Critical theory and feeling

The affective politics of the early Frankfurt School

Simon Mussell

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526105714
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book examines the vital role of affect and feeling within the work of the early Frankfurt School. The author investigates a range of concepts – including melancholia, hope, (un)happiness, objects, and mimesis – and argues that a contemporary reading of critical theory needs to accommodate an adequate understanding of affect.

1

Thinking through feeling: critical theory and the affective turn

The assumption that thought profits from the decay of the emotions, or even that it remains unaffected, is itself an expression of the process of stupefaction.¹

In this opening chapter, I will begin by offering an overview of the particular form of critical theory on which this book will focus, namely that of the first-generation Frankfurt School, since I believe that there is still much of interest within this tradition of thought for our present time. I will then set out the contemporary theoretical context that informs my re-engagement with the earlier work of the Frankfurt School. In particular, I want to chart the recent ‘affective turn’ in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, which has proven to be a fertile, if somewhat disorderly, ground for research within the broader field of ‘new materialism’. My aim is to draw on some of these theories of affect to prompt new readings of first-generation critical theory, readings that will emphasize the latter’s often overlooked concern with feeling, in all its senses.

As will become apparent throughout the chapter, whilst I believe there are some important and constructive findings from within the broad ambit of affect theory and new materialism, I do not fully endorse them as adequate models for theorizing social, political, and cultural phenomena. Indeed, the political economy of ‘intellectual labour’, of which the production and circulation of academic theory is a considerable part, should make one wary of exaggerated claims to theoretical innovation. There are endless institutional and market imperatives to concoct novel methodologies and modes of analysis, which serve to accelerate output and inflate the impact and prestige of the attached individuals and departments. Moreover, in throwing oneself headlong into the most recent theoretical trends, one inevitably risks abandoning what remains valid or simply under-explored within previous approaches. As such, part of this chapter will serve to situate the affective turn and the new materialisms within a wider context of the ‘post-critical’.

Of course, there are also risks associated with the present project. For some, the voguish nature of the term ‘affect’ is sufficient grounds to ignore it and proceed in the belief that it cannot have anything of import to contribute to leftist political discourse. Conversely, for some affect theorists it might appear anachronistic for me to utilize their analyses for the purposes of returning to social theories of the early to mid-twentieth century. But my aim in this book is to show that affect theory and critical theory can be effectively brought into dialogue, especially with a view to bringing to light the potential blind spots and missed opportunities of each. What is more, I believe this is a necessary intervention, because just as the political content of critical theory needs an affective supplement in order to be actualized, so theories of affect need to be mediated by political conviction and engagement, lest they become ahistorical and free-floating, betraying their much-vaunted materialist credentials by retreating to a naive idealism via the backdoor.

Thoughts untimely: critical theory in the twenty-first century

Before making a case for the importance of revisiting critical theory for and in the twenty-first century, we ought to define precisely what variety of ‘critical theory’ will be revisited here. After all, the very term has come to enjoy currency in an increasingly diverse array of discourses since its original inception in early twentieth-century Frankfurt. Indeed, without additional specification the use of ‘critical theory’ today can invoke all manner of intellectual movements and scholarly fields. These include: the gender theory of Judith Butler; the critical genealogies of Michel Foucault; the postcolonialism of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak; the poststructuralism of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; the queer theory of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; the literary and cultural criticism of Lauren Berlant; the affect theory of Brian Massumi; the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida; the theories of the postmodern of Jean-François Lyotard and Fredric Jameson; the cosmopolitanism of Seyla Benhabib; the cyborg feminism of Donna Haraway; the post-secular rationalism of Jürgen Habermas; the socialist-humanism of Zygmunt Bauman; and the ubiquitous Lacanian-Hegelianism of Slavoj Žižek, to name just some of the most prominent figures and trends. The concerns that now come under the rubric of critical theory continue to traverse disciplinary boundaries: social theory, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, literary theory, queer theory, feminism, politics, philosophy, pedagogy, ecology, geography, and so it goes on. Critical theory is a broad church indeed.

But such varied threads are nevertheless loosely drawn together by their adjectival counterpart – namely, their critical standpoint in relation to the given state of affairs. All critical theories (in the plural) exceed mere description and either directly deploy or indirectly imply normative arguments. That is to say, a theory that is critical will not just claim that ‘this is the case’; it will also make (or imply) the additional claim that ‘this ought not to be the case’. This normative orientation – albeit in a negative form – is characteristic of both classical and contemporary critical theories. While there exist major disagreements as to what exactly is the case in theory, and how things should be improved in practice, it is this implicit normative charge, the dissatisfaction with what exists, that connects the vast array of theorists listed above to the original formulators of critical theory in the early twentieth century.² In all genuinely critical theories, there is an overriding concern with real obstacles to human flourishing and betterment (even if positive conceptions of what counts as such ‘betterment’ remain subject to ongoing debate). Keeping this in mind, then, let us recall the origins of critical theory, along with some of its central political and epistemological concerns, as well as its social and historical context.³

As one of the most influential strands of what Perry Anderson labeled ‘Western Marxism’, critical theory, in its originary form, is primarily associated with the work of the Frankfurt School. As an umbrella term, the ‘Frankfurt School’ only came about in retrospect to refer to the Institute for Social Research [Institut für Sozialforschung] at Goethe University, Frankfurt. Felix Weil had established the Institute in 1923. Its first director was Carl Grünberg, a historian from the Austro-Marxist tradition, whose tenure followed a more orthodox form of Marxism. The very early work of the Institute aimed at uncovering the economic imperatives, dynamics, and logics that give rise to complex social and superstructural phenomena. Much of this initial research still adhered to a scientific, mechanistic version of historical materialism.⁴ From the end of Grünberg’s directorship in 1929, the Institute would continue to be broadly guided by Marxist principles (at least, arguably, until the late 1980s), but its output became far more heterodox, self-reflexive, and critical.

In this regard, one can say that critical theory followed Georg Lukács’s lead in pursuing Marxism as a dynamic method, rather than a static doctrine. Lukács reproached the positivist materialism of Bukharin’s ‘Theory of Historical Materialism’ for its simplistic scientific model (transposed wholesale from the natural to the social sciences), as well as its prioritization of the forces of production and the false universalization of the Bolshevik experience in Russia. At the same time, Lukács also wrote vehemently against the ‘decadence’ of bourgeois idealism, existentialism, and modernism. The Frankfurt School can be seen to follow a similar trajectory to that of Lukács, insofar as they also sought to transcend the well-worn antitheses of idealism and materialism by way of a thoroughly dialectical method. Indeed, when Max Horkheimer became director of the Institute in 1931, his inaugural speech gestured towards the same kind of dialectical synthesis advocated by Lukács. In the speech, Horkheimer comments on a tendency for social philosophy to proceed dogmatically from a general thesis:

[O]‌ne usually takes up in a simplifying manner one of the theories that have arisen historically and then uses it to argue against all others, remaining dogmatically in the realm of the general. It can thus be asserted that economy and Spirit are different expressions of one and the same essence; this would be bad Spinozism. Or, alternatively, one maintains that ideas or ‘spiritual’ contents break into history and determine the action of human beings. The ideas are primary, while material life, in contrast, is secondary or derivative; world and history are rooted in Spirit. This would be an abstractly and thus badly understood Hegel. Or one believes, contrariwise, that the economy as material being is the only true reality; the psyche of human beings, personality as well as law, art, and philosophy, are to be completely derived from the economy, or mere reflections of the economy. This would be an abstractly and thus badly understood Marx. Such notions naively presuppose an uncritical, obsolete, and highly problematic divorce between Spirit and reality which fails to synthesize them dialectically.⁵

In turn, it is worth recalling that this move towards method is precisely what Marx himself outlined in the afterword to the second German edition of Capital, Volume I, in which he states that dialectics, in its rational form (in contrast to the Hegelian, ‘mystified’ form), ‘includes in its positive understanding of what exists a simultaneous understanding of its negation, its necessary decline … [I]‌t regards every historically developed form as being in flux of motion, and therefore grasps its transient aspect as well … [I]t does not let itself be impressed by anything, being in its very essence critical and revolutionary’.⁶ This inheritance of Marxism as the dialectical method par excellence would become the red thread running through the Institute.

The shifting sands on which the Frankfurt School was founded betoken the fact that there was no actual ‘school’ as such, in the sense of a shared, agreed-upon set of theoretical positions, nor a physically localized group of people.⁷ Those associated with the Institute for Social Research, either officially or more informally, may have shared a common methodological basis, but a range of biographical and historical factors – e.g. different (or no) party and political affiliations, working relationships and practices, experiences of activism, disciplinary backgrounds, areas of expertise, and so on – made for a heterogeneous set of thinkers. Yet rather than being a hindrance to the Institute’s cohesion and purpose, as might be expected, it was precisely this intellectual independence and political non-conformity that fostered some of the Institute’s most productive and provocative pieces of research.⁸ What is more, the collaborative, interdisciplinary character of the Institute did not come about by accident; it was a resolute objective of the Institute’s second director, Max Horkheimer, who sought to cultivate a new kind of transdisciplinary theory.

In the programmatic essay ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ (1937), Horkheimer sets out his vision for the Institute’s innovative brand of critical theory in opposition to what he terms ‘traditional’ theory. According to Horkheimer, the ‘traditional idea of theory is based on scientific activity as carried on within the division of labor at a particular stage in the latter’s development. It corresponds to the activity of the scholar which takes place alongside all the other activities of a society but in no immediately clear connection with them’.⁹ In observing and reporting on empirical facts with no broader consideration of the societal values and impact of their work and its place within the production process, traditional theorists uncritically reproduce what exists, rather than examining it more holistically and analytically. In traditional theory, scientific activity is divided into multiple disciplines that set themselves apart from the wider world and context in which their activities are situated. In the misbegotten belief in science’s supposed disinterestedness, social reality is seen as entirely extrinsic to the theorist. Objects of study become separate entities, alien matter to be observed, experimented with, mapped out, described, and so on. In this way, Horkheimer argues, traditional theory mirrors all bourgeois thought insofar as it is ‘essentially abstract, and its principle is an individuality which inflatedly believes itself to be the ground of the world or even to be the world without qualification, an individuality separated off from events’.¹⁰

In light of the limitations of traditional theory, one of the central aims of a critical theory must then be to re-establish the connections between the individual and society, subject and object, facts and values, in a way that brings theory to bear on the totality of social relations and practices. Doing so will also of necessity draw out the inevitable partiality and value-laden investments of all theoretical work, as well as the latter’s role in social (re)production. There is no neutral standpoint whence one might theorize. A critical theory will not seek to explain away, or smooth over, the numerous tensions and contradictions that persist in a given situation; rather, it will attempt to magnify and sharpen these contradictions, exposing their unsustainability, all the better to presage their future abolition. In Horkheimer’s words:

[T]‌he critical attitude of which we are speaking is wholly distrustful of the rules of conduct with which society as presently constituted provides each of its members. The separation between individual and society in virtue of which the individual accepts as natural the limits prescribed for his [sic] activity is relativized in critical theory. The latter considers the overall framework which is conditioned by the blind interaction of individual activities (that is, the existent division of labor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: once more, with feeling
• 1 Thinking through feeling: critical theory and the affective turn
• 2 Feeling blue: melancholic dispositions and conscious unhappiness
• 3 A feeling for things: objects, affects, mimesis
• 4 Expectant emotion and the politics of hope
• Coda
• Bibliography
• Index