The Persistence of Critical Theory

Gabriel R. Ricci

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351477543
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

The latest volume of Culture and Civilization gathers contemporary exponents of critical theory, specifically those based in the Frankfurt School of social thinking. Collectively, this volume demonstrates the continuing intellectual viability of critical theory, which challenges the limits of positivism and materialism. We may question how the theoretical framework of Marxism fails to coordinate with the conditions that defined labor forces, as did Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, or deliberate on the conditions that justify the claims we make through public discourse, as did Jurgen Habermas. Or, like Axel Honneth, we may reflect on recognition theory as a means of addressing social problems. Whatever our objective, the focus of critical theory continues to be the consciousness of established "positive" interests that, without debate, may sustain injustices or conditions which the public may not have chosen to impose. Throughout the hardship of punitive dismissal and exile in the 1930s and 40s, and the shock of the New Left in the 1960s and 70s, and finally the later linguistic and pragmatic turn, the Frankfurt School has sustained the idea that people escape disaffection and alienation when their knowledge of the social and political world is dialectically mediated through creative interaction. This new volume in the Culture and Civilization series continues the tradition of critical thought.

1
Critical Theory in Germany: On the Way into the Twenty-First Century

Samuel Salzborn

Critical theory has been one of the most influential schools of thought for the social sciences and humanities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—however, its institutional anchoring in Germany’s university system has remained considerably less established than is the case with critical rationalism and rational choice theory, for example.

Critical theory emerged in the Germany in the 1920s, shaped by an interdisciplinary impetus, and inspired by perplexing anomaly seen in society around the turn of the century: in the wake of a materialist critique of the political economy, as had been authoritatively developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, there prevailed a certain puzzlement in the 1920s among intellectuals in Germany and across Europe. This was because the objectively seen social conditions, which should have—according to Marx and Engels—certainly resulted in a socialist revolution, had instead failed to ignite any class consciousness or revolutionary potential among the majority of the working class. Quite contrarily, as would soon be seen in the 1930s, there were large segments of the blue-collar and white-collar workforce that not only lacked revolutionary ideals in the socialist mold, but actually supported counterrevolutionary ideas and had a strong affinity for fascist and Nazi beliefs. For the circle of young intellectuals surrounding Max Horkheimer, this perplexing anomaly had already prompted them in the 1920s to explore why certain objectively seen social and/or economic constellations had indeed failed to bring about the consequences that would be expected in theory.

The resulting critical theory utilized the trailblazing insights of Marxist social theory, and also challenged its historically deterministic assumptions by recognizing the social theory potential of psychoanalysis, thereby connecting it to the question of the subject/object relationship within the interplay between history and society. The hope and faith found in a materialist critique of political economy thus gave way to critical theory’s realism, which many have also seen as pessimism: no longer letting yourself be led by utopian desires, but instead continually subjecting society to critique, one that will never lack an object of investigation, so long as society remains bound up in its own economic and social contradictions.

Frankfurt in the 1920s thus saw the foundation of a small institute that would become a launching pad for radical social criticism, one that always strove for interdisciplinarity, because the totality of bourgeois society demanded it; this new critical theory would soon be a thorn in the side of the rising National Socialist movement. The young intellectuals associated with Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, and Erich Fromm were forced to emigrate, eventually finding—after various European detours—a welcome in North America. This is where the major studies into National Socialism and fascism were developed, the cornerstone for the empirical study of worldview development was laid, and the groundwork for various large-scale social theory projects was established. While some critical theorists like Franz L. Neumann and Herbert Marcuse stayed in the United States after the defeat of National Socialism, others like Horkheimer and Adorno worked in Frankfurt during the 1950s and 1960s, where they managed to reestablish critical theory in Germany—despite massive resistance from the political and academic systems.

In the scholarly histories of critical theory, there now exist extensive works on the history of Frankfurt’s Institute for Social Research, alongside multiple intellectual biographies on Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Fromm. However, the history of critical theory certainly does not end with the death of Adorno or Horkheimer, and by no means has it been adequately recounted if all attention since the 1980s has been focused exclusively on Jürgen Habermas, who has been considered (especially in the German-speaking world) the main heir to critical theory—rightly or wrongly. In terms of scholarly history, it is striking how the establishment of critical theory has always remained rudimentary at Germany’s universities, even though critical theory has decisively shaped the ideas of social research and humanities research in Germany, right up into the present day; this is precisely why the intellectual history of critical theory since the death of Adorno needs to be reconstructed. This reconstruction is particularly aimed to discover both the commonalities and the contradictions and to show how these might ultimately be connected to one another.

A Bottled Message Without Addressees: But with What Senders?

It was during the American exile of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research that Theodor W. Adorno became fascinated with the metaphor of the message in a bottle, although this image is explicitly mentioned just twice in his body of work:

Even at that time the hope of leaving behind messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism bursting on Europe was an amiable illusion: the desperate letters stuck in the mud of the spirit of rejuvenescence and were worked up by a band of Noble Human-Beings and other riff-raffinto highly artistic but inexpensive wall-adornments.¹

Even though it has been said, in reference to the Adorno-Marcuse debate about theory versus practice in regard to the German student movement of the late 1960s, that the bottle has since been “uncorked”² and that critical theory has found an addressee—an idea admittedly corresponding more to Marcuse’s understanding, and not to that of Adorno—the fascination of this metaphor still remains, not only for considerations of critical theory, but also for the possibilities and limitations of critical social research in general. It is a metaphor that was contextualized in the following by Horkheimer and Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, although only implicitly: “If there is anyone today to whom we can pass the responsibility for the message, we bequeath it not to the ‘masses,’ and not to the individual (who is powerless), but to an imaginary witness—lest it perish with us.”³

The unaddressed message in a bottle, the unknown witness—these both illustrate the desperate placelessness of critical theory, which—if it will not intellectually corrupt itself—cannot throw in its lot with the totality of bourgeois socialization, where it neither belongs and yet is not excluded either, and which in its ambivalent placelessness can only kindle a subjective hope by not kindling hope itself. Adorno’s assertion that the whole is untrue,⁴ meaning that nothing—not even one’s own thoughts—can escape the suspicion of ideology, structurally demarcates the impossibility of truly uncorking the bottled message, of finding a real addressee. However, if one further pursues the history of critical theory, this metaphor of a message in a bottle holds yet another contradiction: although the bottled message had no addressee, it still had at least senders, in the form of Adorno, Horkheimer, and others—and in view of the debates concerning the continuities and fractures in the development of critical theory since the 1970s, these senders seem to have become not only more diverse, but also less identifiable. And so, as we begin this outline of critical theory perspectives at the start of the twenty-first century, one could certainly come up with the idea that it is not only the addressee who is unknown, but that the bottle’s senders have also become just vaguely distinguishable figures in the fog.

In asking who were the senders of the bottled message since the 1970s, some have taken the easy route and said that the first generation of critical theory was succeeded by a second one largely associated with the work of Jürgen Habermas, in whose footsteps came Axel Honneth as a major representative of the third generation, to be followed in turn by Rainer Forst (either as a parallel or a subsequent development, depending on one’s analysis). All of them further developed the legacy of critical theory, especially at the traditional stronghold of Frankfurt, and could thus be justifiably seen as the torchbearers of the Frankfurt School (a label that had shifted from an external sobriquet to a self-assumed one) who continually adapted it to each period’s context. Others, seeing a departure from the socially critical ambitions of critical theory when Habermas turned it to communicative issues, have taken an equally easy route by saying that the senders of the bottled message after Adorno and Horkheimer could include many other people like Alfred Schmidt, Hans-Jürgen Krahl, Oskar Negt, Regina Becker-Schmidt, Alex Demirović, and Detlev Claussen, but certainly not Habermas and his followers.

What is striking about this contested attempt to designate the true inheritors—a project still pursued with much zeal today⁵—is that the very idea of asking who has preserved and further developed the real or “true” core of critical theory is in itself a contradiction of its goals, precisely because it is impossible for anyone to justifiably and dogmatically claim to have developed a way of thinking and a social critique that never succumbs at any point to the totality of modern socialization, without having to constantly question the possibility of this danger in a process of self-reflection and criticism. Although Franz L. Neumann is right in saying that no critical thinking can avoid having some last minimal trace of metaphysics,⁶ it is equally important to never stop trying to avoid it (precisely because of its inevitability, not despite it). The focus here is on a “deontic framework,” as stated by Jürgen Ritsert,⁷ which is fundamental to the prospect of emancipation, whereby the “defining of the relationship between the subsumption model and emancipation model of subjectivity” should result in “neither a culturally pessimistic establishment of absolutes under the subsumption model, nor in a strict disjunction.”⁸

Therefore, those who would appoint themselves the final arbiters in the question of who then are the legitimate successors to the critical theory of Horkheimer and Adorno must also stand under suspicion of promoting an ideology, having ennobled their own reasoning at least to the point of enthroning themselves to pass this judgment.⁹ In other words, any attempt to reflect upon differing critical theory approaches—if it is to avoid negating itself as precisely the opposite—should focus not only on the deviations but also on the potentials; and not only on the identical and the desire for harmony but also on the non-identical and the resulting desire for ambivalence. The critical stance remains torn between belonging and not belonging, at an indeterminable site in social theory, beyond certainties, and free in a twofold sense: free of prescription, but also free of certitude, with the only certainty being the recognition of that which is untrue. The only surety is uncertainty, resisting the mania for the identical, the unquestioned and the ideological, while constantly doubting intellectual and political dogmas.

Critical theory thus situates itself at a social and intellectual non-place that is characterized by both inclusion and exclusion: it is only by engaging with this condition, analyzing it both empirically and theoretically, that a useful contribution can be made to critical thought. However, there is always the omnipresent danger that this all-inclusive approach might ultimately reinforce the very structures that underpin injustice. Any certainty of having avoided becoming part of the ideological is itself undermined as yet another form of ideology. If critique is to form the methodological premise, then all that remains of it in political terms is the torn, the non-identical and the ambivalent: being inside and yet always outside. Within this self-contradictory, potentially irreducible ontological core of critical theory lies a space of possibilities, one that has been multiple concretized in the wake of Adorno and Horkheimer but which itself remained, and must remain, ambivalent—it is the core of an emancipa-tory philosophy that is radical because it is negative. An emancipatory philosophy for the structurally unfree subject in bourgeois society: “[...] critical theory has no specific influence on its side, except concern for the abolition of social injustice.”¹⁰

In this postulate—seemingly trivial, and yet on closer inspection highly ambitious—Horkheimer’s dictum on maintaining the non-identical and the negative as a central element of critical theory¹¹ is linked to Adorno’s categorical demand that people “arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.”¹² If one understands the negative nature of critical theory from this ambivalence—which in its subject orientation tries to reduce the individual’s every suffering, but in its society orientation never wants to align itself with totalizing socialization—then one sees not only the two poles of social theory that have historically been accented in different ways since Horkheimer and Adorno, but also a contradiction, because if one intellectually turns toward the subject, this will necessarily bring along relativizations...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Critical Theory in Germany: On the Way into the Twenty-First Century
• 2 The Frankfurt School, Critical Theory, and Sociology at the Institute for Social Research (1950 to 1960)
• 3 The Dialectification of Science and Philosophy
• 4 From Complex Classlessness to Complex Denaturalization: On Marx, Luhmann, and Critical Theory
• 5 Transnational Governmentality and Civil Society: Ambivalences of Power in a Globalized World
• 6 Neo-Noir Dialectics and the Subject of Crisis
• 7 The Concept of “Crisis” in the Thought of Cornelius Castoriadis
• 8 Language, Action, and Power: A Critique of Pragmatist Critical Theory
• 9 Habermas’s Critique of the Production Paradigm
• 10 Sympathy Regulated by Communicative Reason: Horkheimer, Habermas, and Animals
• 11 The Promise and Problem of Recognition Theory
• 12 Female Resistance or the Politics of Death? Rethinking Antigone
• 13 We Cannot Draw Closed the Net in Which We Are Caught—Walter Benjamin’s Fragment Capitalism as Religion
• Contributors