a growing frustration with first-generation Critical Theory. Horkheimer and Adorno’s failure to express anything more than eschatological hope for social change forced many to look elsewhere for inspiration. There was even a small anti-Frankfurt wave that sought to discredit Critical Theory as sociology (Tar 1977). Postmodernism provided some alternative, but only short-term relief from frustration. Other scholars continued to follow Critical Theory’s genealogy by turning to Jürgen Habermas for succour.

5.3 From Dialectic of Enlightenment to Communicative Action When the Frankfurt School’s first generation became problematic for its North American supporters, Jürgen Habermas stood up as Critical Theory’s new muse. Habermas’s work provided a logical sequel to Horkheimer and Adorno’s because he had spent his whole career working through the problems that they could not resolve. Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse captivated New-Left idealists with their innovative critiques of modernity, but bequeathed little in the way of practical politics. Habermas, on the other hand, had been quietly constructing a version of Critical Theory which would transcend its representatives’ desperate outlook. Consequently, an elaboration on Habermas’s work and influence is worthwhile here. He presented the young North American Critical Theorists with a template from which both continue to work in the Frankfurt School lineage while entertaining other ways of understanding, and perhaps changing, the world. Habermas’s attitude towards Dialectic of Enlightenment perfectly captured the possibility of genuflecting without submission to one’s intellectual forebears. Habermas’s own arrival at the Institute for Social Research in 1956 coincided with his politico-philosophical awakening. In his role as Adorno’s assistant, Habermas entered the world of Critical Theory by undertaking a thorough investigation of its theoretical forebears. An interest in radical philosophy was nothing new for Habermas. After the war, he sought the works of Marx and Engels that had been banned under the Nazis, and after a university education in philosophy, Habermas became enamoured with Heidegger’s theories of Being. In many respects, his path before Frankfurt was not that different from Herbert Marcuse’s (and even Horkheimer’s). By the mid-1950s, however, Habermas had publicly distanced himself from Heidegger and found new inspiration in works like Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness and Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (Beck Matuštik 2001). Thus, once he arrived at the Institute, Habermas was at least partially prepared for the shock of Adorno’s ‘absolutely electrifying role’ in his philosophical education. Listening to Adorno and reading his post-war work inspired the young scholar to further his own explorations. Habermas looked beyond Lukács to the young Marx, and then, to Hegel and Kant. The experience was a watershed that established his intellectual purpose. As he recalled of the period: ‘Reading Adorno had given me the

5.3 From Dialectic of Enlightenment to Communicative Action

81

courage to take up systematically what Lukács and Korsch represented historically: the theory of reification as a theory of rationalisation, in Max Weber’s sense. Already at that time, my problem was a theory of modernity, a theory of the pathology of modernity, from a viewpoint of the realization—the deformed realization—of reason in history. So naturally, the Dialectic of Enlightenment became a key. When I met Adorno and saw how breathtakingly he spoke about commodity fetishism and applied this concept to cultural and everyday phenomena, at first it was a shock. But then I thought: try to act as if Marx and Freud, about whom Adorno spoke with the same orthodoxy, were contemporaries’ (Dews 1992: 98). Habermas’s commitment to the Enlightenment reason led his work through a process of re-evaluation and reconstruction, which arguably advanced his understanding of rationality beyond that of Horkheimer and Adorno.1 Moreover, under Habermas, Critical Theory unfolded hopefully, rather than collapsing under the instability of too many loose ends and new beginnings (Honneth 1979). It was this nuanced critique of his own teachers which attracted the North American neo-Critical Theorists to his work. For at the exact moment when their patience with the Frankfurt School was beginning to wear thin, Habermas finally directed attention to the School’s legacy. That is not to say that he had not been concerned with criticising the School’s work beforehand. In post-war Germany, his own intellectual generation had to grapple with the dual legacies of Nazism and Critical Theory. He is either portrayed as being Critical Theory’s traitor or guardian. The latter is probably closer to the truth. He definitely gave Critical Theory a more ‘scientific’ approach, but he has remained close to Adorno’s ideas if not always agreeing with them. However, Habermas’s disputes with Horkheimer over his habilitation thesis did go some way to alienating the young scholar and sent him away from Frankfurt to the Max Planck Institute which accounts for his concern with social science rather than pure philosophy (Beck Matuštik 2001). At this point, therefore, it is worthwhile spending some time examining the direction which Habermas’s thought took in the 1970s and 1980s to see how it ultimately altered American Critical Theorists’ opinions of the Frankfurt School and Horkheimer and Adorno in particular. In a 1977 interview, Habermas was asked whether he still defended the Critical Theory of Dialectic of Enlightenment. His diplomatic response was indicative of his direction. Critical Theory was certainly the intellectual tradition with which he identified, but he had moved beyond his predecessors. Three principle weaknesses in Horkheimer and Adorno’s work served as a ‘negative pointer’ for Habermas: first, that there was no justification for any claims to truth; second, that there was no systematic engagement with analytical philosophy or the social sciences and finally, that there was an unhealthy obsession with instrumental reason which limited any ability to undertake empirical social analysis (Dews 1992: 56). Habermas’s subsequent works were defined against each of these 1 For

an early Anglophone assessment of Habermas’s ‘epistemological anthropology’ see Martin Jay, ‘Some Recent Developments in Critical Theory’, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, no. 17, 1973–74, pp. 27–44. And on the relationship between Habermas and Adorno’s thought see Axel Honneth, ‘Communication and Reconciliation in Habermas’ Critique of Adorno’, Telos, no. 39, 1979, pp. 45–61.

82

5 Championing Dialectic of Enlightenment in America

points. For Habermas, truth was not obsolescent merely because modernity seemed to vacillate in a dialectic of freedom and domination. Rather, the Enlightenment offered up many useful insights which could be harnessed and combined to improve our understanding of modernity. He therefore incorporated many different theories—some came from the Anglo-American intellectual heartlands—into his own method and consequently challenged Critical Theory’s one-dimensional obsession with instrumental reason. When compared to the modernist obstinacy of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Habermas’s thought appears a far more judicious form of Critical Theory. In one sense, this was as a result of Critical Theory’s post-war maturation. Horkheimer and Adorno returned to Frankfurt with as much enthusiasm to incorporate American social science methods into their teaching as they had desire to hide their pre-war and wartime writings. Although Horkheimer and Adorno retained their dislike of positivist social analysis, both recognised the need for a greater material basis to their social scientific work. Yet neither man ventured too far into this ‘scientific’ territory in their own philosophical works, which remained decidedly speculative. Consequently, it was up to a new and eager generation to reformulate Critical Theory by broadening its understanding of social realities. Habermas’s work stands at the head of this overhaul, fusing the Frankfurt School’s philosophical basis with the materialist necessity of social scientific proof. For Habermas, overcoming the problems which Marxist approaches faced in the past meant seeking alternatives to historical materialism, and its Western Marxist variant, in liberal discourses. Habermas had long been critical of the Marxist project, his main problem being its inadequate theory of labour as social arbiter. By the 1970s and 1980s, he was more of a radical liberal than a Marxist (Jay 1984; Rockmore 1989). When questioned on the subject he once replied, ‘I am not a Marxist in the sense of believing in Marxism as a sure-fire explanation… [However] I am firmly convinced that the Left in general, and the Marxist Left in particular, can claim one advantage over all other political forces. This is the belief in the possibility of introducing theoretical analysis with a middle- or long-range perspective into day-to-day politics. This is one tradition that should not be sacrificed’ (Dews 1992: 83). This generally shifted his thought towards other ways of seeing modernity’s problems. The foremost change in his thought, inspired by linguistic analysis, moved Critical Theory away from a philosophy of consciousness—which had been the concern of Horkheimer’s circle—and towards a theory of communication. As a result of his increased scope and theoretical versatility, Habermas began to view reason in the same way as he approached it: as a multifaceted entity largely determined by communication between different outlooks. Numerous published accounts of Habermas’s system outlined how he combined different analytical techniques into his own methodology (McCarthy 1978; Geuss 1981; Outhwaite 1994). The early 1980s saw Habermas embark on the first real review of his thought’s relationship to the earlier Frankfurt School. Habermas published two major works which evaluated the merits of Horkheimer and Adorno’s approach: the two-volume magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action (1981), and a set of lectures on postmodern theory, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1983). In both works,

5.3 From Dialectic of Enlightenment to Communicative Action

83

Habermas positioned himself as the Frankfurt School’s legatee and applauded many of its critical insights. But he was also painting himself as modernity’s defender and was thus determined to discard many of Critical Theory’s pessimistic assumptions. The Theory of Communicative Action is a daunting work—as impressive as it is complicated. Habermas’s intent was not only to reclaim reason from the clutches of its growing critics, but also to revise the concept altogether. Needless to say, his work’s breadth cannot be done justice in this study. However, to put it briefly (and hence inadequately), Habermas proposed that reason be understood as being grounded in a process of communication which has consensus or mutual understanding as its goal. Each person involved in a speech exchange asserts particular validity claims that are either rejected or accepted by the others. The will of the speaker is not, however, always met with agreement from the hearer. Agreement can only occur on the basis of three things: recognition of a truth claim, recognition of sincerity or recognition of right action. Such contingency means that claims to validity cannot be merely subjective but take place in a social environment. Thus, communicative action discovers rational, normative foundations to thought through agreement within a comprehensive grammar rather than through arbitrary or capricious power (Habermas 1984a). It was a shift of emphasis that brought Critical Theory into step with twentiethcentury philosophy’s concern for linguistic analysis. For the task at hand, the work’s relevance resides in Habermas’s criticism of the Weberian-Marxist tradition in which he positions Horkheimer and Adorno’s 1940s Critical Theory. The similarities between Weber’s concept of rationalisation, Lukács’s argument about reification, and Horkheimer and Adorno’s dialectic of enlightenment ultimately result in each thinker’s failure. The argument is, of course, not particularly original: History and Class Consciousness was written as Lukács was coming out of his pre-war association with Weber and his circle, and the Frankfurt School was one of the book’s biggest fan clubs. According to Habermas, Horkheimer and Adorno leant ‘too heavily on Weber’ (Habermas 1984b: 332) and ultimately forced themselves into a theoretical predicament. Weber believed modernity’s disenchantment of the world had turned all thought into purposive or instrumental rationality (Zweckrationalität) whose only aim was Nature’s, and humanity’s, domination. To Habermas, Weber was correct to argue against this rationalisation. But when Horkheimer and Adorno appropriated this concept as instrumental reason in Dialectic of Enlightenment, they immediately neutered their thought’s possible progressivism. If the rational processes of society were always already instrumental, then there was no hope for social change through technological development’s relationship to class consciousness. As a result, Horkheimer and Adorno ended up sharing Weber’s belief in the ‘loss of meaning’ and ‘loss of freedom’ in modern life (Habermas 1984a 346–355). The principal way in which Horkheimer and Adorno differ from Weber is in their application of his rationalisation. For this they owe a debt to Lukács whose perception of reified individuals under capitalism they transformed into a ‘socio-psychological’ category. On reification’s psychology, Habermas reiterates a version of the argument

84

5 Championing Dialectic of Enlightenment in America

he made in his 1974 essay, ‘Moral Development and Ego Identity’. One of the Frankfurt School’s central problems was that Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse and Fromm all believed, to differing degrees, that industrial society abolishes the individual, yet they also held a strong belief in psychoanalysis’s egocentric subject. They cannot, Habermas argued, have it both ways. Habermas tackled the paradox himself by seeking to show the normative basis of the ego or the self within a framework of sociological analysis. In this case, he examined disparate psychological (Jean Piaget) and sociological (G. H. Mead) theories to show similarities in assumptions about individual existence and find universal motifs among their claims. His more specific intention was to show how moral consciousness is determined by the ability and need to communicate. Because his social action theory is based on communication he managed to hold these otherwise tenuous links together. Of course, Habermas’s own thought has a specific interest in the self’s continued relevance since for the subject to act politically there must be some autonomy. He saw this autonomy in the methods he brought together: all are similar in their analysis of communication. This reconstruction of first-generation Critical Theory’s shortcomings is classic Habermas: with the help of others he proves or disproves theories that Horkheimer and Adorno never verified. Habermas felt that Horkheimer and Adorno’s overstatements only hindered Critical Theory’s potential. To say that freedom no longer existed denied the freedoms of some Western societies versus, say, those in the Soviet Union or Communist China. Likewise, to argue that all meaning had been lost was to disregard its ongoing creation through social interaction. In this sense, The Theory of Communicative Action became a manifesto for reason per se in the same way that Dialectic of Enlightenment and One-Dimensional Man had been arguments against its instrumental form. Habermas chose to focus on reason’s positive characteristics, rather than its dangers and thereby defined his argument against his predecessors (Holub 1993). A belief in communication’s effects led Habermas to critique the Frankfurt School’s assumption that most reason is instrumental reason. The upshot of this criticism was the reversal of Critical Theory’s pessimism. Yet these criticisms of the Frankfurt School did not mean he was rebuffing Critical Theory’s heritage. Indeed, only 2 years after The Theory of Communicative Action first appeared in German, Habermas was keen to defend Horkheimer and Adorno’s main text. Published in English as The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987), Habermas responded to the rising tide of ‘post-structuralist’ and ‘postmodernist’ philosophy in Europe. The work was divided into chapters on the key thinkers of this fashion—Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard—as well as their philosophical forebears—Hegel, Nietzsche, Bataille, and, contentiously, Horkheimer and Adorno. In the chapter devoted to Dialectic of Enlightenment, ‘The Entwinement of Myth and Reality’, Habermas defended Horkheimer and Adorno from inclusion in the annals of postmodern irrationality. To do so, Habermas made a distinction between the bourgeoisie’s ‘dark’ and ‘black’ writers. The distinction is extrapolated from Dialectic of Enlightenment in which Horkheimer and Adorno state: ‘The dark writers of the bourgeoisie, like its apologists, did not seek to avert the consequences of the Enlightenment with harmonistic doctrines’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 92).

5.3 From Dialectic of Enlightenment to Communicative Action

85

Supposed cynics like Hobbes, Machiavelli and Mandeville—those who described human relations in grim terms but believed such ills could be reduced through strong political organisation—fell into the first group, while the title ‘black’ was reserved for likes of Nietzsche and de Sade—those convinced that modernity’s civilising pretension disguised a continuing ‘state of nature’ in human relations. According to Habermas, the ‘dark’ writers’ pronouncements complemented Enlightenment thought without undermining it, while the ‘black’ writers’ produced the opposite: critical pessimism’s constructiveness is never the same as total pessimism’s destructiveness. This neat distinction between ‘dark’ and ‘black’ clearly established an opposition between enlightenment and nihilism—Marx versus Nietzsche—which had obvious consequences for assessing the Frankfurt School. That is, the combination of these exclusive traditions in Dialectic of Enlightenment, in Habermas’s mind, ultimately confuses Critical Theory’s purpose. Instead of continuing to propagate a progressive theory of society, Horkheimer and Adorno end up suspended in a state of flux between positions for and against rational thought. By placing them in this median position, Habermas avoided identifying Horkheimer and Adorno with the anti-Enlightenment. To be sure, de Sade and Nietzsche were mentioned by Habermas because both men are treated ambiguously in Dialectic of Enlightenment. But this did not mean that Horkheimer and Adorno had succumbed to irrationality. A beam of light from their Critical Theory background forestalled un-reason’s blackness. As a consequence, Dialectic of Enlightenment is ‘their blackest book’ in which they ‘joined with these writers to conceptualize the Enlightenment’s process of self-destruction’ (Habermas 1987: 106). That is, Dialectic of Enlightenment is darker than dark, but not quite black. Nonetheless, Habermas still berated Horkheimer and Adorno for fetishising instrumental reason. For if all thought is governed by self-interest then there can be neither dialectical progress nor truth; all arguments become relative, independent and converge into struggles for power. There is, Habermas contended, ‘scarcely any prospect for an escape from the myth of purposive rationality that has turned into objective violence’ (Habermas 1987: 114). Dialectic of Enlightenment’s theoretical flaws showed the need for a clearer understanding of reason and truth. Despite this deficiency, Habermas continued to defend the work. He advanced clear historical reasons for Critical Theory’s arrival at this hopeless juncture. The Frankfurt School position before the war was a ‘mistaken Marxist prognosis’ that did not break ‘with Marxist intentions’. Within a few years, however, the Second World War’s shadow transformed this outlook into a philosophy of ‘history congealed into nature and faded into the Golgotha of a hope become unrecognizable’ (Habermas 1987: 116). Given the context, this change was, for Habermas, understandable. What troubled him more was how Horkheimer and Adorno overlooked their argument’s central flaw. That is, they failed to notice that their ‘description of the self-destruction of the critical capacity’ was contradictory ‘because in the moment of description it still has to make use of the critique that has been declared dead’ (Habermas 1987: 119). It is a conceptual flaw that they share with Nietzsche and others. Any argument must be positioned with some form of validity claim beyond itself. Habermas applied this logic to the future as Nietzsche and Horkheimer and

86

5 Championing Dialectic of Enlightenment in America

Adorno saw it: ‘if they still want to continue with critique, they will have to leave at least one rational criterion intact for their explanation of the corruption of all rational criteria’ (Habermas 1987: 126–127). The options, Habermas believed, were twofold. First, there is the conversion of all action and thought into a race for power of the kind Nietzsche envisaged, a situation characterised by hierarchy, exclusion and violence. Obviously, the outcome of such social Darwinism was too bloody for Horkheimer and Adorno’s humanist tastes. They could not align themselves with a system of thought now identified, however justly or unjustly, with the barbarities of Nazism, nor did they want to propagate an argument that aids reason’s demise. Instead they took a second option which Habermas describes as ‘stirring up, holding open, and no longer wanting to overcome theoretically the performative contradiction inherent in an ideology critique that outstrips itself’ (Habermas 1987: 127). In other words, Horkheimer and Adorno knew they had undercut their own argument and decided they could do nothing to remedy it. Such resignation disappointed Habermas. Even though Horkheimer and Adorno remained ‘men of the Enlightenment’, they had to concede that there may be ‘no way out’ of such an impasse. What is more, both men continued to hold onto this assumption long after writing Dialectic of Enlightenment—Adorno’s post-war career was devoted to reaffirming this negative view. In Habermas’s opinion, Dialectic of Enlightenment sounded the death knell of effective Critical Theory in the hands of Horkheimer and Adorno. By continuing to assume that all reason is instrumental, they reproduced the stale assurance and dogmatism of the ‘traditional theory’ against which the Frankfurt School had originally defined itself. Habermas’s ‘The Entwinement of Myth and Reality’ re-announced the way in which he could continue Critical Theory in a different context and avoid the impasse into which Horkheimer and Adorno had fallen. He empathised with Horkheimer and Adorno’s despair at the end of bourgeois and working-class radicalism. He even wrote an afterword to the 1986 edition of Dialektik der Aufklärung (Hullot-Kentor 1989). But, as one critic has put it, he rejected their ‘radical critique of instrumental reason’ because it ‘cannot be validated in theoretical terms’ (Hohendahl 1985: 13). Instead, Habermas felt that the solution to the problem as they saw it in the 1940s, and as so many continued to see it at the end of the century, resided in sensitivity ‘to the traces and the existing forms of communicative rationality’ (Habermas 1987: 129).

5.4 Conclusion The disparate interest in the Frankfurt School during the immediate post-war years eventually led to a consolidation of interest among young scholars during the 1970s. These American imitations and appropriations of the Frankfurt School’s thought grew directly from an era of dissatisfaction immediately following one of revolt. Heightened awareness of abuses in political power, both at home and abroad, and limited options for viable alternatives meant new tools for critique were sought. Likewise, the sociology and philosophy offered to North American students—with its chiefly

5.4 Conclusion

87

instrumentalist bent—inevitably led some to look for alternatives. In this sense, the young leftists who found a home at Telos were much like other alternative political and social movements of the time. What they were coming to terms with, however, was continental philosophies and social theories steeped in their own lineages and historical contexts. Any appropriation of these works was bound to be contested and changeable. The resultant texts are significant contribution to the literature of American social and political thought. Armed with a Critical Theory mindset, a series of works by Telos contributors and others—for example, Schroyer, Aronowitz, Jay, Schmidt, Poster, Piccone—presented Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of reason as relevant to their circumstances. By late 1970s, this group was still grappling with the large oeuvre of Frankfurt School work (to say nothing of the other social theory in their world) all at the same time. The political outlook of many had been determined by sixties radicalism and Marcusean criticism which ultimately led, much like Horkheimer and Adorno’s own thinking, to an impasse of frustration resignation. Criticism seemed all that remained. By contrast, Habermas, who had travelled a similar road any years earlier, offered instead a concrete social democratic corrective to the socialism of disappointment. He was ahead of the curve they followed and arguable more intimate with the ideas that these younger scholars were enthusiastically trying to comprehend and apply in their own contexts. Habermas is thus a fascinating figure in the history of Dialectic of Enlightenment as a text. His own position in Frankfurt School story is central. His relationships with both Horkheimer and Adorno were quite different: Horkheimer, ever smug, dismissed his evident talents; while Adorno encouraged his younger colleague as he forged his own way (Claussen 2008: 318–320). But it is his direct engagement with these progenitors work that was instrumental in redirecting the North American Critical Theorists away from Horkheimer and Adorno and towards his theories, especially of communicative reason and action. Habermas’s thought gave rise to more agreeable positions towards reason among many of these scholars. Instead of continuing to see limits to reason—especially as domination—Habermas offered a lifeline to those for whom Horkheimer and Adorno’s prognoses had originally led them to Critical Theory in the first place. Not all were swayed, however, Piccone held strongly to his intellectual affiliation with original criticisms of instrumental reason as apposite to the US and beyond during the cold war’s denouement. And his heavyhanded governance of Telos eventually led to the splintering of the original cohort that had made it synonymous with Critical Theory in America. This reconsideration is taken up again in chapter six where some follow Habermas’s qualified rejection of Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument while others continued to follow the first generation of Critical Theory, albeit not necessarily alongside earlier post-1960s fellow travellers.

88

5 Championing Dialectic of Enlightenment in America

References Aronowitz, S. (1973). False promises: The shaping of American working-class consciousness. New York: Routledge. Beck Matuštik, M. (2001). Jürgen Habermas: A philosophical-political profile. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Beran, D. (2001). Early British Romanticism, the Frankfurt School, and French post-structuralism: In the wake of failed revolution. New York: Peter Lang. Brenner, R. (2006). The economics of global turbulence: The advanced capitalist economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005. London: Verso. Buck-Morss, S. (1977). The origins of negative dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute. New York: Free Press. Claussen, D. (2008). Theodor Adorno: One last genius. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge MA: Bellknap Press. D’Amico, R. (1975). A concept of subjectivity: Comments on Jacoby’s Social Amnesia. Telos, 24, 129–134. D’Amico, R. (1980/81). Leftism: An adult disorder. Telos, 46, 102–107. Dews, P. (Ed.). (1992). Autonomy and solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas. London: Verso. Eagleton, T. (2000). The idea of culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elbaum, M. (2002). Revolution in the air: Sixties radicals turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. London: Verso. Geuss, R. (1981). The idea of a critical theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, J. (1979) Communication and the evolution of society. Trans. Thomas McCarthy, London. Habermas, J. (1984a). The theory of communicative action: vol. 1, reason and the rationalisation of society. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1984b). The theory of communicative action: vol. 2, lifeworld and system. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. 1987. The philosophical discourse of modernity: Twelve lectures. Trans. Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Held, D. (1980). Introduction to critical theory: Horkheimer to Habermas. Berkeley: University of California Press. Heydebrand, W., & Burris, B. (1984). The limits of praxis in critical theory. In J. Marcus & Z. Tar (Eds.), Foundations of the Frankfurt School of social research (pp. 387–417). New Brunswick. Hohendahl, P. U. (1985). The dialectic of enlightenment revisited: Habermas’ critique of the Frankfurt School. New German Critique., 35, 3–26. Holub, R. C. (1993). The enlightenment of dialectic: Jürgen Habermas’ critique of the Frankfurt School. In W. D. Wilson & R. C. Holub (Eds.), Impure reason: Dialectic of enlightenment in Germany (pp. 34–47). Honneth, A. (1979). Communication and reconciliation in Habermas’ critique of Adorno. Telos, 39, 45–61. Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T.W. (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment. (Edmund Jephcott, trans.) Stanford: Standford University Press. Howard, D. (1977). The Marxian legacy. New York: Urizen Press. Hullot-Kentor, R. (1989). Back to Adorno. Telos, 81, 9–14. Jacoby, R. (1971). Towards a critique of automatic marxism: The politics of philosophy from Lukács to the Frankfurt School. Telos, 10, 119–146. Jacoby, R. (1975a). Social Amnesia: A critique of conformist psychology from Adler to Laing. New Brunswick: Transaction. Jacoby, R. (1975b). The politics of crisis theory: Towards the critique of automatic marxism II. Telos, 23, 3–52. Jacoby, R. (1981). Dialectic of defeat: Contours of western Marxism, Cambridge.

References

89

Jacoby, R. (1980-81). Crisis of the left? Telos, 46, 108–111. Jacoby, R. (1983). The repression of psychoanalysis: Otto fenichel and the political freudians, New York: Basic Books. Jay, M. (1974). The Frankfurt School’s critique of karl Mannheim and the sociology of knowledge. Telos, 20, 72–89. Jay, M. (1975). Crutches vs. stilts: An answer to James Schmidt on the Frankfurt School. Telos, 22, 106–117. Kellner, D., & Roderick, R. (1981). Recent literature on critical theory. New German Critique., 23, 141–170. Kimball, R. (1990). Tenured radicals: How politics has corrupted our higher education. New York: Harper and Row. Lasch, C. (1975). Introduction. To Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia: A critique of conformist psychology from Adler to Laing (pp. vii–xv). New Brunswick: Transaction. McCarney, J. (1990). Social theory and the crisis of Marxism. London: Verso. McCarthy, T. (1978). The critical theory of Jürgen Habermas. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Outhwaite, W. (1994). Habermas: A critical introduction. Cambridge. Piccone, P., Schmidt, J., D’Amico, R., Grahl, B., Fehér, F., & Breines, P. (1977). Internal polemics. Telos, 31, 178–197. Piccone, P. (1971). Phenomenological Marxism. Telos, 9, 3–31. Piccone, P. (1978a). The crisis of one-dimensionality. Telos, 35(1978), 43–54. Piccone, P. (1978b). General introduction. In ed. A. Arato & E Gebhardt (Eds.), To the essential Frankfurt School Reader (pp. xi-xxii). Oxford: Bloomsbury. Piccone, P. (1994). From the new left to the new populism. Telos, 101, 173–208. Poster, M. (1978). Critical theory of the family. London: Pluto Press. Rockmore, T. (1989). Habermas on historical materialism, Bloomington ID: Indiana University Press. Schmidt, J. (1974). Critical theory and the sociology of knowledge: A response to Martin Jay. Telos., 21, 168–180. Schroyer, T. (1973). The critique of domination: The origins and development of critical theory. Boston: Beacon. Sherover, E. (1975). Review Essay: Russell Jacoby’s Social Amnesia. Telos., 25, 196–200. Whitebook, J. (1995). Perversion and utopia: A study in psychoanalysis and critical theory. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Tar, Z. (1977). The Frankfurt School: The critical theories of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. New York: MIT Press.

Chapter 6

Reconsidering Dialectic of Enlightenment in America

By virtue of its principle, enlightenment does not stop short at the minimum of belief without which the bourgeois world could not exists. It does not render to power the reliable services which had always been performed for it by the old ideologies. Its antiauthoritarian tendency, which communicates, if only subterraneously, with the utopia contained in the concept of reason, finally made it as inimical to the established bourgeoisie as to the aristocracy, with which, indeed, it Lost no time in forming alliances. Ultimately, the antiauthoritarian principle necessarily becomes its own antithesis, the agency opposed to reason: its abolition of all absolute ties allows power to decree and manipulate any ties which suit its purposes. Horkheimer and Adorno

By the 1980s, Dialectic of Enlightenment no longer held the attention of younger American Critical Theory scholars in the same way that it had a decade earlier when its translation first appeared. This change of mind was due to the wider range of social theory now available to position Horkheimer and Adorno’s work and that of the early Frankfurt School in general. As a result, the groupings that had formed first around Telos and its offshoot, New German Critique (NGC), began to change their relative stance to Dialectic of Enlightenment’s thesis. As outlined in the previous chapter, the influence of Habermas in this regard was substantial. His own position offered many the chance to move swiftly from the wartime pessimisms of his forebears to a syncretic reconsideration of rationality in light of multiple social scientific and philosophical influences. What’s more, it fulfilled a critique of liberal democracy and capitalism that had always been at the heart of the American Critical Theory enterprise without resorting to reconstructed Leninism. This type of rethinking was especially attractive to the Weimarophiliacs at NGC, with its focus on Germany’s modernist cultural heritage. Celebrations of civil society via the possibilities for constructive discourse was the type of thinking that was most desirable as the dual spectres of Anglo-American neo-conservatism and Soviet intransigence seemed the order of the future. Indeed, as the latter became pliable. It also appealed to some at Telos. But soon enough the political lines that extended into that journal from the New Left within began to shift to the right. Where some chose to © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 H. Prosser, Dialectic of Enlightenment in the Anglosphere, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3521-5_6

91

92

6 Reconsidering Dialectic of Enlightenment in America

move to Habermas’s global vision of understanding, Piccone at Telos sought solace in localist ideas affiliated with the New Right in Europe and the United States. This meant that the original group of North American Critical Theorists affiliated with the journal headed off in different directions—most often to New German Critique, which offered a much more welcoming, and continued leftness, approach. The upshot was that Dialectic of Enlightenment, during the 1980s and 1990s, was now one text among many within; on the one hand, the Critical Theory tradition that Habermas was redirecting in the North American discussions and, on the other, within a growing theory industry buoyed by postmodern enthusiasms. For North American Critical Theory, this meant a dispersal of its significant if tenuous post-New-Left coalescence.

6.1 The Rise of the Habermasians It is little surprise that Habermas’s arguments for communicative reason, with their combination of radically democratic and anti-instrumental theses, appealed to disillusioned soixante-huitards. The 1980s held little fresh air for gasping sixties radicals. Marxism was in crisis, neo-liberalism in the ascendancy and postmodernism in fashion. The reasons for Habermas’s appeal resided in his major early eighties texts discussed above: first, in The Theory of Communicative Action Habermas provided an alternative to Horkheimer and Adorno’s view of reason as instrumental reason and second, his opposition to postmodernism in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity made him a formidable ally for those struggling against theoretical relativism. Habermas was an alternative to the Frankfurt School without completely severing links with Critical Theory. By following him many scholars were able to fall on the side of modernity—somewhere between Marxism and liberalism—and thus replicated the Frankfurt School’s own path. Before this turn to Habermas, however, his work was marginal in Anglophone circles. Few outside the small worlds of Telos and New German Critique—both of which published his essays in the seventies—were aware of his substance (Kramer 1992). It is more than likely that, at first, his intimidating technical prose and exotic references confounded those who tried to come to terms with his reworking of Critical Theory and defence of the Enlightenment. Similarly, no traditions of social theory existed in the American academy that could easily take up the scope of Habermas’s ideas and so he remained neglected. Thus, it was only once Anglophone scholars had a grip on the traditions from which he had arisen—namely, German Idealism and Critical Theory—that interest in his work increased. The growing interest in Habermas was thanks largely to a formidable group of North American scholars that was translating and interpreting his ideas with clarity and vigour. The outcome of their work was quite different to interpretation of the original Frankfurt School. In their mind there was no way that the vagaries of Horkheimer and Adorno’s work could be applied with any purpose. Habermas’s system, on the other hand, once his work was mediated, could be applied within a

6.1 The Rise of the Habermasians

93

broad range of disciplines. Key Habermasians applauded Critical Theory’s development towards communicative action theory and away from the philosophy of consciousness that dominated the Frankfurt School (Bernstein 1985). Implied in this enthusiasm for Habermas was criticism of Horkheimer and Adorno who did not want to be, in Heller’s (1982: 21) words, ‘the Prince of Wales of negative dialectics’. As Hohendahl (1991: 204) pointed out, ‘in the Habermas debate of the 1980s it is generally taken for granted that the theory of communicative action supersedes negative dialectics’. Such arguments managed to both belittle the first-generation Critical Theorists and elevate Habermas to the role of the Enlightenment’s gatekeeper—in accordance with the latter’s claim that ‘we are just contemporaries of the Young Hegelians’ (Dews 1992: 199). The early Frankfurt School could be dismissed by the new Habermasians because, in their minds, it did not provide a practical means of political action, social emancipation or rational critique (Finlayson 2003). The ideas expressed in Dialectic of Enlightenment have been superseded, so the story went, by a more effective form of critical social theory (Benhabib 1986). But these Habermasians are of less importance to the present study than those who turned to his work after deciding that first-generation Critical Theory was inadequate. Many of those who regarded Horkheimer and Adorno as their guiding lights began to look in the direction Habermas and his supporters were heading. The intellectual historian Richard Wolin is a case in point. After hearing Habermas lecture in the United States during the early 1980s—lectures which eventually coalesced into The Theory of Communicative Action—Wolin renounced his faith in Adorno’s negativism and enlisted in Habermas’s Enlightenment restoration. ‘As a product of the 1960s and a disciple of Hegelian-Marxism’, Wolin (2001: xv) explained, I had until then been a convinced Adornian who viewed Negative Dialectics as a type of philosophical holy writ. I was persuaded that Adorno, in describing late capitalism as a “totally administered society” and a “context of delusion,” had more or less delivered the final word. Listening to Habermas’s reconstruction of modern social theory from Durkheim to Parson caused the scales to fall from my eyes. I came away from his stimulating presentations with a keen awareness of how much ground the first generation of Critical Theorists had unwittingly ceded to the enemy camp (à la Max Weber) narrowly identifying “reason” with “instrumental reason” or “positivism.” I also came away with a renewed appreciation of the valuable potentials for reform, contestation, and critique residing in existing democratic societies – a lesson that, I fear, has taken too long to learn for many of my generational compagnons du lutte.

Given that Wolin’s career began as the author of the first English-language work on Benjamin and as a Telos editor, his reverence for Critical Theory’s negative dialectics and philosophy of history is unsurprising. A turn to Habermas was made by way of the first generation and in the early 1980s Wolin’s work often expressed his position between the two Frankfurt Schools. In ‘Modernism versus Postmodernism’, Wolin (1984/85) outlined a defence of the modern reminiscent of Habermas’s (1981) own argument of a few years earlier, ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’. He later reworked this essay for a collection of his 1995 work—Labyrinths. In this reformulated version, postmodern culture was late capitalism’s curse on humanity. Not only had culture been infiltrated by profit, but the homogenising effects of this culture offered the ‘illusion of emancipation’ rather than its reality. Yet, his prognosis was not all doom and

94

6 Reconsidering Dialectic of Enlightenment in America

gloom. Rather than acquiesce to the Horkheimer–Adorno viewpoint, Wolin agreed that certain oppositional inroads against the culture industry had been made since the sixties counter-culture. Just like Habermas’s point about the classical bourgeois public sphere, there existed space within contemporary society for disputation. Wolin warned, however, that these developments should not be overstated. Contrary to the beliefs of liberals and Cultural Studies theorists, late-twentieth-century culture— both high and low—was always already commodified. Thus, ‘one should not be too quick to consign the Frankfurt School critique of mass culture to irrelevance’ (Wolin 1995: 28). Wolin (1995) changed his approach somewhat a few years later with his essay ‘Critical Theory and the Dialectic of Rationalism’. According to him, Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument about the culture industry might be sound, but the overall thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment and its sequels was seriously flawed. The Frankfurt School represented a special moment in the rethinking of Marx, but its Flaschenpost mentality confined its thought to the individual rather than the social (Wolin 1987). By Horkheimer and Adorno’s logic, an inter-subjective or communicative reason of the type Habermas was promoting would be instrumental in intention. But such shortsightedness would not solve the social problems under capitalism. Instead, it would merely result in the characterisation of all thought, including speech, as repressive. The result for Critical Theory is a paucity of normative foundation or social theory. Marcuse offered some reprieve from this pessimism in his post-war work, but for the most part the logic of their decadent, anti-reason argument extended from Dialectic of Enlightenment and Eclipse of Reason to Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. For Wolin, Adorno’s suggestion that reason’s conceptual inadequacies could be solved by further reflection on such shortcomings was inadequate. As Wolin later claimed, Dialectic of Enlightenment ‘is loaded with provocative and stimulating insights… [but] as a philosophically grounded theory of social evolution, the conclusions purveyed are faulty to an extreme’ (Wolin 1992: 60). Habermas, on the other hand, tried to surmount such shortcomings. Wolin believed that Habermas’s theory of communicative reason understood the social as ‘meaningful’ action in the ‘life world’ and thus one which can overcome purely goal-oriented instrumental actions (Wolin 1987: 43). By grounding rational thought in meaning and consent developed through communication there is a possibility of a normative, albeit dialectical, foundation to reason. For Wolin (1987: 51–52), however, this ‘hyper-rationalist utopia of total communicative transparency’ runs the risk of reverting to the same sort of instrumentalism that has blighted modernity (‘commodity fetishism, bureaucratisation, the performance principle’). In other words, Habermas could fall into the very ‘rational’ (instrumental) categories that Horkheimer and Adorno sought to relinquish. Indeed, Alexander (1995) argued that Habermas reverted to a form of social theory that Horkheimer and Adorno were critiquing. Consequently, the theory of communicative action, as ambitious as it is, has its own problems with understanding human action. But this does not disqualify Habermas’s role in Critical Theory’s development. Wolin saw the younger Frankfurt scholar as the perfect correction to the first generation’s paranoia. By reintroducing some form of the rational to Critical Theory, Habermas’s

6.1 The Rise of the Habermasians

95

provocative ‘methodological directive’ provides a solution to the Frankfurt School’s long-term impasse (See Rajchman 1988, 1989; Wolin 1989). After these initial works, Wolin incorporated Habermas’s defence of enlightenment humanism as his own. Habermas’s thought was not without its own problems, but there was a more sophisticated understanding of reason in his work than in that of earlier Critical Theorists. Moreover, the combination of an early tutelage in negative dialectics and a mature appreciation of Habermasian theory equipped Wolin with the means to oppose postmodernism. Any fashionable attempts to expose reason as domination or myth were quickly set upon by Wolin who, like Habermas, was uncompromising in his criticism—particularly of Heidegger (Wolin 1980). To him, postmodernism was a new manifestation of the irrationality which had sparked the twentieth century’s many catastrophes. It thus required no extra kindling. Indeed, when Telos began publishing works on Carl Schmitt and seemingly drifted towards right-wing radicalism, Wolin, among others, left the journal and wrote against it (Wolin 1993). Since Critical Theory had long been regarded as alive in Habermas’s hands (Schroyer 1975), many of the Frankfurt School’s supporters made the shift to his work with relative ease. Douglas Kellner’s Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity (1989) explained his own understanding of this transition. In the work, he gave credence to both first- and second-generation Critical Theory,1 but the latter was seen as more relevant to future understanding. During the seventies and eighties, Kellner promoted Critical Theory’s neo-Marxist position, publishing and translating numerous essays on Marxism and the Frankfurt School (Kellner 1984). Just as the Frankfurt School had metamorphosed during the twentieth century, so too did his appreciation of its work. An earlier essay in Telos indicated his own misgivings about Horkheimer and Adorno’s approach, arguing that their conception of the culture industry underestimated the pockets of resistance to cultural reification within the industry itself (Kellner 1984/85). Kellner continued this explication of Frankfurt theory in Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity (1989)—his self-described attempt to ‘do’ Critical Theory. According to Kellner, the Frankfurt School’s foundations remained relevant only insofar as they could be revised to cope with what he called ‘techno-capitalism’—a constellation of capitalist society in which ‘technical and scientific knowledge, automation, computers and advanced technology play a role in the process of production parallel to the role of human labour power, mechanization and machines in earlier eras of capitalism, while producing as well new modes of societal organisation and forms of culture and everyday life’ (Kellner 1989: 178). As a result of this development, the Frankfurt School theorists had to renovate their conception of capitalism if they were to remain relevant. 1 Some

clarification is necessary for terms like second-, third- and even fourth-generation Critical Theory. The second generation is specific to Germany and includes Habermas as the most well known among Anglophones. The thought of other younger Critical Theorists like Karl-Otto Apel, Claus Offe and Alfred Schmidt fall into this category. The third generation is shared among inheritors in Germany—chiefly Axel Honneth—and those scholars working in its wake in America. Räiner Forst is considered the head of a fourth generation (Hohendahl 2001).

96

6 Reconsidering Dialectic of Enlightenment in America

A new Critical Theory had to be developed to account for the dominance of consumption and technology. Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse had, to a certain extent, already begun this path with their post-1940 critique of reason. Dialectic of Enlightenment and One-Dimensional Man had added a new dimension to understanding social forms of bourgeois control. Their explanations, however, did little more than describe the state of affairs. On consumption, Marcuse came closest to a political programme with his later distinction between real (vital) and false (non-vital) needs, but he failed to extend it beyond the asceticism of the Great Refusal. In the contemporary context, a distinction could be made which suggested ‘consumption, as the life-enhancing use and enjoyment of commodities, and consumerism, as a way of life dedicated primarily to the possession and use of consumer goods’ (Kellner 1989: 161). From this distinction between consumption and consumerism, genuine human needs might be identified and an approximate alternative to the culture industry established. Consumption, therefore, was a ‘contested terrain’ on which discrimination could be used against the over-production of goods and the companies that produce them. On technology, Kellner believed Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique was unable to account for technology’s positive and negative effects. In so failing, they denied the very dialectic on which their theory of enlightenment was based. Instead, Kellner looked to Habermas for a more positive perspective on science and technology, but also felt that he did not go far enough beyond the limits of a social democratic participatory politics. It was up to Critical Theory ‘to analyse the emancipatory possibilities unleashed by techno-capitalism’ (Kellner 1989: 215). In a tone reminiscent of Schroyer’s New Leftism, Kellner argued that such possibilities were now being harnessed by novel left-wing social movements—from peace and ecological groups to feminist politics. Kellner claimed that Critical Theory could promote a consumer politics that is aware of the culture (or consumer) industry’s ability to co-opt such opposition. From such micro-politics, Critical Theory could then move to the macrolevel, ‘for the very notion of a society organised around production and consumption of commodities is highly peculiar and problematical, as is the assumption that the marketplace alone should dictate what is to be produced and consumed’ (Kellner 1989: 164). Critical Theory could be used to vitalise cultural resistance—especially through the analyses of information and interrogation of technology—and inspire an educated consumer. In essence, Kellner’s argument was that Critical Theory retained and developed important Marxist criticisms when the object of that criticism, capitalism, was becoming more sophisticated. The mechanisms of the superstructure—what Kellner outlines as ‘culture, technology, media, information, knowledge, and ideology’—have become indistinguishable from the mentality of the base they dominate. The Frankfurt School was one of the first of the Western Marxisms to realise this ideological blending, yet a more discriminatory Critical Theory was needed to evaluate the virtues and iniquities of this transformed modernity. Kellner believed he found parts of this new social theory in the second-generation Frankfurt School. Indeed, his work incorporated not only the insights of Habermas but also those of Schmidt and the more marxisant Claus Offe. Yet the extent to which Kellner’s solutions challenge the capitalist systems is questionable. The consumer discernment he espoused is not the

6.1 The Rise of the Habermasians

97

same as the obsolescence of a system of overproduction and unequal distribution. A public sphere of consumer politics might result in capitalism’s resurgence rather than its upending (McNally 1993). This public sphere argument (and others like it) is a symptom of late twentieth century’s politics. The disappointments of the Communist system meant that the radicalism of ‘socialist’ solutions had to be tempered by liberal thought. Moreover, the predominance of capitalist systems could only permit a certain amount of radicalism. Habermas’s social democratic solutions were sure to appeal to many left liberals: non-confrontational theory based on communication that, most importantly, made little mention of economics. Simply put, in the 1980s and 1990s, discussions of public spheres were acceptable, whereas the formation of workers’ soviets or to use a more contemporary example, landless movements, was not. Thus, as the eighties closed, Habermas’s influence grew among Critical Theory’s American epigones. New German Critique continued to be the Weimar-in-English journal that it had always been. More often than not, NGC’s issues dealt with philosophers and writers like Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse and Benjamin alongside questions about representations of the Holocaust or the trajectory of German cultural politics. The journal was more concerned with interpreting and perpetuating the German Enlightenment in a social democratic sense. Socialist radicalism was dispensable. Habermas fitted perfectly into this schema because his work’s purpose coincided exactly with its rationalist objective. Because of the journal’s breadth of interests it is difficult to gauge specific influences. Habermas’s presence in the journal, however, became especially noticeable after an unofficial special edition on his work in 1985. For the next few years, Habermas and the Habermasians became a major influence. This was especially so in regard to the question of postmodernism about which contributors had mixed feelings. Some felt it was a useful new category of cultural analysis. But because Germany’s liberal and Marxist intellectuals were less warm to postmodern explanations, which were seen as a new irrationalism (Niethammer 1992), many at the journal subscribed to Habermas’s position. Similarly, at Telos a Habermasian influence displaced, for a time, the pro-Adornian line. In the 1980s, Telos was struggling to find an ideological position by ‘blending non-Marxist intellectual traditions with the rudiments of New Left radicalism’ (D’Amico 1994: 99). By the mid-1980s, a policy of internal pluralism had come to an end, Piccone’s ‘artificial negativity’ wound up in same impasse as Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument, and the journal’s theoretical accent was inflected by a virulent anti-Soviet politics (Piccone 1988). There was no longer any discussion of peace, feminist or ecological movements as a way forward. Still, Habermas’s arguments for a renewed public sphere and participatory democracy—under communicative action theory’s aegis—provided something of an alternative to Critical Theory’s frustration, capitalism’s inequities and Communism’s inadequacies. Even Paul Piccone began to rethink capitalist social structures in a similar manner to Habermas in Legitimation Crisis (Hohendahl 1991). But this appropriation was short-lived. Telos did not, as one of its former editors reflected, ‘know how not to be critical’ (Gross 1994: 115) and Habermas was soon shelved.

98

6 Reconsidering Dialectic of Enlightenment in America

6.2 Back to Adorno? Notwithstanding the differences in NGC’s and Telos’s appetite for Habermas, the revision of first-generation Critical Theory via its second generation was indicative of a widespread rejection of Marxism. Both journals moved away from the Western Marxist heritage which had directed their content for so long. Telos searched for new radicalisms, finding them on the Right as well as on the Left. NGC withdrew to culturalism, albeit with reference to the German Left. Habermas had provided a perfect conduit for this move because he was both for and against the Western Marxist position. However, as faith in Habermas diminished, aspects of the original Frankfurt School—especially Adorno—reappeared. This interest was, of course, contrary to the broader move away from Western Marxism. But it was not Adorno’s quasi-Marxism which interested those at Telos and NGC. Critics were captivated by his turn away from Marx, his coming out of the other side of Marxism which had begun with Dialectic of Enlightenment and culminated in Negative Dialectics. This was especially the case at Telos. By the late 1980s, Telos transformed its previously left-oriented critique to include right-wing critics of liberalism. This initially tentative reformation soon turned into a reversal as representatives from the Right took precedence over those from the Left. Such an inclusionary policy was based on the increasingly widespread assumption that Left and Right no longer delineated opposing positions (Berman 1996; Palti 1996; Piccone 1996). Because liberal democratic thought was now hegemonic, its past critics, no matter what their political outlook, were now the allies of its present critics. This position was part and parcel of the concomitant argument that ‘history’ had, for all intents and purposes, ended. Left liberals, and some Marxists, sought political solace in this neo-conservative line. To a certain extent Telos’s staff made a similar move. Contributors were critical of their neo-conservative contemporaries, but shared a vision of a renewed democratic tradition which remained critical of liberalism. It was a critique similar to that of the 1990s European Right, especially Umberto Bossi’s Lega Nord (Piccone 1991/92). Much of this shift was a result of discontent with Marxism or socialism as alternatives to the current system. Telos replaced essays on the Frankfurt School and other cultural Marxists with discussions about the ways in which the forthcoming systemic crises in Western societies, specifically the United States, could be avoided by a form of community politics—or ‘federal populism’—that involved small-scale individual participation (Piccone 1991). The reasons for this trend within Telos are worth examining because they seem so out of step with the journal’s past. Telos’s apparent relocation away from the Left, which alienated many former allies, occurred over a long period and was, according to its editor, not incongruous with other former radical positions in the journal. This way of thinking was out of step with many of those who had helped establish the journal during the 1970s and early 1980s. With Marxism apparently bankrupt and the Soviet bloc in tatters, left-wing radicalism no longer inspired as it had in the sixties and seventies. The journal had long been critical of ‘really existing socialism’ and forms of Marxist intellectualism—such as that practiced by their British counterparts

6.2 Back to Adorno?

99

at the New Left Review. As contributions to Telos from exiled Eastern European dissidents increased during the 1980s, an anti-Marxist sensibility began to pervade the journal. This position was vindicated by the Communist collapse. Right-wing radicals seemed more relevant to critiques of eighties and nineties neo-liberalism, a position Telos shared with others on the ‘Left’ like the post-Marxist theorist Mouffe (1999). Right and Left no longer seemed relevant definitions of political difference. Critical Theory was not, of course, necessarily at odds with such a position—Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of reason indicted almost all contemporary political forms. Consequently, an argument like that of Dialectic of Enlightenment could be coopted into this new theoretical agenda. For example, when a special section on Carl Schmitt and the Frankfurt School appeared in 1987, Piccone voiced its desire to balance its left-wing critique of liberalism with a rightist counter-weight. All radicalism, it seemed, was good radicalism. Western Marxism was replaced by a home-grown liberal radicalism that was not equivalent to neo-liberalism. The call for a return to ‘federal’ politics—devolutionary polis, local autonomy, self-determination—is reminiscent of the nineteenth-century arguments which surrounded the United States’ early development and the radical ideas circulated by right-wing political groups that have now moved from the American hinterlands to the mainstream. By the mid-1990s, Telos had fused its populism with an American intellectual parochialism to such an extent that the journal’s formerly continental, or international, approach was set aside for theoretical essays on the New Right or opinion pieces on American politics (Bresler 1995; Piccone 1993/94). Many contributors and readers turned away. Indeed, social theorist Boris Frankel, in the pages of New Left Review, cited Dialectic of Enlightenment back at the Telos turn as a riposte to its fickleness. He added: In an America characterized by the absence of a strong left mass oppositional movement, Telos’ right turn to populism is hardly an exceptional event. All kinds of gurus, left and right sects, apocalyptic prophets and quacks are levelled by the market. Like most of the other brands, Telos’ ‘organic populism’ may attract disillusioned customers by offering another pseudo-panacea to cure America’s ills. But it will probably incur the same fate of political impotence as other theories in search of a mass movement (Frankel 1997: 74).

In spite of this shift, Telos remained close to the Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Its persistence was largely dependent upon two things: the culture of the journal and the efficacy of Adorno’s (and Horkheimer’s) critique. The journal’s long identification with the Frankfurt School meant any attempt to drop it would be difficult. Scholars had long looked to Telos for the latest information on or interpretation of the Frankfurt School’s work. It can even be argued that Telos would have remained obscure, or even folded, without the sustenance that the standard Critical Theory fare had provided since the early 1970s. More than that, however, was the fact that post-war Critical Theory’s interpretive versatility allowed its criticisms of reason and culture to fit into Telos’s new doctrine. The glumness of Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis of modernity seemed to fit with the new editorial direction, even if this fit required their work to be reinterpreted. Thus, some believed that Critical Theory’s leftists affiliation was not reason enough to permanently sideline its representatives.

100

6 Reconsidering Dialectic of Enlightenment in America

At the beginning of Telos’s transformation, for example, Robert Hullot-Kentor called for a re-reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment to achieve greater clarity about Horkheimer and Adorno’s intentions. This call to go ‘back to Adorno’ seemed to fly in the face of Telos’s apparent dissociation from Marxist thinkers. But Adorno’s Marxist residues were not of interest to Hullot-Kentor. Instead, it was the philosopher’s critique of rationality which appealed. For Hullot-Kentor, Dialectic of Enlightenment had been misunderstood due to its poor English translation. Such misunderstanding could be rectified by reading the text as a positive analysis of the Enlightenment. Hullot-Kentor (1989) set about rectifying the situation by giving his own interpretation of the text. But his frustration was also evoked by those advocates of a new American formalism—centred around deconstruction—who had discarded Horkheimer and Adorno’s ‘hard won insights into class structure, surplus repression, and conformism… in favour of the refinement of techniques of avoidance and the glamorization of the sort of punning which used to be dismissed as the last resort of a washed out imagination’. Moreover, the American identification of Critical Theory with Habermas’s work—‘as a result of a terribly unlucky historical mismatch’ (Hullot-Kentor 1989: 5)—had further eroded Dialectic of Enlightenment’s potential. According to Hullot-Kentor, Horkheimer and Adorno provided a critique of enlightenment that has been countered by neither empty postmodernist rhetoric nor naïve Habermasian liberalism. What had to be understood was that Horkheimer and Adorno, as the German Enlightenment’s ‘modern successors’, substantiated reason by calling for ‘the reversal of subjectivity from the domination to the liberation of nature’ (Hullot-Kentor 1989: 6). This type of fanatical pro-Dialectic of Enlightenment argument did not become de rigueur at Telos, but that did not mean that the essence of Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique was dropped. In the issue following that which contained Hullot-Kentor’s essay, an article’s title simply asked: ‘Does Critical Theory Have a Future?’ (Telos Staff 1989). Apparently, Hullot-Kentor had not been convincing enough. The short answer to the question was a qualified yes. That is, first-generation Critical Theory could only remain relevant in a dismantled form. It was a solution expressed in Telos since the journal took the Frankfurt School onboard. In 1976, Paul Piccone’s initial response to Critical Theory’s American renaissance had been characteristically brusque. Hegelian Marxism’s moment, Piccone (1976: 97) argued, ‘had passed and it could only resurface as revolutionary nostalgia’, while Adorno’s dialectic ‘remains a frozen expression of a pre-World War II reality stopped in its tracks by Auschwitz and Siberia’(103). This attitude, which elicited Piccone’s artificial negativity thesis, captured the gist of Telos’s ambivalence vis-à-vis Critical Theory. Naturally, the numerous articles on the Frankfurt School eventually made Critical Theory central to the journal’s stance. But this relationship was always insecure: the Frankfurt School’s pertinence was expressed in the same breath in which it was denounced as passé. For many at Telos in the early 1990s, Critical Theory represented a historical moment which did not persist beyond 1945 and, as a result, there was only so much which could be appropriated from it for the present. Such limits prompted a retreat from Critical Theory.

6.3 A Right-Wing Critical Theory?

101

6.3 A Right-Wing Critical Theory? Yet when this retreat came in the 1990s—the number of articles on or using Frankfurt ideas decreased steadily—there were some aspects of Critical Theory which remained. The longevity of the Frankfurt School’s association with the journal was probably one small factor in its persistence. Critics moulded by particular thoughts do not necessarily relinquish them easily. But more than this, the Frankfurt School, especially Horkheimer and Adorno’s dialectic of enlightenment, was not necessarily at odds with Telos’s altered perspective. At the completion of Telos’s ‘federal populist’ reconstruction in the mid-1990s, one of its contributors announced that the journal’s politics had always been ‘basically anarchistic’ which translated into consistently ‘anti-statist’, ‘anti-nationalist’ and ‘contra-capitalist’ positions which ‘always flowed through the pages of Telos’ (Luke 1994). The advantage of such anarchic pretensions was the ability to collapse the difference between Left and Right. Western Marxism’s perspectives could easily be construed as aligned with anti-statism, anti-nationalism and contra-capitalism; so too could the positions of the journal’s new pin-up boy, Alain de Benoist. Indeed, in the 1990s, Telos merely replaced NewLeft idealism with New-Right idealism—there is a sense that, as a political solution, federal populism could be expressed through either Hungarian Soviets or Virginian militias. More particular to the Frankfurt tradition, however, was Telos’s continued reliance on culture as a bulwark against existing forms of social domination. In his 1978 treatise on artificial negativity, Piccone (1978: 48) argued that ‘the systems’s Achilles heel is no longer economic or social, nor political, but cultural’. It was believed that capitalism’s negative effects—alienation, homogeneity, inequality—could be alleviated by the protection of cultural identity. This position continued into the 1990s as culture became the signifier of the communities that Telos wished to defend as the new political form. ‘By contraposing a central government predicated on allegedly neutral values, scientific knowledge, and rationality, to local communities bound only by particular traditions, customs, religion, dialects, etc.’, Piccone claimed, ‘the New Class has progressively delegitimated the latter—usually by instrumentalising crises whenever they occur—thus paving the way for the central government usurpation of most function which were originally meant to remain local prerogatives’(Raventos 2002: 144–145). By developing a criticism of the educated elite—the New Class—Telos rejected the Marxist opposition between bourgeoisie and proletariat and moved further from its New-Left origins. This was not at odds with Horkheimer and Adorno’s so-called 1940s rationalist turn. The Critical Theorists overtly applied neither Marxist class analysis nor Marxist economics in their critique of reason. Indeed, presupposing the dominance of industrial reification was Horkheimer and Adorno’s surrogate for empirical assessment of society. Similarly, their rejection of an orthodox Marxist analysis—in which the working class remains central—can be read as a turn to a populist faith in human reason beyond class determinacy. Those who accuse Adorno of being a conservative critic at heart fail to acknowledge that he based his opposition to the culture industry and other means of reification on a faith in human potential.

102

6 Reconsidering Dialectic of Enlightenment in America

His writings against mass culture were never against the masses per se—despite his bourgeois trappings. High and low culture were, after all, torn halves of the same whole. Telos shared both this turn away from Marx and his belief in the potential of the popular. On the one hand, ‘New Class’ exclusivity was taken as given within the advanced capitalist form: Marxism was no longer useful because modernity’s social form had altered to such an extent that bourgeoisie and proletariat were now outmoded categories of analysis. On the other hand, Telos’s staff continued to express a democratic belief in the ability of individuals, when liberated from technocratic dominance, to act as rational subjects within new political arenas. Both Horkheimer and Adorno and those at Telos assumed dominance was linked to social arrangements not necessarily elaborated by Marxist thought. In this regard, it is understandable that Dialectic of Enlightenment could retain some use for late Telos. Horkheimer and Adorno’s neglect of class theory plays into the hands of those wishing to rid the humanities and social sciences of Marxiststyle class analysis. The Critical Theorists failed to adequately address how class affected their rendering of the dialectic of enlightenment. Instead of either agreeing with or complicating the bourgeois/proletariat distinction they merely accepted social inequity as a fact of modernity. This oversight was especially pronounced in the Culture Industry chapter where there is an implied distinction between those who determine this industry and those who accept it. Though Horkheimer and Adorno probably wanted to blur this dichotomy, its rather facile construction made it ripe for a vulgar appropriation by those espousing the ‘New Class’ line. Telos’s rejection of Marx was replaced with an antipathy towards new elites who had nothing but contempt for those outside their privileged position. Instead of remedying this situation by suggesting capital’s redistribution or abolishment, Telos espoused the need for cultural self-determination. A major part of the problem for cultural selfdetermination, as Piccone now sees it, resides in the institutions which legitimate and reinforce New Class power—included among which is the culture industry. The retention of the culture industry as a category of analysis shows an ongoing affinity between Horkheimer and Adorno’s claims and Telos’s shifting politics. To a certain extent, Telos’s decision to turn to cultural populism was based on both a frustration with Critical Theory’s political inapplicability and desire to solve the dialectic of enlightenment (Luke 1994). Of course, this solution was not what Horkheimer and Adorno had in mind. Indeed, the elitism against which Telos writes could be read as embodying the sort of thing that the Frankfurters had in mind: the creation of a humanistic intelligentsia that would provide the inspiration for critical reason’s triumph. Obviously, Horkheimer and Adorno were not advocating a technocracy— they wanted critical reason to be enacted by all. But they certainly saw themselves as the guardians, if not the exemplars, of this critical capacity. Had Horkheimer and Adorno’s overall thesis been couched in more explicit class terms—or had they completed the sequel to the text—Telos’s reactionary appropriation of their culture industry thesis could have been a lot more difficult. Having said that, Telos did not renounce its belief that contemporary society was characterised by growing inequities (not just in ownership, but in cultural, and thus political, capital as well), nor did it take to assuring readers that the real resistance to

6.3 A Right-Wing Critical Theory?

103

such inequities could be found in the saccharine offerings of Hollywood and its imitators. Rather, the subjugation of those outside the professional classes was legitimated by a sophisticated process of institutionalised exclusion. As a part of this process, the culture industry played a role in placating the masses and sanctioning inequality. By paying to consume culture industry products individuals only reinforced their own reduction to cogs in the modernisation process. Thus, just as it had in the 1970s, Telos continued to name the culture industry as an ideological propagator of social injustice. The reasons for the persistence of this analysis are twofold. First, the culture industry thesis was in keeping with the journal’s new populist attitude that authentic cultural expressions existed beyond those manufactured by an industry. If culture was capitalism’s battleground then the culture industry was its weapon. Second, the culture industry could easily be recognised as part of a greater domination complex which was not linked to a Marxist understanding of the class system. By assuming the culture industry’s effects were felt by all members of society, Telos could analyse these effects en masse rather than limiting itself to the bourgeois-proletariat divide. In other words, Horkheimer and Adorno’s culture industry formula was simply articulated to Telos’s theory of New Class domination. The difference between Critical Theory and Telos’s new line lays with their respective solutions to this ongoing dialectic of enlightenment. Horkheimer and Adorno, while advocating no particular political model, did espouse the value of autonomous individuals with autonomous culture as the solution to reification in the hands of capitalism and its culture industry. In contrast, Telos decided autonomous communities were more effective protection against cultural homogenisation and economic subjugation. Again, there are similarities between the two approaches—namely, autonomy—but Telos entered a non-Frankfurtian realm when it combines issues like communal resistance and authenticity. Adorno posited the overcoming of ‘identity logic’ as the way forward for humankind, and was thus wary of claims to group authenticity. To be sure, Piccone continued to contend that ‘today professionalism, the epistemological primacy of instrumental rationality, and what Adorno called “identity logic”, remain the predominant dogma’ (Raventos 2002: 143), but the identity politics that Piccone proposed included an assumed phenomenological criteria for belonging. However, much Adorno’s work may have a certain Husserlian logic, he was anxious not to succumb to an essentialism or authenticity that would merely replace closed bourgeois identity forms with communitarianism. That is, for Adorno, the modern self’s instrumentalisation under capitalism already existed in previous social arrangements. Dialectic of Enlightenment’s purpose was to expose this rational tendency throughout human history and how, in Horkheimer and Adorno’s time, the regression to an authoritarian personality was taking place under fascism, capitalism and communism. Piccone’s desire to overcome this impasse led to a faith in small communities which define their own ways of knowing (reason) against those which seek to dominate them. This approach sidesteps Horkheimer and Adorno’s chief complaint against rationality. A provincial solution results in closed particularity which an instrumental

104

6 Reconsidering Dialectic of Enlightenment in America

conception of the self—and hence the dialectic of enlightenment—merely continues. Particularity is elevated over universalism. Horkheimer and Adorno regarded this move as a regression to pre-modern forms of myth. Indeed, their criticism of anti-Semitism was based on this point. Dialectic of Enlightenment was certainly ambiguous enough to be construed as an argument against the imposition of arbitrary universalism. Yet neither man believed Enlightenment reason’s universality should be eradicated completely. Instead, rational thought needed to be qualitatively improved for both individual and social psychology. To argue for particularism as a solution to capitalism’s universal rationalisation is to advocate anti-cosmopolitanism and, ultimately, anti-humanism. Piccone et al. assumed this position. Not only did Telos ceased any discussion of capitalism’s importance as a historical determinant, it has all but rejected humanism. This is, of course, dangerous ground on which to tread. Promoting a peoples’ community as a serious political alternative to liberal individualism or socialist collectivism has harbingers in the very politics against which Dialectic of Enlightenment was composed. Although Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of reason was ambiguous enough to be used to support a variety of arguments, it would be rather difficult to stretch their intentions to advocating Volksgemeinschaft. It is therefore understandable that their presence in Telos’s pages reduced during this period. Similarly, Telos’s faith in community resistance to the culture industry had to place Horkheimer and Adorno to one side. To dilute the culture industry’s influence, it had to be looked at as a system which was weaker than communitarian cultural forms. But just as many accuse Cultural Studies theorists of overestimating consumer resistance to the culture industry, some felt Telos overstated small-scale community resistance. This was especially the case when such resistance was said to exist in the United States or other Western nations. Much of the federal populist model was focused on communities in the affluent nations; however, the distinctiveness of these communities was problematic mainly because of the culture industry’s effects. As Telos contributor Zipes (1994: 166) wrote, when the populist turn was at its height, Piccone’s belief in the ubiquitous ‘recuperation’ of communal life was naïve. Against Piccone, Zipes believed that the culture industry was encroaching ‘in all communities large and small’. Any ongoing Critical Theory presence in Telos was only due to a belief in the partial relevance of Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique. In fact, by the late 1990s, as a sign of the complete exodus from Piccone’s monomaniacal rule, the journal’s articles on Critical Theory were been chiefly concerned with Adorno’s aesthetic theory. Moreover, those who do publish on Critical Theory are usually outside of the Telos core’s politics. For example, an article read Horkheimer and Adorno in a way that could suggest a return to the New Left: Dialectic of Enlightenment is an original, though inadequate, social and philosophical study from which lessons can still be learnt. Morgan’s (2001: 75–76) ‘The Project of the Frankfurt School’ argued that the tendency to read Dialectic of Enlightenment as a ‘historical document’ masks ‘an unwillingness to confront disappointed hopes’. Instead, the text should be read in the same way that Benjamin, following Breton, perceived revolutionary energies in the ‘outmoded’ (Morgan 2001: 76). What Horkheimer and Adorno were

6.3 A Right-Wing Critical Theory?

105

attempting, according to Morgan, was a vast psychological rethinking of reason. This was not, as Habermas suggested, merely ‘a theoretical description of the “other” of rationality so much as making an imaginative leap into another state of mind’ (Morgan 2001: 95). Morgan’s overall point was certainly a cogent and pertinent one: many questions posited in Dialectic of Enlightenment continue to dog rational thought. But by stressing this utopian aspect in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Morgan merely reiterates earlier claims about the importance of Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument. For the present study, the actual content of his argument is of less importance than what it represents for Critical Theory’s current reception. Morgan’s argument can be read historically in two ways. First, it is a part of the current fashion for Benjaminian readings of modernity—of which Dialectic of Enlightenment is an early model. The characteristics of today’s modernity are regarded by some as little different from those pertaining in Benjamin or Horkheimer and Adorno’s time. Correspondingly, any valid insight from last century—of which these three men are assumed to have had many—could apply to this one. Second, and perhaps more pertinent to what has just been said, the presence of this argument in Telos shows an enduring representation of Horkheimer and Adorno’s thought within the journal. In fact, it seemed as though the journal has come full circle—Morgan’s espousal of Benjaminian technique was an echo of James Schmidt’s comments in his 1974 exchange with Jay. When Morgan asked at the outset of his article whether ‘Horkheimer and Adorno are obsolete’ the question could have also been asking whether or not they are obsolete at Telos. The presence of Morgan’s essay, others like it, and the ongoing use of the culture industry as an analytical category seemed to suggest that the short answer was, ‘not quite yet’.

6.4 Modernist Antidote to Postmodernism The answer would have been similar at New German Critique. Like Telos, NGC’s relationship with Critical Theory since the 1980s has been mixed. While Piccone et al. used Critical Theory as part of their search for political alternatives, those at NGC were happy to interpret the Frankfurt School in its own context. Consequently, the journal continued to concern itself with cultural rather than political thought. Its contributors were more interested in intellectual history than in developing political theory. To a certain extent, this retrospective view was because NGC has been constrained by its own interest in Weimar culture. The intersection between culture and politics that characterised the interwar period determines references to issues of Western Marxism, phenomenology, Judaism and Nazism. The rich intellectual tradition which grew from that tragic era undoubtedly deserves concentrated attention. But there is a certain amount of nostalgia for the pre-Nazi period which did not equate with the political alternatives sought by those at Telos. Benjamin’s almost constant presence suited the postmodern times nostalgia for modernist origins. Adorno’s cultural criticism—especially his post-war work—also fitted perfectly into this desire for critical lineage. His writings were political enough to be relevant, but apolitical enough to not cause a commotion. With the passing of the 1970s, NGC found itself

106

6 Reconsidering Dialectic of Enlightenment in America

outside the historical conjuncture which had inspired its existence. Interest in Critical Theory was no longer part of a New-Left (or post-New-Left) agenda and as a result became even more academic in tenor. Many of the theorists who had contributed to the debates about Critical Theory’s relevance in the 1970s were now arguing over Critical Theory and postmodernism in the 1980s and 1990s. Instead of Critical Theory being seen as a rearticulation of Marxist or socialist transformation, it became even more of a cultural phenomenon. New German Critique was therefore able to continue its seventies’ attitude towards German left liberalism or Marxism but with less concern for political consequences. That is not to say that contributions did not have political intentions. The decision to examine ideas from the past is always a political act. And, even more than this, how the past is interpreted determines how the present is defined. Indeed, the role that NGC played, alongside Habermas (1988a, b), in the historikerstreit proves the extent to which the past plays an integral part in modern German self-identity—a situation complicated even further since 1989. Rather, to say that NGC was no longer attentive to political consequences is to argue that it offered no specific, or collective, political programme of the kind that Telos developed. The reasons for this extend beyond its historical approach. First and foremost, it was probably unthinkable for NGC to follow Telos into federal populism because the journal’s liberal outlook and Germany’s peculiar history would not permit right-wing radicalism to affect its direction. Indeed, comparing the two journals says something about the direction the New Left took after the mid-1970s. NGC’s position can be seen as representative of the German left-liberal tradition that was so important in the Federal Republic’s construction. Indeed, a large part of the journal’s rationale was bringing issues from West Germany’s intellectual circles to English-speaking audiences. This meant describing the FRG’s cultural life in a way that was distinct from the rest of Europe, America and, especially, the communist east. During the 1980s, the journal’s position could even be construed to stand against the dominance of the austere, though economically successful, Schmidt-Kohl era. This meant that a social democratic humanism, or even a socialist humanism, shaped many issues. Telos, by contrast, was not beholden to such political factors. It only had to define itself against America’s closed party-political system which had little social democratic, let alone socialist, tradition. Moreover, a commitment to Enlightenment humanism was not necessarily essential to Telos. Although the United States has been responsible for its fair share of violent abuses, both locally and internationally, American nationalism seemed almost impervious to the sort of guilt that haunted post-war Germany. Thus, Telos could consider other political alternatives that were unthinkable within a specifically German context— Carl Schmitt being the obvious example. If NGC had toyed with the sort of politics Telos espoused in the 1990s, accusations of neo-Nazism would have ensued. Telos’s long contrarian position afforded it leverage beyond NGC’s capacity or, it must be said, desires. Second, by publishing articles from a wide range of contributors on a wide range of thinkers and issues in twentieth-century German cultural history, no particular ‘party line’ developed. Contributions came from a mix of European (especially German) and American academics whose presence was determined by the specific themes of

6.4 Modernist Antidote to Postmodernism

107

each issue. Unlike Telos, New German Critique was less editorially prescribed and thus less hermetic. Piccone’s dominance at Telos governed the journal’s direction. NGC relied on far more liberal governance under the likes of Anson Rabinbach and Andreas Huyssen. Its concerns have always been primarily focused on literature and art rather than philosophy and politics—though with a keen understanding of the links and overlaps between them all. Thus, notwithstanding their fraternal nature, both NGC and Telos remain separate enough to have had their own theoretical voyages. Nonetheless, NGC’s attention to Critical Theory followed a similar trend to Telos: it was steady without being pronounced. After the 1970s, articles on the Frankfurt School only appeared spasmodically and then decreasingly. By the 1990s, however, this trend changed. In the brief introduction to a 1992 special NGC issue on Adorno, Peter Uwe Hohendahl gave his diagnosis of contemporary positions on the German philosopher. To Hohendahl (1992: 3), ‘the work of Theodor W. Adorno has received more attention than it did during the 1970s when Western Marxism was the most significant oppositional theory in literary and cultural studies’. Moreover, Hohendahl continued, ‘the return of Adorno after years of neglect is particularly remarkable since his work does not fit into any of the intellectual trends of the late 1980s and early 1990s’. With this paradoxical renaissance in mind, Hohendahl then went on to outline the four main approaches to Adorno since the 1970s. These four approaches—roughly, the New Left, the post-structuralist, the postmodern and a new ‘authenticity’—have managed to send aspects of Adorno’s thought in different directions and as such Adorno criticism is now at a new ‘turning point’. For Hohendahl, Adorno’s sophistication demanded an equally sophisticated appropriation/interpretation of his work which examined the breadth of his theory in a changed social context and did not reduce his aesthetic theory to a renunciation of politics. In other words, in the late twentieth century, Adorno had to be read without New Left, post-structuralist or postmodernist blinkers as well as with attention to a new historical moment. The desire for this new outlook marked NGC at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Works began to follow innovative readings of Adorno and Critical Theory, though for the most part, but postmodernism’s hangover was hard to shake. In 2000, the journal published another special issue on Adorno, but this time it focused specifically on Dialectic of Enlightenment. The decision to select Dialectic of Enlightenment as representative of Frankfurt theory was more related to postmodernist obsessions than a new politico-aesthetic purpose. Indeed, in contrast to earlier NGC work on Critical Theory, there was a definite postmodern flavour to the issue. Most articles chose to focus on Horkheimer and Adorno’s presentation of subjectivity, especially in their reading of the Odyssey. Horkheimer and Adorno’s use of Odysseus could be interpreted on a number of levels—theses on subject formation, advocacy of authentic art, creation of the aesthetic and the origins of patriarchal domination—and as such it was ripe for postmodern deconstruction. In his contribution to the issue, Albrecht Wellmer (2000), a third-generation Critical Theorist with novel postmodern sympathies, pointed to three possible readings of Odysseus in Horkheimer and Adorno and, at one point, argued that an ‘aesthetic delight’ is unwittingly present in Dialectic of Enlightenment which amounts to a Derridean

108

6 Reconsidering Dialectic of Enlightenment in America

‘différance’. Others in the issue more vigorously pursued the trend towards deconstructive readings of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Rebecca Comay’s article focused on the Sirens’ episode in Dialectic of Enlightenment, but wished to consider what might have gone ‘unread’ in Horkheimer and Adorno’s allegory. Comay (2000) contended that Odysseus’s masculinity was threatened by the Sirens and was thus reasserted by him being strapped to the phallus that was the ship’s mast. She then extended this assumption to a psycho-sexual reading of the culture industry—‘a forepleasure so benumbing it would pre-empt the greater urge to happiness’ (Comay 2000: 34)— and a conclusion which posited Adorno’s ultimate misogyny as identical to that in the Odysseus metaphor. By arguing that mass culture is equivalent to the ‘natural’ irrationality of a woman Adorno reasserts his own masculine bourgeois self. In other words, Horkheimer and Adorno did not escape the dialectic of enlightenment’s own identity logic and in fact reveal the masculine bias of the bourgeois self in their misogynistic interpretations of Homer’s epic. In keeping with NGC’s comprehensive nature, however, other contributors did not necessarily follow these evaluations. Slavoj Žižek and Joel Whitebrook wrote articles against reading Dialectic of Enlightenment as a proto-postmodern description of subjectivity’s demise. Both, however, were dissatisfied with Horkheimer and Adorno’s description of the modern self as ineffective. In keeping with his cool opinion of Critical Theory, Žižek’s (2000) ‘From History and Class Consciousness to Dialectic of Enlightenment… and Back’ dismissed the Frankfurt School for leading the Left away from the proletarian subject and towards academia. Horkheimer and Adorno are deemed guilty of diverting ‘socio-political analysis to philosophicoanthropological generalization’, a shift which ‘necessitates that reifying “instrumental reason” is no longer grounded in concrete capitalist social relations, but itself almost imperceptibly becomes their quasi-transcendental “principle” or foundation’ (Žižek 2000: 112–113). To counter these ill effects, Žižek called for a return to the Lukacsian understanding of history—that of revolutionary subjects and actions— which would reinstate a form of politics beyond the ‘democratic fundamentalism’ of neo-liberalism. His work then, as usual, diverged from its initial purpose and Žižek (2000: 123) ended on a note that sounded remarkably similar to Horkheimer and Adorno: ‘Are we still able to commit the act proper described by Lukács? Which social agent is, on account of its radical dislocation, today able to accomplish it?’ The contemporary subject, in other words, can be seen as ‘radically dislocated’ in either the Lukácsian sense (reification), the Critical Theory sense (identity logic) or the postmodern sense (fragmented). Whitebrook’s ‘The Urgeschichte of Subjectivity Reconsidered’ (2000), took a different Freudian tack in seeking to overcome Horkheimer and Adorno’s pessimism. To Whitebrook (2000: 128), the Odysseus chapter captures the very introversion of sacrifice that is at the heart of Horkheimer and Adorno’s enterprise: ‘Odysseus seeks to escape mythical fate by rationally calculating the sacrifice of his own mythical nature’. For Whitebrook, this analysis of the situation denied Freud’s key insight of sublimation. Because Horkheimer and Adorno dismissed theories of sublimation as forms of domination—a sacrifice at the behest of instrumental reason—they could not show the difference between reason ‘as Nature’ and reason ‘arising from Nature’.

6.4 Modernist Antidote to Postmodernism

109

In other words, critical reason’s possibility was reliant on a sublimation of the self. Indeed, the repression of Nature in the individual permitted the distinction between the instrumental and the critical. Instrumental reason required no other thoughts than those of self-preservation, whereas critical reason demanded the individual repress the overbearing will of the self, and, in doing so, look towards the other. Sublimation was central to the individual’s ability to empathise and thus socialise humanely. By dismissing this Freudian concept, Horkheimer and Adorno limited their possibilities of escaping instrumental reason’s dominating effects. After the war, therefore, Adorno could only opt for vague orientations towards non-identical forms as a way out of the impasse. For Whitebrook, however, sublimation was necessary if such a negative identity was to become apparent. This is a complicated issue, but basically Whitebrook’s argument suggests that Adorno’s non-identity would always involve some form of sublimated identity thinking for it to be truly critical. A link between identity and non-identity could only be found in a theory of sublimation since change always involves some form of renunciation. Whitebrook argued that the system of renunciation Horkheimer and Adorno reject is actually integral to the identity formation of the modern self. ‘Not only does the concept of sublimation provide a way out of one of the actual impasses of The Dialectic of Enlightenment’, Whitebrook (2000: 141) claimed, ‘but it also provides an alternative to the selfdeceiving forms of pseudo-transcendence and false reconciliation’. Within both Telos and NGC there was an overall return (though critical) to Adorno at the end of the twentieth century. The results of this return are now being seen in the theory industry’s interest in Adorno’s work. This trend appears to prove the perennial nature of Adorno’s (and with him Horkheimer’s) questioning of modernity. Of the two journals, NGC’s interpretations seem to place Critical Theory within a broader problematic than do those of Telos. The latter is now concerned with a political agenda of its own invention. That is not to say that Horkheimer and Adorno have no place in this schema. As has been argued above, the culture industry thesis is not necessarily at odds with Telos’s current radicalism. This says something about the correlation between the Frankfurt School’s thought and that expounded by conservative radicals of early-twentieth-century Germany. But it also says much about the state of supposedly radical arguments in today’s academy. That is, the struggle between the particular and the universal—so much a part of the history of left-wing criticism—continues in a much more ambiguous form. Telos is now, it seems, on the side of the particular. So too were Horkheimer and Adorno, but not at the expense of the universal. Indeed, it is the articles that now appear on issues other than the Frankfurt School which reveal more about Telos editors’ views on Critical Theory. But the journal is no longer the bastion of North American Critical Theory. The other side of the equation can be seen at NGC. Its interpretations of Critical Theory—Dialectic of Enlightenment in particular—continued to harbour more universalist intentions. There is still a commitment to sorting through the problems which have dogged Critical Theory without completely dismissing its work. Moreover, the eclectic approach that pervades each of its issues permits a greater appreciation of

110

6 Reconsidering Dialectic of Enlightenment in America

viewpoints than is now permitted at Telos. The latter remains an important journal, not least because its current incarnation says much about the times we live in. It is NGC, however, that continues to publish works which are testament to the sort of ethos that Horkheimer and Adorno represented. NGC, like the Frankfurt theoreticians, appears committed to re-establishing the rational with a sideways glance to the aesthetic possibilities of romanticism and idealism. But such commitment always denies a specific political programme. As Žižek (2000) put it, Horkheimer and Adorno are not Lukács. In this sense, the journal remains very much like the old Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung—full of innovative critical insights that have little hope of actual application. Ultimately, this situation once again comes down to the issue of whether first-generation Critical Theory can offer anything to those trying to reformulate the Enlightenment project in a way that avoids its supposedly inherent desire to dominate. For now, at least, those as NGC seem to think that Horkheimer and Adorno were onto something.

6.5 Conclusion Contributions to New German Critique and Telos at the end of the century attested to a continuing interest in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Such continuity is largely due to the New Left’s postmodern hangover. The initial interest in the Frankfurt School emerged from a need to reassess Marxism in light of Stalinism and a transformed capitalism. Once this review was exhausted, a broad movement away from Marx took place which was similar to that taken by Horkheimer and Adorno after 1940. A turn to Habermas only partially remedied the resulting impasse. His criticisms of Horkheimer and Adorno provided many with the means to take the Frankfurt School in a different direction. But not all of Critical Theory’s North American admirers became Habermasians. Those who were not convinced by Habermas’s rationalisations looked elsewhere for inspirations. For them, if Critical Theory was to continue in the postmodern or post-Marxist climate of the 1980s and 1990s, it was Dialectic of Enlightenment and its sequels that had to be reinterpreted. Postmodernism relied heavily on a criticism of (Western) reason and Horkheimer and Adorno offer a ready-made example of such a criticism. Those at Telos, while not avowed postmodernists, believed the imposition of particular forms of reason is modernity’s scourge—a belief which ultimately led to the reactionary identity politics of federal populism. Western reason’s claims to universality are considered irreconcilable with local cultures’ particular rationalities. The only logical solution is segregation at the expense of universal goals. What this solution amounted to was a politics at odds with Horkheimer and Adorno’s original intentions. But irrespective of this apparent reversal, Telos’s anti-universalism during the 1990s exemplified how far an interpretation and appropriation of Dialectic of Enlightenment—and the Frankfurt School in general—can be taken. To apply an old theory in a new context

6.5 Conclusion

111

is common, but to mobilise a theory as part of an antithetical agenda is unusual. At New German Critique, by contrast, some contributors manifested a postmodernist temperament which seeks to equate Critical Theory with post-structuralist critique. Others at the journal forcibly resisted this move by reinforcing first- or secondgeneration Frankfurt School thought. But even a turn to Habermas is no sure-fire defence as some regard his work as complicit with postmodernism anyway. Faced with these ‘postmodern’ dilemmas, it is easy to understand how both Telos and NGC return to Dialectic of Enlightenment from time to time for a reminder of the modern paradox: that freedom brings domination. The similarities many wish to reveal between Critical Theory and postmodernism are therefore symptomatic of the Left’s broader malady. Telos’s editors are certainly not wrong in saying that the post-1960s situation saw the state requisition some of the more liberal aspects of the New Left’s project. This appropriation then impeded the possibility of more radical changes. Democratic impulses and participatory citizens were stunted by growing government bureaucracies which sanctioned dissent within the confines of this system—the Left academy being exemplary. The turn to Critical Theory and to postmodernism, apart from radical insights into cultural hegemony, can be read as part of the movement away from organisational radicalism in the New Left. This turn was not the only, nor even the decisive, factor involved in the New Left’s breakdown. But it bespoke the disillusionment of many on the Left with continued political infighting and defeat. In this sense, there is a strong possibility that Dialectic of Enlightenment’s 1972 appearance was a reaction against the sixties’ revolutions. The book was undoubtedly part of the time’s radicalism, but its logical position of impasse seemed to lead nowhere at all and could be seen as representing the same opinions beginning to be circulated by a newborn postmodernism. The appeal of Critical Theory to those at Telos and NGC can be regarded as a Left alternative in a situation when no positive alternative seemed forthcoming—much as had been the case in 1930s Germany. It is clear that the North American appropriation of the Frankfurt School is part of the story of the intellectual Left’s political retreat. The refreshment Western Marxism provided the Left was short-lived and a purely academic interest in its works soon became a refuge for student radicals without influence. Those who chose to follow the Frankfurt School were aware but seemed unbothered that its thought arose from political defeat and ended up in the impasse of Dialectic of Enlightenment. As a result, the pro-Frankfurt turn, while certainly intellectually stimulating, can be read as a part of the dismantling of the Left in the post-sixties era. The creation of an academic ‘theory industry’, of which Telos and NGC were (unwittingly) central, allowed different readings of texts like Dialectic of Enlightenment to flourish. This process made way for a postmodern scholasticism that serves as both a political diversion and a critique of reason; a critique which was potentially more devastating to Enlightenment discourse than that which Horkheimer and Adorno had expressed decades earlier.

112

6 Reconsidering Dialectic of Enlightenment in America

References Alexander, J. C. (1995). Fin de Siècle social theory: Relativism, reduction, and the problem of reason. London: Verso. Benhabib, S. (1986). Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A study of the foundations of critical theory, New York 1986. Berman, R. A. (1996). Immigration between Liberalism and populism: Reply to Palti. Telos, 107, 129–137. Bernstein, R. (1985). Introduction. In R. Bernstein (Ed.), Habermas and modernity (pp. 1–32). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bresler, R. J. (1995) The end of new deal Liberalism and the rise of populism. Telos, 104, 13–26. Comay, R. (2000). Adorno’s siren song. New German Critique, 81, 21–48. D’Amico, R. (1994). What was Telos all about? Telos, 101, 97–100. Dews, P. (Ed.). (1992). Autonomy and solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas. London: Verso. Finlayson, J. G. (2003). The theory of ideology and the ideology of theory: Habermas Contra Adorno. Historical Materialism, 11(2), 165–187. Frankel, B. (1997). Confronting neoliberal regimes: The post-marxist embrace of populism and realpolitik. New Left Review, 226: 7–92. Gross, D. (1994). Where is Telos going? Telos, 101, 110–116. Habermas, J. (1981). Modernity versus postmodernity. New German Critique, 22, 3–14. Habermas, J. (1988a). A kind of settlement of damages (Apologetic Tendencies). New German Critique, 44, 25–39. Habermas, J. (1988b). Concerning the public use of history. New German Critique, 44, 40–50. Heller, A. (1982). Habermas and Marxism. In J. B. Thompson & D. Held (Eds.), Habermas: critical debates (pp. 21–41). Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Hohendahl, P. U. (1991). Reappraisals: Shifting alignments in post-war critical theory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hohendahl, P. U. (1992). Adorno criticism today. New German Critique., 56, 3–15. Hohendahl, P. U. (2001). From the eclipse of reason to communicative rationality and beyond. In P. U. Hohendahl & J Fisher (Eds.), Critical theory: Current state and future prospects (pp. 18–28). New York: Berghahn. Hullot-Kentor, R. (1989). Back to Adorno. Telos, 81, 14–29. Kellner, D. (1984a). Herbert marcuse and the crisis of Marxism. London: McMillan. Kellner, D. (1984/85). Critical theory and the culture industries: A reassessment. Telos, 62, 196–206. Kellner, D. (1989). Critical theory, marxism and modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Kramer, L. (1992). Habermas, history and critical theory. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere (pp. 236–258). Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Luke, T. (1994). Toward a North American critical theory. Telos., 101, 104–106. McNally, D. (1993). Against the market: Political economy, market socialism and the marxist critique. London: Verso. Morgan, B. (2001). The project of the Frankfurt School. Telos, 119, 75–76. Mouffe, C. (1999). Carl Schmitt and the paradox of liberal democracy. In C. Mouffe (Ed.), The challenge of carl schmitt (pp. 38–53). London: Verso. Niethammer, L. (1992). Posthistoire: Has history come to an end? Trans. P. Camiller. London: Verso. Palti, E. J. (1996). Is there a Telos right? Telos, 107, 121–127. Piccone, P. (1976). Beyond identity theory. In J. O’Neill (Ed.) On Critical Theory, (pp. 129–144). New York: Seabury Press. Piccone, P. (1978). The crisis of one-dimensionality. Telos, 35, 43–54. Piccone, P. (1988). 20 years of Telos. Telos, 75, 17–21. Piccone, P. (1991). The crisis of liberalism and the emergence of federal populism. Telos, 89, 7–44. Piccone, P. (1991/92). Federal populism in Italy. Telos, 90, 3–18.

References

113

Piccone, P. (1993/94). Confronting the French new right: Old prejudices or new political paradigm? Telos, 98–99, 2–22. Piccone, P. (1996). The tribulations of left social criticism: Reply to Palti. Telos, 107, 139–168. Rajchman, J. (1988). Habermas’s complaint’. New German Critique., 45, 163–191. Rajchman, J. (1989). Rejoinder to Richard Wolin. New German Critique, 49, 155–162. Raventos, J. (2002). From the new left to postmodern populism: An interview with paul piccone. Telos, 122, 144–145. Schroyer, T. (1975). The re-politicization of the relations of production: An interpretation of Jürgen Habermas’s analytic theory of late capitalist development. New German Critique, 5, 107–128. Staff, T. (1989). Does critical theory have a future? Telos, 82, 111–129. Wellmer, A. (2000). The death of the sirens and the origin of the work of art. New German Critique, 81, 5–19. Whitebrook, J. (2000). The Urgeschichte of subjectivity reconsidered. New German Critique, 81, 125–141. Wolin, R. (1980). The politics of being: The political thought of Martin Heidegger, New York 1980. Wolin, R. (1984/85). Modernism versus Postmodernism. Telos, 62, 9–30. Wolin, R. (1987). Critical theory and the dialectic of rationalism. New German Critique, 41, 23–52. Wolin, R. (1989). On misunderstanding Habermas: A response to Rajchman. New German Critique., 49, 139–154. Wolin, R. (1992). The terms of cultural criticism: The Frankfurt School, existentialism, poststructuralism. New York: Columbia University Press. Wolin, R. (1993). Carl Schmitt: The conservative revolution and the aesthetics of horror. Political Theory, 20(3), 424–447. Wolin, R. (1995). Labyrinths: Explorations in the critical history of ideas. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Wolin, R. (2001). Heidegger’s children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Zipes, J. (1994). Adorno may still be right. Telos, 101, 157–167. Žižek, S. (2000). From History and Class Consciousness to Dialectic of Enlightenment … and back. New German Critique, 81, 112–113.

Chapter 7

Dismissing Dialectic of Enlightenment Among Britain’s New Left

The mythical scientific respect of peoples for the given reality, which they themselves constantly create, finally becomes itself a positive fact, a fortress before which even the revolutionary imagination feels shamed as utopianism, and degenerates to a compliant trust in the objective tendency of history. As the instrument of this adaptation, as a mere assemblage of means, enlightenment is as destructive as its Romantic enemies claim. It will only fulfil itself if it forswears its last complicity with them and dares to abolish the false absolute, the principle of blind power. Horkheimer and Adorno

With the Frankfurt Institute’s doors closed directly after the Nazi accession, its members sought refuge, most eventually made their way to the United States where they continued to remain loosely connected. Horkheimer and Adorno, if anything, strengthened their connection as a result of the exodus. But this relationship was not consolidated till both arrived in Los Angeles, in 1940 and 1941, respectively, where Dialectic of Enlightenment was composed. Horkheimer, only 3 years into his directorship, initially went to Geneva before finding a home for the Institute at Columbia University in New York in 1934. Adorno, however, went first to Britain. His time there was not easy, from all accounts. According to one biographer, Adorno was able to circumvent tight immigration controls, thanks to a British uncle’s savvy and connections including with J.M. Keynes and William Beveridge, resulted in an invitation to Merton College, Oxford (Müller-Doohm 2005). Out of place with the intellectual culture, as well as initially at sea with the language, he eventually found his feet as an enrolled ‘advanced student’ among philosophers, albeit of a different tradition, and other foreign exiles (Claussen 2008). His 4-year stay in Britain was remarkably productive, including intense correspondence with Benjamin in Paris and, rather prickly, with Horkheimer in New York. And he also gained insights about Hitler’s Germany because he managed to visit his wife and parents there up until 1938 when Gretel returned with him and they set sail for America.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 H. Prosser, Dialectic of Enlightenment in the Anglosphere, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3521-5_7

115

116

7 Dismissing Dialectic of Enlightenment Among Britain’s New Left

The work undertaken produced during his British sojourn—on Husserl, on music (popular and classical) and via aphoristic jottings—were foundational for the texts later published during the 1940s, especially Dialectic of Enlightenment (Claussen 2008). But beyond this self-study, Adorno has left little impression on the philosophical world that he briefly entered. This situation continued into the post-war period as his work began to be circulated by Britain’s ‘second’ New Left. Thus, in comparison with the impression Critical Theory made on the American New Left, the Frankfurt School had little resonance in Britain. Much of this lack of impact can be attributed to attitudes to Western Marxism fostered by this ‘second’ New Left and its journal—New Left Review (NLR). From the 1960s till 2000, the journal consistently introduced the ideas of continental European leftist thinkers, especially Marxists, to the English-speaking audiences. This process, complemented as it was by a publishing house, allowed texts like Dialectic of Enlightenment to be read but also positioned within a larger intellectual lineage associated with rethinking Marxism for changing conditions. Such a deliberate approach was in keeping with the second New Left’s political hopes—that these Europeans conversations, in contrast to limited British discussions, could inform social and political praxis in the late twentieth century. Such revolutionary hopes were in keeping with the type of socialist intellectualism that Horkheimer and Adorno had in mind when writing during the 1930s and 1940s. However, Dialectic of Enlightenment, and the Frankfurt School in general, was not as popular with the writers in New Left Review as it was with their transatlantic comrades at Telos. Where the latter were consciously building a North American Critical Theory, the former held to a belief that such a theory led to a theoretically neat culde-sac of political inaction. This chapter outlines some of the discussion surrounding Dialectic of Enlightenment within the pages of NLR from the 1970s until the turn of the century. Some of the general intellectual landscape is offered but, much like within the Frankfurt School itself, the British New Left’s second generation was a mixed bunch with arguably more intellectual variegation. Nevertheless, the strident revolutionary Marxism of the clique was primarily at odds with Frankfurt theory throughout this time. Some consideration is given below to others, like Gillian Rose, who found in their work, especially Adorno’s, much to be grateful for when considering the state of philosophy and sociology in Britain. But even those beyond NLR who did engage with the Frankfurt School tended to regard its work as politically limited for similar reasons. This says much about the intellectual traditions of British leftism during the post-war period. In spite of the fact that Horkheimer and Adorno’s work, and that of the Frankfurt School in general, had much in common with the critical cause of the British New Left, a sustained interaction was limited, somewhat ironically, because of Critical Theory’s lack of revolutionary faith. The irony, however, is that by the end of the century, with socialist hopes dashed once more, many figures within this movement ended in the same resigned place as Horkheimer and Adorno half a century earlier.

7.1 New Left Review Versus the Frankfurt School

117

7.1 New Left Review Versus the Frankfurt School The British New Left was a significant intellectual movement in the UK whose influence is latent in contemporary activist and scholarly circles. Indeed, such influence can be read a global phenomenon. A brief definitional explanation is important to clarify the terms used previously and below. Much like the generations of the Frankfurt School, the British New Left is commonly seen to have two different phases. The first New Left is original group of radical scholars who departed politically from initial communist enthusiasms in the wake of the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary and the Suez crisis of the same year. Its key members’ scholarly works gave rise to two influential intellectual projects of the twentieth century: Social History under E.P. Thompson and Raphael Samuel and Cultural Studies under Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and Stuart Hall (Woodhams 2001; Kenny 1995). Just as this group was coalescing around its activism and producing leftist works for popular consumption, including its journal New Left Review, a younger cohort of intellectuals, led by Perry Anderson, usurped their position. These upstarts shifted the focus of the New Left, around 1962, from a renewed version of British socialism in a Marxist tradition towards a more continental intellectualism of the sort Sartre and others in France espoused. This shift towards ‘theory’ is often seen as a rupture within the British New left; although, as Madeline Davis (2006) has shown, and members of the both phases New Left would concede, both ‘generations’ held a lot in common. Nevertheless, considerations of Western Marxist tradition were central to the younger New Leftists agenda and the pages of NLR became synonymous with translations of European Marxist writings. In comparison to Telos, however, NLR did little to advance Critical Theory in Britain. The journal published few of the Frankfurt School’s works and criticised its purpose. Many contributors to NLR saw the Frankfurt School as an arcane sect of pseudo-Marxists who were more adroit at cultural criticism than social analysis. Nevertheless, the Frankfurt School’s unattractiveness to British leftists was not simply a matter of its absence from NLR’s pages. The reasons for this absence are related not so much to English ‘peculiarities’ (Thompson 1978: 35) as to there being little space for the School on the British Marxist scene. In this sense, the British resistance to the Frankfurt School is as important as its American popularity in the discussion of its post-1970 history. Overall, the Frankfurt School’s British plight came down to its advocates’ political tone. If Telos’s social analysis was regarded as radical by North American standards, it was markedly passive when compared to New Left Review’s strident Marxist critique of politics, history and philosophy. NLR’s publication of Frankfurt School articles in the late 1960s was part of an attempt to define this Marxist critique. Thus, when it was discovered that the Frankfurt School’s members were short, or soft, on political action, they were quickly jettisoned. The story of this short-lived flirtation is part of the journal’s chequered history. In 1964, Perry Anderson, the journal’s new editor, and Tom Nairn published articles outlining the need to measure British history and society against a Gramscian gauge. The subsequent ‘Nairn-Anderson theses’ established a

118

7 Dismissing Dialectic of Enlightenment Among Britain’s New Left

continental attitude in the journal that was very different from its original British focus (see Anderson 1992: 121). Consequently, Gramsci became the Review’s talisman; but, after mid-1966, other Western Marxist heavyweights’ clout—Sartre, Lukács, Althusser, Benjamin and Adorno—began to be felt. Such theoretical Marxisms were intended to renovate the British Left, which the Review’s staff believed was wallowing in the unsophisticated categories of labourism. Anderson further articulated this purpose in his 1968 essay, ‘Components of the National Culture’. The only answer to Britain’s lack of an indigenous Marxism or revolutionary theory, Anderson argued, was to introduce continental Marxist methodology in the hope that it would foster a socialist movement beyond flaccid Fabianism. The student movement inspired Anderson’s assessment of Britain’s lack of a revolutionary intellectual heritage. To Anderson, the absence of a significant student movement in late sixties’ Britain signified the hegemony of conservative attitudes towards university and society. The Left had to take some blame for this deficit in radicalism, however, since it had ‘usually been a passive spectator, at times a prisoner, rarely questioning a national inheritance that for the most part has been made against it’ (Anderson 1992: 49). The task of his work, then and thereafter, was therefore to equip the British Left with the means to question this inheritance first via students then through workers. At first it appeared that the Frankfurt School was earmarked to play a central role in this renewed socialist strategy. In the late 1960s, NLR published some of Adorno and Marcuse’s essays as part of its Western Marxist renaissance. But this enthusiasm soon turned lukewarm after 1970 when the Frankfurt School’s presence in the journal subsided. It would be wrong to conclude, however, that the British New Left then totally repudiated the Frankfurt School. After all, the journal did continue an interest in the Frankfurt School and its publishing arm, New Left Books (later Verso), was responsible for Minima Moralia’s English translation as well as a valuable volume of German Marxist debates Aesthetics and Politics (1977). Rather, the School’s value to NLR’s purpose was seen as less than that of other approaches. The journal’s editors read their continental predecessors diagnostically—evaluating the pros and cons of each thinker. A cacophony soon emerged among those who attached themselves to certain Western Marxisms over others. Naturally, each voice in the din claimed to best express the current situation. But it was Gramsci’s and Althusser’s followers who eventually spoke most loudly. This distinct tone eventually influenced the journal’s direction in the late 1960s and early 1970s and thus dictated the Frankfurt School’s reception. As Lin Chun (1993: 114) argues in her impressive history of the British New Left, NLR’s enthusiasm for most Western Marxism went little further than the studies of the 1970s: ‘apart from the work of Gramsci and, in another direction, structuralist Marxism, the western Marxist currents received little critical and creative examination among the British intellectual Left’. Nevertheless, of those convinced that their Marxism would strengthen by swimming with the Althusserian wave, there were some who hoped that Hegelian Marxism would drown in the swell (Stedman Jones 1971). In 1970, Göran Therborn’s structuralist essay, ‘The Frankfurt School’, crippled Critical Theory’s potential in Britain even before much of its work had been translated. Indeed, it seems no coincidence

7.1 New Left Review Versus the Frankfurt School

119

that the Frankfurt School’s presence in the journal waned after this essay’s appearance. Therborn was not only adroit in his understanding of the School’s thought but scathing about its political intent. His irritation at the Critical Theorists’ work was indicative of structuralist Marxism’s hostility to Lukács, Korsch and the Frankfurt School. Structural Marxism’s doyen, Louis Althusser, disliked this other Marxism. As a lifelong member of the French Communist Party (PCF), Althusser subscribed to ‘scientific’ Marxism, whereas Lukács and the Frankfurt School’s Hegelian or Weberian Marxism made science the centre of their criticisms. Of all the so-called Western Marxisms, Althusser’s variety is arguably the most orthodox in its structural approach to political and economic concerns and its distancing from the 1844 Manuscripts. Although his take on ‘late capitalism’ is often reduced to his conception of Ideological State Apparatuses, his work extends well beyond this formulation. Indeed, the texts in which he took the humanist Marxists to task, For Marx (1969) and Reading Capital (1970), display clear links between Marxism’s pre- and post-1917 expressions. Althusser never wrote on the Frankfurt School, however, and there is little written which compares the two schools of thought—although Colletti’s (1972, 1973) work comes closest. Therborn followed the logic of structural Marxism in his hatchet job. He castigated Critical Theory’s extension of an anti-scientific Marxism initiated by Georg Lukács in History and Class Consciousness. Such anti-scientism’s virulence, which crested with Dialectic of Enlightenment, amounted to a complete rejection of Marxism and a partial rejection of modernity. According to Therborn, the Frankfurt School’s theorists arrived at a paradoxical, and therefore useless, point: they were both for and against the modernity that governed their original purpose. His argument identified two key mistakes in Critical Theory’s construction. First, fascism’s rise hindered Horkheimer and Adorno’s ability to objectively assess the uniqueness of its sociopolitical moment. Their wartime belief that fascism was a form of capitalism was understandable. But to continue to argue after the war that fascism lurked beneath the surface of all rational thought was an ahistorical generalisation. Fascism had to be understood as part of a specific historical conjuncture, and any arguments to the contrary were anachronistic. Horkheimer and Adorno’s persistence with their ‘capitalism-equals-fascism’ position allowed their otherwise sophisticated critique of modernity to be filed away as Cold War totalitarian theory (Therborn 1970: 87). Second, by criticising science and technology, Horkheimer and Adorno discarded the orthodox Marxist faith in the role capitalism plays in socialism’s victory. According to Therborn, such abandon renounced any belief in the possibility of a production process governed by labourers. What many on the Left had suspected since the Frankfurt School’s inception appeared to be true: its members denied the proletariat’s centrality in changing society for the better. Of course, it was Althusser who stood behind Therborn’s line of reasoning. For Althusser, as for Marx, a person’s relationship with the material world, and hence existence, was defined through the fact, or act, of labour. The French theorist disdained anyone who resorted to a humanist (bourgeois) or idealistic belief in capitalism’s inevitable downfall. Horkheimer and Adorno were certainly not guilty of this

120

7 Dismissing Dialectic of Enlightenment Among Britain’s New Left

misconception. But they were nonetheless bourgeois because, according to Therborn, Dialectic of Enlightenment removes the proletariat from a role in acquiring the happiness promised to it under socialism. Moreover, they held a particularly individualist line. The bourgeois self’s disjuncture from itself was central to their argument. In maintaining this argument, its authors sidestepped the material basis of the dialectical process Marx outlined: the mode of production and the division of labour. What is worse, Therborn contended, the gap left by this removal is replaced with nothing more than a faint hope for capitalism’s future negation. The lack of a materialist programme explaining how this negativity, or a negative revolutionary subject, could be attained meant Critical Theory amounted to little more than fatalism (Therborn 1970). Such a critique of Horkheimer and Adorno recurred in ensuing years, but Therborn’s essay was one of the first works in English to chart the shifting nature of the Frankfurt School and its Marxist inadequacies.

7.2 Skipping Frankfurt But Therborn’s critique and NLR’s failure to sponsor the Frankfurt School does not completely explain why British scholars failed to take up Critical Theory. Other factors contributed to the School’s British malaise. One explanation may lie, once again, in its members’ emigration to the United States. Adorno’s brief stint as a student at Oxford University is illustrative here. In essence, Adorno’s discontent came down to the clichéd distinction between British positivist philosophy and European speculative philosophy. This continental divide also dictated the lack of enthusiasm for the Frankfurt School’s work in Britain. Perry Anderson explained this British resistance to European thought in his famous ‘Components of a National Culture’. The German, or Austrian, intellectual exiles that chose to settle in Britain were almost completely ‘White’ in their political outlook. The German ‘Reds’, by contrast, almost all decided that America was the better option. While Horkheimer and Adorno were by no means communists, they nevertheless went with the Red flow rather than the White. ‘The German emigration’, Anderson (1992: 62) argued, ‘coming from a philosophical culture distinct from the parish-pump positivism of interbellum Vienna, generally avoided England’. From this bifurcation of European intellectuals, Britain received positivists like Namier and Popper as well as an altogether different Frankfurt School, that of sociologist Karl Mannheim, whose methods were compatible with the empirical traditions of the United Kingdom. The later positivist dispute, in 1961, or Positivismusstreit, between Adorno and Popper, who settled in New Zealand and then Britain during the war, encapsulates this red-and-white distinction. The dispute, which preceded any English knowledge of the Frankfurt School, captured an entrenched British hostility to what Popper saw as its Hegelian obscurantism (Theodor et al. 1976). In this sense, Popper’s criticism was not that different from Therborn’s. Indeed, Popper even berated the Frankfurt School’s writings for betraying Marx’s promise for a better future. As Popper put it, ‘Horkheimer rejects, without argument and in defiance of historical facts, the possibility of reforming our

7.2 Skipping Frankfurt

121

so-called social systems. This amounts to saying: let the present generation suffer and perish, for all we can do is expose the ugliness of the world we live in and heap insults on our oppressors, the “bourgeoisie.” This is the so-called Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School’ (Popper 1984: 169). Such hostility forestalled Critical Theory’s popularity. Thus, in contrast to the Institute’s American inroads, Britain lacked a formal introduction to both the Frankfurt School itself (in the 1940s) and its German Idealist intellectual heritage.1 As a result, when Critical Theory appeared in New Left Review it had few intellectual reserves on which it could draw. Applying another aspect of Anderson’s ‘Components’ reveals a further reason for the British Marxists’ subdued response to the Frankfurt School. Anderson’s central argument was that the British Left’s idiosyncrasies separate it from any comparable European movement. Most obviously, Britain lacked an indigenous version of Western Marxist versatility. Britain’s left-wing tradition was typically rigid in its understanding and applications of socialist politics. Its socialist origins were still more in line with the Fabians than Marx, and the tendency was towards reform rather than revolution. It was this lack of Marxist theory that inspired NLR’s promulgation of Western Marxism. Britain’s communist and social democratic traditions were seen as lacking the ability to challenge capitalism’s post-war streamlined form. However, the particularity of British socialism also explains why Gramsci and Althusser captured the British New Left’s hearts and minds. Both thinkers retained a communist orthodoxy which resonated with the existing Labourist traditions in the United Kingdom. Neither were wholly philosophical in approach, and both paid attention to capitalism’s material basis (and superstructure) and Marx’s revolutionary theory. Of all Western Marxist thought, Gramsci and Althusser’s contributions were the most easily co-opted by British Leftists (Harris 1992; Steele 1999). The Frankfurt School, on the other hand, offered no such obvious continuation of labour politics. In the case of Horkheimer and Adorno, class and revolution were all but absent from their work. The only identifying feature of their Marxism was their anti-capitalist, dialectical reasoning. Thus the British New Left, when faced with the choice of which Western Marxists to follow, chose those seemingly closest to Marx’s original thought. That is not to say that the British New Left misunderstood Critical Theory, nor that they were vulgar materialists (in fact, nothing could be further from the truth as contributors to New Left Review were some of the savviest interpreters of the 1970s theoretical inundation). Rather it is to say that in the unpacking of the Western Marxist treasure trove, it was decided that Frankfurt School’s Marxist value was modest (New Left Review 1977). A third reason for Critical Theory’s failure to crystallise with the British New Left follows from this point. The process of ‘Westernising’ British Marxism included an articulation of capitalism’s cultural manifestations. That this expression occurred through Althusserian or Gramscian prisms gave the British Left’s analysis a specific approach to cultural ideology. As a result, the New Left had little time for the Frankfurt 1 There

was a British school of Hegelians—exemplified by the work of T. H. Green and F. H. Bradley—but its influence was small compared to the dominance of the local philosophical tradition. Moreover, it did not significantly articulate itself to any Marxist reading of Hegel (Robbins 1982).

122

7 Dismissing Dialectic of Enlightenment Among Britain’s New Left

School’s cultural criticism because it had little room for its theories. The Gramsci– Althusser alliance in cultural criticism already filled the gap into which the Frankfurt School could have slotted (Therborn 1970: 92). A useful point of departure for this analysis is Dennis Dworkin’s Cultural Marxism in Post-War Britain (1997). In the text’s introduction, Dworkin compares and contrasts the two schools of thought. ‘British cultural Marxism’, Dworkin argued, shares three common themes with the Frankfurt School: both were shaped by the failure of the revolutionary movements in the West; both saw themselves as philosophical alternatives to Marxist economism and Leninist vanguardism; and both stressed the autonomy of culture and ideology in social life. Conversely, the two schools are at odds with each other over issues of mass culture, praxis and disciplinary origins: where the Frankfurt School viewed mass culture as ‘debased mass entertainments of the culture industry’, the British New Left saw culture as a more contradictory, and potentially subversive, phenomena; where the Frankfurt School saw critical thought as a form of revolutionary practice, the New Left wrestled to link theory and practice; and where the Frankfurt School looked to philosophy, the British cultural Marxists relied on history and literary and cultural theory (Dworkin 1997: 4–7).

7.3 Cultural Marxist Parallelism All of these points are strikingly relevant. Yet, Dworkin did not flesh out his comparison. He used the Frankfurt School as a tool to define British cultural Marxism—a curious arrangement, especially given the Frankfurt School’s lack of effect in Britain. Such an incomplete comparison ultimately decreases its effectiveness. The similarities he points to are neutered by the differences. For example, culture’s apparent autonomy is undermined by the Frankfurt School’s description of the culture industry. Moreover, there is a tension in Dworkin’s characterisation of the New Left. His point about the British New Left embracing mass culture is contentious since culture was a subject that caused many divisions within British New Left, specifically in relation to its major scion, Cultural Studies (Steele 1997). Despite these problems, the comparison remains a useful construction. Its conclusion deems that the ‘British cultural Marxists’ already had much of the theory that the Frankfurt School offered them. Put simply, the two schools appear to run parallel to each other and such parallelism precludes the need for overlap. The implicit argument is that their similarities and their differences prevented any cogent articulation of one with the other. On the one hand, Cultural Studies’ rise—in its broadest sense—took up the space which could have been afforded to the Frankfurt School. On the other hand, the Frankfurt School’s politics seemed at odds with some of the New Left’s imperatives. In this sense, if Frederic Jameson’s remark that Raymond Williams’s cultural materialism outstripped Adorno’s cultural criticism is true, there seems little need for a large presence from Adorno or other Frankfurt theorists in British cultural Marxism (Jameson 1990: 45). Likewise, the importance the British Left placed on a clearly explained relationship between theory and practice appeared to prevent any

7.3 Cultural Marxist Parallelism

123

reconciliation between the two schools. The Frankfurt School’s speculative nature, its determination by the Nazi era and, above all, its apparent ahistoricism in texts like Dialectic of Enlightenment did little to endear it to a British New Left seeking a more effective Marxism (Nairn 1977: 359). Still, the Frankfurt tradition was not completely reviled. Significant figures in the British New Left—old and new—sought inspiration from its thinkers. In the late 1970s, for instance, Williams was asked in an interview whether he felt any affinity with the Frankfurtian belief that all progress is also regression. ‘No’, Williams replied, ‘I entirely accept the practice of distinguishing the positive and negative effects, the achievements and the failures of any social order, and of historically tracing the processes whereby positives becomes negatives over time, as one order is threatened or succeeded by another—a practice that is best represented by Marxism, more than any other system of historical analysis’ (Williams 1979). However, Raymond Williams’s late works reveal the beginnings of an engagement with the Frankfurt School via his interest in modernist politics. Williams claimed that the ‘practice of the early Frankfurt School in Germany… had genuinely found, though on its own distinctive base—radically influenced by psychoanalysis—new and penetrating methods of formal historical analysis’ (Williams 1989). Indeed, one thing the British New Left shared with Horkheimer and Adorno was an inspiration from Benjamin’s philosophy of history. Benjamin’s aura—his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’—suffused texts released by New Left Books (later Verso) in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The historical bases of the British New Left found the work exhilarating as it defended historical materialism from the factfinding of historicism. By the late 1970s, works abounded with references to the text. For example, Terry Eagleton (1981) wrote one of the first full-length English texts on the Benjamin; Benedict Anderson used Benjamin as a reference point for time in his now canonical Imagined Communities (1983); and Tom Nairn (1977) invoked Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’ in the conclusion to his celebrated essay on nationalism’s two faces, ‘The Modern Janus’. Nairn’s use of Benjamin is unique in that Adorno stands alongside his friend rather than against him. In ‘The Modern Janus’, Nairn argued that humanity’s failure to fulfil the ideals of the Enlightenment ‘has always engendered pessimism in the West, as well as regurgitations of Hegel and Spinoza. These philosophies of defeat and anguish increasingly informed western Marxism after the First World War. Their most impressive and sophisticated formulation was of course that given by the Frankfurt School. Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia is the masterpiece of this dark intelligence: with its reflections on life in the United States, it also provides the most interesting connection with the great revival that Frankfurtism is now enjoying there. But the single most extraordinary image of their world view … was Walter Benjamin’s angel of history’ (Nairn 1977: 359). Overall, then, the Frankfurt School’s history in Britain is quite different from its history in the United States. This difference is indicative of the New Left’s disjointed nature. The Marxist intellectuals responsible for examining Critical Theory, namely, those associated with New Left Review, soon became bored with its apparently apolitical philosophy and aestheticism. Beyond New Left Review, those in Britain who wrote on the Frankfurt School’s ideas were scarce. When works did appear, they

124

7 Dismissing Dialectic of Enlightenment Among Britain’s New Left

often arrived at the same conclusion as Göran Therborn: Critical Theory was limiting rather than liberating. Not even the increasing attention to culture as a social determinant turned attention to the Frankfurt School’s work. A combination of NLR’s Althusserian dominance, British philosophical anti-continentalism and a flooded seventies intellectual ‘market’ put paid to Critical Theory’s revival in the UK. The British Marxists, and some non-Marxists too, seemed to agree with the Italian Marxist Lucio Colletti (1973: 175) when he declared that the theorists of the Frankfurt School ‘are the most conspicuous example of the extreme confusion that can be reached by mistaking the romantic critique of intellect and science for a socio-historical critique of capitalism’. Thus, the Frankfurt School’s reception in Britain, when compared to its appeal in the United States, was therefore relatively unproductive. There is a parallel here with the comparative history of socialism in these nations. Socialism’s apparent failure in America, the most advanced capitalist state, has long been a source of puzzlement for scholars (Hansen 1985). The strong labour traditions of the UK, by contrast, have given historians much to think and write about. Such a tradition’s persistence would not require the sort of ‘romantic critique of intellect and science’ that Horkheimer and Adorno offered. Even socialist intellectuals, like those at NLR, who were initially attracted to the Frankfurt School did not see much hope for their movement in its cerebral neo-Marxism. Why turn to a despairing critique when the possibility of socialist revolution, in many people’s minds, continued to be a reality up until at least the late 1970s? Although NLR’s theoretics had arguably alienated many workers from reading its often difficult pages, the editorial board remained committed to the proletariats’ role in social change well into the 1990s and, arguably, still does since its ‘renewal’ in 2000 (Anderson 2000).

7.4 Beyond the British New Left But what of Dialectic of Enlightenment and the Frankfurt School in Britain beyond the New Left? There is no scope here to consider this in detail. Suffice it say that if the attitude of the British New Left was tepid, at best, there was distinct lack of engagement with Critical Theory beyond the NLR’s pages. To be sure, the growth of Cultural Studies as an intellectual movement and discipline, which has largely British origins in the Birmingham School, led to intersections with Horkheimer and Adorno’s thought. These connections, which are discussed in Chap. 8, were generally hostile to the patrician and totalising logic of Dialectic of Enlightenment’s ‘Culture Industry’ chapter. Cultural Studies’ doyen, Stuart Hall, himself a member of the first New Left, generally diverged from the New Left under Anderson et al., in spite of his enthusiasm for Marx. When it came to the Frankfurt School, however, Hall shared a generally avoidant stance. This may have been due to foundational study within the Birmingham School’s Centre for Cultural Studies (CCS)—further discussed in Chap. 8—by Phil Slater (1974). Slater’s was the only text to come out of the CCS on Critical Theory—he

7.4 Beyond the British New Left

125

later expanded it into a book-length study (Slater 1977) that was controversially received on the other side of the Atlantic (see Jacoby 1977; Plaut 1977; Slater 1977). The initial piece emerged after 3 years researching the translated and untranslated texts of the Frankfurt School; Slater concluded that the Frankfurt School’s ‘aesthetic’ concerns, especially Adorno’s, were politically redundant because they did not consider the theory–praxis nexus. Slater found little in Critical Theory’s aestheticism that came close to the proletarian or revolutionary assessments of art professed by Lenin, Trotsky, Lukács and Brecht. He castigated Horkheimer and Adorno for turning away from such Marxist orthodoxies. Their ‘undialectical’ analyses of the culture industries failed to consider the possibility of ‘non-manipulative even critical employment of those means of communication’ (Slater 1974: 187). This oversight not only betrayed the working classes, it neglected the culture industry’s counter-hegemonic potential. That is, the Frankfurt School failed to see what the Birmingham School was supposedly beginning to realise: that the culture industry’s means of production could be harnessed to serve proletarian revolution. The Frankfurt School lacked the critical aesthetic praxis that was, for Slater, propagated by various Marxisms— most notably Benjamin’s pro-communist (or ‘Brechtian’) works—which would, in turn, strengthen the will of the masses. Instead, Horkheimer and Adorno remained enamoured with the ‘potential’ of art to provide ‘negation’. This radicalism ultimately translated into the promotion of the bourgeois avant-garde. As a result, Slater rejected Critical Theory’s political efficacy—an attitude summed up in the belief that ‘Adorno’s theory loses all significance for concrete critical aesthetic praxis’ (Slater 1974: 206). Others’ significant figures proximate to the New Left’s cliquishness engaged with Frankfurt School directly. But these tended to be short interventions rather than sustained enthusiasm or critique. An early piece in the New Statesman by moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre concluded that the Frankfurt School ‘embraced a pessimism of the most drastic kind’ (1973: 568). Others, like sociologists Richard Kilminster (1979) and Paul Connerton (1980), for instance, felt Critical Theory was limited work in any social or theoretical transformation of modernity. Two other examples of engagement are worth fleshing out—partly because their conclusions differed from each other, but also because they represent significant figures in the history of British humanities and social science in the late twentieth century. The first figure is Gillian Rose. Rose’s early work certainly made her a figure of the political left, or indeed ‘critical Marxism’ (Gorman 2001: 105), but her own scholarly proclivities focused on the questions raised by European continental thought for contemporary philosophy. As such, she stood out in a British philosophical tradition which, as New Left Review bemoaned, had a cold attitude to European metaphysical influence. In this sense, Rose was part of a new guard of British philosophers who were keen to reconnect British scholarly discussion with what was happening in Europe as it had been in the time of Hume. Some philosophers, many of whom were associated with NLR, established a new journal in 1972, Radical Philosophy, which incorporated Marxist, anarchist and postmodernist approaches to philosophy, with particular attention to Critical Theory. Other independent theorists in Britain did find some interest in the Frankfurt School’s work. The centre of this influence

126

7 Dismissing Dialectic of Enlightenment Among Britain’s New Left

was Essex University where other Critical Theory scholars—like Peter Dews, J. M. Bernstein and Simon Jarvis—all worked for a time. For Rose, this meant engaging with German Idealism and, consequently, confrontation with the phenomenological tradition. This clash, illustrated by Rose’s later complaints about Heidegger and Derrida, came largely from her earlier affiliations with Adorno’s work. That is to say, Rose produced a doctoral thesis on Adorno’s work—under the supervision of Lezsek Kolakowksi, himself no fan of Critical Theory (see Kolakowski 1968)—that eventually appeared in 1978 as The Melancholy Science: And Introduction to the Work of Theodor W. Adorno. In this work, Rose treated Adorno’s thought as a corrective to not only a stagnant and exclusive British philosophical culture, but also sanguine projections of progress espoused by liberalism and socialism alike. Within these attitudes Rose regarded, in line with Adorno, contemporary sociology’s scientism as complicit with a destructive progressive mentality that believed conceptual thought was equivalent to the world it sought to understand. This led to a will to control nature rather than be a part of it. Understanding this perspective meant that Rose trailed through the German philosophical and sociological tradition that preceded and influenced the Frankfurt Schools works. Such a survey was important not only to contextualise Adorno’s thought, but to show British audiences that there were other lineages to consider. For Rose, the liberal complacency of British—or Anglophone—philosophical thought failed to consider how human domination of nature, including of humans, was deleterious. Moreover, the complicity of scientific rationality within this process was dismissed in favour of inevitable progress. The German Idealist tradition from Critical Theory had departed, and arguably continued, offered a possible corrective to this way of thinking. Rose urgently presented alternatives, though not easy solutions. More specifically, Rose argued that Horkheimer and Adorno’s book illustrated the ‘difficulty of linking a general theory of domination of nature with a theory of a specific kind of society’ (Rose 1978: 34). They did so with the mobilisation of the reification of humans. But the problem for those seeking to understand their work is the hyperbole within their discussion. Conceptions of ‘total reification’ or ‘the end of the individual’ were actually means through which the potential for other ways of living—socially and politically—because they purported to close a system off from alternatives. In this sense, Rose seized upon the radicalism of Horkheimer and Adorno’s text in a way that the New Leftists had overlooked. She believed they were ‘dramatising these ideas, presenting them as if they were absolutely and literally true, in order to undermine them more effectively’ (Rose 1978: 34). In this sense, Rose was one of the few British thinkers who turned to Adorno to understand her late-twentieth-century context. She saw in Horkheimer and Adorno’s text a means of understanding how the supposedly rational explanations of the world contained within them the seeds, and sometimes the fruits, of oppression. Moreover, in seeking to comprehend this fact, the humanities and social sciences had reverted back to the forms of thinking they were seeking to overturn. For Rose this insight was Horkheimer and Adorno’s radical critique. The belief that ‘intellectual and social transformation can only be effective if the power of traditions is conceded, was always the measure of the radicalism of Adorno and the Frankfurt School and

7.4 Beyond the British New Left

127

not their equivocation’ (Rose 1978: 180). This position was quite different from earlier dismissals of Critical Theory’s import among member of the New Left. But this initial introduction of Adorno led to reconstructing his approach, and his work with Horkheimer, in her subsequent reconstruction Marxism’s Hegelian foundations, which was in keeping with ‘Western’ its tradition (Rose 1981) and could be own critique of post-structuralism’s ‘self-denying ordinance’ (Rose 1984: 1). The other British figure worth considering for their engagement with Critical Theory is T. B. Bottomore whose final books explored the Frankfurt School’s relevance to the future of sociology. From the mid-1950s, Bottomore produced a significant body of work on sociology, especially its theoretical understanding of and application in society. His work worked within a Marxist frame that, much like his comrades in the first New Left, departed from the orthodoxies of the Second and Third Internationals. And, what’s more, Bottomore’s works were widely read as a form of public sociology, published by popular press, in which Marxism was explained in ways beyond simplification and scaremongering. Class was still of utmost importance, as was political economy, but its cultural manifestations were more nuanced than earlier historical materialism could allow. Still, his works were also keen to dispel false turns and concession to capital within the sociological enterprise (Bottomore 1984). Towards the end of his career, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he considered the new zeal for continental social theory post-1960s Britain as something necessary to engage—not only to whet his own thought but the larger social and political project to which he was committed. This attitude led to a book-length consideration of the Frankfurt School during the early 1980s: The Frankfurt School and Its Critics (1984). Of all the theories floating around at the time, Bottomore saw the Frankfurt School’s potential as a rich corrective to the cultural deficiencies of Marxist thought. Much like Williams, Bottomore understood how Critical Theory engaged ideas around production and consumption in novel ways that could assist with an improved social analysis. And yet, Bottomore’s conclusions, unlike Rose’s, were far from supportive of what he saw as Critical Theory’s overall position of resignation. Horkheimer and Adorno were the main culprits. With Dialectic of Englightenment, as well as Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution (1941), Critical Theory jettisoned its Marxist foundations without ‘embarking upon a systematic critical confrontation with it’ (Bottomore 1984: 24). Ultimately for Bottomore, Horkheimer and Adorno’s position, as well as other Frankfurt School works, contained a rational critique of reason that was only useful to a point. Its implications stymied any possibilities of political action in favour of human liberation because human’s propensity for domination was regarded as irreversible. This logic underpinned Horkheimer and Adorno’s thought, according to Bottomore, and therefore limited the application of the Frankfurt School to his own radical sociological project. Far from seeing them as conservative critics, Bottomore, much like Therborn and others within Britain’s second New Left, felt Critical Theory had blown its potential for critical praxis. This was, he conceded, understandable given devastating times in which they wrote. But too much was gained by modernity within those times, Bottomore argued, for its promise to be completely vanquished.

128

7 Dismissing Dialectic of Enlightenment Among Britain’s New Left

The School’s members, to his mind, ignored historical and economics, approach to their detriment. Since class conflict remained the central game for sociological analysis, ‘The Frankfurt School, in its original form’, Bottomore concluded, ‘is dead’ (1984: 76). Bottomore’s British Marxist appraisal of the Frankfurt School was not dissimilar from that at New Left Review: interesting, but not very practical. During the 1980s onwards, NLR’s mentions of Critical Theory and Dialectic of Enlightenment appeared sparingly. However, with the end of communism’s disastrous experiment in Europe and the replacement of social democracy with neoliberal governance, Horkheimer and Adorno’s own political resignation began to seem more attractive to the vestiges of the British New Left. It is worth concluding the chapter on this ironical note. By the 1990s, the grouping had undergone its own fracturing, but a core remained involved in the editorship of NLR and continued to oversee the publication of social theory at Verso. What emerged during this time of the left defeat’s and capitalism’s ongoing triumph, especially via postmodern culture, was a renewed combination of ideologiekritik and kulturkritik in the face of limited, or apparently no, political alternatives for the world at the end of history. A number of works captured this attitude, not least those of Frederic Jameson, the American Marxist literary theorist and political philosopher whose prolific output often appeared in the British New Left’s journal and publishing house (see Jameson 1990). But it is worth returning to Perry Anderson’s thinking at the end of the century to see how much Critical Theory seemed the only option for a disconsolate left. Anderson’s Origins of Postmodernity (1998) distilled much of the attitudes at the time and, ironically, ended up sounding remarkably like Horkheimer and Adorno in his conclusions. The irony was that Anderson, still the key figure among the remaining New Leftists, had expressed a disdain for the Frankfurt scholars’ political retreat during the 1970s in his work on Western Marxism (Anderson 1976). By the end of the 1990s, Anderson’s formidable understanding of the times led him to reconsider, if not necessarily concede, his earlier position. Jameson’s production mill offered an opportunity for insightful reflection. Anderson was to write a short introduction to the Jameson’s The Cultural Turn (1998) but he ended up writing a short book. In this work, Origins of Postmodernity, Anderson outlined a historical description of the so-called postmodern times—a historical categorisation with which he had little truck—and also indicted, much as he had elsewhere (Anderson 1984), the post-structuralist turn that had helped to theorise this moment. Indeed, even Habermas, who had been regarded as something of a hope against postmodernism inflation of linguistic interpretation (Anderson 1984), had succumbed to it in his own communicative solution. Instead, the political possibilities contained within cultural production were neutered by their inherent serving of capitalist interests. The then-new world of cyberspace, itself an invention of the military–financial consociation, was emblematic of this moment and the future to come. Anderson pointed to the work of his fellow travellers for critiques of this new development in capitalism’s cultural logic. Jameson was the key figure, but so too Julian Stallabrass, an art historian and critic, who had produced a text a year earlier,

7.4 Beyond the British New Left

129

Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture (1996), that berated the somnambulistic but insatiable consumption of culture industry goods. Stallabrass drew much from Critical Theory in this study of late-twentieth-century culture and technology. What he quaintly called cyberspace, for example, is criticised as an exemplar of Horkheimer and Adorno’s famous claim that Enlightenment is totalitarian. ‘The invention of cyberspace’, Stallabrass (1996: 76) contended, ‘is, then, the attempt to create a world where to perceive is the same as to understand, where “objects” are entirely adequate to their concepts, and are even, through their dematerialization, identical with them… So technophiliac enthusiasts are stitching up a totalizing, brave new world based on an Enlightenment paradigm but defended by postmodern theory. Adorno, and others following him, have been much concerned to argue that there is a negative and liberatory charge in objects exceeding their concepts. It is this which cyberspace promises to abolish’. For Anderson, Stallabrass’s disquisition in Gargantua was so in line with Dialectic of Enlightenment that it fulfilled Frederic Jameson’s call ‘for a sequel to Horkheimer and Adorno’s “Culture Industry”, to address subsequent forms of manipulation’ (Anderson 1998). Such a suggestion does not mean that the British New Left had completely reconciled itself with Horkheimer and Adorno, however. In historical terms, this New Left, whether it was the first or second incarnation, had weakened by this point, which was in keeping with the social and political times. It was a trajectory not dissimilar to the Frankfurt School. Indeed, the relaunch of NLR in 2000 spoke of a shared political outlook with the German scholars: resignation warmed by hopefulness (Anderson 2000). Within those new pages, Frankfurt Critical Theory continued to appear and so too works within its publishing house. But as with those associated with Telos across the Atlantic, outlined in the next chapter, they remained the ‘messages in a bottle’ that Horkheimer and Adorno conceded they would be during a period when all political affiliations—especially along the left-to-right spectrum—were upturned.

7.5 Conclusion Much like Adorno’s own opinion of the Oxbridge circumstances in which he found himself during the 1930s, the British New Left’s reception of the Frankfurt School’s is best described as lukewarm. Note that the Oxbridge-educated members of the British New Left were any fans of those institutions of ruling-class reproduction. In spite of significant patrician origins, the New Left was as out of step with British philosophical and political traditions as Adorno. Certainly, there were elements of the Critical Theory tradition that resonated with the groups’ interest in cultural theory influence by reconstructed Marxist thought. Indeed, cultural criticism was regarded as the Frankfurt School’s main strength. But Horkheimer and Adorno’s dialectical analysis—with its focus on domination and with little hope for a movement beyond this historical cycle—stood at odds with the Marxist orthodoxies retained by the New Left’s main figures, who found solace instead in the Bolshevism inherent in Gramsci’s inspirational writings and the scientism of revolutionary inevitability in

130

7 Dismissing Dialectic of Enlightenment Among Britain’s New Left

Althusser. In contrast to Telos, which built a refuge for grad school contrarians within the Critical Theory tradition, New Left Review continued to push identify itself as a socialist journal with hopes for future transformation. Its contributors retained a faith in revolutionary future that could be cultivated through radical critique and affiliation with left-wing popular movements throughout the globe—if not Soviet communism directly then at least in anti-imperialist agitations. New Left Review’s modus operandi was to catalogue and survey intellectual ideas working within the Marxist tradition, especially so-called Western Marxism, and try them on for size in the late-twentiethcentury context. This approach was apropos of the revising historical materialist tradition in which it worked, but it also resulted in capriciousness and abstraction that did little to bring about the revolution hoped for, especially among workers of the world. For this reason, the second British New Left and the Frankfurt School shared much in common: high on insight, low on praxis. Abstruseness was a complaint both groups continually heard from critics on the left. The French traditions that inspired the former’s intellectualism, with continued connections to the PCF, were not readily transferable to the British context. And likewise, the German working-class radicalism of the 1930s was something from which Horkheimer’s school of social philosophy stood at a distance, despite sympathies and affiliations, and continued to do so after the war. Indeed, by the 1980s, the faith of some in the British New Left in Benjamin’s angel of history meant that a position of hopeful resignation in the face of capitalist, or just plain human, plundering of the earth was shared with Horkheimer and Adorno. In spite of reservations about Critical Theory’s political applicability, the British New Left certainly retained a belief in its theoretical import, as evidenced by its continued publication of Frankfurt School works, into the 1990s and beyond. By then, Therborn’s earlier critique still retained currency, but the possibility of barricades in the 1968 was becoming less and less likely as Thatcherism took hold and late Cold War police states transformed into the 1990s free-market industries. The irony then, given the dismissal of Critical Theory, was that by the end of the century, the British New Left had was looked much like the Frankfurt School during the 1940s—knowingly defeated. Arguably, this position, which did not revert to rightist ideas of the type Piccone was espousing at Telos, smarted even more as the critical tradition of the left turned its attention to postmodernism as either a cultural moment for populist celebration or an intellectual posture of endless critique without justice.

References Althusser, L. (1969). For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books. Anderson, P. (1984). In the tracks of historical materialism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Anderson, P. (1998). The origins of postmodernity. London: Verso. Anderson. (2000). Renewals. New Left Review, 1, 5–24. Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.

References

131

Anderson, P. (1968). Components of the national culture. New Left Review, 50, 3–57. Anderson, P. (1976). Considerations on western Marxism. London: New Left Books. Anderson, P. (1992). English questions. London: Verso. Bottomore, T. B. (1984a). Sociology and socialism. New York: St Martin’s Press. Bottomore, T. (1984b). The Frankfurt School and its critics. London: Routledge. Chun, L. (1993). The British new Left. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Claussen, D. (2008). Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge MA: Bellknap Press. Colletti, L. (1972). Rousseau to Lenin: Studies in ideology and society. Trans. John Merringer and Judith White. London: New Left Books. Colletti, L. (1973). Hegel and Marxism. Trans. Lawrence Garner. London: New Left Books. Connerton, P. (1980). The tragedy of enlightenment: An essay on the Frankfurt School. London: Cambridge University Press. Davis, M. (2006). The Marxism of the British new left. Journal of Political Ideologies, 11(3), 335–358. Dworkin, D. (1997). Cultural Marxism in post-war Britain: History, the new left, and the origins of cultural studies, Durham, pp. 4–7. Eagleton, T. (1981). Walter Benjamin, or, towards a revolutionary criticism. London: Verso. Gareth Stedman Jones. (1971). The marxism of the early Lukács: an evaluation. New Left Review, 70, 27–64. Gorman, T. (2001). Gillian Rose and the project of a critical Marxism. Radical philosophy, 10, 25–36. Hansen, F. R. (1985). The breakdown of capitalism: A history of the idea in Western Marxism, 1883–1983. London: Routledge. Harris, D. (1992). From class struggle to the politics of pleasure: The effects of Gramscianism on cultural studies. London: Routledge. Jacoby, R. (1977a). ‘Review essay: Phil Slater, origin and significance of the Frankfurt School: A Marxist perspective. Telos, 31, 198–202. Jacoby, R. (1977b). Reply to Slater and Plaut. Telos, 33, 157–158. Jameson, F. (1990). Late marxism: Adorno, or the persistence of the dialectic. London: Verso. Jameson, F. (1998). The Cultural turn: Selected writings on the postmodern, 1983–1998. London: Verso. Kenny, M. 1(995). The first new left. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Kilminster, R. (1979). Praxis and method: A sociological dialogue with lukacs, Gramsci and the early Frankfurt School. London: Routledge. Kolakowski, L. (1968). Main currents of Marxism: Its origins, growth and dissolution (Vol. 3). Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacIntyre, A. (1973). Pessimists of the left. New statesman. 86, 567–568. Müller-Doohm, S. (2005). Adorno: A biography. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Polity. Nairn, T. (1977). The break-up of Britain. London: New Left Books. New Left Review (Ed.). (1977). Western Marxism: A critical reader, London. Plaut, T. C. L. (1977). On slating slater. Telos, 33, 155–157. Popper, K. (1984). The Frankfurt school: An autobiographical note. In J. Marcus & Z. Tar (Eds.), Foundations of the Frankfurt school of social research (pp. 167–172). New Brunswick: Transaction. Robbins, P. (1982). The British Hegelians, 1875–1925. New York: Garland. Rose, G. (1978). The melancholy science: An introduction to the thought of theodor W. Adorno. London: Macmillan. Rose, G. (1981). Hegel contra sociology. London: Althone Press. Rose, G. (1984). Dialectic of Nihilism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Oxford. Slater, P. (1974). The aesthetic theory of the Frankfurt School. Working Papers in Cultural Studies and Theory, 6, 172–211.

132

7 Dismissing Dialectic of Enlightenment Among Britain’s New Left

Slater, P. (1977a). Origins and significance of the Frankfurt School: A Marxist perspective. London: Routledge. Slater, P. (1977b). The ideological significance of a critique of the Frankfurt School in Britain. Telos, 33, 152–155. Stallabrass, J. (1996). Gargantua: Manufactured mass culture. London: Verso. Steele, T. (1997). The emergence of cultural studies 1945–1965: Cultural politics, adult education and the English question. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Steele, T. (1999). Hey Jimmy! The Legacy of Gramsci in British Cultural Politics. In G. Andrews, et al. (Eds.), New left, new right and beyond: Taking the sixties seriously (pp. 26–41). Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Theodor W. A. et al. (1976). The positivist dispute in German sociology. Trans. Glyn Adley and David Frisby. London: Heinemann. Therborn, G. (1970). The Frankfurt School. New Left Review., 63, 65–96. Thompson, E. P. (1978). The poverty of theory and other essays. London: Merlin. Williams, R. (1979). Politics and letters: Interviews with new left review. London: Verso. Williams, R. (1989). The politics of modernism: Against the new conformists. London: Verso. Woodhams, S. (2001). History in the making: Raymond Williams, Edward Thompson and Radical intellectuals 1936–1956. London: Merlin.

Chapter 8

Reconciling Dialectic of Enlightenment with Postmodernism

The liquidation of tragedy confirms the abolition of the individual. Horkheimer and Adorno

Of all the theoretical positions that arose from the 1970s left-wing academic upsurge, none caused more debate than postmodernism. This nebulous term was propagated, if not invented, by Anglophone scholars who identified with the critiques of reason expounded by French intellectuals such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard. Just as Critical Theory had its representative supporters in the English-speaking world, so too did these radical philosophers. The French thinkers were expediently grouped under a manageable rubric—post-structuralism—which obscured key differences between them. It was a misnomer of convenience and more inaccurate than the Frankfurt School’s grouping which at least had grown out of a single institute. This title soon became distended to accommodate other avantgarde cultural theories, most notably from art and architecture, in the same basket. The result was a postmodernism: a theory of theories which contended that social structures were open-ended domains in which individuals were constantly created and recreated through linguistic events and/or power struggles. Writing against this trend, Marxist critic Aijaz Ahmad argued that the subsequent academic obsession with postmodernism’s novelty can be read in two distinct ways. The propagation of what is called ‘theory’ as a discipline unto itself is both the embodiment and the outcome of the post-sixties academic Left whose enterprise multiplied interpretations of society. Yet, it also represented political dissent’s domestication. According to Ahmad (1992: 1–2), an obsession with theory managed, among other things, to ‘displace an activist culture with a textual culture … and to reformulate in a postmodernist direction questions which had previously been associated with a broadly Marxist politics—whether communist, or social democratic, or inspired by some other strand in the labour movements around the globe’. As has been argued in preceding chapters, Dialectic of Enlightenment’s Anglophone reception was concomitant with and, to some extent, complicit with this movement in the English-speaking world. Both post-structuralism and Critical Theory appeared © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 H. Prosser, Dialectic of Enlightenment in the Anglosphere, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3521-5_8

133

134

8 Reconciling Dialectic of Enlightenment with Postmodernism

on the scene at a time when the intellectual Left was abandoning its traditional solidarity with the working class for abstract or niche matters. If the Frankfurt School made this move during the 1940s, the French post-structuralists did so in the 1970s, and much of the Anglo-American Left followed suit in the 1980s. Given this theoretical turn, the Frankfurt School can be regarded as paving the way to postmodern thought. If sixties radicals’ penchant for Horkheimer and Adorno’s gloomy social analyses was an indicator of the Zeitgeist, then French poststructuralism’s appeal was predictable. Indeed, the two theories’ intersection resulted in postmodern readings of Critical Theory which placed it in the same anti-rational boat as post-structuralism (Schnädelbach 1999). As Heller (1984/85: 145) remarked, with postmodernism’s advent—for her January 1968—Adorno, Lukács, Goldmann and Bloch ‘ended up on the same side of the proverbial barricade’ against it. This coupling was easily achieved since there are certainly clear parallels between Horkheimer and Adorno’s theoretical concerns and those expressed by postmodernism’s advocates: Dialectic of Enlightenment’s focus on bourgeois subjectivity replicates the postmodern critique of this self-identity and its fleeting, over-determined nature; Horkheimer and Adorno’s apparent shift away from Marxism is akin to postmodern warnings against the totalising effects of grand historical narratives; and postmodernism’s affinity with Nietzsche, often used to fill the gap left by historical materialism, is also reminiscent of Horkheimer and Adorno’s own Nietzschean proclivities. Underlying all of these similarities is, of course, a shared critique of modernity and reason: an assumption that rational concepts are ultimately dominating. It seems as though the schools’ similarities are unquestionable. If the dialectic of enlightenment is a cycle of perceived emancipation and actual domination with little hope for the former, then postmodernism is a logical partner in Critical Theory’s assessment of modernity. As a result of this logic, at the time, during the 1980s and 1990s, contemporary commentators appropriated Horkheimer and Adorno’s thesis to support adherence to a variety of postmodernism’s key thinkers. As an academic moniker, as well as a commercial one, Critical Theory was no longer a term reserved for Frankfurt thinking, or even an affiliation with its Marxist origins (Fraser 1987), it became synonymous with postmodern theoretical approaches (Norris 1992). Not all approved this marriage, however. The hostility to postmodernism by some has been almost as virulent as its support by others has been enthusiastic and some commentators see the Frankfurt School’s co-optation by postmodern zealots as misinterpretation (Eagleton 1996). For Horkheimer and Adorno’s defenders, the prima facie resemblance between Critical Theory and postmodernism belies the reality of their differences. While Horkheimer and Adorno expressed a critique of the self, Marxism and modernity—in a word, enlightenment—they do not share postmodernism’s conservative philosophical and political implications. For Horkheimer and Adorno, a critique of subjectivity does not lead to identity’s collapse but to the rethinking of the self’s relationship to nature—what Adorno later called ‘non-identity’. Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of Marxism did not equal a wholesale rejection of his work or purpose in favour of Nietzschean irrational individualism—the latter’s mentality being invoked with far more caution than Marxism’s. And a critique of reason is not a total rejection of its utility for altering action—in fact, human

8 Reconciling Dialectic of Enlightenment with Postmodernism

135

reason is paradoxically regarded as the only means to overcome its instrumental form’s dominating consequences. In other words, Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the Enlightenment differs from postmodernism’s in subtle but significant ways. Most obviously, Critical Theory’s defenders highlight its acceptance of modernity’s inescapable persistence. Such acceptance leads Horkheimer and Adorno towards two purposes: first, to act as a warning beacon against rational dangers that may occur or recur in the future; and second, to a belief in the future, rather than in the past. As Habermas (1987) argued in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, the Frankfurt thinkers are distinguishable from their postmodern counterparts by their ultimate defence of the Enlightenment. Thus, in the English-speaking world, the relationship between Dialectic of Enlightenment and postmodernism is mixed. On the one side are those postmodernists willing to accept and co-opt the text, as well as the Critical Theory tradition, for their own purposes. Similarities in their epistemological concerns allow such a coalition to fall into place quite easily. On the other side stand those who use Critical Theory’s critique of modernity to expose postmodernism’s excesses. In this view, any attempt to debunk modernity necessarily discredits the positive outcomes that may flow from it. During the 1980s and 1990s, Horkheimer and Adorno’s insights were often positioned to counter a new Anglophone obsession with postmodern theory: Frederic Jameson, as will be discussed, named Adorno as the ideal philosopher to criticise the postmodern age (Jameson 1990). That is not to say that Horkheimer and Adorno should be accepted as faultless social critics, nor that so-called poststructuralist strain is bankrupt of insights. It is rather that the Frankfurt scholars work was perceived as a rational alternative to the popularity of postmodern discourses often bent on replacing social justice with individual pleasure. Hence, as with most readings of Dialectic of Enlightenment discussed heretofore, the text remains contentious.

8.1 From Post-structuralism to Postmodernism Any discussion of postmodernism is immediately confronted by the confusion the term entails. Debate over postmodernism’s definition raged in Anglo-American universities, at differing levels of intensity, since the late 1970s with little being resolved or achieved. The passion of this debate is now hard to re-capture. Whether it is indicated new form of criticism, a new era or a new form of criticism for a new era remains an open question for many scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Defining postmodernism became an academic industry in itself. Suffice to say that postmodernism’s contentiousness denied the possibility of a single definition of its make-up and, in so doing, unwittingly defined the postmodern attitude itself. From a historian’s point of view, it can most usefully be explained as a particular description of modernity’s current guise. That is, it is a specific way of theorising a specific historical juncture. Those who have critically examined postmodernism from this

136

8 Reconciling Dialectic of Enlightenment with Postmodernism

perspective have often provided the most insightful accounts of its position vis-àvis modernity. Harvey (1989) and Jameson (1998), for example, both regarded it as an adequate description of the superficial changes in capitalism’s appearance in the last 40 years—changes which have not, however, altered the basic structure of capitalist accumulation. Unlike these marxisant positions, others define something as postmodern by testing its belief in the following criteria: the end of Enlightenment ‘grand narratives’ (from liberalism to Marxism); the dissolution of the Cartesian subject; and the replacement of objective truths with multiple, and therefore relativistic, ‘truth claims’. The short-term origin of such pronouncements lies within post-war France’s intellectual milieu. The political upheavals of the era—from the beginnings of the Cold War, to the problems of decolonisation, and the eventual student–worker uprisings— brought characteristic intellectual debates. On the Left, existentialists and structuralists fought for supremacy over Parisian periodicals, cafes and universities (Judt 1992). But they soon found themselves usurped by post-structuralist interlopers. These poststructuralist thinkers provided an alternative after the demise of political Marxism in the classical sense and the end of philosophical Marxism in its so-called Western or unorthodox guise (Merquior 1986; Therborn 2006). This terminus created a vacuum for both political and philosophical innovations on the Left into which stepped a new crop of gauchiste intellectuals—Like Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard— disenchanted by previous commitments to either the French Communist Party (PCF) or the socialist project in general (Sim 1996; Macey 1993). Any faith in ‘really existing socialism’ was quashed as tanks rolled into Wenceslas Square during the Prague Spring, while the dalliance of many young Marxist intellectuals with Mao’s Cultural Revolution was cut short by revelations of its barbaric implementation (Ffrench 1995; Alexander 2001). With Marxism wallowing in the blood split by those acting in its name, many chose to jettison it altogether. In the English-speaking world, however, matters were slightly different. As has been outlined in previous chapters, the 1970s saw radical continental thought infiltrate the Anglophone academic Left. Marxism was bathing in a newfound vigour; but so too was post-structuralism, which was included in the influx. British and American scholars were only beginning to come to terms with where they stood in relation to Western Marxism and its post-structuralist critics. The intellectual Left was therefore constructing its identity with reference to continental philosophy rather than working-class politics. This was perhaps easier to achieve in the UK and US where the significance and influence of native communist parties, unlike in France, had dwindled since 1945. As might have been expected, the ensuing years saw this Left divide into factions dressed in a variety of continental fashions. Within this complex story, a number of Anglo-American scholars appropriated post-structuralism’s chief representatives—mainly Foucault and Derrida at first—and then claimed to be writing either genealogical or deconstructionist critique. In the early stages, these approaches were confined to literary and cultural theory and thus remained somewhat esoteric. But, by the 1980s, post-structuralism escaped such quarantine and its

8.1 From Post-structuralism to Postmodernism

137

effects were felt throughout the humanities. Specific differences between the poststructuralist thinkers were soon overlooked in favour of postmodernism as an overarching definition of their anti-Enlightenment thought. In this sense, postmodernism is a peculiar creation of the English-speaking world (Poster 1989). As one of its supporters put it—albeit in rather Biblical patter—‘in the seventies, postmodernism experienced an exhilarating but unsettling confluence with post-structuralism, the critique of method, the philosophic cure, that sprung athwart structuralism’ (Arac 1986: ix). Postmodernism became a synonym for post-structuralism and replaced Marxism as the dominant position of the academic Left. This shift, not coincidentally, was embedded in larger geopolitical upheavals in which the European rejection of the Soviet project in 1989–1991. This period represented a significant turning point politically for the world beyond academe. The then viable alternatives were limited to the ascending neo-liberal ideas of the late 1970s or the emerging trend towards identity politics. As it turned out, these were not mutually exclusive. Neo-liberalism, the late twentieth century’s hegemonic ideology, proved adept at allowing identity politics to exist comfortably within the market structure. Intellectually, the outcome was similar. Thought which dissociated itself from projects of social transformation tended to accept modernity’s status quo and turned to individual rights. Postmodern thought—with its multiple identities, power struggles, floating meanings and pleasure principles—was amenable to the ideology of the market precisely because it did not challenge it. Marxism was old-hat as postmodernism became the new chic: radicalism could now be feigned all the more easily since history and economics’ cumbersome apparatuses were said to be bunk. Such a description immediately recalls similar accusations made against the Frankfurt School. Its retreat to philosophy was regarded by many as an abandonment of praxis and a precursor to the Left’s later academic ghettoization. The fact that both during and after the Second World War Horkheimer and Adorno spoke little of social(ist) alternatives appears to confirm an abandonment of Critical Theory’s original purpose. Critical Theory’s political outcome (or lack thereof) seemed to foreshadow postmodernism’s own position. With both Horkheimer and Adorno dead by the early 1970s, it was as if these long-term residents’ rooms in what Lukács (1971: 22) called the ‘grand hotel abyss’ were quickly rented to new philosophical tourists from across the Rhine. In the same way that orthodox Marxism gave way to unorthodox or Western Marxism, postmodernism can be regarded as a direct, if not inevitable, outcome of the disbandment of Western Marxism and yet another example of the socialism’s late-twentieth-century decline. The ascendant interest in postmodern discourse eventually led to its meeting with Critical Theory. For those eager to foster this relationship, there was little primary evidence available as French post-structuralism had not directly concerned itself with the Frankfurt School’s work. The historical reasons for this lack are clearly based on the fact that pre-1950s Critical Theory had only recently emerged from the Institute’s vaults. However, one fact that is rarely discussed is that the Frankfurt School and post-structuralists were, at least for a short period, contemporaries. Such an overlap means that they were not only responding to similar philosophical problems, but to similar historical circumstances.

138

8 Reconciling Dialectic of Enlightenment with Postmodernism

Nevertheless, the lack of conversation between the Critical Theorists and the post-structuralists also says something about the isolation of intellectual cultures in their respective Republics. Or, to put it differently, the isolation of the intellectual cultures full stop. When Foucault (1991) bemoaned the fact that the Frankfurt School was virtually unknown in post-war France, it was because it was virtually unknown in post-war Germany. Still, when he finally came to read their work, he noted the similarities between his and Critical Theory’s projects. ‘If I had been familiar with the Frankfurt School’, Foucault claimed, ‘I would not have said a number of things that I did say and I would have avoided many of the detours which I made while trying to pursue my humble path—when, meanwhile, avenues had been opened up by the Frankfurt School’ (Raulet 1983: 200). Had he known, ‘he would’ve done nothing else in life but the job of commenting on them’ (Foucault 1991: 120). Unlike Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard wrote about the Frankfurt School’s first and second generation, but his remarks amounted to little. His essay ‘Adorno as the Devil’ (1974) misrepresents Adorno’s position on the antagonistic relationship between society and Nature, while The Postmodern Condition—aimed specifically at Habermas— overlooked the second-generation Frankfurt thinker’s own critique of reason (Lyotard 1984). Other key postmodern figures have even less to say on Critical Theory. For example, Baudrillard’s (1998) work on mass culture owes an unacknowledged debt to Adorno, while Derrida remained silent on the Frankfurt School, except for some laudatory remarks on Benjamin (Jacques 1994 and 1992). Any link between the Frankfurt School and postmodernism was seen to reside in their common approaches to modernity. Although their focuses were distinct, both schools of thought were concerned with how reason determines modern existence. This common ground was closely allied with an almost unspoken understanding of capitalism’s historical role in this rational construction. Post-structuralism’s Marxist past was still strong enough for its spokesmen to concede that modern ‘discourses of power’ were characteristic, if not a consequence, of the age of capital. Foucault’s work on scientific structures, for example, can be read as a parallel to Marx’s critique of capitalism—both men discussed the effects of the transition from pre-modernity to modernity (Lecourt 2001). Indeed, post-structuralism’s forebears were just as much German Idealists and anti-rationalist as they were French philosophers and psychologists (Dews 1995). Likewise, the idea of a postmodern era is also closely linked to social commodification in a way that echoes Adorno’s criticism of late capitalism. The overlap between these descriptions—postmodernism/late capitalism— shows some continuity from the work that Horkheimer and Adorno were producing in the 1940s to the postmodernist discourses at the century’s end. For the social and cultural forms, Horkheimer and Adorno witnessed in 1940s America—especially Hollywood’s output—became the template for capitalist culture throughout the post-war world. Such a development gave a sense that the bureaucratization of everyday life—towards the totally administered society—had broadened beyond even Weber’s imaginings. For all their faith in the linguistic construction of norms, the post-structuralists shared Critical Theory’s fear of instrumental reason’s real effects: rationalism dominating human beings. In this sense, the shared position of Critical

8.1 From Post-structuralism to Postmodernism

139

Theory and postmodernism was not a critique of capitalism, but a critique of reason itself (Honneth 1991 and Wellmer 1993).

8.2 Enlightenment as Domination Dialectic of Enlightenment is suffused with references to the relationship between rational thought and domination. The fundamental interaction of humans with nature is viewed not only as an attempt to dominate it as Nature but is extrapolated to the domain of human interaction—individuals dominating individuals. Even more than this, however, is the extension of this domination within the self. The desire for selfpreservation governing humans’ supposed control of Nature is internalised through the sacrifice of nature within the individual. The result is what Adorno later called identity thinking: the identity of the rational self—as defined by science, property and social relations—is alienated from other (undefinable) aspects of its nature and is therefore incomplete. Such a quasi-Freudian approach—based more on a historical subject than any essentialised ego—captures the dialectic of enlightenment at both a material, external level and at a conscious, internal level. In other words, instrumental reason has colonised not only the lifeworld, but individual consciousness. Horkheimer and Adorno (2002: 10) put it this way: ‘The generality of the ideas developed by discursive logic, power in the sphere of the concept, is built on the foundation of power in reality’. In regard to modernity, Horkheimer and Adorno’s central point is that this process of domination increases under capitalism’s reifying effects. Thus, the emancipatory hopes of Marx and his followers are all but dashed. It is understandable that such a critique found a natural ally in Foucault’s critique of domination. Foucault’s admiration for the Frankfurt School was both a guide and a gift to those who wished to link his work to Critical Theory. His offhand supportive remarks were taken as direct evidence of theoretical overlap (Whitebook 2002). Like the Frankfurt School, the translation of his works in the 1970s led to wide discussion of his innovative ideas and techniques. The 1980s saw smitten British intellectuals fall out of love with Althusserian Marxism to find solace in Foucault. Likewise, American intellectuals who had turned to the Frankfurt School for guidance—and who had resisted Althusser—regarded post-structuralism as an appealing alternative to the hyper-rational direction in which Habermas was taking Critical Theory. As a consequence, Foucault became (and, to some extent, remains) the doyen of the post-New Left era. His work appealed to so many for two obvious reasons. First, power relations are evident in every social situation and hence a Foucauldian reading is easily applied to any social analysis. Second, and accordingly, this versatility transcended staid academic barriers which meant that it was not only philosophers and historians who could appropriate his thought. Foucauldians germinated in all fields. Such popularity made him not only the best known postmodern figure—although he hated the term—but also the best understood. The moment at which this interest occurred reveals something more about Foucault’s allure. The Left, still in its post-sixties’ disarray, was moving away from

140

8 Reconciling Dialectic of Enlightenment with Postmodernism

Marxism to other social analyses (Wood 1986). Foucault offered a politics that complimented the era’s new social movements—for example, feminism, environmentalism, gay rights and anti-racism. Despite the much-remarked two phases of Foucault’s career (roughly speaking, the structuralist and post-structuralist), he always regarded power as functioning latently—either through the obvious systems of law and science or, as he later contended, knowledge and the body.1 The idea of capillaries of power infiltrating all aspects of social life—the personal no less than the political—appealed to grassroots political groups far more than the apparent simplicity of Marxism’s bourgeois bogeyman. Moreover, Foucault’s work expressed a movement away from an over-arching, and thus stifling, critique of the superstructure and towards an examination of how power functioned at an everyday level. To a large extent, this sentiment reflected the Left’s deflation. Postmodernist discourse could easily reduce social analysis to tales of unassailable domination. The subsequent demise of the Soviet system in the early 1990s appeared to vindicate those who believed the Marxist meta-narrative to be dead (though its liberal counterpart remained healthy) and, as a result, the Anglophone, academic Left acquiesced to postmodern analyses. Thus, it was not surprising that the similarities between this position and that of Horkheimer and Adorno’s would be brought to the fore. Critical Theory’s discussions of domination or dulling of thought processes to achieve social control sounded remarkably similar to post-structuralist positions. Christopher Norris (Norris 1992: 172) concluded that Horkheimer and Adorno ‘concur with Foucault’s genealogies of power/knowledge, whatever the clearly-marked differences in outlook that emerge elsewhere between Frankfurt Critical Theory and Foucauldian discourse analysis’. Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) reinforced such arguments when it bursts onto the scene alongside Dialectic of Enlightenment. Here was a work which not only expressed the historical origins of modern, rational, social domination, but which forcefully described the dominated subject and showed how power suffused all social activity. It even included an unwitting Frankfurt connection to Otto Kircheimer and Rusche’s 1939 Punishment and Social Structure (Foucualt 1977: 24). That the Frankfurt School caught the fancy of some and Foucault tempted others were expressions of a similar attitude among intellectuals: left-wing thought, as it stood, was in a critical condition as a result of insurmountable social domination. As Russell Berman put it,

1 The

among intellectual historians has often been to divide grand philosophical personae into periods. Usually, such temporal shifts indict philosophers as never punctual: Foucault is either early or late, so too is Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, etc. In the case of Foucault, the distinct periods of his work seem to revolve around differing degrees of emphases on domination and resistance. Most of his early works—from the cornerstone The Order of Things (1966) to Discipline and Punish—stress the almost totalitarian nature of modern, or rational, forms of social control; his later works—the three volumes of The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1976), The Use of Pleasure (1984), The Care of the Self (1984) and the newly published 1975–1976 lectures on war, Society Must Be Defended—still centre on this theme, but stress the possibility of action within circumscribed discursive regimes.

8.2 Enlightenment as Domination

141

just as Foucault and Nietzsche may be suggesting a duplicity inherent in appeals to ‘liberty’ by ‘the ruling classes,’ the Frankfurt School draws attention to a homologous inversion in the history of occidental rationalisation. Enlightenment, not unlike ‘liberty,’ turns out to be entwined in elaborate strategies of domination, the apparent opposite of enlightenment; … it is enlightenment (or a version of it), rather than a conservative traditionalism, that leads to Auschwitz (1989: 13).

Foucault’s focus on the bourgeois self’s formation was not unlike Horkheimer and Adorno’s historical mapping of this self from pre-modernity. To be sure, Foucault saw discontinuity between the modern and the pre-modern, whereas Horkheimer and Adorno saw continuity between the past and present. But all three men argued that domination was a symptom of the past and that reason was the culprit behind its continuance. Even Foucault’s peculiar presentation of evidence echoed Horkheimer and Adorno’s avant-garde approach in Dialectic of Enlightenment. His positioning of selective historical and fictional material to discredit rational discourses even evokes an effect similar to the ‘constellation’ technique that Horkheimer and Adorno took from Benjamin. Though Horkheimer and Adorno’s intentional modernism arguably outstrips Foucault’s often self-defeating claims, all three authors share a transhistorical view that most reason to date—from ancient to modern times—has been instrumental in nature. Many Anglophone scholars were interested in exploring this intersection and intellectual historian Mark Poster led the way. Poster’s Existential Marxism in Post-War France (1978) and Foucault, Marxism, and History (1984) established a long-term context for the origins of postmodernism in Marxism. Rather than restricting Foucault to post-structuralist origins, Poster (1984: 1) depicted Foucault ‘as a continuation of and departure from the Marxist tradition’. It was not just Foucault’s origins in the French communist movement that led to this conclusion, but the belief that his work continued a trend of critical Marxism which questioned the place of reason in history. That the Frankfurt School was exemplary of this critique guided Poster (1984: 16) to conclude that Horkheimer and Adorno’s ‘refusal to take reason at its word and their insistence on investigating its imbrication with domination leads directly to the problematic explored by Foucault’. Similarly, Dialectic of Enlightenment’s ‘critique of humanism’ prefigured Foucault’s argument against the social power inherent within scientific discourse. For Horkheimer and Adorno, as for Foucault, all social scientific attempts to understand or organise society contain ‘an element of domination of a technology of power’ (Poster 1984: 149). Both comparisons appear accurate. The Frankfurt School was definitely at pains to expose the implicit dangers in instrumental reason and the rationalisation process. Yet, a tension is implicit within Poster’s comparative argument which is symptomatic of the problem in both Horkheimer and Adorno’s and Foucault’s work. There is a juggling act involving the Marxist principle of social change along with Nietzschean notion of social decadence. If Foucault let go of Marxism rather more easily than Horkheimer and Adorno (though it arguably never completely leaves his work), then Horkheimer and Adorno were never completely convinced by Nietzsche in the same way that the later Foucault was. Poster solved this apparent imbalance with a postmodern solution to the problem: Marxism was dumped. He situated his argument

142

8 Reconciling Dialectic of Enlightenment with Postmodernism

in an era where the ‘mode of information’ (Poster 1990) had superseded the mode of production as the chief historical determinant. Modernity had altered to such an extent in the late twentieth century that traditional Marxist discourse was no longer adequate or even necessary—the governing factor in social interaction is no longer capital, but discourse. Information’s overwhelming influence (or power) in Western individuals’ everyday life can only be deciphered by an adequate theory of how this power functions on a micro-level. In other words, Horkheimer and Adorno were positioned in the text to legitimate a postmodern critique of Marxism. Moreover, Poster undermined his own argument to the extent that he proselytised his own social science discourse. Or, to put it more simply, by advocating Foucault, he positioned one discourse of knowledge/power as superior to others. This implies a new form of domination and a continuation of the dialectic Horkheimer and Adorno describe. Poster remained caught in Foucault’s own labyrinth of power with little hope for, or desire to, escape. Thus, Poster’s (1984: 164) call for ‘Marxists and Western Marxists to pay heed to these texts because they are the best examples of critical social theory’ may remain unheeded because Foucault lacks an adequate theory of emancipation. As Poster (1984: 164) himself confessed, ‘Foucault’s texts do not work to undermine capitalism; they are not adequate as class analysis; they do not provide a link between the superstructure and the substructure; they do not expose the ideological play behind the culture industry’. Instead, they expose the internal machinations of ideology. This is where the value lies in Foucault’s work: he enters the realm of ideology (embodied in bourgeois institutions) to examine how it works in modernity. In this sense he goes deeper, if not further, than Althusser’s (1984) description of bourgeois ideology and its apparatuses, even if in doing so he ignored underlying question of why this ideology exists and functions in the first place (Dews 1979). Five years later, Poster restated his heuristic project in Critical Theory and Poststructuralism (1989). In it Poster reiterated his point that post-structuralism was best equipped to comprehend modernity’s ‘new forms of domination’. But rather than articulating post-structuralism with Western Marxists, Poster now suggested that post-structuralism—or, as he called it, ‘critical theory’—‘contains the best of what remains in the shambles of Marxist and neo-Marxist theoretical positions, the best of what is left of the Left’ (1989: 3). The Frankfurt School is included in this dismissal. Marx is replaced by Nietzsche, and there is an almost complete acceptance of the postmodern era’s arrival: ‘the line between words and things, subject and object, inside and outside, humanity and nature, idea and matter becomes blurred and indistinct, and a new configuration of the relation of action and language is set in place’ (Poster 1989: 10). Yet, Poster still included Dialectic of Enlightenment among those texts which have undermined reason’s foundations. This move was part of Poster’s larger critique of Habermas’s ‘absolutist defence of reason’ in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Habermas, he alleged, was wrong to make a distinction between Horkheimer and Adorno and other postmodernist critics because both approaches dispute ‘the lens that discerns “reason” in law and democracy but not in gas chambers and atom bombs, the distorted Habermasian lens that espies in

8.2 Enlightenment as Domination

143

bourgeois reason a mirage of “universalist foundations” when there is nothing more in sight than yet another human discourse’ (Poster 1989: 22). There is, however, a large assumption within this claim which sidesteps the aspect of Horkheimer and Adorno’s work which Habermas highlighted: their defence of reason. Horkheimer and Adorno are not the same as the post-structuralists because they defended reason, but rather because they approach reason in a different manner. For Poster, the post-structuralists contend that ‘it is not that reason has “turned into” domination but that all discourses are always already implicated in power’ (1989: 26) Horkheimer and Adorno, on the other hand, did have a qualitative view that allows reason to change with changed historical circumstance. The Frankfurt theorists did historicise instrumental reason in a narrative that was based on a long history of human interaction with nature—in particular, the desire for self-preservation. In this sense, their claim that enlightenment or reason is domination appears to have post-structuralist undertones. Yet in Dialectic of Enlightenment they remained Hegelian enough to believe that this selfish instrumentalism could be overcome by an improved—albeit frustratingly unformulated—form of reason. This utopian argument stands in stark contrast to post-structuralist affirmation that power is a constant. With power relations implicit in all knowledge systems, degrees of power (for example, state-based or familial, physical or mental, economic or gendered) seem invincible and uncritical individualism or sectarianism becomes the logic of the day (Honneth 1986). As Simon Jarvis contended, ‘Adorno and Horkheimer do not want to reverse enlightenment. They are not, for example, suggesting that power and knowledge are identical, but, instead, are asking how knowledge might become the dissolution of domination’ (1998: 22). At the same time as Poster’s Critical Theory and Post-structuralism was appearing, Ben Agger compared Critical Theory and postmodernism in a way which continued the theme that Poster had begun with his analysis of Foucault and Marxism. Agger’s Discourse of Domination (1989) presented a more diachronic approach by arguing that rapid industrialisation increased individual alienation to such an extent that a successful proletarian revolution was a fantasy. Intellectually, the outcome of this alienation process was a series of theses which prefigured postmodern resignation. Agger contended that theories of rationalisation (Weber) and reification (Lukács) were converted into theories of a totally administered society and onedimensional man (the Frankfurt School) which then turned into theories of domination as natural (Foucault). Agger’s ‘Marcusean’ approach established postmodernism’s origins in the Marxist tradition, specifically the unorthodox Marxism of the Frankfurt School. Although there was no causal link between the two, Agger nevertheless regarded their concerns as identical. His thesis was therefore similar to Poster’s in Foucault, Marxism, and History. Like Poster, Agger recognised the validity of many postmodern developments—specifically deconstructionist means of interpretation and Foucauldian regimes of power—but saw them as part of a wider progressive left-wing discourse. Ultimately, Agger’s project, both here and in subsequent texts, was to remount a Frankfurt-inspired Marxism in response to its 1980s crisis. As a result, Agger (1989: 4) situated himself somewhere between orthodox Marxism and post-Marxism, a position which accepted that a new stage of monopoly

144

8 Reconciling Dialectic of Enlightenment with Postmodernism

capitalism has arrived—which he called ‘fast capitalism’ (Agger 1989)—and posited that the Frankfurt School is still a valuable guide to understanding this new stage. For Agger, however, the Frankfurt School, as it stood, was inadequate for contemporary debates and therefore must be merged with more novel intellectual approaches. For instance, in a later text Agger (1993) argued that Horkheimer and Adorno’s reading of consumer culture can be improved by the deconstructive insights that describe ‘texts’s’ undecidability or ‘Cultural Studies’s’ readings of cultural artefacts as signs of both repression and resistance. This new-and-improved-Frankfurt-School approach is indicative of Agger’s desire for a theory that avoids the impasse of either Horkheimer and Adorno or post-structuralism—what he called a third-generation Critical Theory (Agger 1993: 1). As a consequence, Agger treated Dialectic of Enlightenment as an integral moment in ‘postmodern critical theory’s’ genealogy. For Agger, the text successfully employed a critique of capitalism by focusing on the problems of modernity, specifically in science and culture. The positive effect of Dialectic of Enlightenment and other Critical Theory was to distill ‘the essence of Marx’s analysis of the logic of domination so that we can make use of this analytical framework in our own, later works’ (Agger 1992: 5). The inadequacy that Horkheimer and Adorno perceived in Marxist analysis, according to Agger, was exactly the same noticed by many theorists at the twentieth-century’s end: Enlightenment thought (read Marx) fails to break with the ‘ethos of domination of nature and society’ (Agger 1992: 229). To escape this impasse, Agger posited a new re-politicised Critical Theory, which he called a ‘lifeworld-grounded critical theory’—a combination of ‘certain postmodern insights’ with ‘Marcuse’s version of critical theory’ (Agger 1992: 279). His final expository chapter in Discourse of Domination, and other works thereafter, consciously applied this revised Critical Theory to the public sphere. In essence, Agger blended both first-and second-generation Frankfurt School with post-1960s theory— specifically postmodernism and feminism—to create a progressive postmodern philosophy. In other words, his hypothesis amounts to a medley of often conflicting theories. According to Agger, Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse’s negative outlook allowed certain positive developments to be articulated to their thought. Thus, Agger wanted to create a ‘counter-hegemony’ by combining the ‘critical insights from the culture industry’ with ‘postmodernism’s radicalism’ (1989: 280). Still, just as in the Frankfurt School and postmodern theory, there is little reference to class or where counter-hegemony actually resides. For all Agger’s rhetoric about the continuity of the Marxist tradition within this new Critical Theory, the central themes of Marx thought—class, capital, history, revolution—seem conspicuously absent. Nonetheless, a dialectic of postmodernity provided Agger with a postmodernist means to criticise, if not overcome, capitalism’s dominating manifestations—namely, overproduction and over-consumption. Other readings of Dialectic of Enlightenment also saw its affinity with Foucault’s critique of rational domination. In 1994, David Couzens Hoy published an interlocutory text, Critical Theory, with the Habermasian Thomas McCarthy (they divvied the chapters between them, responding to each other’s claims). The premise of the work was to apply Frankfurt theory to twentieth-century philosophy’s ‘perennial problems’

8.2 Enlightenment as Domination

145

(Hoy and McCarthy 1994). In Hoy’s case, this task was best achieved by comparing Critical Theory with his chosen theorists Michel Foucault and Hans Georg Gadamer. Foucault was of particular interest to Hoy because he believed the Frenchman’s work, like that of the Frankfurt School, had long been misread as ‘fruitless, or even anarchistic and nihilistic’ (Hoy and McCarthy 1994: 107). Rather than pandering to such criticism, Hoy attempted to show how Dialectic of Enlightenment—which he regarded as marking a shift in Critical Theory—actually develops a ‘critical historiography’ or ‘critical history’ similar to that expounded by Nietzsche and Foucault (Hoy and McCarthy 1994: 121). Horkheimer and Adorno are said to reject Hegel’s dialectical absolute in favour of something close to post-structuralism’s claim that ‘any text is involved in an infinite network of readings’ (Hoy and McCarthy 1994: 123). As Hoy continued, ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment is thus on my interpretation not a philosophical theory of history or of reason or of knowledge, but a history of how the traditional conception of theory originates and how it runs amok’ (Hoy and McCarthy 1994: 123). Such a characterisation harks back to Adorno and Horkheimer’s late-1930s work as well as looking forward to the post-structuralist critique of reason. Yet, Hoy’s analysis was nuanced enough to argue that Horkheimer and Adorno’s position was not exactly Foucault’s; nor did he wish to see Adorno conflated with Nietzsche or Heidegger. In Hoy’s mind, a comparison between Dialectic of Enlightenment and Foucault’s works was important because they show ‘that the actual history of the effects of enlightenment runs counter to what the theory of enlightenment projects’ (Hoy and McCarthy 1994: 131). Rather than portraying Horkheimer and Adorno as shifting more and more towards a post-structuralist position, it is Foucault who, Hoy claimed, shifts closer to Critical Theory. As a result, Foucault, like Horkheimer and Adorno, becomes a defender of Enlightenment aspirations.2 In the same year that Hoy and McCarthy’s book appeared, political scientist Christopher Rocco wrote an article which called for a similar rapprochement between the modernist Horkheimer and Adorno and the postmodernist Foucault. Rocco’s argument was that Horkheimer and Adorno had not only anticipated Foucault’s genealogy critique, but that they actually had applied it without knowing they were doing so. As a defender of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Rocco’s work stands alongside that of Agger in viewing the Frankfurt School as a crucial, if flawed, antecedent to so-called radical contemporary theory. ‘Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment’, Rocco (1994: 91) contended, ‘initiates a dialogue between critical 2 Hoy dispelled accusations that Foucault was against reason by pointing to later comments in which

the philosopher said it is impossible to be against reason. Thomas McCarthy, in his rejoinder to Hoy’s argument, tended to disagree with this analysis of Foucault. To McCarthy, the similarities between Foucault and post-Weberian critical social theory were striking. Lukács, Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas all agreed that rationalisation brought with it a ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ rather than ‘unmitigated progress’. Yet to McCarthy the ‘real differences with Foucault concern whether there is at all a positive side to the story, an emancipatory dimension of enlightenment’. After a brief elaboration, McCarthy came up with a predictably Habermasian answer: no—although with a bit of ontological tweaking Foucault could make a good Critical Theorist (Hoy and McCarthy 1994: 224-230).

146

8 Reconciling Dialectic of Enlightenment with Postmodernism

theory and genealogy and shows how each, properly understood, is a precondition for, and a limit to, the other. If there is a middle road between modernism and postmodernism then Dialectic of Enlightenment at least points the way out’. It is, in other words, a ‘mediating’ text. Unlike Agger and Poster, Rocco was less positive about postmodernism’s political applicability. He did not see postmodernism as a solution to Critical Theory’s shortcomings, but rather he stated that Horkheimer and Adorno remain important because their text teaches ‘us how to think about the world of people and things’ (Rocco 1994: 72). Indeed, Rocco, like Horkheimer and Adorno, said very little about the actual way out of the impasse Dialectic of Enlightenment describes. This does not, however, diminish his argument’s basic point: that Horkheimer and Adorno’s thesis is similar, without being equivalent, to Foucault’s overall project. On the one hand, Horkheimer and Adorno used methods and drew conclusions which (once again) ‘anticipate’ Foucault’s own techniques. For example, the Odysseus chapter’s conflation of past and present in the bourgeois subject creates similar effects to Foucault’s juxtaposition of ‘premodern and modern practices, knowledges, and institutions to better illuminate the contours of the present’ (Rocco 1994: 74). On the other hand, however, such comparisons also show differences in Horkheimer/Adorno and Foucault’s intentions—that is, unlike Foucault’s focus on discontinuity between pre-modernity and modernity, Horkheimer and Adorno (2002: 11) use the Odysseus metaphor to show continuity between the past and the present: ‘Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized’. There was, however, a barb in Rocco’s analysis. With Horkheimer and Adorno and Foucault as allies, Rocco subverted Habermas’s inclusion of his forebears in the Enlightenment tradition and attempted to undermine the concept of rational versus irrational discourse. Even though many agree that Horkheimer and Adorno fall somewhere in between the modern and the postmodern, for Rocco they are closer to the latter. Yet, he concurred with Habermas’s point that, unlike Foucault, these ‘dark’ Enlightenment writers temper their wariness towards reason with a faith in its potential. Dialectic of Enlightenment’s central political argument, according to Rocco, is how the individual functions under democratic norms which are increasingly dominating. Ultimately, this question sets Horkheimer and Adorno apart from Foucault because for the post-structuralist democracy as domination is the norm rather than the exception. As Rocco (1994: 90) put it, ‘I think the Dialectic is both suspicious of what Foucault calls the disciplinary effects inherent in democratic practices and acknowledges the need for a vision of political freedom that is democratic—inclusionary rather than exclusionary’. As a result, Dialectic of Enlightenment’s political application appears quite different from Foucault’s genealogy critique. To be sure, similarities exist, as Rocco’s analysis attests, but they ultimately diverge. In Rocco’s interpretation, Foucault believes that the status quo cannot be transcended and always already results in power’s rationalisation through yet another rational means of power. By contrast, Horkheimer and Adorno regarded rationality’s instrumental manifestation as power and domination—exclusion of both the non-identical self and others—as an avoidable situation. What is interesting about those who have chosen to compare Critical Theory with Foucault (and with other post-structuralist) is that they do not represent any

8.2 Enlightenment as Domination

147

combined outlook like, say, that of Telos or, more broadly, Cultural Studies scholars. Instead, they represent the impact that Foucault has had on leftist academia since the 1970s. Both Poster and Agger can be regarded as ‘generation of 68ers’ who had turned away from Critical Theory and towards genealogy critique. In doing so, they justified this turn by showing the similarities between previous positions held and new ones appropriated. Readings like Rocco’s show a desire to come to terms with how Critical Theory and post-structuralism can be read as part of a broader discourse on modernity. Ultimately, such comparisons between Horkheimer and Adorno and Foucault (and his followers) will continue. Similarities within their respective critiques of modern domination are obvious. The centrality of domination in both Foucauldian genealogy critique and Critical Theory, not to mention Foucault’s own sympathies for the Frankfurt School, is a tempting intersection to examine. Both schools of thought downplayed—albeit to differing degrees—the importance of the economic within as a determinant of domination. Nonetheless, it is the underlying epistemological bases which will reveal the real differences. As John McCormick suggested in his analysis of this dilemma, ‘I posit that it is much more preferable to fall woefully short in the effort to pursue an alternate reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment than to let it fall victim to an interpretation imbricated in a sociopolitical vision so antithetical to the authors’ work and lives’ (McCormick 2002: 94). This sort of criticism was a sign that some were unconvinced by Foucault’s antipathy for the structures of modernity which, though usually polemical, evinced an enthusiasm for the pre-modern that had dubious ethical bases. Critical Theory, on the other hand, could be seen as a theory within the Enlightenment tradition which examines some of the same issues as the French philosopher without a dissolution of the self or rejection of modernity.

8.3 Dialectic of Textuality Postmodernism’s other central theme—textuality—was of little relevance to firstgeneration Critical Theory. The linguistic turn which characterised much scholarship in the twentieth century’s final decades occurred after Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s deaths (Jay 1983). As such they remained silent on a subject that has greatly influenced their inheritors. That said, there are clear lines within Critical Theory which could be followed up by the deconstructionists. Horkheimer and Adorno’s familiarity with logical positivism and its antecedents did not make them naïve about language’s centrality to philosophy (Hohendahl 1995; Hanson 1992). In addition, both men paid close critical attention to the early phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger that eventually transmogrified into Derridean deconstruction. Indeed, both of these schools—logical positivism and phenomenology—were the approaches against which Horkheimer, Adorno, and much of the Frankfurt School defined themselves. To the Critical Theorists, the positivists’ linguistic mathematics reeked of the unreflective assurance of science, while phenomenology’s undialectical essentialism was

148

8 Reconciling Dialectic of Enlightenment with Postmodernism

seen as the exact opposite of Critical Theory’s historical and psychological analysis of identity formation. The textual revolution inspired by Derrida in the late 1960s was not the plagiarism of early-twentieth-century thought that some make it out to be. Nor is his work a simple collapsing of all possible forms of meaning, however easy it is to gain that impression (Norris 1996). After all, as Peter Dews points out in his critique of postmodernism, Derrida’s deconstructive process based itself on the ‘anti-relativistic impulse of Husserl’s phenomenology’ (Dews 1987: 5). Nevertheless, it can be argued that Derrida went beyond Husserl in exposing Western philosophy’s instability of meaning to such an extent that he re-instated metaphysical relativism (Wilke 1990). The chief criticism of Derrida’s deconstruction was that his revelation of unified meaning’s impossibility denies political change and abdicates ethical or political responsibility. That this criticism replicates charges levelled against Foucault suggests a certain affinity between their works. Both Derrida and Foucault, as well as Lyotard, have contended that all conceptual thought structures are closed and thus dominating in their effects. Thus, deconstruction’s opposition to fixed meaning equates with postmodernism’s obsession with rigid ideologies’ totalising and dominating outcomes. Of course, differences exist between various post-structuralist positions. Derrida’s linguistic analysis, specifically the contrast between speech and writing (the critique of logocentrism), differs from Foucault’s pseudo-materialist approach to institutional discourses of power. In his reading of texts, Derrida and his transatlantic deconstructionist counterparts sought to ‘prove’ the impossibility of determining fixed meanings from within an infinitude of alternative and competing meanings. Moreover, because this infinitude is expressed in every text’s structured meaning, any claims to truth always already undermine themselves. Like Foucault’s theory of power, Derrida’s deconstruction was both a result of and a reaction against European phenomenology and French structuralism. In his radical anti-philosophical manifestoes, Of Grammatology (1967) and Writing and Difference (1967), Derrida made two key points. First, he defined the deconstructive ethos which governed his, and others’, subsequent technique as exposing philosophy’s constant attempt to deny all knowledge of its own figural or constructed nature (Norris 1996). Second, Derrida also believed that texts disseminated or deferred (différance) meaning to a point where authorial intent is pushed out of sight by the play of infinite interpretive freedom (Roberts 1995). Problems for deconstruction arose, however, when its application to events beyond the literary realm came across as nonsensical. The late 1980s Paul de Man affair and the subsequent attempt to use deconstruction as a political tool ultimately exposed its inadequacy for tasks beyond the text (Hamacher et al. 1989). Deconstruction appeared as little more than an academic exercise in anti-metaphysical metaphysics. This argument has also been used against Adorno. His negative dialectics, the origins of which are contained in Dialectic of Enlightenment, posit an antimetaphysics—one which opposes transcendental consciousness and total(itarian) conceptual thought—as an alternative to current philosophy. Adorno’s negative dialectics is, as Bewes (1997: 139) has said, ‘a form of dialectical reasoning which

8.3 Dialectic of Textuality

149

couches its reflections in an enduring, cynical struggle against positivistic rationality—the mechanism of reification’. For Adorno, there was an incongruity between the way in which philosophy characterises the world and the reality of the world itself. In other words, conceptual thought dominates nature as much as it purports to understand it. The alienation of the individual from the non-identical—the dialectic of enlightenment’s harmful outcome—continues in philosophy through invocations of a transcendental subject and ungrounded logic. Philosophy is thus continually at odds with the reality of the natural world. Such a claim of disjuncture makes it easy to see how Adorno’s position does not seem far removed from Derrida’s (not least in its confusing nature). Even Habermas agreed that Adorno and Derrida shared common ground in the drama they made ‘of something which should be trivial by now: a fallibilist conception of truth and knowledge’ (Dews 1992: 199). Both men seemed to conclude that philosophy undermines itself in its forthrightness, creates mythic utopian examples from a constructed rhetoric of absolutism and denies the possibility of reconciliation between thought and reality. In the English-speaking world, the interaction between deconstruction and Critical Theory has largely taken place within a Marxist discourse eager to mobilise Derrida for its own cause. In fact, much of this interaction deals with Adorno’s post-war work: Dialectic of Enlightenment is regarded as a precursor to the theories developed in Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory. The political ‘solutions’ that Adorno intimated in these later works are said to outline some possible avenues for deconstruction to follow. In the early 1980s, Michael Ryan attempted to politicise deconstruction in a book called Marxism and Deconstruction (1982). To show the origins of the latter in the former, Ryan conscripted Adorno and Marcuse. For Ryan, an alliance between Derrida (rather than his American imitators) and Western Marxism could benefit both traditions because deconstruction presents itself as subversive in its identification and demolition of hierarchies of meaning—hierarchies that implicitly exclude other forms of normative identity. This insight has the hallmarks of a revolutionary idea that could easily be taken up by Marxist political theory. Indeed, it comes close to some of Adorno and Benjamin’s arguments which Ryan argued were the ‘closest approximation of deconstruction on the left’ (Ryan 1982: xiv). Adorno and Benjamin were undoubtedly aware of the domination implicit within the assertion of a single identity, and the hierarchy of meaning within this exercise. But Ryan extended this similarity even further by claiming that Adorno foreshadowed much deconstructionist thought. That both men attacked ‘the idealist privilege of identity over non-identity, universality over particularity, subject over object, spontaneous presence over secondary rhetoric, … and so on’ (Ryan 1982: 75) is seen as evidence of a common confidence in deconstructive anti-conceptualism. On the other hand, Ryan believed the differences between Adorno and Derrida must also be stressed. There is an obvious divergence in their respective emphasis on language. Derrida’s obsessive concern for truth’s linguistic construction finds little in the way of an ally in Adorno’s work. As Ryan stated, ‘the undecidability which Adorno locates on the conceptual level, Derrida works out in language’ (1982: 78). Though Ryan noted this distinction, he definitely downplayed its importance (perhaps out of an unwitting desire not to expose his comparison’s shortfall—a move which,

150

8 Reconciling Dialectic of Enlightenment with Postmodernism

ironically, would prove Derrida’s point about rhetorical decay quite well). In doing so, he overlooked the epistemological gap between Critical Theory and deconstruction, namely, that deconstruction over-inflates language at the expense of its relation to, and position in, the material world; whereas Adorno’s texts, however metaphysical, continue to link philosophy to materialism—albeit in an ambiguous form (Morris 2001). In this sense, deconstruction remains quite unlike Critical Theory. When it came to the issue of identity, however, Ryan’s comparison was better developed. Adorno’s faith in overcoming identity through non-identity was not especially radical for Ryan. ‘Adorno’, Ryan (1982: 79) argued, ‘limits himself to plotting the emergence of non-identity within identity; Derrida posits a more radical dissymmetry, heterogeneity, or alterity—supplementarity, differentiation, trace—which includes as one of its determined orientations the metaphysical conceptual system Adorno attacks’. In contrast to Critical Theory’s passivity, therefore, deconstruction is a radical and ‘aggressive act of reading’ (Ryan 1982: 79). The revolutionary violence implicit in such a statement is apparent, but just how such an act makes Derrida’s work more subversive than Adorno’s is less clear. Ryan’s desire to transcribe a revolutionary (Marxist) radicalism to deconstruction blinded him to the limits of the latter’s actual radicalism. Presumably, Adorno’s being ‘bound to conceptuality’ is less politically effective than Derrida’s ‘attempt to break down the way in which philosophical ideas are produced’ (Ryan 1982: 80). Deconstruction comes off looking more materially and historically minded than the thought of Adorno or other Western Marxists (Hansen 1992). Admittedly, Adorno’s rarefied solution to philosophy’s identity crisis may be politically inadequate, but to argue that deconstruction is as historical as Marxism overlooks an important distinction between the two schools. A simple conflation of Derrida and Adorno, or deconstruction with Critical Theory, ignores the specific material basis, of lack thereof, within each theory. Unlike Ryan, philosopher and critic Peter Dews was less convinced by arguments which portrayed Critical Theory as proto-deconstruction. His Logics of Disintegration (1987) used both first-and second-generation Critical Theory as a bulwark against post-structuralist suspicion. For Dews, post-structuralist discourse was overzealous in its attempt to collapse all meaning. Such disintegration was not what Adorno was trying to achieve, for Adorno’s radicalism ‘is not abolition of the subject-object distinction, or of any other philosophical distinction’ (Dews 1987: 40). Derrida’s assault on hierarchies of meaning, in contrast, falls into a conceptual void in which he then finds himself grasping for new unthinkable or undecidable meaning formations— an act which Adorno would equate with any other identity-forming philosophy. According to Dews, The fundamental illusion of philosophy is the illusion of the autonomy and primacy of the concept, but this illusion is not constitutive of thought as such. Rather it is part of the structure of delusion generated by an antagonistic society. Thus, the very concept of truth points beyond philosophy, toward political practice, however despairing Adorno himself might be about the possibility of such practice. Furthermore, if social antagonism conceals itself behind the illusion of identity, then the overcoming of antagonisms, contrary to Derrida’s expectations, will also be the overcoming of identity (1987: 44).

8.3 Dialectic of Textuality

151

Contrary to Ryan, who tried to politically mobilise deconstruction, Dews saw a fundamental distinction between Derrida and Adorno. Rather than depict Adorno as trapped in the deconstructive maze, Dews reclaims Adorno’s politico-philosophical practice as central to the overcoming of social alienation. Derrida made no such bold claims. Of course, a deconstructive position would claim that Adorno had not rid his thought of metaphysical vestiges, or, simply put, claims to truth—a claim with which the Critical Theorist would not disagree. According to this perspective, Critical Theory, unlike postmodernism, retained a Hegelian–Marxist sense of history as the locus of possibility. For Adorno, critical reason—including its linguistic expression—is inherently ethical and thus political, but its affirmative telos is not assured (Bernstein 2001). In the reverse of Michael Ryan’s argument, Terry Eagleton suggested it was such historical understanding that separated Critical Theory from postmodernism. As Eagleton (1996: 51) continued, ‘for socialist thought, there has indeed been a grand narrative, and more’s the pity. It is a truth to be mourned rather than celebrated. It would be far better if the postmodernists were right, and there was nothing constant or continuous about the chronicle at all. But the price of believing this is a betrayal of the dead, along with the living’. This type of political comparison was made by Frederic Jameson in his influential Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). Coming from a self-professed ‘postmodern Marxist’ perspective, Jameson believed that Adorno always remained true to his historical materialist origins. Nevertheless, Jameson saw that some affinity with so-called postmodern positions was evident in the German philosopher’s oeuvre. But it was not Derrida to whom Jameson turned for inspiration. Instead, he chose deconstruction’s North American principal, Paul de Man, as Adorno’s chief interlocutor. De Man showed a familiarity with Adorno’s work in a way that Derrida did not. De Man’s posthumously published Aesthetic Ideology (1996)—which bears a title similar to Adorno’s final Aesthetic Theory—includes some discussions of Adorno. But there was not enough evidence to show that these discussions offered any direct affiliation with Critical Theory. That task was left to later theorists. It was Jameson’s (1991: 230) contention that although Adorno and de Man had methodological differences, both men shared a belief that the abstract or metaphoric ‘concept remains binding and is an ineradicable component of thought’. Adorno’s depiction of a gap between philosophical theory and historical reality is in line with de Man’s belief in the inability of language to depict reality. For Jameson, both Adorno and de Man would agree that the linguistic construction of the philosophical concept relies on an abstraction to prove its point. Such emphasis on linguistic abstractions was the grist of de Man’s theory. Adorno’s focus on the abstract—be it in the conceptual or identity form—as a form of deception was decidedly proto-postmodern, and, according to Jameson, found its equal in de Man’s literary theory. Of course such a simple comparison appears to suffer from the same problems as those which equate Adorno with Derrida: a failure to account for differences between Critical Theory and deconstruction. Jameson was aware of such differences, however. He argued that neither Adorno nor de Man surpassed Marx when it came to understanding the relationship between human understanding and

152

8 Reconciling Dialectic of Enlightenment with Postmodernism

historical becoming. Marx’s ‘code of value’—and the emphasis it placed on capital in human affairs—was far more compelling than either de Man’s focus on rhetoric or Adorno’s on ‘identity’ or ‘concept’ (Jameson 1991: 237). But if Jameson had to make a decision between the two theorists’ efficacy, then Adorno would always come up trumps. As Jameson went on to point out, the key difference between the two critics lay in their proximity to Marxism. Adorno’s intellectual background made him account for philosophical abstraction’s emergence through an ‘external, historical narrative’, while de Man—for whom history was understandably best forgotten—was resigned to his own account of the collapse of internal meaning through linguistic deconstructions (Jameson 1991: 236–239). In other words, Jameson’s account of deconstruction—albeit in a de Manian form—and Critical Theory differed markedly from Ryan’s. For Ryan, Derrida was the historically minded theorist who put Critical Theory’s Marxist claims to shame. But for Jameson, Adorno’s work—because of its historical awareness—exposes deconstruction’s textual insularity through its continued commitment to materialist history. As a result, in Jameson’s account, Adorno appears far closer to Lukács and Marx than he does to Derrida or de Man. Interaction between deconstruction and Critical Theory has mostly occurred, therefore, via considerations of Marxism. Ultimately, this has meant debating both schools’ relevance to a progressive, if not radical, politics. Deconstruction is perhaps the more difficult of the two to reconcile with the Marxist enterprise. Associating deconstruction with one of Marxism more recondite manifestations—Critical Theory—could make this reconciliation an easier proposition. Ryan’s prodeconstructionist stance and Dews and Jameson’s limited enthusiasms went some way to accepting the deconstructionist theory of multiple interpretations. With this acceptance, it was merely a matter of pushing deconstruction towards Marx, hence the Frankfurt School’s involvement. But, as Dialectic of Enlightenment attests, the Frankfurt School has its own mixed relationship with Marx’s thought. Indeed, if Critical Theory and deconstruction share anything in common it is indecision vis-à-vis historical understanding. Horkheimer and Adorno saw history as a litany of domination from instrumental reason’s effects. Derrida and his followers see history as a linguistic arrangement which outlines multiple explanations which pass for truth. There is, however, an underlying common factor in both of these outlooks—ideology. Though somewhat out of fashion, the critique of ideology remains the best political description of both the Critical Theory and deconstructionist enterprises. For Horkheimer and Adorno, instrumental reason functions as ideology in the way it determines specific forms of power within both pre-modern and modern societies. In deconstruction, language can be read as an ideology that produces false metaphysical concepts. This position is not that far from Adorno’s critique of identity thought. Yet, deconstruction does not allow for a qualitative assessment of these determinate ideologies and hence falls short of political application. The same could be said of Dialectic of Enlightenment. There are, however, grounds to argue the opposite case—that Horkheimer and Adorno believed enough in the possibility of an improved reason to distinguish them from deconstruction’s indeterminacies.

8.4 A Question of Subjectivity

153

8.4 A Question of Subjectivity If there is one topic that has both infuriated and delighted many in the debate surrounding postmodernism, it is that surrounding the self. In reference to Critical Theory, postmodernism’s questioning of subjectivity seems to dissolve any apparent similarities between the two schools of thought. Critical Theory’s roots in the Enlightenment tradition assume that human actors not only exist but act in a rational manner. That is not to say, however, that these individuals are unproblematic. Dialectic of Enlightenment’s argument goes some way to showing how human existence has not extended much beyond the instrumental desire for self-preservation. This anthropological–historical account also presupposes the importance of a later Enlightenment discourse—psychoanalysis. By sublimating the self-preservation impulse, the individual alienates itself from coming to terms with that which is external (Nature) and, as a consequence, the Other. In this sense, Freud’s division of consciousness aligns directly with Horkheimer and Adorno’s damaged subject. Indeed, Dialectic of Enlightenment can be read as something of a modernist sequel to Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. Postmodernism, by contrast, generally rejects such closed accounts of identity formation. To postmodernism’s advocates, both the traditional Enlightenment individual—the Cartesian self—and the psychoanalytic approach— the conscious and unconscious self—are little more than discourses of social domination. Each post-structuralist figure differs in their take on the self’s construction—for Derrida identity remains a textual matter; Lyotard, in a Nietzschean fashion, privileges the unconscious over the conscious self; Foucault turns all talk of self into a means by which to strengthen modern institutions of power. Yet despite these differences, a broad postmodern dissolution of the self has been identified and paralleled to Horkheimer and Adorno’s own problematisation of subjectivity. In a classic post-structuralist reading of Critical Theory, Rainer Nägele decided to confuse matters somewhat by delving into the arcane world of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory for evidence of postmodern subject analysis. It was no surprise that he found it. His essay appeared as part of a volume released by a postmodern journal, boundary 2, which was eager to distill postmodernism’s political consciousness. In revealing postmodernism’s politics, not only did he declare an obvious ‘inter-est’ between Marxism and deconstruction—‘that there is such a common inter-est, is due to the common family romance of a struggle with the history of the bourgeois European Enlightenment’ (Nägele 1986: 94)—he also discovered that Adorno’s writings on the subject overlap with post-structuralism. The upshot was that, for Adorno, ‘subjectivity is both the resistance against and the principle of domination’ (Nägele 1986: 102). This is, of course, an accurate characterisation of Adorno’s identity theory. Nägele, however, went on to inflate the importance that Adorno places on language in the determination of this identity. As a result, Adorno, and Benjamin alongside him, end up ‘involved in semiosis that does not pretend to be a metalanguage above the semiotic effects; rather it stages them, it plays the signs and thus displaces them’ (Nägele 1986: 108). In other words, they become post-structuralists for whom the subject is nothing more than a sign.

154

8 Reconciling Dialectic of Enlightenment with Postmodernism

Not all scholars agreed with the postmodernists’ assessments of Horkheimer and Adorno. Once again, Peter Dews proved the most effective critic. In his 1995 work, The Limits of Disenchantment, Dews reiterated his opposition to post-structuralism’s overall programme as well as to the belief that Adorno was deconstructionist avant la lettre. Indeed, it was Dews’s (1995: 20) contention that ‘Adorno offers us some of the conceptual tools with which to move beyond what is increasingly coming to appear, not least in France itself, as a self-destructively indiscriminate and politically ambiguous assault on the structures of rationality and modernity in toto’. For Dews, the shared Nietzschean origins of Critical Theory and post-structuralism undoubtedly gave the two schools similar outlooks. Yet, they were not identical, especially when it came to the issue of subjectivity. Adorno’s critique of identity thinking was quite different from Lyotard, Foucault or Derrida’s respective downplayings of the individual. This argument was underpinned by two important aspects of Adorno’s thought. First and foremost, Adorno did not abolish subjectivity, but rather considered the subject necessary to ‘break through’ a constitutive subjectivity’s deceptions (Dews 1995: 27). This retention of the subject is certainly the most important element that distinguishes Adorno’s work from the French theorists. Without it, there could be no possibility of overcoming the dialectic of enlightenment he and Horkheimer described. Following from this point, Adorno accepted that a disjuncture between thought and reality, the concept and the particular—or, as Dews (1995: 28) put it, ‘the split between bare facticity and conceptual determination’—could be overcome. Poststructuralists, on the other hand, made their careers by countering this argument. Unlike them, however, the issue for Adorno was not a problem with conceptual thought per se, but that present conceptions of reality are inadequate. Identity thinking categorises the object and in doing so excludes the object’s claims to particularity. As a result, the definition of the whole is incomplete. But rather than accepting this deficit, or choosing to elevate the particular over the universal, Adorno saw that ‘identity can only become adequate by acknowledging its own moment of nonidentity’ (Dews 1995: 31). In other words, it is only when an object’s particularity and universality are considered together (as identity and non-identity) that the antagonism between humans and Nature can be left behind. This has obvious implications for a humanist politics which seeks to understand the Other—be it on gendered, political or cultural lines. The dialectic of enlightenment captures the manner in which conceptual thought stagnated once it had achieved its short-term purpose: a human’s desire for self-preservation through the dominance of nature. But Adorno’s purpose was not to prove that all conceptual thought led to domination. Rather, it was to say that the same reason which governed a partial understanding of nature (identity thinking—universal over particular) can also govern a way out of the alienation that ensued. This belief is, therefore, quite different from the post-structuralist acceptance of alienation within the concept. By neutering the individual’s ability to alter conceptual thinking—and thus reinforcing the primacy of identity thinking— post-structuralism defined itself against the dialectical tradition in which Adorno

8.4 A Question of Subjectivity

155

wrote. As Dews (1995: 35) concluded, ‘one of the major differences between poststructuralism and Critical Theory is summarised in Adorno’s contention that “even when we merely limit the subject, we put an end to its power”’.

8.5 Conclusion Most of the aforementioned texts appeared in a period that extended from the mid1980s to the mid-1990s. This was not only the heyday of postmodern discourse, but also the moment when the many Anglophone Critical Theory scholars published the fruits of their post-1970s labours. It should be clear by now that these two discourses—the postmodern and Critical Theory—coincided in different ways. To some, the coupling looked to be productive, while to others, it was a water-and-oil combination. In this midst of this discussion, Frederic Jameson posited an alternative to this apparent contradiction. For Jameson, the best way to preserve Horkheimer and Adorno’s efficacy was not by christening Critical Theory ‘postmodern’. Rather, it was a matter of recognising their applicability to the contemporary era. Such a view accepts the ineluctability of modernity—as opposed to its replacement by so-called postmodernity—and Horkheimer and Adorno as important observers of this fact. In his major text on Adorno, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (1990), Frederic Jameson argued that those who limit Dialectic of Enlightenment to a fascist context ignore its contemporary relevance—the changing nature of capitalism in the mid-twentieth century and its subsequent cultural manifestations. His contention was that Adorno retained a historically minded Marxism which can now be read as an alternative to the postmodern philosophy of a perpetual present defined by discourse. Adorno’s Critical Theory (what became ‘negative dialectics’) reconceived Enlightenment questions by recognising modernity’s failures—specifically a reliance on the illusion of complete understanding. If postmodernism is little more than a triumphant capitalism’s cultural manifestation, as Jameson has suggested, then Adorno’s critical continuation of Enlightenment philosophy is the perfect theoretical antidote. Unlike postmodernist thought, Adorno’s dialectical model is both critical and avant-garde in its progressiveness. In this sense, he differs from postmodern thought which either celebrates the present, Western obsession with consumption as identity or looks back with nostalgia to by-gone social forms, especially via commodity culture. For Jameson, the spirit of negativity in Adorno’s work provided a means, but not the only means, of confronting postmodernism’s quietist politics and capitalism’s further entrenchment. Dialectic of Enlightenment outlined the relationship of this entrenchment process without giving up hope for its dislodgement. Like Adorno, the actual outcome of Jameson’s faith in negativity as a solution to capitalism is never explained fully. To this extent, the same criticisms of Horkheimer and Adorno— foremost, frustratingly abstruse reasoning (with writing a close second)—can be made of Jameson. Yet, Jameson’s belief in Adorno’s critique of reason pointed to a

156

8 Reconciling Dialectic of Enlightenment with Postmodernism

Critical Theory, or post-Critical Theory, that neither rejects the Enlightenment nor accepts it without criticism. In many respects, Dialectic of Enlightenment’s relationship to postmodernism is summed up in Jameson’s (1990: 148) own repositioning of Horkheimer and Adorno’s work vis-à-vis late capitalist realities: ‘The question about poetry after Auschwitz has been replaced by that of whether you could bear to read Adorno and Horkheimer next to the pool’. Comparisons between Critical Theory and postmodernism petered out in the early twenty-first century as the latter’s innovative pretensions deflated. If anything Critical Theory’s particularity has been re-instated and postmodernism’s radicalism is under a cloud. Critical Theory’s inherent political possibilities, however obscure, position it in a tradition of critical reason: Horkheimer and Adorno—in Dialectic of Enlightenment and elsewhere—criticised Kant, Hegel and Marx for underestimating and, sometimes, reinforcing the negative effects of instrumental reason. As Rolf Tiedemann (1997: 128) perceptively pointed out, it is the three common points that Critical Theory shares with the German idealist tradition that separates Horkheimer and Adorno from postmodernism: a notion of the whole (or totality), the importance of history and a concept of utopia. Horkheimer and Adorno treat each of these themes with a modernist radicalism unlike that of their predecessors’ formalism; but it is a radicalism which still owes much to such formalism. The retention of these grand narratives ultimately separates Critical Theory, even in its post-1940s form, from postmodernism. To call Horkheimer and Adorno proto-postmodernists may be feasible, but the truth is stretched when suggesting that they had the same epistemological approaches to domination, textuality and subjectivity as figures like Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard. Comparisons between all these figures are more indicative of a style of thinking prevalent in Anglophone academia between the 1970s and 2000s. The rise of postmodern theory allowed all thought to be compared together, whereby composite theories could overturn or improve previous ideas’ shortcomings. In this sense, Horkheimer and Adorno’s incorporation of many theories in Dialectic of Enlightenment was the beginning of this trend. What differed, however, was that they saw themselves as writing a radical revision of reason, whereas much postmodernist literature looks to debunk reason altogether. That is not to say there is nothing to gain from continuing the dialogue between the intellectual representatives of the postmodernism and Critical Theory. Indeed, the highlighting of the Nietzschean moments in Dialectic of Enlightenment and other works by Adorno goes a long way to explaining how they used such moments to debunk the limitations of other theorists like Marx and Weber. But such a dialogue was arguably more fulfilling in that other realm of postmodern contention—which centres on the position of culture in late capitalist society. It is this debate about culture that the next and final chapter examines.

References

157

References Agger, B. (1989). Fast capitalism: A critical theory of significance. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Agger, B. (1992). Discourse of domination: From the Frankfurt School to postmodernism. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Agger, B. (1993). Gender, culture, and power: Toward a feminist postmodern critical theory. Westport: Praeger Publishers. Ahmad, A. (1992). In theory: Classes, nations, literatures. London: Verso. Alexander, R. J. (2001). Maoism in the developed world. Westport: Praeger. Althusser, L. (1984). Essays on ideology. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Verso. Arac, J. (1986). Introduction. In J. Arac (Ed.), To postmodernism and politics, ix-xliii. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Berman, R. (1989). Modern culture and critical theory: Art, politics and the legacy of the Frankfurt School. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Bernstein, J. M. (2001). Adorno: Disenchantment and ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bewes, T. (1997). Cynicism and postmodernity. London: Verso. de Man, P. (1996). Aesthetic ideology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dews, P. (1979). Nouvelle philosophie and Foucault. Economy and Society, 9(2), 127–171. Dews, P. (1987). The limits of disenchantment: Essays on contemporary European philosophy. London: Verso. Dews, P. (Ed.). (1992). Autonomy and solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas. London: Verso. Dews, P. (1995). Logics of disintegration: Poststructuralist thought and the claims of critical theory. London: Verso. Eagleton, T. (1996). Illusions of postmodernism. London: Wiley. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Allen Lane. Foucault, M. (1991). Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori. Trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito. New York: Semiotexte. Fraser, N. (1987). What’s critical about critical theory? The case of Habermas and Gender. In S. Benhabib & D. Cornell (Eds.), Feminism as critique: Essays on the politics of gender in late capitalist societies (pp. 31–56). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Habermas, J. (1987). The philosophical siscourse of modernity: Twelve lectures. Trans. Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Hamacher, W., Hertz, N., & Keenan, T. (Eds.). (1989). Responses: On Paul de Man’s wartime journalism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Hansen, M. (1992). Mass culture as hieroglyphic writing: Adorno, Derrida, and Kracauer. New German Critique, 156, 46–62. Harvey, D. (1989). The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heller, A. (1984/85). Lukács and the holy family. Telos, 62, 145–153. Hohendahl, P. U. (1995). Prismatic thought: Theodor W Adorno, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Honneth, A. (1986). Foucault and Adorno: Two forms of the critique of modernity. Thesis Eleven, 15, 48–59. Honneth, A. (1991). The critique of power: Reflective stages in a critical social theory. Trans. Kenneth Baynes. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hoy, D. C., & McCarthy, T. (1994). Critical theory. Oxford: Blackwell.

158

8 Reconciling Dialectic of Enlightenment with Postmodernism

Jacques, D. (1992). Force of law: The ‘mystical foundations of authority.’ In C. Drucilla, R. Michael & D.G Carlson (Eds.), Deconstruction and the possibility of justice (pp. 3–67). New York: Routledge. Jacques, D. (1994). Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. London: Verso. Jameson, F. (1990). Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the persistence of the dialectic. London: Verso. Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism. London: Verso. Jameson, D. (1998). The cultural turn: Selected writings on the postmodern, 1983-1998. London: Verso. Jarvis, S. (1998). Adorno: A critical introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Jay, M. (1983). Should intellectual history take a linguistic turn? Reflections on the HabermasGadamer debate. In D. LaCapra & S. L. Kaplan (Eds.), Modern European intellectual history: reappraisals and new perspectives. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Judt, T. (1992). Past imperfect: French intellectuals, 1945–1956. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lecourt, D. (2001). The mediocracy: French philosophy since the mid-1970s. London: Trans. Gregory Elliot. Lukács, G. (1971). The theory of the novel: A historico-philosophical essay on the forms of great epic literature. Trans. Anna Bostock. London: New Left Books. Lyotard, J.-F. (1974). Adorno as the devil. Telos, 19, 127–137. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984).The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Macey, D. (1993). The Lives of Michel Foucault. London: Vintage. McCormick, J. P. (2002). A critical versus genealogical ‘questioning’ of technology: Notes on how not to read Adorno and Horkheimer. In J. P. McCormick (Ed.), Confronting mass democracy and industrial technology: Political and social theory from Nietzsche to Habermas. Durham: Duke University Press. Merquior, J. G. (1986). From Prague to Paris: A critique of structuralist and post-structuralist thought. London. Morris, M. (2001). Rethinking the communicative turn: Adorno, Habermas and the problems of communicative freedom. Albany: SUNY Press. Nägele, R. (1986). The scene of the other: Adorno’s negative dialectic in the context of poststructuralism. In J. Arac (Ed.), Postmodernism and politics (pp. 91–111). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Norris, C. (1992). Uncritical theory: Postmodernism, intellectuals and the gulf war. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Norris, C. (1996). Deconstruction, postmodernism, and philosophy: Habermas on Derrida. In M. P. D’Entreves and S. Benhabib (Eds.), Habermas and the unfinished project of modernity: Critical essays on the philosophical discourse of modernity, (pp. 97–123). Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Ffrench, P. (1995). A time of theory: A history of ‘Tel Quel’, 1960–1980. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Poster, M. (1984). Foucault, Marxism and history: Mode of production versus mode of information. Cambridge: Polity Press. Poster, M. (1989). Critical theory and post-structuralism: In search of a context. Ithaca. Poster, M. (1990). The mode of information: Post-structuralism and social context. Chicago. Raulet, G. (1983). Structuralism and post-structuralism: An interview with Michel Foucault. Telos, 55, 195–211. Roberts, D. (1995). Nothing but history: Reconstruction and extremity after metaphysics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rocco, C. (1994). Between modernity and postmodernity: Reading dialectic of enlightenment against the grain. Political Theory, 22(1), 71–97. Ryan, M. (1982). Marxism and deconstruction: A critical articulation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

References

159

Schnädelbach, H. (1999). The cultural legacy of critical theory. New Formations., 38, 64–77. Sim, S. (1996). Jean-François Lyotard. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Therborn, G. (2006). From Marxism to post-Marxism?. London: Verso. Tiedemann, R. (1997). Concept, image, name. In T. Huhn & L. Zuidervaart (Eds.), The semblance of subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (pp. 123–145). Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Wellmer, A. (1993). The persistence of modernity: Essays on aesthetics, ethics, and postmodernism. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Whitebook, J. (2002). Michel Foucault: A Marcusean in structuralist clothing. Thesis Eleven, 71, 52–70. Wilke, S. (1990). Adorno and Derrida on Husserl. Telos, 84, 155–176. Wood, E. M. (1986). The retreat from class: A new ‘true’ socialism. London: Verso.

Chapter 9

Confronting Dialectic of Enlightenment via Cultural Studies

The less the culture industry has to promise and the less it can offer a meaningful explanation of life, the emptier the ideology it disseminates necessarily becomes. Even the abstract ideals of the harmony and benevolence of society are too concrete in the age of the universal advertisement. Horkheimer and Adorno

Cultural Studies’ academic good fortune owes little to the Frankfurt School. From its origins in early 1970s until earlier this century, the discipline consistently failed to engage with Critical Theory on a more than superficial level. On the few occasions when Cultural Studies’ theorists examined Critical Theory, their focus usually dwelled Dialectic of Enlightenment’s ‘Culture Industry’ chapter or Adorno’s subsequent cultural criticism. Such investigations were customarily dismissive. This prejudice is no doubt due to the widespread belief that Horkheimer and Adorno’s culture industry thesis is either a simple theory of media manipulation or a defence of the high culture/low culture divide (Gans 1974). Because Cultural Studies defines itself against these attitudes, it is not surprising that its representatives have had little time for Horkheimer and Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment’s ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ was perceived as an obstacle to Cultural Studies’ more upbeat outlook and, thus, had to be superseded or, failing that, at least circumvented. That most Cultural Studies theorists chose the latter tactic is revealed most clearly in their overall neglect of the Frankfurt School. But circumvention is also visible in the two relatively crude procedures used for coping with Critical Theory. On the one hand, Cultural Studies’ theorists disparage Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument as wartime hyperbole that is inconsequential in the present context. On the other hand, they advocate an ersatz rapprochement between Cultural Studies and the Frankfurt School in which Walter Benjamin’s supposed populism is routinely elevated to new heights at the expense of Adorno’s apparent archaism and superciliousness. Such measures have proved attractive precisely because they could be used either separately or together to arrive at the same conclusion: the culture industry thesis’s redundancy.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 H. Prosser, Dialectic of Enlightenment in the Anglosphere, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3521-5_9

161

162

9 Confronting Dialectic of Enlightenment via Cultural Studies

Some other theorists in Cultural Studies’ field have deemed such rejections unfair. For them, the culture industry thesis, while by no means perfect, was neither pessimistic nor elitist. Instead, Horkheimer and Adorno are read as defenders of human culture—what Adorno elsewhere called ‘the perennial claim of the particular over the general’ (Adorno 1991)—against rationalisation. This assault on culture was most worrying because it struck at the very heart of independent human expression and ipso facto social improvement. Instead of sanctifying the high/low culture dichotomy, Horkheimer and Adorno’s excursus on the culture industry is seen as showing how all culture is now commodified. As a result, by the end of the twentieth century, advocates of Cultural Studies and Critical Theory began to appear with attempts to reconcile their apparent differences. This reconciliation was predicated on the belief that the Frankfurt School had much to offer Cultural Studies. First and foremost, Horkheimer and Adorno’s culture industry thesis is said to read late capitalist culture in a far more resolute manner than Cultural Studies’ relativistic (and thus irresolute) approaches. Most obviously, culture is regarded as yet another locus of reification which reinforces social domination rather than freedom. This emphasis would temper Cultural Studies’ exaggeration of individuals’ ability to culturally resist. Second, Horkheimer and Adorno’s relationship to the culture industry is understood as quite different from Cultural Studies’. While it is conceded that the German philosophers were perhaps too scathing in their dismissal of almost all contemporary culture, Cultural Studies is sometimes regarded as having gone too far in the other direction: its theorists often celebrate the consumer society they profess to criticise. That is not to say that the Frankfurt School is considered to have discovered some Archimedean point from which to observe culture—although Adorno certainly gave this impression—but that a level of critique is lacking in Cultural Studies’ analysis. The extent of this reconciliation by the end of the 1990s, however, should not be overstated. Cultural Studies’ long critique of the culture industry thesis hindered appreciation of its virtues, especially as a corrective to cultural populism and a celebration of capitalist cultural production. This chapter outlines the tenor of this discussion with examples that illustrate the Frankfurt scholars’ position in the history of Cultural Studies in the late twentieth century. That this position is contested is likely a reading that both Cultural Studies and Critical Theory would concede as appropriate. But it nevertheless reflects how culture as a means of dominance, resistance and liberation over time. Cultural Studies’ postmodern jouissance had little truck for Horkheimer and Adorno’s so-called cultural pessimism, until this pleasure principle was understood as both a freedom and a constraint.

9.1 The Rise of Cultural Studies Broadly speaking, Cultural Studies has been a phenomenon of the Anglophone world and is identified almost exclusively as a project of the Left which emerged from the 1960s (Dworkin 1997; Steele 1997). And Cultural Studies is a discipline which is

9.1 The Rise of Cultural Studies

163

notoriously difficult to define because, on the one hand, resists definitions and, on the other, its polyvalent examination of popular culture’s effects means that any straightforward history of Cultural Studies will inevitably avoid its developmental intricacies (Hall 1990, 1992; Grossberg 1993). Suffice to say that Cultural Studies is the institutional manifestation of culture’s centrality as an analytical category— especially under postmodernism’s influence—in the late twentieth century. During this period, Cultural Studies attention was especially placed on popular culture and the way that it was, in Stuart Hall’s words, encoded by its producers and decoded by its consumers. But, as Todd Gitlin put it, Cultural Studies was ‘the activity practiced by people who say that they are doing cultural studies’ (Gitlin 1997: 25). This activity usually contained strong elements of social theory—from its professed origins among the first British New Left and cultural anthropology to its appropriation of postmodern, post-Marxist or postcolonial thought. Despite this mix, or perhaps because of it, the Birmingham School’s work during the 1970s becomes an important marker. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University—especially when Stuart Hall was its director—provided much of the inspiration for subsequent academic examinations of popular culture which was becoming increasingly commodified.1 The Birmingham School’s work reflected the theoretical response to this historical change. In practice, this meant a movement away from the ‘cultural Marxism’ of their New Left predecessors Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and Edward Thompson (Steele 1997). As Americanisation took hold in Britain, these figures’ examination of working-class culture was relegated to a level of socialist nostalgia. The subsequent ‘postmodern era’ broadened the definition of culture to include those trappings against which Cultural Studies had been initially established (Williams 1989; Hoggart 1995). The social theory soon rose to meet these times. There was therefore a movement away from a ‘functional’ analysis of commodity culture—that is, Marxist interpretations of culture which stressed productive, in preference to interpretive or reproductive, processes (Grant 2000). This outcome altered British Cultural Studies in such a way that in its parochial accent there could now be heard a smattering of French inflections albeit with heavy Sardinian undertones. In an era of postmodern theory and commodity culture, Cultural Studies believed that ‘Marxism was the theory that had to be encountered, and if necessary, transcended’ (Davies 1995: 8). Such aims did nothing to unite the Birmingham School with the work of its earlier counterpart in Frankfurt. Such terms permitted a greater degree of agency for the individual consumer than Horkheimer and Adorno had allowed. Similarly, the cultural texts being read were not regarded as the products of a menacing culture industry, but as tools for self-identification against confining social definitions. To many, the Frankfurt School’s work offered not even supplementary assistance to this approach. Critical Theory was, at least in theory, the opposite of late 1970s Cultural 1 The

Birmingham School, like the Frankfurt School, is a term of recent construction. It appears that Hall (1990: 11) took some offence at the term claiming that ‘there is no such thing as the Birmingham School. To hear “the Birmingham School” evoked is, for me, to confront a model of alienation in which something one took part in producing returns to greet one as thing, in its inevitable facticity’.

164

9 Confronting Dialectic of Enlightenment via Cultural Studies

Studies. But that is not to say it was ignored. In one of his many recollections of this period at the Centre, Hall (1992: 279–280) depicted this early process as ‘wrestling with the angels’ of sophisticated Western Marxism—this meant a ‘prolonged and as yet unending contestation with the question of false consciousness’. Elsewhere he stated that the second New Left ‘brought us, in English, the major works of the Frankfurt School, then of Benjamin, and then of Gramsci’ without which Cultural Studies ‘could not have become a field of work in its own right’ (Hall 1990: 16). Nonetheless, works published by the Birmingham School, or its many scions, reveal an apparent lack of ‘wrestling’ with Critical Theory. Published work is not, of course, intellectual labour’s only gauge. But in an academic Centre that prided itself on accessible self-publication with theoretical inflections, it is intriguing that the Frankfurt School missing. This absence is best explained through the work of Phil Slater (1974)—outlined in Chap. 6—the only Birmingham scholar to write on Critical Theory at any real length. His orthodox Marxist dismissal of the Frankfurt School was perhaps a sign of a position Cultural Studies was soon leaving behind. Still, it is difficult to say how much such Slater’s scathing indictment of the Frankfurt School in a key Birmingham School text may have affected Cultural Studies’ subsequent treatment of Horkheimer and Adorno. Slater’s dismissal of the Germans’ work set a specific tone toward Critical Theory: a clear voice in what was perhaps the Birmingham Centre’s most Marxist period—a brief moment between the miasma of the late sixties uprisings and the new structuralist and post-structuralist fogs. Writing off the Frankfurt School sent a clear warning to Cultural Studies’ theorists interested in its work: steer clear of Horkheimer and Adorno.

9.2 Beyond Frankfurt and Birmingham But it was less Marxist orthodoxy that was calling for such avoidance. By the 1980s, Cultural Studies’ proponents regarded Horkheimer and Adorno’s work as conforming to an elitist, pessimistic and outmoded way of thinking about cultural production and interpretation during the 1980s. In Australia, where Cultural Studies was gaining momentum, an exchange in the left-wing journal Arena captured this sentiment as well as the resistance to it. In his ‘In Defence of Popular Culture’, cultural critic John Docker (1982) contended that Horkheimer and Adorno were bourgeois intellectuals who patronised the working class and denied their ability to make critical choices. In a mode that was to become de rigueur for Cultural Studies, Docker (1982: 81–82) went on to say ‘that because they dislike formality, with its aura of private exclusive ownership of “high” culture, working-class people will avoid the hunting grounds of the middle and upper class cultural traditions: opera, ballet, theatre (radical as well as mainstream), classical music concerts, art galleries. When working class activities— like nineteenth-century music hall—are appropriated by capitalist managements, and formalised, the working class will reappropriate informal modes of response, of discrimination and enjoyment, in terms of entertainment in pubs and clubs, or at home watching TV’. His argument’s upshot was similar to that of the Birmingham

9.2 Beyond Frankfurt and Birmingham

165

School: instead of seeing meaning as dictated to the masses, it was the masses who dictated their own meaning.2 Docker’s comments inspired a stoush. Anthony Ashbolt was quick to pounce on the conceptual defects of Docker’s characterisation. For Ashbolt, Adorno remained important in an analysis of television culture because, despite his writing in the 1950s, television programmes were still predictable, clichéd and stylised. Docker’s caricature of Adorno ignored mass media’s ideological role: television programmes, in Ashbolt’s Adornian interpretation, limited thought (1982: 136). To Ashbolt, Docker’s naïve defence of popular culture threatened to negate Critical Theory and leave only ‘intellectual bankruptcy’ (Ashbolt 1982: 140). Another respondent, Ingrid Hagstrom (1982), conceded Frankfurt’s shortcomings while castigating Docker for overlooking the production that is at the heart of the culture industry thesis and the alienation of the working classes from this production process. Docker’s reply pushed back forcefully. His opening remarks set the tone: ‘The Frankfurt School is alive and well in Australia. That is the only conclusion we can safely draw from the replies… I’d like to reply to these replies, not in a point-by-point way, but by pushing on past where I left off before. I want to widen our differences even further’ (Docker 1983: 109). He argued that popular culture must be opened up to a textual analysis that Marxism often neglects in its rush to stress social, historical and ideological contexts. For Docker, this context-focused method—best represented by the Frankfurt School—did not separate Marxism from bourgeois cultural commentary. Docker emphasised his belief that the majority of post-war Marxist criticism amounted to little more than the middle-class elitism. The Frankfurt School was, in his opinion, largely to blame for this direction. ‘Cultural workers of the world unite!’, Docker declared, ‘You have nothing to lose but your Frankfurt School chains!’ (1983: 120).

9.3 Consolidating Cultural Studies Docker’s tactics illustrated the changing mood and rising dominance of Cultural Studies as the dominant interpretive form. The dominance of Marxist discourse—be it politically orthodox or culturally heterodox—in social theory was waning. The Frankfurt School, despite its marginalism, was sidelined within this new interpretivist approaches that look beyond class theory. This moment, from the mid-1980s onwards, coincided with Cultural Studies’ consolidation in academe, especially via its appropriation and advocacy of post-structuralist thought. 2 In

a later book, Postmodernism and Popular Culture (1994: 62–63), Docker asserted that ‘the Birmingham School is alive, as the Frankfurt School generally wasn’t, to the possibility that audiences may in their own ways decode the “dominant discourses”; their responses are not necessarily automatic, as Adorno and Horkheimer assumed’. Although he still believed that Hall and the Birmingham Centre ‘never really strayed too far from decades-long [Marxist] orthodoxy; the reach was long, but they always allowed it to pull back’.

166

9 Confronting Dialectic of Enlightenment via Cultural Studies

During this period, Tony Bennett, for instance, surveyed the competence of Marxist approaches to contemporary media issues. Bennett, who led the CCS after Hall, published the essay in a 1982 collection produced for the Open University that conveyed the virtues of open-ended audience interpretation over the so-called manipulation theory. Bennett’s analysis, ‘Theories of the Media, Theories of Society’, included the Frankfurt School but only as an example of a now obsolete tradition. Overall, his even-handed critique arrived at a similar conclusion to Slater’s: that the Frankfurt School should not be considered a beacon for contemporary cultural theory because Horkheimer and Adorno’s take on culture was elitist and therefore undemocratic. ‘The Frankfurt theorists’, Bennett (1982: 47) argued, ‘although remaining committed to Marxism, broached the task of analysing the relationship between class, ideology and the media through the conceptual prism supplied by the amalgam of the mass society critique and the presuppositions of German philosophical idealism grafted on to the framework of Marxist theory’. This anti-German idealism was a sign of the increasingly postmodern times. It came as no surprise that Bennett suggested that such prejudiced and idealistic Kulturkritik should be ignored and that preference should be given to approaches more amenable to structuralism and poststructuralism—namely, Althusser and the linguistics of Russian Formalism (Bennett 1979). These sentiments strengthened and spread in following years. In 1984, Lawrence Grossberg published an essay, ‘Strategies of Marxist Cultural Interpretation’, which also mapped left-wing cultural analysis’s development from the Frankfurt School to post-structuralism. Indeed, the essay was something of a watershed as Grossberg was instrumental in bringing this Birmingham School approach to his colleagues in the United States and assisting the subsequent global spread of the discipline (Grossberg 1997). He favoured the argument that consumers create their own meanings from the cultural goods and services they consume. Thus, anyone who argued that a ‘culture industry’ exploited individuals was either theoretically deficient or, presumably, mistaken. Horkheimer and Adorno obviously fell into one, if not both, of these categories—their work thus became a ‘classical’ version of Cultural Studies. To avoid this Adornian cul-de-sac, Grossberg pointed to the route taken by Walter Benjamin. This positioning of Benjamin against Adorno, by no means Grossberg’s invention, was already a standard method of criticising the culture industry thesis. But rather than directly referring to Benjamin’s work, Grossberg put forward the argument made by the art critic and novelist John Berger in his influential Ways of Seeing (1972) who saw new opportunities for liberation in the emergence of art’s reproducibility. The irony here, however, was that Berger’s conclusion is somewhat incongruous with Grossberg’s purpose. For Ways of Seeing acquires an Adornian tone when it examines the intentions behind certain cultural texts. Berger was just as scathing about the culture industry for quelling the political. Ways of Seeing ultimately combined Horkheimer and Adorno’s culture industry thesis with Benjamin’s belief in cultural reproduction’s potential. If anything, by arguing that original artwork remained ‘authentic’ and that publicity was manipulation, Berger’s thesis was closer to Horkheimer and Adorno’s. Grossberg’s proposal, that the followers of Cultural

9.3 Consolidating Cultural Studies

167

Studies and Critical Theory could do themselves a favour by turning to Berger’s text, unwittingly advocated a return to the position he set out to criticise.3 Nonetheless, throughout the 1980s and 1990s Cultural Studies sought to correct the culture industry thesis neglect of individual agency by championing cultural consumers’ abilities to reinterpret and reenvision their world through popular culture products. This belief almost always regarded the Frankfurt theorists as limited in their conception of consumer or audience sophistication. And as Cultural Studies’ gained momentum, its theories were taken to new extremes in which the culture industry thesis became a caricature. The ‘cultural populists’ (McGuigan 1992) who rose to prominence in the late 1980s had no time for theories that stifled the cry of ‘all power to the audiences’. John Fiske was the much-cited exemplar of this trend. In Fiske’s eyes, cultural production should be embraced rather than feared since it acts as a conduit for consumers’ own projects of counter-hegemonic resistance. Fiske’s encounter with the Frankfurt School in Television Culture (1987) applied the culture industry thesis to the 1970s television programme Charlie’s Angels. If the Frankfurt School’s members were able to watch and analyse Charlie’s Angels, Fiske hypothesised, they would not have stressed the ‘element of radicalism’ engendered in the casting of three women in detective roles that were usually reserved for men. According to Fiske, they would have argued that such radicalism was inevitably ‘incorporated into the dominant sexist ideology… in such a way as to show that patriarchy can accommodate the “new woman” into its views of the world without having to make any adjustments of principle, only minor ones of detail’ (1987: 38). This ‘incorporation theory’ would conclude that all popular culture ‘serves the interests of dominant ideology’ and thus deprived ‘the radical’ viewer of a dissenting voice (Fiske 1987: 38). Fiske, by contrast, claimed that television programmes offer a diversity of meanings that allow them to be popular among many different people. That is, there are ‘extra-textual experience and attitudes’ that extend beyond the textually determined meanings and affect interpretation (Fiske 1987: 40). Accordingly, arguments that regard culture as an ‘instrument of domination’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 147) overstated cultural production’s importance and ignore audiences’ capacities to decipher cultural product’s ideologies. True to Cultural Studies’ form, Fiske (1987: 41) maintained that it was Gramsci rather than the Frankfurt School to whom Cultural Studies had to pay homage because the Italian’s theory of hegemony exposed how dominant ideologies could be ‘resisted, evaded, or negotiated with, in varying degrees by differently socially situated readers’. But the resistance of cultural populism only went so far. Deborah Cook offered Frankfurt-tradition response to Fiske’s (and Baudrillard’s) position. According to Cook (1992: 236): ‘As Adorno already realised, people are not entirely dupes of the system. This is essentially what Fiske and Baudrillard have discovered. To say that people are not entirely duped is not 3A

variation on this simple Benjamin-versus-Adorno schema appeared in an essay by Richard Johnson, ‘What is Cultural Studies Anyway?’ (1987). Johnson was associated with the CCCS from the early 1970s and became its director in 1979 once Stuart Hall departed and the Centre was subsumed by Birmingham University.

168

9 Confronting Dialectic of Enlightenment via Cultural Studies

to say that they resist, however. Working against theories which claim that people are completely passive, manipulated, and alienated, what Fiske and Baudrillard have shown is that they are not. This is a small gain—smaller, perhaps, than either would like—but it is an important one’. This small and important gain appeared at the same time as Cultural Studies’ search for legitimation in academia came to a close. During the 1980s, the study of popular culture became a pop-culture phenomenon in its own right. Cultural Studies was no longer restricted to those associated with the Birmingham School. Indeed, it was fast becoming a more American-centred academic practice. By the 1990s, it had emerged in most Anglophone universities and caused much controversy (Williams 1995; Slatamburlo 1998). This upsurge in interest cultivated a similarly proportioned increase in the field’s literature. Such demand, as well as a desire to sustain it, fostered the introduction of Cultural Studies ‘readers’—easily accessible digests of important essays in the field.4 Cultural Studies theorists were anxious to legitimate their approach to culture and society by reflecting on their discipline’s origins. As such, ‘readers’ that selected a variety of cultural criticisms inadvertently produced narratives showing how Cultural Studies had progressed through a process of natural selection. Unsurprisingly, Horkheimer and Adorno’s culture industry chapter only as a something against which to define contemporary Cultural Studies. The Cultural Studies Reader (1993), for instance, presented Horkheimer and Adorno’s work as an integral stage in Cultural Studies’ development. But, Simon During pointed out in an introduction to ‘The Culture Industry’, Horkheimer and Adorno neglected ‘the ways in which the cultural industry, while in the service of capital, also provides the opportunities for all kinds of individual and collective creativity and decoding’ (During 1993: 29–30). Hence, Horkheimer and Adorno were said to mistakenly perceive consumers as dolts and deny the possibility of individual agency within the discourse in which a consumer functions. The upshot was that Horkheimer and Adorno had a rightful place within the history of Cultural Studies, but that their position was one from which the discipline had advanced (see Collins 1989; Docker 1994; Munns and Rajan 1995; Strinati 1995).

9.4 Frankfurt’s Limited Defences Yet, Cultural Studies seemed to have advanced to a position so in favour of audience reinterpretation that its scholars were now uncritical of the production of cultural artefacts under capitalist conditions. In many respects, this development arose from the disciplinary crisis that faced Cultural Studies at the end of the century (Nelson, Triechler and Grossberg 1992; Hall 1990). Once its institutional status was accepted, 4 It

should be noted that such collections were by no means new to Cultural Studies. The Open University had been producing anthologies since the late 1970s. One of the first to appear was for a course that shared its title with the book—Mass Communication and Society (1977)—and included Horkheimer and Adorno’s ‘The Culture Industry’ essay.

9.4 Frankfurt’s Limited Defences

169

the field’s supposedly radical epistemology came into question. Such questioning was primarily caused by criticism of the field from both outside and inside its ranks. The much-touted inclusive nature of Cultural Studies allowed many to claim to be exponents in the field, but, insofar as theoretical allegiances are concerned, postmodernism was the dominant force. Suffice to say that by the late 1990s accusations of complicity with the culture industries did not sit well with Cultural Studies’ representatives who still considered themselves to be of the political left. And so by the early 2000s a reconsideration of the culture industry thesis began to appear as corrective to this populist collusion. Only a handful of scholars dared to do so before this point. It was not until the release of an essay collection in 1986, Studies in Entertainment, that Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument was positively reassessed. Contributions from Tania Modleski and Bernard Gendron both contended, albeit in differing ways, that the culture industry thesis remained germane to Cultural Studies’ project. In the collection’s introduction, Modleski formulated a continuum of cultural theory that positioned Horkheimer and Adorno’s warnings against the culture industry at one end and theorists who believed that popular culture was unproblematic at the other. At present, Modleski observed, the latter position held sway, but such dominance was not something to relish. Modleski pointed out a dangerous trend towards celebrating popular culture at the expense of criticisms that are wary of such culture’s ideological cunning. As Modleski postulated: ‘If the problem with some of the work of the Frankfurt School was that its members were too far outside the culture they examined, critics today seem to have the opposite problem: immersed in their culture, half in love with their subject, they sometimes seem unable to achieve the proper critical distance from it’ (Modleski 1986a: xi). Cultural Studies’ enthusiasm for the popular had blinded it to what Modleski saw as left-wing cultural analysis’s purpose: to change the means and conditions of cultural production. She proposed that Horkheimer and Adorno were integral to the process of bringing Cultural Studies back into line with its original in critique of capitalism. Modleski was not advocating a return to considerations of political economy, however. Rather, it was in French postmodernists like Barthes, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Kristeva that she heard echoes of Horkheimer and Adorno’s ideas—even though most did not always share the Frankfurtians’ latent utopian hopes. In her main contribution to the collection, ‘The Terror of Pleasure: The Contemporary Horror Film and Postmodern Theory’, Modleski argued that many postmodernist thinkers ‘engage in the same kind of oppositional thinking about mass culture that characterised the work of the Frankfurt School’ (1986b: 156). But Horkheimer and Adorno’s approach was even more obvious, Modleski contended, in contemporary horror films. To Modleski these films expressed an assault on all that bourgeois culture is supposed to cherish. For example, the depiction of cannibalism and family breakdown in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) could be seen as criticising capitalism’s abhorrent outcomes; George Romero’s images of soulless zombies wandering around shopping malls in Dawn of the Dead (1978) amounted to a depiction of benumbed consumption; and the casting of the video as monster in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) illustrated

170

9 Confronting Dialectic of Enlightenment via Cultural Studies

the potentially terrifying nature of technology (in particular, entertainment technology). Modleski was arguing that a variant of postmodern art—the horror flick—was able to negatively render capitalist society in a way similar to Adorno’s espousal of the modernism. Her own overall point was reminiscent of Horkheimer and Adorno’s belief that modernity’s so-called ‘developments’ could lead to fiendish terror. Bernard Gendron’s piece in the collection, ‘Theodor Adorno meets The Cadillacs’, used a different tack to support Critical Theory. Gendron used Adorno’s 1936 essay ‘On Popular Music’—an important text in developing Dialectic of Enlightenment’s thesis—to highlight the difficulties of analysing cultural production. For Gendron, Adorno’s essay remained one of the few penetrating pieces ever written on the subject because it did not shy away from a link between industry and music: that processes of standardisation influenced the production of functional and cultural artefacts. Gendron only agreed with Adorno to a certain extent, however. A cultural artefact’s purpose, Gendron stressed, differs from a purely functional artefact in its application. That is, music can be played in various situations without having to produce anything but itself. Even though a universal text like music must manifest itself as a functional artefact (that is, on paper or on disc), Gendron (1986: 26) argued that ‘the factors accounting for standardisation in the production of musical texts must be significantly different from those which account for standardisation in functional artefacts’. But Adorno was not, Gendron maintained, as passé as a fifties doo-wop group. Indeed, for him re-reading Adorno on popular music was a refreshing change to the celebratory mood of mid-eighties Cultural Studies. It was with this sentiment in mind that Gendron chastised some of the Birmingham School’s work, especially Dick Hebdige’s, for legitimising rock and roll when it emphasised audience appropriation. He was similarly critical of the small attention such work gave to the culture industry’s role in determining popular music’s meaning. This lack, Gendron conceded, was probably due to a difficulty in describing complex systems of publicity; but that was no excuse for methodological negligence. Gendron felt Adorno’s work could be a solution to this problem since his theory of cultural production—despite overlooking the limits of the industrial model when applied to culture—was intent on exposing the culture industry’s message. ‘With his theory of industrial standardization in music’, Gendron (1986: 35) argued, ‘he combined concepts of both political economy and semiotics, drawing on analogies between the industrially-produced functional artefact and the industrially-produced cultural text’. For the most part, these small moves towards the work of Horkheimer and Adorno were drops in an ocean of Cultural Studies’ work. The discipline continued to expound the active audience thesis and the dearth of interest in the culture industry thesis continued well into the 1990s. Critical Theory’s few supporters, however intellectually sophisticated, paled in comparison to the number clustered around Cultural Studies. In 1991, John Caughie (1991: 129) lamented how easily Dialectic of Enlightenment had been ‘adopted as the convenient apostasy of a new rhetoric, operating as a kind of semaphore, signalling correct positions across great distances with a simplified and functional code’. Caughie submitted that it was Horkheimer and Adorno’s avant-garde perspective that angered contemporary theorists: the Critical Theorist’s modernist posturing about ‘genuine’ or ‘autonomous’ art was confused

9.4 Frankfurt’s Limited Defences

171

with a prescription for ‘elitist’ art. Moreover, an understanding of what Dialectic of Enlightenment was saying criticising in the application of reason—human’s domination of nature—had been sorely lacking in any Cultural Studies discussion of Critical Theory. Those who discussed the Frankfurt School at all always failed to recognise how its critique of instrumental reason governed the culture industry thesis.

9.5 Fortifying Frankfurt These concessions to the Frankfurt School within the Cultural Studies fold illustrate Horkheimer and Adorno’s limited influence. But there were other scholars during this time that sought to re-define postmodern cultural criticism with old-fashioned Critical Theory in mind. Ben Agger began this process in 1992. Having outlined his version of postmodern Critical Theory in The Discourse of Domination (1991), Agger then sought to position the Frankfurt School tradition within the Cultural Studies fold. Cultural Studies as Critical Theory (1992) was the result. For the most part, the text can be seen as part of the wave of texts on Cultural Studies that appeared in the early 1990s. Yet, Agger’s approach paid significant attention to the Frankfurt School’s cultural theories. Moreover, he began to compare the Birmingham and Frankfurt Schools. It was the former’s reliance on Gramsci which, Agger argued, allowed them to overlook the latter’s ‘mandarinism’ (1992: 57). Similarities between Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and the Frankfurt School’s cultural politics went largely unseen because Critical Theory did not engage with the Sardinian’s work (see Morrow 1991). Agger’s agenda seemed to be an ecumenism which allowed all ‘theory’ to be seemingly conglomerated to create a super-critique of late capitalism. His faith in the Frankfurt School, unlike some of his other contemporaries, meant that Critical Theory had pride of place alongside postmodernism and Cultural Studies. The upshot of his position become clear by the end of the text where he ambiguously claimed that ‘a critical postmodernism can offer the Frankfurt culture-industry thesis a foundation in a cultural studies approach owed to thinkers like Foucault’ (Agger 1992: 168—original emphasis). Others, however, sought to look beyond comparisons or postmodern rejuvenations of Critical Theory. The best example of a work trying to reinstate Horkheimer and Adorno’s importance was philosopher Deborah Cook’s The Culture Industry Revisited (1996). Cook was working in a tradition closer to the now fractured Telos group from the 1970s and 1980s than that of Cultural Studies. Consequently, her portrayal of the culture industry thesis was a laudatory one. It was Cook’s contention that Adorno’s work on the culture industry, both in Dialectic of Enlightenment and elsewhere, had been misread and misrepresented. What cultural theory needed to stress was how much the culture industry remained a part of Westerners’ everyday lives (Cook 1996: 137). Any attempt to suppress this industry’s significance was, for Cook, just another example of its omnipotence. If domination through conformity was the leitmotif of the twentieth century, Cook was eager to point out that Horkheimer and Adorno did not believe its effects to be total. Indeed, those who

172

9 Confronting Dialectic of Enlightenment via Cultural Studies

regarded Dialectic of Enlightenment as representative of the manipulation thesis at its most extreme were, according to Cook, mistaken. She noted that although Dialectic of Enlightenment gave little in the way of possibilities of resistance, the culture industry thesis had some small evidence of consumer resistance when its authors pointed out the increasing difficulty of restraining people in an unreflective condition. But rather than combing Adorno’s work for examples of resistance, Cook suggested, contemporary cultural theorists would be better served by regarding the culture industry thesis as a starting point for the difficult questions surrounding cultural commodities’ exchange-cum-use value (Cook 1996: 25). By casting Adorno as a corrective mechanism to contemporary cultural studies enthusiasm for individuals’ interpretations because all too often cultural theorists assumed that ‘there is some sort of ahistorical psychological core in consumers which is at least partially untouched by capitalism and resistant to it’; Adorno, on the other hand, stressed that ‘capitalist production processes have a profound impact on consciousness’ (Cook 1996: 116). Cook’s insights were soon followed by a significant article from Douglas Kellner that, like Agger, compared Critical Theory and Cultural Studies. This essay was the result of Kellner’s debt to both schools of thought. Kellner’s early identification with Telos’s North American Critical Theory altered as he came to accept a diverse range of post-war cultural theory. Though still working in a philosophy department, Kellner directed his work towards issues of popular culture and how this culture reflected the postmodern era (see Durham and Kellner 2001). The distinct shift in Kellner’s focus took place after the late eighties publication of Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity. In that text, Kellner (1989: 178) came to the conclusion that the Frankfurt School’s modernist theories could not adequately assess the challenges of post-1970 ‘techno-capitalism’. The upshot was that Critical Theory retained and developed important Marxist critical categories when the object of that critique— capitalism—was becoming more sophisticated in its conflation of the superstructure and base. Their definition’s usefulness, however, has elapsed because the mechanisms of domination—what Kellner outlines as ‘culture, technology, media, information, knowledge, and ideology’ (1989: 178)—are now almost indistinguishable from the culture of those they dominate. That this transformation is just what Horkheimer and Adorno believed would happen seems somewhat at variance with Kellner’s overall argument—especially given their obvious influence on his thought. It appears his attitude derived from accepting the logic of changed, postmodern times. Thus, according to Kellner, because modernity had been transformed so too must cultural theory, otherwise, it would not be able to meet new complexities in cultural production and reproduction. In 1996, Kellner provided his own version of this transformed—meaning combined—cultural analysis. In a work entitled Media Culture, Kellner argued that ‘media culture’ deserves attention because it is the late twentieth century’s mostcontested ideological terrain. As such, Kellner echoed Cultural Studies’ party line: culture is the locus of political negotiation—as much a site of resistance and selfidentification as a site of domination and compliance. This stance was not, however, the work of an apostate Frankfurt School supporter. On the contrary, Kellner’s familiarity with its members’ close readings of the culture industry did not allow him to

9.5 Fortifying Frankfurt

173

completely dismiss Critical Theory. After all, Horkheimer and Adorno’s point was that preserving the potential of human reason required exposing the culture industry’s involvement in such reason’s reification. Achieving this exposure demanded engagement with the culture industry’s commodity form. Kellner agreed, but still felt this approach was lacking. Consequently, he added some complementary Cultural Studies concepts—hegemony, polysemy and identity politics—to Critical Theory’s claims. The resultant definition of critical cultural theory reads as a veritable lexicon of Cultural Studies keywords. Media culture was to be read not just in a socio-economic context, but in a manner that saw ‘how the internal constituents of its texts either encode relations of power and domination, serving to advance the interests of dominant groups at the expense of others, or oppose hegemonic ideologies, institutions, and practices or contain a contradictory mixture of forms that promote domination and resistance’ (Kellner 1996: 56). The major shortcoming of all Marxist approaches to culture, Kellner contended, was an over-emphasis on class. Class was not the only factor that had to be considered when reading how cultural texts function, nor should commodified cultural texts be regarded as merely manipulating their consumers. In other words, for Kellner, to initiate an effective critique of society, Western Marxist theories of culture and modernity—long the subject of his attention—had to be revitalised by theories of gender, ethnicity, race, nationality and sexuality. Thus, Kellner attempted to encourage equilibrium between the two extremes of manipulation theory and populist Cultural Studies. Media culture, in short, should be regarded as neither capitalism’s chief cultural medium nor fatuous entertainment. In the year following Media Culture’s release, Kellner expressed more specifically the need for an articulation between Frankfurt and Birmingham. His essay ‘The Frankfurt School and British Cultural Studies: The Missed Articulation’ argued for the elucidation of these two schools’ intersections. Once this was achieved, it would become clear that both traditions ‘overcome the weaknesses and limitations of the other’ (Kellner 1997: 12). The reason for this rapprochement lay in the beliefs Kellner had expressed in earlier texts: a successful Cultural Studies must be simultaneously aware of culture industries’ political economy, the proliferation of new cultural texts and the diversity of audience appropriation. What Kellner found curious about his proposed alliance, however, was that it had never been put forward before. The logical articulation of Frankfurt and Birmingham had been, as his title suggested, ‘missed’. According to Kellner, the two schools’ fusion should be obvious because of their shared interests and intellectual lineage. And yet Cultural Studies theorists caricatured the Frankfurt School as elitist pessimists which discouraged positive comparisons. Kellner was eager to overturn this limited conception. He posited that the key perspectives of the ‘second stage’ of British Cultural Studies—marked by the founding of the Birmingham centre in 1964—resembled, or even replicated, those of the ‘classic’ Frankfurt School (circa 1930–1945). In the first place, they shared a multidisciplinary interest in understating how media culture led to the working class’s embourgeoisement and thereby abolished revolutionary consciousness’s possibility. This interest amounted to a common belief in the ideological role culture plays in

174

9 Confronting Dialectic of Enlightenment via Cultural Studies

bolstering the capitalist system. Second, both schools convey notions of possible resistance to capitalism via cultural forms. Kellner noted that the Frankfurt School’s reversion to what some would call ‘high’ culture—modernism—was not dissimilar to that of Birmingham turning to youth culture for signs of opposition and transformation. The third similarity Kellner pointed out was, however, his argument’s basis. For Kellner, ‘British cultural studies—like the Frankfurt School—insists that culture must be studied within the social relations and system through which culture is produced and consumed, and that thus the study of culture is intimately bound up with the study of society, politics and economics’ (Kellner 1996: 18). In short, the two schools of thought had more in common than was usually assumed. But Kellner was not revealing such foundational similarities merely to debunk Critical Theory’s critics. Rather he believed these important overlaps to be the first recognition of the potential articulation between British cultural studies and the Frankfurt School. He took his argument one step further by claiming that the differences between the two approaches could conceivably be points of reconciliation rather than conflict. That is to say, the strengths of one could be used to overcome the weaknesses of the other to create a ‘multiperspectival cultural studies’ (Kellner 1997: 34). For example, Hall’s (1980) encoding/decoding might rectify the Frankfurt School’s characterisation of passive consumption, while the notion of the culture industry could return Cultural Studies’ focus to the commercial domination of much contemporary culture. Kellner’s argument was clearly directed towards invigorating a Cultural Studies plagued by commercial euphoria. In Kellner’s opinion, too much Cultural Studies work celebrated popular culture at the expense of actually criticising its effects. By neglecting to engage with representations of ‘high’ culture, Cultural Studies reinforces the confluence of culture into ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ which merely ‘inverts the positive/negative valorizations of the older high/low distinction’ (Kellner 1997: 34). At least the Frankfurt School engaged with the oppositional forms provided by the modernist avant-garde; Cultural Studies’ eagerness to legitimate popular culture as the bearer of a pure popular will compelled it to neglect other (less popular) cultural manifestations. The result, Kellner attested, was a period of ‘cultural populism’— from the mid-1980s to the present—in which theorists on both sides of the Atlantic turned away from the social(ist) politics of the Williams–Hoggart–Hall variety and towards the postmodernist politics of identity and representational critique. But Kellner was certainly not painting a picture of the Frankfurt School that concealed the failings in its account of capitalism. The usual criticisms—a lack of empiricism, a homogenising concept of passive consumption, a reinforcement of the high/low culture dichotomy and the need for greater emphasis on possible resistance within mass culture—remained pertinent warnings to anyone wishing to wax nostalgic for its thought. ‘Media culture’, Kellner (1997: 15) argued, ‘was never as massified and homogeneous as in the Frankfurt school model and one could argue that the model was flawed even during its time of origin and influence and that other models were preferable’. Just because the Frankfurt School was being dusted-off to rearticulate Cultural Studies did not make it beyond the criticisms that had long been levelled against it. Critical Theory still had to be re-thought. For Kellner, the immanent critique at the heart of the Frankfurt School made this rethinking possible:

9.5 Fortifying Frankfurt

175

in other words, a belief in Critical Theory was a belief in its ability to criticise itself. Such was the logic that allowed Kellner to reintroduce the Frankfurt School to contemporary theory. The more sophisticated commercialisation of contemporary culture under techno-capitalism did not make Horkheimer and Adorno’s model of the culture industry redundant. On the contrary, techno-capitalism renewed their critique’s importance precisely because it had concentrated on how the combination of capital, technology and culture affected individuals and society. Thus, the late 1990s saw the beginnings of a small movement altering Cultural Studies’ perception of the Frankfurt School’s worth. What is more, some of this new perception was coming from Britain rather than North America. Younger scholars there began to read the Frankfurt School in unique and innovative ways alongside more recent theoretical approaches. They were aware of the Cultural Studies tradition in which they were working, but ever more concerned about the lack of evident resistance to cultural products and the advancing market forces determining everyday lives. Most importantly, these scholars began to use the culture industry thesis as an antidote to Cultural Studies’ populism. The most significant moment in this process followed a 1998 conference at the University of Salford on Cultural Studies’ and the Frankfurt School. In 1999, the papers presented appeared collectively in a special issue of the journal New Formations—‘Hating Tradition Properly: The Legacy of the Frankfurt School in Cultural Studies’—which questioned Cultural Studies’ ostracising of Critical Theory. The contributors’ enthusiasm for Critical Theory extended from the lukewarm to the ebullient. The more dexterous responses revised the Manichean division of Adorno and Benjamin—giving the former a fresh patina and further polishing the latter’s lustre. In some senses, this repositioning of Adorno indicated Cultural Studies’ ability to co-opt almost any thinker into its cultural analyses. But such changes also revealed a discipline reassessing its own epistemological foundations in the wake of a sustained critical onslaught on its fundamental concepts. The preceding years saw models of consumer resistance and the politics of pleasure increasingly deemed to be not only facile but complicit with the capitalist commodification of experience (see Bennett 1982; Murdock 1997; Joli and Pauly 1997). This defensive juncture led to new ways of thinking. For those contributors to this particular issue of New Formations at least, this meant returning to Frankfurt. The collection began by acknowledging the slightness of Cultural Studies’ acquaintance with the Frankfurt School. Cultural Studies indebtedness to Horkheimer, Adorno or Marcuse was therefore significantly less than what it owed to neo-Gramscians like Williams or Hall and post-structuralists like Foucault or Derrida; even the inclusion of Benjamin on the ledger sheet would not significantly alter the apparent disparity. Cultural Studies, true to its seventies’ origins, was clearly a product of postmodernist rather than modernist thought. Thus, the question of Critical Theory’s legacy in Cultural Studies, as New Formations editors put it, was really a question of ‘what legacy?’ (McCracken and Rowland 1999: 5). In other words, if the pentimenti of Critical Theory could not be discovered below the veneer of more recent cultural theory, then the Frankfurt School could only be positioned in the

176

9 Confronting Dialectic of Enlightenment via Cultural Studies

future of Cultural Studies. Those who chose this line of argument mobilised Critical Theory against postmodernism’s dominance in contemporary cultural theory. Neil Lazarus’s opening ruminations on Adorno’s place in his own field of postcolonial studies is a case in point. Lazarus’s (1999: 9) agreement with Adorno’s claim in Minima Moralia that ‘one must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly’ was the metaphor on which he based his argument. That is, the philosopher became the embodiment of this statement and thus a metaphor for the dialectic of enlightenment itself. Lazarus contended that, on the one hand, Adorno’s thought supplies a strong critique of bourgeois humanism’s stymied ideals without rejecting modernity outright. By emphasising how modernity offers humanity a historical consciousness, Adorno was outlining a means to progressively alter the world. Moreover, the modernist episteme that governs Dialectic of Enlightenment allows for a sophisticated approach to popular culture. Lazarus noted that the culture industry thesis should not be read as an elitist, left-wing Decline of the West, for it is in favour of popular culture and against its vested interests in manufacture and distribution. On the other hand, Adorno’s elitism and Eurocentrism equated with the dominating tendencies of other unfashionable white-male philosophers of the Enlightenment. Adorno’s applicability to the contemporary world system was limited by his modernist rigidity on two key points: first, his limiting of modernity’s effects to Europe and America; and second, his chronic lamentation for the Marxist project which, he believed, died with the post-1917 working-class revolutions. The modernism of Adorno’s cultural analysis was thus inappropriate to those wishing to ‘hate tradition properly’ at the end of the twentieth century. For Lazarus, Horkheimer and Adorno’s quiescent aesthetic solution to this problem—that faith in the future can be witnessed in the modernist moment—undermined their wisdom. The confidence they placed in modernism failed to regard it as a ‘homogenising project’ of a specific era and one that ‘overreached itself, constructing its own historically, socially and culturally specific protocols, procedures, and horizons as those of the modern as such’ (Lazarus 1999: 18). Horkheimer and Adorno thus underestimated the dominating effects of their modernist plot to rescue popular culture from the dictates of capital. Nevertheless, Lazarus continued to argue in favour of the culture industry theory and Adorno’s work in general. When stripped of modernist trappings, Lazarus opined, Adorno’s criticism is a guiding light for postcolonial theorists struggling to find political egress from their postmodernist labyrinths. According to Lazarus, the marginalisation of non-postmodern discourses has distanced the recent postcolonial project of Said, Bhabha and Spivak from its engagé universalist origins among scholars like Anwar Abdel Malek, C. L. R. James and Samir Amin. While the work of the second-generation postcolonial theorists should not be discarded (their critical attributes outweighing their deficiencies), it required a significant overhaul to become politically tenable. Fortunately, Lazarus argued, such renovations had already commenced in the late 1990s as a response to ‘the rapid emergence in the social sciences and Cultural Studies of a host of research projects focusing on globalisation, neo-liberalism, post-Fordism, [and] McDonaldisation’ (Lazarus 1999: 28).

9.5 Fortifying Frankfurt

177

Such a change continued in a postmodern vein via Foucauldian impresarios eager to outline modernity’s micro-politics on a global scale. Yet irrespective of postmodernism’s continuing influence, Lazarus concluded that for the first time in its short history postcolonial theory had space for overtly socialist scholars to influence the field’s direction. Therein lay the importance of his invocation of Adorno. For even though Adorno’s Eurocentric prejudices seemingly exclude him from the postcolonial approach, his underlying ethics—a rational critique of reason—privilege his politics over postmodernism’s feigned radicalism. Exhuming the Frankfurt School was a means of exposing Cultural Studies’ over-reliance on postmodernism. In this respect, the articulation of Adorno and the re-examination of the culture industry thesis parallels Jameson’s portrayal of Adorno as the philosopher for the postmodern age (Jameson 1991 and 1993). The problem was postmodernism’s lack of a norm against which to measure any criticism of culture and society. Deprived of such a mean, Cultural Studies becomes the philosophical sales rep of the culture industry: a celebration of all cultural artefacts as equally valid in their production of meaning. For Cultural Studies to avoid such a critique and retain an emancipatory politics, its standards must be raised. Kate Soper’s article, ‘Despairing of Happiness: The Redeeming Dialectic of Critical Theory’, exemplified this call for change. Her argument considered the Frankfurt School’s ability to equip Cultural Studies with an immanent critique of society. As it stands, Soper argued, much contemporary theory lacks the necessary foothold from which to begin any evaluation of culture: ‘what has been lost is any aesthetic criterion for pronouncing most of the cultural products on offer from the video industry, and the vast majority of programmes put out on TV to be crap: a loss we may feel all the greater in that, if anything since Adorno’s day, the crap has got crappier, the banality more banal, and the ugliness uglier’ (1999: 145). This critical criterion, Soper continued, could easily be gleaned from the Frankfurt School’s extensive oeuvre. Critical Theory’s Ideologiekritik was here distinct from the theory of culture that has dictated the work of Cultural Studies since its inception. In this sense, Soper identified Horkheimer and Adorno as offering a more Marxist cultural theory of industrial commodification as opposed to the Leavis–Williams–Hall genealogy’s concern for meaning within cultural products. The impasse into which the latter had fallen was presented as largely due to its current representatives’ political resignation: there is no over-arching political implication to their work beyond a liberal reformism. For Soper, the Frankfurt School’s dialectical understanding of modernity, on the other hand, does not confuse its own despondency with surrender. Its members realised that social relations among individuals in late capitalism occur within ‘a dialectic that recognises both freedom and unfreedom’ (1999: 147). As a result, they purposefully constructed a theory of culture with this dialectic of enlightenment in mind.

178

9 Confronting Dialectic of Enlightenment via Cultural Studies

9.6 Conclusion A simplified position of being either for or against Horkheimer and Adorno was shifting within Cultural Studies by the twentieth century’s end. Cultural Studies had moved through a number of phases by then and shifted towards a broader, global, post-Birmingham position. To be sure, it still held tight to positions that helped establish the field—audience interpretation, in particular—but there was a growing interest in the production of cultural goods and their circulation through global markets, especially in light of the then-new digital technologies. Horkheimer and Adorno still did not have a major role to play in this discussion and they remained in the role of cultural pessimists. But the diffusion of Cultural Studies approaches saw some reconsiderations of Dialectic of Enlightenment’s culture industry thesis, especially from those that were disappointed with the cultural populism and sought a version of left-wing activism through political movements that had both universalist intentions with particular proclivities—race, gender, sexuality and ecology. After the liberal triumphalism of the 1990s, there was a distinct shift towards global issues, especially neo-imperialism and environmental devastation, with which Horkehimer and Adorno’s world-historical vision was not necessarily at odds. What’s more, within this globalising scenario the intellectual groupings began to extend beyond previous confines—new and old ideas circulated more readily; rigid theoretical affiliations became more malleable. This late 1990s reconciliation of Horkheimer and Adorno’s cultural theory with an enlarged Cultural Studies can be read as a solution to what some regarded as Cultural Studies’ political lack. Cultural Studies’ adherence to the postmodernist understanding of post-war cultural developments led to a gridlock of collapsing metanarratives. This did little to challenge the culture industry that had removed cultural production from the populace. Postmodernism’s lack of a political applicability placed the adolescent discipline’s supporters in a position that belied their radical origins or pretensions. The oppositional posturing of Cultural Studies theorists throughout the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s—relying heavily on a neutered reading of an Italian revolutionary leader—did little to challenge the concurrent neo-conservative proclamation that capitalism is History’s realisation. Frankfurt thinking could moderate Cultural Studies’ overconfidence in commodified resistance to commodity culture. As Jay Bernstein argued in his defence of Adorno against postmodernism, ‘if the surface logic of the culture industry is significantly different from the time of Adorno’s writing, its effects are uncannily the same’ (1991: 23). The positive turn of Cultural Studies towards Frankfurt at the end of the 1990s should not be overstated, however. Beyond the use of Benjamin by some of its scholars, any appreciation of the work of the Frankfurt School’s core members was minor when weighed against much other Cultural Studies work. As has been shown here the discipline that has much in common with the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory generally uses it as a point of differentiation often in a hostile or caricatured fashion. Such flippancy reveals a degree of theoretical shortsightedness when it came to the reconciliating the two traditions. Some of this is due to the rebranding

9.6 Conclusion

179

of critical theory in the wake of its Marxist hegemony. Horkheimer and Adorno’s own Marxist proclivities ensured they were not looked upon favourably by the new postmodernists. But those tangentially supportive of Cultural Studies’ disciplinary project—like Agger, Cook and Kellner—were able to register the Frankfurt scholars’ insights in spite of contemporary academic empire building. Yet to be fair to both the Frankfurt School and some Cultural Studies practitioners, the articulation of the two cultural analyses would, as Kellner predicted, initiate a system of understanding in contemporary cultural theory that took a more critical stance towards commodity culture than is currently espoused. The work that deals directly with this problem is Shane Gunster’s Capitalizing on Culture: Critical Theory for Cultural Studies (2004). For Gunster, the Birmingham School and Grossberg add something to the understanding of late capitalist culture, but they have still not come to terms with the need for an adequate critique of political economy. To remedy this problem, Gunster suggested a thorough revival of Adorno and Benjamin’s cultural criticism. When Adorno and Benjamin are read in tandem, they provide insight into each other’s works, but also show how cultural critique is a dialogic process. More than this, however, Gunster contended that because both men place the commodity (or commodification) at the heart of their criticism, their work fills major lacunae in Cultural Studies discourse that some had noticed early on (Negt 1978). Likewise, Robert Witkin’s two books on Adorno—Adorno on Music (1998) and Adorno on Popular Culture (2003)—constituted a thorough defence of Adorno’s future relevance. The latter book is particularly vocal on the culture industry’s continuing importance. Witkin contended that Adorno’s description of the culture industry was a defence of the self and was thus congruent with his overall critique of modernity. ‘Ultimately’, Witkin (2003: 15) argued, ‘Adorno takes his place among the major theorists who have interpreted modernity as the expropriation of the subject— of freedom, autonomy, community and spirit—by the very “machineries” that have developed to master nature and to maximise control over material resources. As a Marxist, he believed that the economic machinery of capitalism was fundamental in this expropriation of the subject. The culture industry was part of that’. Apart from the promising effects of interpretations like Gunster’s, Dialectic of Enlightenment’s value to Cultural Studies lies in its reworking of the philosophical and political connotations of reason. Cultural Studies all but overlooked the critique of reason central to Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument. Consequently, Critical Theory’s real pith was unsavoured. Horkheimer and Adorno realised that combating instrumental reason’s ill-effects—be it in totalitarianism, positivism or metaphysics—required a dialectical opposition: human’s ability to control history in a manner that both emancipated and dominated nature necessitated a moral basis of dialectical thought; only then could barbarism to be forestalled (Bernstein 2001). Cultural Studies could still benefit from an injection of this formulation in two ways. First, an emphasis on the possible transcendence of alienation—via a challenge to both capitalism and instrumental reason—would overwhelm the inconsequentiality of postmodern critique. By refusing to rule out the possibility of modern individuals overcoming their alienation, Horkheimer and Adorno continued to lay claim to

180

9 Confronting Dialectic of Enlightenment via Cultural Studies

some notion of dialectical succession. Cultural Studies’ sustained de-radicalisation of its lineage and therefore managed to transform individuals previously identified as struggling within or against class inequities into sentient beings shaping their identities within a framework of shifting signifiers. Or, to put it plainly, consumption defines individuals. Rather than couching such commodity fetishism in a theory of alienation, Cultural Studies adhered to a liberal argument that claims private property as the defining feature of the self. This viewpoint is only a small step away from the argument that the culture industry is just meeting real demand. Commodity-to-person relationships are thus moments of identification that epitomise the self’s empowerment. Today, such a thought is a far from radical. But Cultural Studies could arguably salvage radicalism by invoking the genealogy of alienation which extends from Marx through Lukács and Horkheimer and Adorno and up to the British New Left. The culture industry thesis provides a point from which to develop Cultural Studies because it portrays the process of alienation beyond the workplace at a moment when late capitalism’s cultural logic was beginning to take root. The second benefit flows out of the first and perfectly captures the dialectic of enlightenment’s paradox. A philosophy of history that goes beyond simple platitudes of synthetic resolution illuminates the relationship between the culture industry and the individual-as-consumer. Clarification of this relationship would highlight the similarities between Adorno’s faith in a possibly autonomous individual and Cultural Studies’ belief in the active consumer. Such an alignment would appreciate that both traditions espouse a self that is alert to the context in which cultural artefacts are produced, encoded and reproduced. The critically alert figure conceived by the Frankfurt School—of which Adorno probably considered himself the best example to date—could therefore be regarded as almost identical to the adroit and active consumer of Cultural Studies’ design. However, while this outcome may seem a positive development for existing Cultural Studies, or even the humanities and social sciences in general, the opposite analysis of these ideal selves could also be true. Devoid of a dialectical or historical context against which to define truth, the subjective taste of a cultural elitist would be no different from the multitudinous interpretations of the television viewer (Stallabrass 1996). Thus, both self-conceptions could just as easily reinforce Horkheimer and Adorno’s point on the near-complete reification of the individual. In other words, the mere snobbery that motivates attendance at an opera is equal to the fleeting reflection that guides the channel surfer’s thumb. Therein lay the dialectic of enlightenment. The possibility of this situation captures the essence of the philosophy of history that Horkheimer and Adorno expounded. With all hopes of autonomy dashed, an unapparent barbarism would be the order of the day. In such a situation, Cultural Studies would not need a critical edge and Critical Theory would speak of another time. But rather than succumb to such a pessimistic prescription, it is better to heed the warning with the belief that total reification is as yet incomplete.

References

181

References Adorno, T. W. (1991). Culture and administration. In J. M. Bernstein (Ed.), The culture industry: Selected essays on mass culture (p. 113). London. Agger, B. (1992). Cultural studies as critical theory. London: Falmer. Anthony, A. (1982). Against left optimism; A reply to John Docker. Arena. 61: 134–141. Bennett, T. (1979). Formalism and marxism. London: Methuen. Bennett, T. (1982). Theories of the media, theories of society. In M. Gurevitch, et al (Eds.), Culture, society and the media (pp. 30–55). London: Methuen. Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. London: Penguin. Bernstein, J. M. (1991). Introduction to Theodor W. Adorno. In J. M. Bernstein (Ed.),The Culture industry: Selected essays on mass culture (pp. 15–23). London: Routledge. Bernstein, J. M. (2001). Adorno: Disenchantment and ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Caughie, J. (1991). Adorno’s reproach: repetition, difference and television genre. Screen, 32(2), 127–153. Collins, J. (1989). Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Postmodernism. New York: Routledge. Cook, D. (1992). Ruses de Guerre: Baudrillard and Fiske on Media Reception. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour., 22(2), 227–238. Cook, D. (1996). The culture industry revisited: Theodor W. Adorno on mass culture. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Curran, J., Gurevitch, M., & Woolacott, J. (Eds.). (1977). Mass communication and society. London: Open University Press. Davies, I. (1995). Cultural studies and beyond: fragments of empire. London: Routledge. Docker, J. (1982). In defence of popular culture. Arena, 60, 81–82. Docker, J. (1983). Popular culture and its marxist critics. Arena, 65, 109–121. Docker, J. (1994). Postmodernism and popular culture: A cultural history. Cambridge. Durham, M. G., & Kellner, D. M. (Eds.). (2001). Media and cultural studies: keyworks. Malden: Wiley. During, S. (Ed.). (1993). The cultural studies reader. London: Routledge. Dworkin, D. (1997). Cultural Marxism in post-war Britain: History, the new left, and the origins of cultural studies. Durham: Duke University Press. Fiske, J. (1987). Television culture. London: Routledge. Gans, H. (1974). Popular culture and high culture: an analysis and evaluation of taste. New York: Basic Books. Gendron, B. (1986). Theodor Adorno meets the Cadillacs. In T. Modleski, (Ed.), Studies in entertainment: Critical approaches to Mass Culture (pp. 18-36). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gitlin, T. (1997). The anti-political populism of cultural studies. In M. Ferguson & P. Golding (Eds.), Cultural studies in question (pp. 25–38). London: Sage. Grant, J. (2000). The cultural turn in marxism. In J. Dean (Ed.), Cultural studies and political theory (pp. 132–146). Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Grossberg, L. (1993). The formations of cultural studies: An American in Birmingham. In V. Blundell, J. Shepherd, & I. Taylor (Eds.), Relocating cultural studies: Developments in theory and research (pp. 21–66). London: Routledge. Grossberg, L. (1997). Bringing it all back home: essays on cultural studies. Durham: Duke University Press. Gunster, S. (2004). Capitalizing on culture: critical theory for cultural studies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hagstrom, I. (1982). Popular culture undefined. Arena, 61, 141–148. Hall, S. (1980). Encoding/Decoding. In S. Hall, et al. (Eds.), Culture, media, language (128–138). London: Hutchinson.

182

9 Confronting Dialectic of Enlightenment via Cultural Studies

Hall, S. (1990). The emergence of cultural studies and the crisis of the humanities. October. 53: 11–23. Hall, S. (1992). Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies. In L. Grossberg, et al. (Eds.),Cultural studies (pp. 277–294). New York: Routledge. Hoggart, Richard. (1995). The way we live now. London: Chatto and Windus. Horkheimer, M., & Theodor, W. A. (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jameson, F. (1991). Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the persistence of the dialectic. London: Verso. Jameson, F. (1993). On cultural studies. Social Text, 34, 17–52. Jensen, J., & Pauly, J. (1997). Imagining the audience: losses and gains in cultural studies. In M. Ferguson & P. Golding (Eds.), Cultural studies in question (pp. 155–169). London: Sage. Johnson, R. (1987). What is cultural studies anyway? Social Text, 16, 38–80. Kellner, D. (1989). Critical theory, Marxism and modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Kellner, D. (1996). Media culture: Cultural studies, identity and politics between the modern and the postmodern. New York: Routledge. Kellner, D. (1997). The Frankfurt School and British cultural studies: The missed articulation. In J. McGuigan (Ed.), Cultural methodologies (pp. 12–41). London: Sage. Lazarus, N. (1999). Hating tradition properly. New Formations, 38, 9–30. McCracken, S., & Rowland, A. (1999) Editorial. New Formations. 38: 5–8. McGuigan, J. (1992). Cultural populism. London 1992. Modleski, T. (1986a). Introduction. In T. Modleski (Ed.), To studies in entertainment: Critical approaches to mass culture (pp. ix–xix). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Modleski, T. (1986b). The terror of pleasure: The contemporary horror film and postmodern theory. In T. Modleski (Ed.), Studies in entertainment: Critical approaches to mass culture (pp. 155–166). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Morrow, R. (1991). Critical theory, Gramsci, and cultural studies: From structuralism to poststructuralism. In P. Wexler (Ed.), Critical theory now (pp. 27–69). London: Falmer Press. Munns, J., & Rajan, G. (Eds.). (1995). A cultural studies reader: History, theory, practice. London: Longman. Murdock, G. (1997) Thin descriptions: Questions of method in cultural analysis. In J. McGuigan, (Ed.), Cultural Methodologies (pp. 178-192). London: Sage. Negt, O. (1978). Mass media: Tools of domination or instruments of liberation? Aspects of the Frankfurt School’s communication analysis. New German Critique, 14, 61–80. Nelson, C., Triechler, P. A., & Grossberg, L. (1992). Cultural studies: An introduction. In L. Grossberg, et al. (Eds.), Cultural studies (pp. 1–22). New York: Routledge. Slatamburlo, V. L. (1998). Soldiers of misfortune: The new right’s culture war and the politics of political correctness. New York. Slater, P. (1974). The aesthetic theory of the Frankfurt School. Working Papers in Cultural studies and theory, 6: 172–211. Soper, K. (1999). Despairing of happiness: The redeeming dialectic of critical theory. New Formations, 38, 141–153. Stallabrass, J. (1996). Gargantua: Manufactured mass culture. London: Verso. Steele, Tom. (1997). The emergence of cultural studies 1945–1965: Cultural politics, adult education and the English question. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Strinati, D. (1995). An introduction to theories of popular culture. London: Routledge. Williams, J. (Ed.). (1995). PC wars: Politics and theory in the academy. New York: Routledge. Williams, R. (1989). The politics of modernism: Against the new conformists. London: Verso. Witkin, R. (1998). Adorno on music. London: Routledge. Witkin, Robert. (2003). Adorno on popular culture. London: Routledge.

Chapter 10

Predicting Dialectic of Enlightenment’s Future

We do not stand by everything we said in the book in its original form. That would be incompatible with a theory which attributes a temporal core to truth instead of contrasting truth as something invariable to the movement of history. Horkheimer and Adorno

When Horkheimer and Adorno reflected back on Dialektik der Aufklärung, in a new preface for the 1969 edition, they had some reservations, but continued to hold true to their main ideas. ‘Our prognosis’, they stated, ‘regarding the associated lapse from enlightenment into positivism, into the myth of that which is the case, and finally of the identity of intelligence and hostility to mind, has been overwhelmingly confirmed’ (Horheimer and Adorno 2002: xii). Such confirmation was cold comfort, of course. Both men died not long after the text’s reappearance—Adorno that year and Horkheimer 4 years later—and never completed the anticipated sequel in which enlightenment would be ‘rescued’. Whether this would’ve been a sanguine addendum to Dialectic of Enlightenment is uncertain as well as unlikely. After their return to the Federal Republic to re-establish the Frankfurt Institute, both men continued a similar line of critically hopeful philosophy, with Adorno’s star rising—with magna opera like Negative Dialectics (1963) and Aesthetic Theory (1970)—as Horkheimer’s dimmed—he produced little significant work after his 1947 texts Dialectic of Enlightenment and Eclipse of Reason. Their relationship continued, but it reverted to the prickliness that characterised their 1930s exchanges (Claussen 2008). They did, however, come together in 1956 to sketch out another possible collaboration. These thoughts were even more disjointed than their earlier philosophical fragments. Gretel Adorno, once again, wrote them down as Horkheimer and Adorno exchanged ideas. They appeared first in 1989 as part of Max Horkheimer’s collected works and then, 20 years later, translated into English as ‘Towards a New Manifesto’ in the pages of New Left Review. By then, the discussion was merely of academic interest. Much like the desire for original insights in various millenarian traditions, not least Marxism, the work offered little of substance to further Dialectic of Enlightenment’s prognosis. There is indeed significant discussion of political possibilities, especially within a reconstructed Marxist frame. Much of it remains interestingly ephemeral. There were, however, insights into the way Horkheimer and Adorno © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 H. Prosser, Dialectic of Enlightenment in the Anglosphere, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3521-5_10

183

184

10 Predicting Dialectic of Enlightenment’s Future

conversed and worked. And, what’s more, their opinions of a variety of issues— including philosophical realism, the culture industry, the Cold War and hope for the future—are made plain. Here’s one exchange, for instance: Horkheimer: Everything we are discussing is far too abstract for my liking. What view, for example, are we to take of America? Adorno: We have to add that things can come right in the end. Horkheimer: People want us to be far more outspoken. Our critique must make it clear that nothing will happened unless some people or other make it happen. Our style must reveal what we think should happen. We ought to write in the style of a possible opposition within the Communist Party. Should we be for or against America? For or against the emergence of a European Union? To ridicule American consumerism is disgraceful unless the reader can pick up how such matters should be regarded. Otherwise, it is merely abuse (Horkheimer and Adorno 2011: 61-62)

What, then, of Dialectic of Enlightenment’s future? From a world-historical perspective, and under the conditions of modernity, Dialectic of Enlightenment is yet another critique of the false promises held by radical materialism and concentrated power as a salve for human suffering. What’s remarkable about Dialectic of Enlightenment as a text is that it captures a moment in modernity before and after awareness of Auschwitz. The philosophical fragments represented the shards of an unravelling modernity which was ever changed, in Adorno’s formulation, after Auschwitz. Given that the final essay, ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism’, was added after awareness of the Holocaust, means that Dialectic of Enlightenment, straddles a fault line of modernity. There will likely be more to come. And when they do some may turn to the text for solace. This concluding chapter rounds of the preceding chapters and offers some considerations on the text’s interpretive possibilities. This is less by way of a historian’s prognostication and more to suggest that the work’s themes, as its ageing authors reflected, are often confirmed by humanity’s default desire to dominate nature. Further, there is a key understanding that people can quell this desire. All of these aspects remain part and parcel of the text: the political possibilities of critical reason enabling of human reconciliation with the natural world of which they are apart. Such possibilities are the chief explanation of the work’s appeal in the English-speaking world during the late twentieth century. They shared a common hope for civic equality quite different from the capitalist or communist options on offer after fascism’s defeat. The theory industry that has taken off during the last few decades has provided the perfect context for discussions of Horkheimer and Adorno’s work. The Anglophone Left’s academicisation permitted the expansion of a publication boom devoted to interpreting contemporary European philosophy. Western Marxists had a central place in this process. Within their discourse, Horkheimer and Adorno exemplified the unaligned humanist intellectuals that many left-wing scholars hoped to emulate. Hence, Dialectic of Enlightenment initially appealed to sixties radicals, or at least those who could read German, because it criticised modern society without affiliation with orthodox (read Communist Party) Marxism. Horkheimer and Adorno thus manifested as independent critics of capitalism, an identity to which many student radicals aspired. This perception shifted in the wake of the New Left. Left-wing

10 Predicting Dialectic of Enlightenment’s Future

185

scholars who had been inspired by the sixties had no influential political organisations towards which to turn and so, like Horkheimer and Adorno in the 1930s, they turned to their books. The Frankfurt School’s works became a refuge for disillusioned and disenfranchised soixante-huitards. The result was a new generation of post-1968 intellectuals who were more intent on producing papers on social change than in bringing it about. Dialectic of Enlightenment was thus popular because it shied from explicit Marxist categories, while maintaining a critical stance towards capitalism and modernity. It is a text that calls upon intellectuals to criticise instrumental reason rather than organise political action. In this sense, the pro-Frankfurt turn that some made during the 1970s indicated a leftist introspection and, ultimately, retreat that was not unlike that carried out by Horkheimer and Adorno themselves more than 30 years earlier. This shift is indicative of attitudes held by almost a whole generation of left-wing scholars. In many respects, it continues to this day. For many post-1970s leftists, bureaucracy and science (instrumental rationality) have replaced commodification (market rationality) as the enemy of humanity. This replacement was due to a number of factors, not least post-structuralism and postmodernism’s influence. But to focus on issues of domination in general allows the (often economic) determinants of such domination to escape thorough criticism. Horkheimer and Adorno were not always cognizant of this fact. Consequently, any renewal of their thought, especially under a post-Marxist rubric, should be wary of the extent to which it continues to obfuscate economic analysis. The second reason for the text’s popularity follows from this nexus of critique and retreat. During the last 30 years, criticising reason, usually at the expense of criticising capital, has become de rigueur for many radical scholars. Post-structuralism and/or postmodernism relied on over-arching hostility towards the Enlightenment’s dominating effects. Horkheimer and Adorno’s text provided fuel for this ideological juggernaut—for them, rationality had always been a problem. Some who identified with the text after 1970 could translate its ideas into a postmodern idiom. On the other hand, those wishing to defend reason from this onslaught decided to examine Dialectic of Enlightenment as a text which defended reason at the same time as criticising it. This latter position required a thorough overhaul of Critical Theory’s categories and, as seen with the diverging courses of Telos and New German Critique, could result in quite different outcomes. But whichever positions endured, reason itself was up for criticism. This fact alone ensured Dialectic of Enlightenment’s topicality. Finally, much the interest in social theory manifested as discontent with rationality in ways that echoed Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique. Theorists turned to Nietzsche and/or cultural criticism to transcend modernity’s limited political options. Horkheimer and Adorno’s Marxist credentials had always been based on an implicit, and thus limited, criticism of the capitalist system as alienating and exploitative. With Dialectic of Enlightenment, however, they announced their movement away from this implicit Marxism and towards a Nietzschean discourse analysis of domination. It is, of course, arguable that this movement was a fusion of the two positions—a theory against all forms of domination, whether that of class or discourse, whatever the period. Indeed, this interpretation of Horkheimer and Adorno’s position highlights

186

10 Predicting Dialectic of Enlightenment’s Future

the transhistorical nature of their argument. Nevertheless, the Nietzschean aspects of their text played into the hands of those who were—thanks largely to the poststructuralists—looking to that philosopher for guidance into pathways leading away from Marx. Just as Dialectic of Enlightenment’s Marxist and Freudian motifs had enthralled New Leftists during the 1960s, Horkheimer and Adorno’s appropriation of Nietzsche excited scholars during the 1970s and beyond. The ‘cultural turn’ of the human sciences has generated more analysis of the dominating effects of cultural texts than attacks on capitalist exploitation. Dialectic of Enlightenment prefigured this turn. There is, however, a contradictory corollary which further highlights Dialectic of Enlightenment’s polyvalence. Horkheimer and Adorno’s treatment of culture—especially their critique of the culture industry—did not attract the same enthusiasm as their criticism of reason. This reticent reception derives from the fact that Horkheimer and Adorno only lived to see the beginnings of the communication revolution that has accelerated since the late 1960s. While the cultural turn may have expanded Dialectic of Enlightenment’s readership, Cultural Studies’ antipathy towards the work did much to alienate scholars from its premises. This situation is curious since the Nietzschean underpinnings of Cultural Studies, which owe much to Foucault, are not necessarily at odds with Dialectic of Enlightenment’s thrust: both Horkheimer and Adorno and Cultural Studies scholars are against domination. Where they disagreed was about whether the culture industry’s products are dominating or liberating. This debate continues, though with Critical Theory given more credit within Cultural Studies’ variants. What it shows is just how ambiguous Horkheimer and Adorno’s text really is. Dialectic of Enlightenment is, in other words, unusually open to interpretation. To argue this case is not, however, to succumb to a Derridean anarchy of endlessly deferred meanings. It is rather to highlight the multiple yet limited interpretations and ‘decodings’ that any complex text can undergo. Horkheimer and Adorno did have a central premise to their work—a position located between Marx and Nietzsche— and sought to rationally resolve reason’s shortcomings. As Habermas has pointed out, ‘even in Dialectic of Enlightenment the impulse of the Enlightenment is not betrayed’ (Dews 1992: 222). It is precisely because of this fidelity that traces of a utopia surface in the text. Indeed, it is difficult to see how enlightenment could have been ‘rescued’ in Horkheimer and Adorno’s proposed sequel without turning to utopian thought for guidance. To be sure, if their goal was to show just how dominating rationality can be, as was the case in Dialectic of Enlightenment, then Nietzsche is the philosopher of choice. But when navigating the dialectic of enlightenment while retaining a belief in the non-dominating futures, some hope for such futures must be present. The authors even said as much in their later jottings (Horkheimer and Adorno 2011). Those writing about Dialectic of Enlightenment, as well as Critical Theory in general, took up this discussion by offering further insight into future possibilities. This made the text an interesting one to think with in similar if later contexts. Hence, the various positions taken by North American Critical Theorists, British New Leftists, postmodernists and Cultural Studies scholars, when taken together, offer a rendering of the text within its late-twentieth-century context. Dialectic of

10 Predicting Dialectic of Enlightenment’s Future

187

Enlightenment explores persistent notions of human domination under modernity (and pre-modernity) and preponderance of instrumental reason. The work has little by way of political prescriptions, certainly nothing to assist those with faith in a proletarian revolution, and instead presents possibilities for thinking critically about closed-mindedness. Its distinction of critical and instrumental reason works in a tradition within critical thought that continues to reflect upon itself, including that of its own Critical Theory tradition under Habermas, and thus does not abandon philosophical inquiry’s significance. It offers a philosophical sensibility similar to the post-structuralist suspicion of reason, but without throwing the baby out with the bathwater, to use Adorno’s favourite English phrase, as a nihilistic response to modernity. It presents a sophisticated critique of cultural products that indicts the producers of inanities and their social effects rather than arguing audiences lack critical acumen. And, finally, it excoriates the unthinking human domination of other humans through means that simultaneously reify the persecutor and the persecuted, whatever the historical context, to the detriment of all. These themes are strikingly contemporary, although such persistence does not mean the text should be seen as unchallengeable gospel. My book has shown that this has been far from the case. What it does reveal, and this is where the intellectual history of books is important, is that text exists within social contexts and interpretations respond to these circumstances, especially newer works that appear to reconsider a certain work’s argument. This point can be extended further using Dialectic of Enlightenment as a case in point: the text is not bounded by its original publication date but rather how it continues to exist within discussions from that point on. The interesting history of Dialectic of Enlightenment—from Philosophische Fragmente to Jephcott’s 2002 translation and beyond—means, in a very Benjaminian vein, that it exists as a palimpsest of the past in the present. Within this present, there are clear connections between Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument contemporary social theory. Part of this resonance is, of course, a shared lineage. Social theory’s application in the humanities and social sciences is often blind to certain genealogies. A smorgasbord of possible theoretical combinations has come to replace some of the affiliations—like North American Critical Theory—that were previously more secure. Still, a lot of this mixing has led to improved critical insights, including the take up of the Frankfurt School, and especially Adorno, since the late 1990s. Part of this as a corrective to postmodern enthusiasms and petty rivalries. As Goran Therborn (2008: 127) put it in his overview of the period: ‘the two decades of postmodernism, the 1980s and 1990s, produced a rift in cultural social thought, itself a symptom of the politico-economic times, which has not been overcome’. Others, like Adorno, are looked to for ideas. As a way of finishing, therefore, some final remarks about Dialectic of Enlightenment’s possible futures are worthwhile. Of course, such comments are speculative and provisional. Looking forward is not always the best way for a historian to end. Horkheimer and Adorno’s future is not guaranteed, nor should it be—they were, after all, writing for a different time and their theory often appears ‘deluded’ (Wheen 2004: 191). Postone (1992: 176) put it differently in his warning against over-enthusiasm for Habermas’s thought, ‘any critical theory that, like the French General Staff, prepares

188

10 Predicting Dialectic of Enlightenment’s Future

for future battles by planning to win the previous war may all too easily find itself outwitted by what apparently can still be characterised as the cunning of history’. The fickleness of theoretical alignments, as well as the surfeit of intellectual production in the present, means that with the passage of time Dialectic of Enlightenment will likely become another forgotten text far from its 1970s heyday. Until that point, three already existing routes seem possible for Dialectic of Enlightenment. I briefly mention them by the way of ending on a hopeful note but also to show that they intersect in a way that is needed within the contemporary left. One is the less obvious affiliation between critical gender studies and the Frankfurt School. This work has a connection to the period surveyed in the preceding pages. Horkheimer and Adorno were mainly blind to gender within their work, although significant theoretical exegesis was given to women in ‘Excursus II: Juliette or Enlightenment and Morals’ and in the ‘Man and Beast’ section of the final ‘Notes and Sketches’. Certainly, they had nothing of the sophisticated insights on gender that emerged from the 1960s. (A similar point could be made about those who took up their work in English during the 1970s.) However, figures like Benhabib (1986), Fraser (1989) and Brown (2006) have been applying the Critical Theory tradition in their important work since the late 1980s. Dialectic of Enlightenment has not much figured in such reworkings (Hewitt 1992). Yet, Adorno is often evoked as offering a number of critical tools for feminist scholars and activists (Heberle 2006). Another obvious connection between Dialectic of Enlightenment and the present, and future, has been made with the politics of ecology and environmentalism. Indeed, when read in the early twenty-first century, Horkheimer and Adorno’s comments about human domination of nature seem very prescient. Some even noticed it earlier on. In the early 1970s, Jeremy Shapiro (1974: 1095) wrote that ‘many themes that have come to dominate the social thought of recent years are already presented by Horkheimer and Adorno in these works, usually with a greater depth and subtlety than among our contemporaries: the domination of nature is seen as central to Western civilization long before ecology had become the catchphrase of the day’. Dialectic of Enlightenment can offer a clear comment on the logic of environmental destruction as manifest in science and ongoing rationalisation via Nature’s domination. In some ways, Dialectic of Enlightenment is becoming an urtext for environmentalism in the opposite manner to which it was used in Cultural Studies. Indeed, the German Green movement owes something to Horkheimer and Adorno’s popularity in the late 1960s (von Dirke 1997). Their relevance to ecology was made clear during the 1990s (Soper 1999) and will likely continue to interest scholars into the current century. Building on this interest, a final connection can be made with the ongoing instrumentality of human action in the world, Horkheimer and Adorno are turned to for an explanation. Certainly, this instrumentality is patent in environmental destruction, but also in the transmogrifying production of the culture industries and, more recently, in the apparent global turn to authoritarian governments. The extent of this shift remains to be seen within a history of liberal democratic crises. But it is significant in the ongoing geopolitical shuffling that has cultural and political consequences. The Frankfurt School had something to say on these matters which is also why its work as taken up by anti-imperialists, including some in the postcolonial fold (Varadharjan

10 Predicting Dialectic of Enlightenment’s Future

189

1995). Arguably, this discussion has improved more recently thanks to discussions of decolonial futures that see Critical Theory as central to this vision (Allen 2016). The current intersection of authoritarianism and culture industries—especially via social media—seems significant enough to have warranted a renewed popular appreciation for the Frankfurt School (Jeffries 2016; Jarosinski 2015). What is more, some of the most articulate voices criticising the exclusionist politics, especially those arising from neo-liberal enthusiasms, have significant cache in the Critical Theory tradition (Brown, Gordon and Pensky 2018). Indeed, the strange use of the Frankfurt School as whipping boys for the American extreme right has been explained, and taken to task by Martin Jay (2010). Deep within the underlying epistemologies of these Frankfurtian discussions is that the notion of history as progress, as improvement, continues to be problematic since it manifests largely as a desire for self-preservation via the exclusion of others and the domination of nature. All of this works as an argument for Dialectic of Enlightenment and Frankfurt Critical Theory. Different perspectives can certainly be taken. But the application of Critical Theory offers a way forward for those concerned that ‘theory’ is more performative than substantive. This criticism could certainly be applied to a close-minded loyalty to its creators’ works. But the possibilities extend beyond that. An appreciation of what Horkheimer and Adorno called critical reason can give insight into the way ideology works under capitalist conditions, but chiefly it indicates humanity’s predisposition towards dominance and power. The added conundrum, the dialectic, is that reason is the means through which freedom and unfreedom is exercised. This argument sits within the Frankfurt School tradition’s enduring relevance and the ‘generations’ that seem to continue to follow it. Herbert Schnädelbach (1999) offered a pithy definition of Critical Theory’s offerings: ‘an interdisciplinary theory of society according to the methodological example of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy, which under the leadership of economy, but without lapsing into economism, integrates philosophy, sociology and psychoanalytic psychology and in addition is capable of absorbing cultural studies through the concept of ideology critique’. It is such dexterity that kept the Frankfurt School in view during the late twentieth century. And it remains pertinent today. Horkheimer and Adorno’s challenge to reason’s paradox persists. Of course, different readings of Dialectic of Enlightenment are possible, depending on one’s position and purpose, but the book remains a tocsin against the consequences of reason’s dominating proclivity. Reason is the means through which humans exploit the world to their advantage and so all conceptual thought is inclined towards domination. This thesis deserves attention and scrutiny. So too does the intricate way in which freedom remains a possibility within this thesis. Indeed, Dialectic of Enlightenment should be read in concert with a range of texts—inside, outside and against the Critical Theory tradition—if any hope of liberation for the angel of history is possible. For if Horkheimer and Adorno’s signal is unheeded, they will remain two among many in history’s chorus of Cassandras.

190

10 Predicting Dialectic of Enlightenment’s Future

References Allen, A. (2016). The end of progress: Decolonizing the normative foundations of critical theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Benhabib, S. (1986). Critique, norm, and utopia: A study of the foundations of critical theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Brown, W. (Ed.). (2006). Feminist theory and the Frankfurt School. Durham: Duke University Press. Brown, W., Gordon, P. E., & Pensky, M. (2018). Authoritarianism: Three inquiries into critical theory. Berkeley: University of California Press. Claussen, D. (2008). Theodor W. Adorno: One last genius. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge MA: Bellknap Press. Dews, P. (Ed.). (1992). Autonomy and solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas. London: Verso. Fraser, N. (1989). Unruly practices: Power, discourse and gender in contemporary social theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Heberle, R. (2006). Feminist interpretations of Theodor Adorno. Penn State University Press. Hewitt, A. (1992). A feminine dialectic of enlightenment?: Horkheimer and Adorno revisited. New German Critique, 56, 143–170. Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T.W. (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment. Trans., Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Horkheimer, M., & Theodor W. A. (2011). Towards a new Manifesto. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: Verso. Jarosinski. (2015). Nein: A Manifesto. New York: Grove Atlantic. Jay, M. (2010). Dialectic of counter-enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as scapegoat of the lunatic fringe. Salmagundi, 168/169: 30–40, 249. Jeffries, S. (2016). Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt school. London: Verso. Postone, M. (1992). Political theory and historical analysis. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere (pp. 164–177). Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Schnädelbach, H. (1999). The cultural legacy of critical theory. New Formations., 38, 64–77. Shapiro, J. (1974). The critical theory of the Frankfurt School. The Times Literary Supplement, 4 October: 1094–1095. Soper, K. (1999). The politics of nature: Reflections on hedonism, progress and ecology. Capitalism, Nature, Ecology, 10(2), 47–71. Therborn, G. (2008). From Marxism to Post-Marxism? London: Verso. Varadharjan, A. (1995). Exotic paradises: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, and Spivak. Minnesota: Minnesota University Press. Von Dirke, S. (1997). ‘All power to the imagination!’: The West German counter culture from the student movement to the greens. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Wheen, F. (2004). How Mumbo Jumbo conquered the world: A short history of modern delusions. London: Harper Collins.