Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

Beyond Reification

Stefano Giacchetti Ludovisi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317156994
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Essays in Politics & International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume explores possibility of constructing a political outcome from the theory of the early years of the Frankfurt School, countering the commonly-made criticism that critical theory is highly speculative. With chapters exploring the work of figures central to the Frankfurt School, including Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Habermas and Honneth, Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis reveals that it is only with a fixed and dogmatic model of politics that critical theory is incompatible, and that it can in fact yield a rich variety of political models, ranging from new forms of Marxism to more contemporary 'dialogical' models centred on the politics of identity. With attention to new ways of contrasting alienation and reification in contemporary forms of social organisation, this book demonstrates that the thought of the Frankfurt school can in fact be an invaluable tool not only for developing a critique of advanced capitalism, but also for originating alternative models of political praxis. As such, it will appeal to scholars of social and political theory, with interests in classical sociological thought and continental philosophy.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Stefano Giacchetti Ludovisi

On Marx’s grave, in London, his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach is recorded: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” After Marx, those philosophers who were not trying to change the world, those who were “only” trying to interpret it, were condemned by Marxists as “bourgeois,” as implicitly defending the status quo. Critical Theory wanted to remain faithful to Marx’s precept that the point is to change the world, but the drastic change that can be witnessed in our contemporary society has to do with the social actor that can bring forth such revolutionary plans. In other words, who is capable today of changing the world? According to a classical Marxist perspective, it is the objective situation of exploitation that determines the revolutionary consciousness of the working class. The proletariat, as the social class that has achieved an objective awareness of their situation of oppression, can become the true subject of a revolutionary change of our social structure. While this held true between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, after World War II and the disastrous experiences of Fascism and Nazism first, and then of the Stalinist turn of the Soviet model, this faith in a revolutionary social actor gradually disappeared. At the same time, the standardization of culture in capitalist societies transformed the consciousness of the exploited class into the most passive acceptance of consumerism and conservative political models. Horkheimer clearly summarizes this problem: “not even the situation of the proletariat in this society is a guarantee of correct consciousness.”

While some members of the Frankfurt School (and in particular Marcuse) tried to find new actors capable of bringing forth the revolution, identifying revolutionary subjectivity in various grassroots movements such as environmentalism, feminism, student rebellions, etc., others (such as Adorno and Horkheimer) never envisioned a new social class able to fulfill such a task. In both cases, Critical Theory chose a more difficult path: the identification of the original reasons for the failure of the formation of a revolutionary group. In its search for the causes of our contemporary inability to form a self-conscious revolutionary class, Critical Theory questioned not only the economic structure of our society but, most importantly, the type of rationality which determines it.

It thus becomes clear how for critical theorists the solution for subverting the capitalistic order necessarily requires first a thoroughgoing critique of the structure of rationality. The point, as Marx admonished, is still to change the world, but this goal will not be achieved without a change in our model of rationality occurring at the same time.

The rationality that is responsible for the domination of nature determined the three major disappointments of the twentieth century, which Critical Theory tried to address. The first disappointment was originated by the failure of the dream of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was supposed to free us from any dogmatism and make us step out of a “self-imposed immaturity,” as Kant formulated it in his essay An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? Critical reason was supposed to replace dogmatism in formulating autonomous and free judgments, but a model of instrumental rationality imposed itself on social formations, and the domination of nature became the main purpose of this rationality. The outcome of such a form of rationality became most evident with the rise of Fascism in the early twentieth century, and at that point the Enlightenment created the opposite effects of what it proposed. Freedom and autonomy were erased by authoritarian forms of social control.

The second disappointment addressed by the Frankfurt School was related to the affirmation of a “socialist” society in the Soviet Union. The Marxist project of creating a classless society was transformed into the authoritarian control of a bureaucratic class. With the Stalinist regime, any hope in the affirmation of a valid alternative to capitalism collapsed. Also in this case, freedom and autonomy were suffocated by authoritarianism.

The third disappointment, which has a more contemporary relevance, was determined by the experience in western democracies. The first impact of several members of the Frankfurt School exiled in the United States was traumatic. The “affluent” society still promised freedom, but beyond the glittering mask of a society based on the fanciest commodities a similar authoritarianism was hidden. Capitalism reduced human life to the same existence as lab-rats, trained to produce in order to consume in an endless cycle that repressed the possibility of any genuine self-affirmation. Freedom and autonomy in this case were presented as a concrete reality, but they could not be experienced by the acritical masses.

How was society finally supposed to escape the cumulative trauma of these successive blows? How was it possible to finally affirm freedom and autonomy in a radically different form of society? Critical Theory tried to give an answer to these questions, recognizing that there was no easy solution to them. The point was to maintain a Marxist framework for criticizing capitalism without falling into the dissolution of individuality in forced conformism. At the same time, the point was to determine the extent to which it was still possible to affirm critical thought with the advance of the culture industry. These problems still remain unsolved, and the globalization of certain standards of the domination of nature are leading us towards catastrophe, on both the personal and the environmental levels. Finding a valid alternative to the domination of nature implied in the model of rationality that guides our social formations is still the mandatory goal of Critical Theory. This book seeks to contribute to the contemporary debate on how to affirm alternative models, inspired by Critical Theory, to the “miserable reality” of today.

We are collecting here a series of chapters developed in the context of the International Critical Theory Conferences held at the John Felice Rome Center of Loyola University Chicago since 2010. The common theme of these contributions revolves around the crucial debate over the possibility of constructing a new political reality on the basis of the philosophical analysis of the early stages of the Frankfurt School. One of the main critiques of the Frankfurt School has in fact addressed the highly speculative aspects of Critical Theory. This criticism spans from the concentration on aesthetics of Adorno, to the metaphysical pessimism of Horkheimer and, in general, to the outdated political context of the theories of Benjamin and Marcuse. This book aims to show that this criticism is not well grounded. Critical Theory can be an invaluable tool not only for developing a critique of contemporary society, but also for originating alternative models of political praxis. The important aspect of Critical Theory is that it presents itself as incompatible with a fixed and dogmatic model of politics, and therefore the political perspectives that can be developed out of it can vary significantly: from the articulation of political models inspired by a new form of Marxism, to the more contemporary “dialogical” models centered on the politics of identity. The common theme remains the envisioning of new ways of contrasting alienation and reification from the perspective of contemporary forms of social organization.

The book is divided into thematic sections which address the contemporary political relevance of the works of Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Habermas and Honneth. The first part (Chapters 2 to 6 ) addresses the contemporary debate over the convergence of the theory of Adorno with political praxis. This part supports both a new reading of Adorno’s work as open to a political transformation of capitalism and the project for a new form of Marxism which can be applied to contemporary society.

The second part (Chapters 7 to 13) addresses a new perspective on the idea of criticism as the basis for reconciling Critical Theory with normativity and a theory of rights and justice. This second part covers both the early stages of Critical Theory (in relation to nationalism and colonialism), as well as its more contemporary formulations.

The final part (Chapters 14 and 15) discusses the relationship between aesthetics and politics in Critical Theory. This relationship is analyzed through the contemporary use of traditional and new media.

I would like to thank, first and foremost, the contributors of this book, both for their work published in this volume, and for their consistent participation in the conferences in Rome. I would also like to thank Andrew Cutrofello, Hugh Miller, David Schweickart, Mark Bosco, Susana Cavallo and all the other faculty members at Loyola University Chicago who supported these conferences throughout the years. My thanks go also to Bahar Tahsili as well as to all my students who collaborated with me in Rome, Chicago and San Diego.

Chapter 2

Adorno’s Global Subject

Deborah Cook

In a well-known passage in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx complained that, as long as mere survival remains paramount for workers, the activities of eating, drinking, excreting, and reproducing will continue to be their “sole and ultimate ends.” Workers now feel themselves to be free only while engaging in these activities, while in their “human functions”—the activities that should allow them to develop their potential qua members of the species—they do not feel themselves to be “anything but an animal.”¹ For Marx, of course, it is the labor process under capitalism that has turned human functions into a mere means to the end of sustaining individual life.² Rather than affirming themselves as members of the species, workers spend their lives struggling to preserve their individual, biological existence over and against the existence of others in a Hobbesian war of each against all.

Following Marx, Adorno agrees that self-preservation remains the primary aim of individuals under monopoly conditions. In fact, he claims that the “present condition is destructive” precisely because it requires the “loss of identity for the sake of abstract identity, of naked self-preservation.”³ Focused exclusively on acquiring the means to feed, house, and clothe themselves, individuals self-destructively “balk at their real dependence on the species as well as at the collective aspect of all forms and contents of their consciousness.”⁴ Nevertheless, Adorno also speculates about how this situation might be changed when he argues that genuine progress requires the emergence of a global subject that will enable individuals to actualize the more universal dimension of their existence as members of the species. In this chapter, I shall elaborate on Adorno’s claims about the global subject and species being while exploring some of their more problematic aspects.

Determinate Negation and Critique

To begin, it is important to note that Adorno denies that our current predicament—in which individuals focus exclusively on their own survival to the detriment of survival of the species—was historically necessary. In Negative Dialectics, he criticizes both Hegel and Marx for dismissing “all doubts about the inevitability of totality.” ⁵ Here Adorno expresses the view that history is contingent, if only on heuristic grounds: “Only if things might have gone differently; if the totality is recognized as socially necessary semblance, as the hypostasis of the universal pressed out of individual human beings; if its claim to be absolute is broken–only then will a critical social consciousness retain its freedom to think that things might be different some day.”⁶ In “Progress,” however, Adorno states much more forthrightly that the parlous situation in which we find ourselves is “man-made, and therefore revocable.”⁷

But if he rejects Hegel’s and Marx’s teleological accounts of history, Adorno shares Marx’s view about what is needed to make radical social change possible. For Marx, as Moishe Postone notes, change must be rooted, not in the “abstract” negation of existing conditions but in their “determinate historical negation.”⁸ To wrest free of exchange relations and the equally subsumptive abstractions of identity-thinking, the specific forms of damage that these abstractions continue to inflict on human and nonhuman life must be negated. In the first instance, however, Adorno contends that this negation of the negative takes the form of critique. Critics must reflect on our compulsive domination of nature which, by keeping us in thrall to nature in the form of survival instincts, now threatens to destroy all life on this planet.

Calling determinate negation a methodological principle,⁹ Adorno also declares that it is “the only form in which metaphysical experience survives today.”¹⁰ Depicting life today as irrational, distorted, even hellish, Adorno negated damaged life in order to arrive at ideas about what a better life might look like. Although he placed a ban on positive images of utopia (ND, 207), this ban does not rule out any and all attempts to envisage something better. In fact, Elizabeth Pritchard rightly rejects influential readings of Adorno’s ban on images on the grounds that they often confuse it with negative theology. To be sure, determinate negation does not yield fully positive images of a better life, or a positive theology of what Adorno sometimes called “redemption.” Yet Adorno also criticized those who appeal to “the ‘wholly other’ character of the absolute (negative theology).”¹¹ Indeed, Pritchard argues that Adorno refused to endorse a complete ban on images because such a ban would risk leaving the status quo unchallenged.¹² With determinate negation, Pritchard explains, Adorno revealed “the features of damaged life that preempt redemption” in order to “indicate something determinate about that redemption, without thereby presuming its immanent arrival.”¹³

Adorno makes this point in a discussion with Ernst Bloch (which Pritchard does not cite):

If the question of utopia is so complex, it is because we are forbidden to generate images of it...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Adorno’s Global Subject
• 3 Adorno’s Criticism of Marx’s Social Theory
• 4 Adorno as Marx’s Scholar: Models of Resistance Against the Administered World
• 5 The Question of Praxis in Adorno’s Critical Theory
• 6 Praxis in the Age of Bit Information and Sham Revolutions: Adorno on Praxis in Need of Thinking
• 7 Against the Reification of Theory and Praxis: On Critical Theory and Empirical Social Research
• 8 Normative Ambivalence and the Future of Critical Theory: Adorno and Horkheimer, Castro-Gómez, Quijano on Rationality, Modernity, Totality
• 9 Realizing Philosophy: Marx, Lukács and the Frankfurt School
• 10 On the Critique of Rights: Adorno, Critical Theory and Natural Law
• 11 Rethinking Critical Theory Once Again: Immanent Critique and Immanent Normativity
• 12 How Practical Can Critical Theory Be?
• 13 Habermas on Solidarity and Praxis: Between Institutional Reform and Redemptive Revolution in Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis
• 14 The Color of Adorno’s Thought: On Hito Steyerl’s Adorno’s Grey
• 15 An Astonished Facticity: Toward a Meta-fetishist Ethnography
• Index