What remains of critical theory?

55 years ago, in the autumn of 1969, died Theodor W. Adorno. At that time, the Frankfurt School was at the height of its influence in the public sphere. Adorno's death symbolized the end of his success story, but not the end of its aftermath. This success story began in 1949, when he returned from exile. Just a decade and a half later, Adorno had become the republic's "media intellectual" and a superstar at the universities. His lectures were events that attracted not only masses of students from all faculties, but also a large non-academic audience from Frankfurt. For students he was an idol, and as a public intellectual he was a figure on a par with Sartre in France. The term "Frankfurt School" was first used around 1960, and by 1968 it had become common knowledge.

Initially, there was nothing to suggest that a researcher like Adorno could have such an impact on the humanities and social sciences, as well as on West German democracy. The opponents of academic philosophy often expressed themselves in aphorisms; his texts were packed with coded assumptions, anything but easy fare. Adorno paid little attention to assumed reading and listening habits, even when addressing a non-academic audience. Also working against his success was the fact that he had returned as an emigrant, which did not earn him a medal in the post-war period, but aroused resentment and even fear.

Philosophically guided social theory

Adorno's charisma and genius undoubtedly played a significant role. The ability to express oneself concentratedly, freely and in complex sentences, even to convey the feeling that the thoughts followed a composition and followed an aesthetic, created a certain aura. Adorno possessed "the pedagogic eros of public communication" and bowed to the applauding audience after a lecture like a pianist after a piano concert.

Adorno's death came amid the quasi-Oedipal drama unfolding between him and the student protest movement.

In sociology the situation was more favorable than in philosophy. Here, the institute had an advantage thanks to its American experience. In academic teaching, Frankfurt had early seen the signs of the times and reacted to the expansion of the education system. In addition, sociology had a favorable position against the background of the systemic competition between the capitalist West and the socialist East. Everything seemed to be "socially mediated", from music, the public, institutions and work to private love affairs. Moreover, the Frankfurt program was accessible to the well-educated middle class. It was possible to engage with Marx without making it easy for Soviet communism and the GDR. And it was very attractive to the generation that in the 1960s began to ask their parents what they had done during the 'Third Reich'. They rarely received satisfactory answers. Adorno filled this vacuum.

Adorno as moral authority

For the post-war youth intellektuell to Adorno was a moral authority who broke the silence about the terrible past and criticized the so-called restoration. Despite his confrontation with the past, he did not demand a break with classical German culture, only a dismantling of its authoritarian character and an openness to the canon of modernism from Beckett to Proust and Schönberg. Cultural industryThe critic was a passionate cinemagoer, and he was even considered the godfather and mentor of a number of progressive and avant-garde artists who came to the court in Frankfurt as spectators. "For my entire generation," he wrote Manfred Frank, who was born in 1945 and observed it all from Heidelberg, “the existence of critical theory was a question of intellectual survival in the face of parents and teachers who were either compromised by National Socialism or who circumvented the delayed analyses in a strategy of avoiding them.” Such references to the situation in the young Federal Republic are legion, not only among the students, but also among the children of their neighbors. Upbringing, the Cold War, a repressed but persistent past, a generational conflict triggered by it, and the broad modernization plus the democratization of society as a whole created the conditions for the success story of Adorno & co. It was a unique constellation and mixture that enabled the thinkers of the Frankfurt School – that is, Hegelian Marxists and Freudians – to make a decisive contribution to the intellectual foundation of the Federal Republic.

As unlikely as the success story is, just as likely is the decline. After Adorno's death, critical theory faced a gloomy decade. It was decentralised, provincialised and no longer had a fixed place of residence. Metamorphoses were formed which evaporated in environments and niches. In the university subjects of philosophy and sociology, it was quickly marginalized, with the exception of Habermas' work with a critical social theory. The demand to go to the heart of the matter and recognize the nature and laws of history and society seemed increasingly anachronistic, originating in the era of heroic modernity. The critical opposition to the false totality lost its persuasive power in an increasingly unclear time.

Critical theory

By Frankfurt University Critical theory continued to exist, but only in a diminished form. Many professors and lecturers at the Faculty of Philosophy were relieved that the categorical imperatives of the founders had now lost their force, that the sociolization of philosophy and the politicization of the sciences were no longer the gold standard. Only Alfred Schmidt held the fort in Frankfurt, which was only good for the university, as the nostalgic view of critical theory benefited the academic center's good reputation. Both academically oriented philosophers and politically ambitious Marx readers got their money's worth in his courses. As successor to Horkheimer's professorship, together with honorary professor Gerhard Schweppenhäuser, he kept the memory of the heyday of critical theory at Goethe University alive. Karl Heinz Haag, who continued to work on unresolved problems in critical theory as a private individual after Adorno's death, is, however, more representative of the real situation of this theory. But only a few realized this.

The Department of Social Research also withdrew from the university. It had specialized in industrial sociology and politically in social conflicts and labor struggles.

New offshoots of critical theory

Rolf Tiedemann, who spent his life and work editing Benjamin's and Adorno's collected writings, was probably as stubborn as the other Adorno students. Above all, it was Benjamin's 'ridiculous' Passenger Screeners which occupied him, as did the struggles against the old accusations that Adorno censored Benjamin while he was alive and manipulated his legacy, which has not been silenced to this day. Tiedemann consistently cut off his archive from the cultural science research on Benjamin, which he despised with all his heart. He produced admirable publications, but the outside world became increasingly alien to him.

With Helge Agnes Pross, Herbert Schnädelbach and Jürgen Habermas left three important Adorno students in Frankfurt, which contributed to their further success. In ministries and the media, Pross became a sought-after expert on socio-political issues, especially on women and gender relations. She can be considered a pioneer in social science gender research. However, she achieved her greatest reach through the television channel ZDF and the women's magazine Brigitte, i.e. through media that are not exactly associated with social science.

Schnädelbach, who also felt that the Frankfurt air had become too confined, could explain the philosophy of reason to the educated strata of the population, demonstrate its social relevance and determine the place of critical theory in it. The question "Why philosophy?" eventually became the question "Why Adorno?". At the end of the 1980s, Schnädelbach became president of the hitherto rather conservative General Society for Philosophy in Germany, which was perhaps also a sign of the times.

Habermas' most important idea, namely that the human form of life is characterized by linguistic communication processes, was through and through republican, the philosophy of the Federal Republic.

Habermas's international success is beyond me. However, he failed as director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Living Conditions in the Scientific and Technical World in Starnberg. Internal tensions and a hostile environment forced him to resign after ten years. Yet it was in these 1970s, amidst the conflicts and bitterness, that he wrote his great work on rational communication. habermas His most important idea, namely that the human way of life is characterized by linguistic communication processes, was thoroughly republican, the philosophy of the Federal Republic. Back in Frankfurt, he revitalized both the philosophical seminar and the intellectual climate in the city, and he in a sense reinvented the critical theory tradition. He became the supervisor of the Frankfurt School of historiography, which began in the mid-1970s. In the republic's political debates, he was often quick to draw his revolver and did not always hit the mark. In 1986, however, in the so-called historians' dispute, he was right on everything. In the 1980s, Habermas became the shining star with Frankfurt provenance, indeed, he himself built up something resembling a school, with constantly new cohorts that to this day continue certain basic elements from the Frankfurt theoretical context.

The Frankfurt school as a media myth

In the "German autumn" of 1977, politicians who Alfred Dregger og Franz Josef Strauss massively against Adorno's heirs. On the left-liberal side and in the counter-public, however, Habermas in particular was Alexander Klüge and Oskar Negt were appreciated and sometimes even flattered as Adorno's teachers and leading figures in the late summer of theory. Those who did not understand Kluge's films in the 1970s still had only themselves to thank. Habermas took on the role of public intellectual that Adorno had once held, Negt was regarded as the chief theoretician of the new left, Kluge as the leader of the new German cinema.

In the counter-public, on the other hand, Habermas, Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt in particular were valued and sometimes even flattered as Adorno's teachers.

The latter two joined forces as writers and continued to be successful even after the movements they were associated with had long since become obsolete or even ceased to exist. Kluges head cinema was closed down in the 1980s, and a decade later the same happened to Negt's political home, the Socialist Bureau. But the ideas of self-management, anti-authoritarian politics and life-world orientation had long since seeped into society. The constitutional patriot Habermas was soon considered the Hegel of the Federal Republic.

All in all, the intellectual work of Adorno's heirs was highly productive and diverse. In each case, they were immersed in details that always mattered to the whole. The decline of the Frankfurt School was not due to a lack of diligence or talent, nor was it due to discord among the students. "The times they are a-changin'" – to say it with Bob Dylan.

The left-wing and Jewish intelligentsia

The genesis of critical theory cannot be meaningfully reconstructed without the National Socialist regime and the expulsion of the left-wing and the Jewish intelligentsia from Germany. At the same time, it was the life stories of Horkheimer and Adorno, Pollock and Marcuse, Löwenthal and Kracauer that formed a large part of the appeal of this social-philosophical-political program for those who only became adults after the end of National Socialism. "The unpredictable impact of critical theory in the late 1960s surely has to do with the fact that this theory was indeed saturated with the biographical and historical experiences of exiled Jews and unorthodox leftists." This is how Jürgen Habermas aptly explains the attraction of Adorno & co. The luminous power that gathered in Frankfurt also acted as a catalyst for a development that had been going on throughout society since the early 1960s. The Frankfurt School is a child of this period of awakening, where the orderly ideals of "formed society" became anachronistic. It promoted ideas critical of authority, which were largely legitimized by the fact that the shadow of National Socialism rested over the country. For so many young intellectuals who went through life with a basic sense of negative identity, critical theory matured into a counterproposal to the post-national order of the Adenauer era. It was then in full bloom in the 1960s.

Adorno's death came in the midst of the quasi-Oedipal drama that unfolded between him and the student protest movement. With his death and the rise of the New Left, Adorno's thoughts on dealing with the Nazi past also faded into the background in this environment, especially his thesis that nothing would be the same after Auschwitz. In general, the hard-won historical consciousness declined in the period that followed. It was not without reason that Jewish intellectuals such as Paul Celan, Peter Szondi, Ivan Nagel and Jacob Taubes modeled themselves after Adorno. Adorno's death and the suicides of Celan and Szondi, but also Fritz Bauer and Jean Améry, marked a caesura for Jewish post-war existence in Germany.

The Consequences of "1968"

The 1970s were characterized by the cultural battle over the consequences of "1968". While the 'neoconservatives' (as Habermas called them) held the Frankfurt School responsible for RAF terrorism, the New Left would no longer know of the leftist bourgeois cultural critic Adorno, while Marx, Mao and Marcuse were very popular. In the 'Red Decade', the Nazi era was once again displaced in these circles in favor of struggles for social liberation and expectations of revolution.

But after painful learning processes and tough confrontations, an awareness emerged in the 1980s of the history-created problems in left-wing subcultures, which recognized and accepted that they also had to question their own self-image: From sectarian derailments and Manichean anti-imperialist interpretations of the world to ignorance about the actual victims in German history, there was much to deal with, not least anti-Semitic attitudes. Especially with regard to the Israel and Palestine conflict, it became clear how unreflected the legacy from the country was in the generation born after the war. Especially the Jewish group in Frankfurt and certain individuals now emphasized the constitutive role that the Jewish experience in this century played for critical theory. Adorno's question "What does it mean to do away with the past?" was again on the agenda.

In the 1990s, it seemed almost imperative to relate Adorno's entire work to "Auschwitz", especially because the philosopher himself had done this in Negative dialecticsAfter 1989, this central aspect of critical theory would gain greater importance than the Marxian-inspired critique of capitalism, the materialist critique of science, dialectical philosophy, and aesthetic theory.

The death of critical theory?

Critical theory is often considered Hegelian Marxism, Freudian Marxism or Western Marxism. But in reality it has many other facets: subject-related aesthetics and ethics, materialist philosophy and social theory, political practice in a life-world-oriented democratic socialism, feminist perspectives on society, democracy-oriented social philosophy, etc.

Critical social theory today stands primarily for an ethical-humanistic attitude to the world that makes it possible for political subjects, who by definition have the capacity for reflection, a sense of ambivalence and non-identity, to orient oneself critically and build resilience against stultifying contexts.

What remains of the Frankfurt School? One thing is certain: as long as the death of critical theory is repeatedly proclaimed, it is still alive. As a doctrine and a grand theory with a totalitarian reference, it is beginning to age, but it has changed the intellectual and political landscape in a way that hardly any other school in the Federal Republic of Germany has. Seen in this light, it has failed. Its glowing core – the existential judgment on the wrong society – will not go out as long as there are systemic crises, such as the climate change caused by industrial capitalism. But critical theory rarely has any practical suggestions for how a sensible society can be established, apart from basic principles. There is no social substance or social actor in sight that corresponds to critical social theory. Critical social theory today stands primarily for an ethical-humanistic attitude to the world that makes it possible for political subjects, who by definition have the capacity for reflection, to have a sense of ambivalence and non-identity, to orient oneself critically and build resilience against stultifying contexts.

See https://www.nytid.no/ornament-pris/

Republished from Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik (Eurozine).
Translated by MODERN TIMES' editor.

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