Liberal republicanism paled in comparison with the drama surrounding the participatory democracy of workers’ councils, the elimination of money and rank, and the manifold cultural experiments with a utopian flavor. Religion, art, and philosophy now become almost interchangeable in the inexpressible truth they project. Utopia exposes how reality exists under what T. W. Adorno termed the “wicked spell”—the fetish surrounding immediate gratification that erodes the critical imagination. Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Two movements were in conflict from the start. From the willing surrender of individuality in the name of instrumental needs to the denial of class claims in the name of an abstract humanity to the final assault on metaphysical abstraction itself—all become logical steps within a single logic. Liberalism employed universal principles for its rule of law and its view on rights. It also marked his concern with the manipulation of discourse and the importance of “undistorted communication.” These themes run through all his works. It has fostered pluralism by generating multiple publics—each with its own standards of judgment and purpose. Eros and Civilization was published at a time when intellectual life in the Western world was dominated by Jean-Paul Sartre and the Existentialists in France, Günther Grass and the “Group ’47” in Germany, and the Beats in the United States. The desire to unify qualitatively different phenomena under a single rubric could only produce historical disorientation and political confusion. The Frankfurt School was always suspicious of organized politics. That Adorno should have undertaken a critique of the exchange relationship under capitalism does not change matters. His arguments appear in various essays 72 collected in The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (1970) and The Revision of Psychoanalysis (1992). The transformative impulse Critical theory was originally intended as an interdisciplinary enterprise to which each might bring his or her unique disciplinary talent and expertise. “All Power to the Soviets!” was Lenin’s revolutionary slogan in 1917, and his State and Revolution (1918) envisioned a communist state that is no longer a state in the proper sense of the word. The Frankfurt School offered understandings of the best life very different than those provided in Utopia (1516) by Thomas More or the American best seller Looking Backward (1887), by Edward Bellamy. The ruling ideas,” wrote Brecht in Saint Joan of the Stockyards (1929), “are the ideas of those who rule.” With its abstract preoccupations, however, the Frankfurt School strips resistance to those ideas of any material referent. They insist upon the need for grounding claims, formulating systemic arguments, and providing ontological characterizations of nature and science. His inability to deal with alienation in terms of its roots in the capitalist production process also has an existential component: to engage the material character of alienation would involve denying the bourgeois aims of his entire project. The constitutional state simply creates the space in which they can finally concentrate upon their most private concerns free of external interference. That was what created its affinity for critical theory and the Frankfurt School. Horkheimer finished high school after World War I. The European Union: A Very Short I, Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction New political perspectives are required to accentuate the transformative prospects for change within a new global society. Western Marxists shared this basic outlook. He insists that only the “pacification of existence,” a sustained experience of happiness without fear of death, can bring about the triumph of Eros over Thanatos. Insofar as works of art are treated no differently than other commodities, the culture industry is seen by the Frankfurt School as standardizing aesthetic experience and imperiling subjectivity. Fostering individual autonomy—perhaps the ethical aim of the revolutionary bourgeoisie—is assimilated into a concern with realizing the new communal and organic notion of “species being.” Improving working conditions in a world of scarcity, or “necessity,” makes way for a “leap into the realm of freedom.” Alienation and, implicitly, reification now become the targets of radical activity. But they cast new suspicions on universal claims, philosophical foundations, and the fixed narrative. Interdisciplinary and uniquely experimental in character, deeply skeptical of tradition and all absolute claims, critical theory was always concerned not merely with how things were but how they might 1 be and should be. Marxism was still understood as an all-embracing philosophical system with scientific foundations and teleological guarantees. The Nazi victory was rather the product of a clash between real movements whose members were quite capable of making diverse judgments concerning both their interests and their values. The proletarian revolution of its time may have turned totalitarian and the new vanguard may have failed in its historical mission. A social democrat and an economist, he would have become the first director of the Institute. The young Karl Marx went even farther with his utopian reflections on human emancipation. 57 Enlightened illusions Horkheimer and Adorno were not merely concerned with the empirical fact that totalitarianism had grown out of a liberal regime like the Weimar Republic. Nicholas Cook New York: Routledge, 1989. Its literary and philosophical essays were evocative, complex, esoteric, and decidedly nontraditional. “Negative dialectics” anticipated many concerns associated with postmodernism and poststructuralism. Edited by Thomas Schröder. They highlight its penchant for violence, and they plead for policies fostering tolerance. The issue is not the political content but the form in which it is expressed—the medium is the message. Yet, there might be a different reason. A bureaucratically administered mass society was apparently integrating all forms of resistance, obliterating genuine individuality, and generating personality structures with authoritarian predilections. He opposed reducing literature to politics, insisted upon the humanitarian character of the expressionist enterprise, and highlighted its assault upon the cultural philistinism that was so much a part of the fascist worldview. It is even fair to say that the character and power of a movement can be gleaned from the vitality of its public sphere. Carl Grünberg thus took over instead. Resolution of the tensions between the individual and society is impossible. The great refusal embodied in modernist art of an explicitly political sort (like that of Brecht) now exited the stage. He resolved to remain within the organization, and he kept to that resolution. The dream of the best life constantly glimmers anew as humanity reflects on what it has ignored. Socrates called conventional wisdom into question. Perhaps utopia does only exist in the moment when one is lying on one’s back in the grass looking at the sky, freed of want and pressure like Ferdinand the Baby Bull, the hero of children’s books, or in the flash of time that departs as soon as it is experienced. Critical Theory. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991. What occurred in the Soviet Union was a product not of modernity but the lack of it: Gramsci actually considered the Bolshevik revolution “a revolution against Das Kapital ” while Leon Trotsky and Lenin maintained that the communist triumph was possible only because Imperial Russia was “the weakest link in the capitalist chain.” Orthodox Marxists among the social democratic leadership—not surprisingly—were clearer about all this than the far more philosophically sophisticated members of the Frankfurt School. Edited by Douglas Kellner. The 24 aim was to understand a fact within the value-laden context wherein it assumes meaning. 121 Further reading Adorno, T.W., et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. Alienation and reification continue to exist in the exploitative class relations of civil society. Translated by Harry Zohn. That was the year in which Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 were finally published, accompanied by a superb review from Herbert Marcuse, in the Institute’s Journal for Social Research. Radical social movements still exist. Yet, it was G. W. F. Hegel who offered the first systematic analysis of alienation. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. Translated by Joseph Bien. Another anthology of his essays, Reflections (1986), strengthened that assessment. But the question of agency was left hanging in the abstract. Norberto Bobbio, the great socialist thinker and activist, was surely correct when he noted that contempt for positivism (not its embrace) was a hallmark of fascism. Like other members of the Frankfurt School, indeed, he was deeply concerned with how it prefabricates experience and nullifies critical thinking. More than that—an ontology of false conditions imperils subjectivity and the ability of individuals to render moral judgments. The point is to change it!” Scrutiny is required of the metaphysical turn taken by critical theory along with categories like the totally administered society and the ontology of false conditions. They brought about their expulsion from Eden—by succumbing to evil. But they all shared a commitment to the same cluster of themes and concerns. Socialism would now be identified with how people were treated rather than a fixed set of institutions and policies. or authoritarian) dictatorship of the proletariat for the rule of the bourgeoisie, and introducing a new secular ideology presumably based on technological and scientific progress. In a similar vein, Leo Lowenthal viewed the increasing lack of individuality among movie stars as reflecting the growing power of the commodity form in his essay collection, Literature and Mass Culture (published 1984). Concerned with illuminating the neglected aspects of freedom, insistent upon the historically constituted character of reality, and already skeptical about the liberating mission of the proletariat, he conceived of critical theory as an alternative to the dominant philosophical paradigms. Its connection with utopia already appears in the biblical expulsion of from Eden. The structural domination of this class is ignored. Adorno’s influence on contemporary understandings of critical theory is without parallel. It exhibits less the framework for advanced industrial society than the impact of its 105 From resignation to renewal Neglecting real ideological and material conflicts of interest in the name of an image like the totally administered society hinders the ability to interpret events in meaningful and innovative ways. 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