Force Fields

Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique

Martin Jay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781136643248
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Force Fields collects the recent essays of Martin Jay, an intellectual historian and cultural critic internationally known for his extensive work on the history of Western Marxism and the intellectual migration from Germany to America.

1

Urban Flights: The Institute of Social Research between Frankfurt and New York

The theme of the city and the university provides a welcome opportunity to clarify an aspect of the Frankfurt School's history that has always troubled me. I refer to the vexed problem of its roots in the social and cultural conditions of its day, the link between its Critical Theory and the context that, in some sense or another, allowed it to emerge. As wary as I have always been of the sociology of knowledge in its more reductionist forms, I have never felt comfortable either with the School's reticence about exploring its own origins, an attitude best expressed in Theodor Adorno's remark that “a stroke of undeserved luck has kept the mental composition of some individuals not quite adjusted to the prevailing norms.”¹ Even luck, deserved or not, seems to me worth trying to explain and perhaps in the case of the Frankfurt School, looking at its relations to the cities and universities with which it was connected may provide some help. For after all, it is not every group of intellectuals whose very name suggests both an urban and an academic link.

Even more understanding may ensue if we remember that the sobriquet “Frankfurt School” was only a late concoction of the 1960s and was never perfectly congruent with the Institute of Social Research out of which it came. The disparity between the research institute and the school of thought that emerged within its walls has in fact led some observers to call into question the coherence of the phenomenon as a whole. No less involved a figure than Jurgen Habermas has recently remarked that although the Institute continues, “there is no longer any question of a school, and that is undoubtedly a good thing.”²

However, rather than abandoning the search for coherence because of the historical and nominal displacements of the institute and the school, it seems to me more fruitful to acknowledge the unsettled nature of a cultural formation that nonetheless did retain a certain fluid identity over time. As I have tried to argue in my study of Adorno, that identity may best be understood as the product of a force field of untotalized and sometimes contesting impulses that defy any harmonious integration.³ In that work, I identified several salient forces in Adorno's personal intellectual field: Hegelian Marxism, aesthetic modernism, cultural mandarinism, a certain Jewish self-awareness and, from the point of view of the reception rather than generation of his ideas, poststructuralism. If we add psychoanalysis and a nuanced appreciation of Max Weber's critique of rationalization, we can perhaps see the major forces operating to constitute the intellectual field of both the Institute and the School, at least until the time of Habermas's introduction of several new elements from linguistics, cognitive psychology, hermeneutics, and anthropology.⁴ Now, to do justice to all of the constellations of these elements during the various phases of the group's history is obviously beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, what I would prefer to do is focus on only a few of them and explore the possibility that their interaction may in some way reflect the School's genesis in its specific urban and academic contexts.

To make these connections will perhaps be especially revealing because the members of the School themselves rarely, if ever, thought to make them. In fact, with the salient exception of Walter Benjamin, himself only obliquely related to the Institute, its members never directed their attention to the important role of the city in modern society.⁵ Perhaps because they knew that the critique of urban life was the stock and trade of antimodernist, protofascist ideologies–a point clearly made in Leo Lowenthal's celebrated 1937 critique of Knut Hamsen⁶–they aimed their own critiques at other targets. Georg Simmel's explorations of metropolitan life or the urban sociology of the University of Chicago's Robert Park had little resonance in their work. In fact, it was not until the Institute returned to Germany after the war that it participated in an empirical community study, that of the city of Darmstadt.⁷ And even then its members warned against the dangers of isolating their results from a more theoretically informed analysis of society as a whole.⁸ Frankfurt itself, the environment that nurtured their own work, was never an object of systematic analysis.

No less ignored during the School's earlier history was the role of the university. Perhaps because an emphasis on education was characteristic of the Revisionist Marxism they scorned, it was not one of the members' central preoccupations. Only after their return to Frankfurt, when Horkheimer in particular was deeply involved in the reconstitution of the German higher educational system, did a Frankfurt School member seriously ponder the importance of academic issues.⁹ Far more characteristic of their first Frankfurt period is the caustic remark of the young and still militant Horkheimer in his essay collection Dämmerung that the absorption of Marxism into the academy as a legitimate part of the curriculum was “a step towards breaking the will of the workers to fight capitalism.”¹⁰

What makes such a charge so ironic, of course, is that the Institute itself clearly did not emerge out of the working class, but rather from a particular stratum of the urban educated bourgeoisie (the Bildungsbürgertum) in crisis. As such, it has been seen by some observers as the first instance of an elitist Western Marxism distanced from the real concerns of the masses.¹¹ Whether or not this is fair to the complexities of its members' development, it does correctly register the fact that the Institute must be understood as much in the context of what Fritz Ringer has called “the decline of the German mandarins”¹² as in that of the working-class struggle for socialism. What, however, made the Institute's unique achievement possible was the specific urban and academic situation in which its particular response to that decline was enacted. To understand that situation, we will have to pause for a moment and focus on certain features of Frankfurt am Main prior to the Institute's foundation.

The old imperial free city had been a center of international trade and finance since the Middle Ages, even if its hegemony had been challenged by the rise of Basel, Mannheim, and especially Leipzig in the eighteenth century.¹³ Along with its economic prosperity went a certain political autonomy from the larger German states, which survived until its absorption into Prussia in 1866. The ill-fated parliament in the Paulskirche in 1848 reflected the city's symbolic role as a center of liberalism, as well as its earlier function as the site of the Holy Roman Emperor's election and coronation. Not surprisingly, the greatest organ of German liberalism, the Frankfurter Zeitung, was founded in the city by Leopold Sonnemann in 1856.

Frankfurt was also distinguished by its large and relatively thriving Jewish community, which numbered some 30,000 members during the Weimar years and was second only to Berlin's in importance. Originally protected by both the emperor and the city council, it weathered the enmity of gentile competitors and the political reverses of the post-Napoleonic era to emerge after 1848 as an integral part of the city's economic, social, and political life.¹⁴ Although assimilation was probably as advanced as anywhere else in Germany, Frankfurt's Jews were noted for their innovative response to the challenges of modernity. Reform, conservative, and orthodox branches of Judaism were creatively developed within its walls.¹⁵ It was, of course, in the Frankfurt of the 1920s that the famous Freie Jüdische Lehrhaus was organized around the charismatic rabbi Nehemiah Nobel, bringing together such powerful intellectuals as Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Ernst Simon.

Although lacking its own university until 1913,¹⁶ Frankfurt had enjoyed a long tradition of private support for scholarly institutions, stretching back to the efforts of Dr. Johann Christian Senckenberg in the eighteenth century. When the university was founded as the amalgamation of several of these academies and institutes, it was a so-called Stiftungsuniversität, funded by private contributors, often from the Jewish community, rather than by the state.¹⁷ The philanthropist Wilhelm Merton, an assimilated Jewish director of a giant metallurgical concern, was the major benefactor. Independent of the anti-Semitic and increasingly statist university system that had long since left behind the liberal intentions of its founder Wilhelm von Humboldt,¹⁸ the new Frankfurt University offered a radical departure in German academic life on the eve of the war. Its self-consciously modern outlook was demonstrated by its being the first German university not to have a separate theology faculty and by its express willingness to open its ranks to a broader range of students and faculty.

Before the war, Merton had also funded a mercantile academy and an institute for public welfare, which have been seen as the prototype for the research institutes that were launched after 1918.¹⁹ Included in their number was one founded in 1923 with the backing of a millionaire grain merchant, Hermann Weil, which chose the name Institut für Sozialforschung. This is not the place to retell the story of that founding, a task recently performed in detail by the German historian Ulrike Migdal,²⁰ but several points merit emphasis. First, the relative autonomy of the Institute, guaranteed by Weil's largesse, was very much in the time-honored Frankfurt tradition of private, bourgeois underwriting of scholarly enterprises. Although after the war and the inflation, the university itself had to call on state support to survive, Weil's continued generosity, combined with his aloofness from the Institute's actual work, meant that it was remarkably free from political and bureaucratic pressures. Although an attenuated link with the Prussian state was forged through an arrangement that specified the Institute's director had to be a university professor, clearly something very different from a traditional academic institution was created.

The difference was manifested in several important ways. First, unlike the many seminars and institutes that proliferated during the Wilhelmian era,²¹ the Institute of Social Research was not dedicated to the goal of scientific specialization and compartmentalization. Instead, it drew on the concept of totalized, integrated knowledge then recently emphasized by Georg Lukács in his influential study History and Class Consciousness²² Although the early leadership of the Institute was by no means explicitly Hegelian Marxist, it nonetheless eschewed the fragmentation of knowledge characteristic of bourgeois Wissenschaft. Second, the Institute was launched solely to foster research and without any explicit pedagogical responsibilities. This privilege meant, among other things, that the traditional mandarin function of training an educated elite designed to serve the state, a function that had become increasingly onerous during the Wilhelmian years,²³ was completely absent from the Institute's agenda. That agenda, and this is the third obvious difference from normal academic institutions, included the critique and ultimate overthrow of the capitalist order.

The irony of a millionaire businessman like Hermann Weil supporting such a venture has not been lost on subsequent observers from Bertolt Brecht on.²⁴ Perhaps Weil's son Felix, the disciple of Karl Korsch on whose urging the Institute was created, had sugarcoated the pill by saying that it would be devoted only to the dispassionate study of the workers' movement and anti-Semitism. Perhaps, Migdal has speculated, the senior Weil was cynically hoping for access to the Soviet grain market through the goodwill accumulated by linking his Institute to the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. For whatever reason, the Institute of Social Research was the first unabashedly Marxist enterprise to be connected to a university in Germany and most likely anywhere else outside of the USSR. As such, it had led to the suspicion that the proper context in which to situate its founding is neither urban nor academic, but political. One particularly wild and unsubstantiated version of this contention is Lewis Feuer's bizarre suggestion that it might well have been a Willi Münzenberg front organization that soon became a “recruiting ground… for the Soviet espionage service.”²⁵

Despite the absurdity of this particular charge, it is of course true that the Institute was not founded in a political vacuum. Several of its earliest members did, in fact, have personal links to radical parties, most notably the German Communist Party (KPD).²⁶ And there was a friendly interchange with David Ryazanov's Institute in Moscow, largely having to do with the preparation of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe. The student nickname “Cafe Marx” was thus not unwarranted. And yet, what is no less true and ultimately of more importance is that the Institute was never institutionally linked with any faction, sect, or party on the left, nor did it hew to any single political or even theoretical line during its earliest years. In this sense, the popular notion of a “school,” which was rarely applied to earlier groups of Marxist intellectuals,²⁷ along with that of a research institute, does capture an important truth about its status. Neither a traditional academic institution, nor a party-oriented cadre of theoreticians, the Institute members presented something radically new in the history of leftist intellectuals.

The notion of a school implies not only detachment from practical concerns, but also the presence of a guiding figure setting the program of inquiry. To the extent that such a master figure was able to emerge, and it was perhaps not until Horkheimer replaced Carl Grünberg as official director that one did,²⁸ the Institute's constitution made it possible. For it gave the director explicitly “dictatorial” powers to organize research. According to the sociologist Helmut Dubiel, an elaborate interdisciplinary program was inaugurated by Horkheimer on the basis of Marx's model of dialectical Forschung and Darstellung, research and presentation, in which philosophy oriented and was in turn modified by social scientific investigation.²⁹ How closely the Institute actually followed this model has been debated, but it is clear that for a long time, the common approach known after Horkheimer's seminal 1937 essay as Critical Theory³⁰ did give the work of most Institute members a shared perspective.

To understand Critical Theory's provenance, however, we cannot stay solely within the confines of academic or political life in the Weimar Republic. For it was the cultural milieu of Frankfurt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Urban Flights: The Institute of Social Research between Frankfurt and New York
• 2 The Debate over Performative Contradiction: Habermas versus the Poststructuralists
• 3 The Morals of Genealogy: Or Is There a Poststructuralist Ethics?
• 4 The Reassertion of Sovereignty in a Time of Crisis: Carl Schmitt and Georges Bataille
• 5 Women in Dark Times: Agnes Heller and Hannah Arendt
• 6 “The Aesthetic Ideology” as Ideology: Or What Does It Mean to Aestheticize Politics?
• 7 The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Inability to Mourn
• 8 The Rise of Hermeneutics and the Crisis of Ocularcentrism
• 9 Scopic Regimes of Modernity
• 10 Ideology and Ocularcentrism: Is There Anything Behind the Mirror's Tain?
• 11 Modernism and the Retreat from Form
• 12 The Textual Approach to Intellectual History
• 13 Name-Dropping or Dropping Names? Modes of Legitimation in the Humanities
• Notes
• Index