Habermas and Literature

The Public Sphere and the Social Imaginary

Geoff Boucher

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501344060
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Teoria della critica letteraria

Although Habermas has written about the cultural role of literature and about literary works, he has not systematically articulated a literary-critical method as a component of either communicative reason or post-metaphysical thinking. Habermas and Literature brings Habermasian concepts and categories into contact with aesthetic and cultural theories in and around the Frankfurt School, and beyond. Its central claim is that Habermas' contribution to literary and cultural criticism is the concept of literary rationality and the notion that literature performs a key role in the formation of the modern social imaginary. Habermas and Literature maintains that literary works have "two faces" – discursive intervention in the public sphere and personal integration of imaginative disclosures – that depend upon two modalities of literary reception: critique and identification. It develops the resulting literary theory through detailed discussion of the theories advanced by Habermas, followed in each case by synthetic and reconstructive argumentation that brings the framework of communicative reason into dialogue with literary methods, aesthetic theories and psychoanalytic categories. It does so through close engagement with debates around aesthetic rationality, world disclosure, social imaginaries, post-secular society and the utopian demand for happiness articulated by artworks. In the process, the Habermasian position is critically reconstructed when necessary, with reference to psychoanalytic and literary theories, and tested, in relation to demanding fiction and popular works.

1

Adorno’s social philosophy

Although Adorno is not the sole influence on Habermas, the theory of communicative action is presented as a response to the impasses of Adorno’s social philosophy and aesthetic theory (TCA1: 345–96 [414–75]). Accordingly, I intend to present the key motifs of Habermasian social philosophy and aesthetic theory as a communicative reframing of Adorno’s core insights. Habermas reformulates Adorno’s critique of instrumental rationality as the problem of the ‘colonization’ of everyday life by system imperatives originating in the economy and the state. The inspiration for Habermas’s celebrated concept of communicative reason springs from Adorno’s search for an alternative to instrumental rationality. The result of Adorno’s enquiry, his conception of aesthetic mimesis, is rethought by Habermas in terms of a communicative aesthetics that locates art and literature within an intersubjective framework. The effect of Habermas’s communicative rethinking of Adorno’s social philosophy is a break with the bleak pessimism of Adorno’s notion of the ‘administered society’. It is also a democratization of the relation between progressive literature and the readership community, for Habermas rejects what he describes as the ‘strategy of hibernation’ of hermetic forms of modernism. Yet the Habermasian position is a prolongation, rather than a rejection, of Adorno’s effort to develop a Critical Theory of society with an emancipatory practical intent.

The concept of a dialectic of enlightenment is central to Habermas and Adorno, but they have entirely different conceptions of what this means. It is reasonable to say that Adorno’s (and Horkheimer’s) controversial and provocative Dialectic of Enlightenment is the definitive work of classical Frankfurt School Marxism. The social philosophy and aesthetic theory that emerges from Dialectic of Enlightenment is the basis for Adorno’s subsequent Negative Dialectics (1966) and Aesthetic Theory (1970). Not surprisingly, that seminal text is the main object of Habermas’s criticisms of Adorno as well as the starting point for Habermas’s democratic retrieval, in his celebrated The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). Furthermore, in many respects, The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) is Habermas’s effort to rewrite Dialectic of Enlightenment in intersubjective and post-metaphysical terms, after the linguistic turn. Accordingly, I intend to concentrate on the way that Dialectic of Enlightenment sets up a whole line of thinking about literature and society, so as to clarify why I think that Habermas has a dialectical relation to Adorno. But I will be doing it a little bit differently.

The standard Habermasian presentation of the relation between the theory of communicative action and Adorno involves the idea of a paradigm shift from the ‘philosophy of the subject’ to communicative intersubjectivity (PDM: 106–30 [130–58]). Had it been stated in this form, however, Adorno would not have accepted this characterization of his position. Adorno certainly would have represented his own thinking as part of a critique of the philosophy of the subject, centred on a repetition, with two differences, of the Hegelian critique of Kant. The basic Hegelian strategy is to locate the ‘transcendental subject’ of Kantian philosophy in its social environment and show that this site evolves according to a dialectical logic of historical development. Dialectical reinscription inserts the (now merely quasi-transcendental) subject into the intersubjective network of social conventions and customary norms that Hegel describes as ‘ethical life’. Now for the two twists. The first is the historical materialist reading of ethical life as itself merely the superstructural reflection of forms of political economy centred on the labour process. This locates the subject, grasped in materialist terms through the concept of labour as the human metabolism with nature, in an ascending sequences of historical stages in the dialectic of forces and relations of production. The second is the psychoanalytic interpretation of the subject as a material ego that is the result of a formative process of socialization. In its maturation process, the ego must traverse a series of potential vicissitudes in coping with instinctual impulses, by successfully developing its reality principle, social conscience and socially acceptable love objects. Both of these twists to the Hegelian dialectic radically de-transcendentalize the subject and re-locate the material ego in social and historical processes that depend on the human relation to nature.

The problem is that the Hegelian critique of Kant only partly succeeds, because it displaces the locus of the transcendental subject from the individual, as its empirical bearer, to the world spirit (Hegel) or the human species (Marx). In the Hegelian Marxism of Georg Lukács, this problem is intensely visible, as the claim that the proletariat is a collective subject whose world-constituting destiny is inscribed in the historical teleology of the forces of production. How then to retain the critical insights into historical development (Hegel), social alienation (Marx) and commodity reification (Lukács), without relapse into historical teleology and a transcendental meta-subject? In many respects, this is the fundamental question that Dialectic of Enlightenment sets out to answer, and a key part of its response is to propose that the Freudian twist makes the Hegelian dialectic divergent, not convergent. The ascent of the productive forces is a descent into repression, so that enlightenment culminates in totalitarianism, not emancipation, because barbaric irrationalism, not socialist revolution, breaks forth in protest against the ‘renunciation of instinctual satisfaction’ demanded by a civilization founded on domination. This is what Adorno means by a ‘dialectic of enlightenment’.

Habermas’s basic argument is that Adorno generates an inverted Hegelianism, a Hegelianism of disaster, not progress, because he lacks access to the conceptual framework of communicative intersubjectivity. The plan for the chapter, then, is to trace out the genesis of Adorno’s dialectic of enlightenment, beginning from the Frankfurt School’s initial alternative to the Lukácsian theory of commodity reification. After looking at the Frankfurt School’s research programme of ‘Critical Theory’, and Adorno’s role within that, the chapter then turns to the School’s two initial breaks with Hegelian Marxism. The first is the critique of labour, as the source of ‘instrumental reason’, and its implications for the Hegelian-Marxist concept of the subject. The second is the turn to Freudian psychoanalysis and its implications for the Hegelian-Marxist philosophy of history. Then, the chapter looks at Adorno’s (and Horkheimer’s) provisional summary of the philo sophical results of this investigation, in Dialectic of Enlightenment. After analysing Adorno’s underlying philosophical anthropology, I return to the Habermasian critique of Adorno. In conclusion, I show how Habermas resumes Adorno’s project from within a different conceptual framework.

Reification: Alienation plus rationalization

According to Habermas, the trajectory of Frankfurt School Marxism, or Critical Theory, including Adorno’s work, is significantly inflected by the problematic of reification developed in Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (1921) (TCA1: 366 [490]). Lukács’s brilliant synthesis of Marx’s critique of alienation with Weber’s notion of rationalization, in ‘the reifying effects of the dominant commodity form’ (Lukács 1971: 84), defines the starting point for Adorno’s critical social theory (Buck-Morss 1977: 27; Claussen 2008: 83–5; Held 1980: 22–3; Jarvis 1998: 8–9; Jay 1973: 42). In fact, the entire notion of a ‘dialectic of enlightenment’, in which enlightenment reverses into mystification, and emancipation twists around into domination, is unimaginable without Lukács’s discovery that rationality might sometimes reinforce, rather than dissolve, alienation. Arguably, Critical Theory represents an effort to dialectically transcend the problems inherent in Lukács’s totalizing integration of social philosophy and aesthetic theory, while extending and deepening the critique of reification (Rose 2014: 35–62).

Lukács adds Weber to Marx – as do Adorno and Habermas. Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism, the way that ‘a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things’, when mediated by exchange value (Marx 1963: 72), is the origin of the concept of reification (Verdinglichung – petrifaction). Commodity fetishism and capitalist alienation are the same thing, and, in a society dominated by commodity production, Lukács proposes, instrumental calculations and logical consistency dominate social action. Enter Weber. For Weber, the modern world is formed through a new type of ‘formal rationality’, which abstracts the calculable form of rational procedures from the substantive goals of social action (Weber 1968: 84–5). What Weber calls ‘purposive rationality’ involves instrumental calculations of the most efficient means to (potentially irrational) goals, while reflection on the goals of action happens in ‘value rationality’, the submission of reason’s ends to procedural formalism. This focus on calculation, Lukács argues, ‘leads to the destruction of every image of the whole’, that is, to the de-totalization of theoretical consciousness and the practical fragmentation of human activity (Lukács 1971: 103). Accordingly, the central conceptual contrast in dialectical theory is between sociocultural fragmentation and revolutionary totalization (Lukács 1971: 27).

According to Lukács, in line with the Hegelian conception of totality, the commodity is the ‘universal category of society as a whole’, a ‘central structural problem’ whose ‘consequences are able to influence the total . . . life of society’ (Lukács 1971: 86, 84). Hegelian dialectics focuses on ‘a conception of the subject which can be thought of as the conscious creator of the totality of content’ (Lukács 1971: 122), that is, an active subject who consciously creates the world and at the same time transforms themselves (Lukács 1971: 128). Lukács maintains that Hegel idealistically reified this agent of totalization into the ‘world spirit’, but Marx’s discovery indicates that the proletariat is the ‘identical subject-object of history’ (Lukács 1971: 206). Confident about the Marxist version of historical teleology, Lukács boldly announces that commodity reification is therefore the last major contradiction of world history. According to Lukács, with ‘the entry of the proletariat into history’, at last a ‘historical situation has arisen in which . . . the unity of theory and practice becomes possible’ (Lukács 1971: 3).

Initially, then, Lukács argued that the practical totalization proposed by the vanguard party of the revolutionary proletariat was the antidote to reification, but with the retreat of the revolutionary tide, Lukács turned to the historical novel as the agent of a conceptual totalization. Lukács suggests that, irrespective of the politics of the author, the aesthetic programme of the historical novel demands the representation of an entire social formation, consisting of historical agents, social relations and material institutions (Lukács 1962). Through the selection of socially typical representative characters, the novelist reconstructs the total internally related network of social practices that constitutes an historical world, not just as a set of reified appearances (experiential fragments constrained by social location), but also as an essential process (social relations based in material production). Accordingly, the realist novel provides a figuration of the historical process itself, locating class agents in the rise and fall of modes of production. At the same time, the novel presents human universality but in a way that speaks to the reader about individual experience and communicates a revolutionary injunction: ‘you must change your life!’ (Lukács 1963: 645). In the late work of Lukács, therefore, the historical novel itself becomes loaded up with the messianic expectation of a unification of theory and practice. Literature is regarded as a revolutionary totalization that involves world-constituting creative praxis, acting as a placemarker for a now-quiescent proletariat.

Although insightful, the concept of reification secretes a problematic metaphysics. The Hegelian cumulative series of historical stages of ‘consciousness in the progress of freedom’ – in its Marxist acceptation as an ascending sequence of modes of production – is not the only ballast hidden in the reification problematic. Alongside historical teleology, Hegelian dialectics also relies on the concept of society as an expressive totality, that is, on the theory that all social structures (economic, political, juridical, ideological) are merely expressions of a single ‘principal contradiction’ that determines the particular historical stage. Finally, Hegelian dialectics depends on a ‘subject of history’, a social macrosubject such as the proletariat, supposed to be the agent of revolutionary transforma tion. In Lukács’s formulation of reification, these three aspects of Hegelian dialectics – historical teleology, expressive totality and social macrosubject – are inscribed with particular force.

Adorno and Horkheimer had their doubts. Adorno vehemently rejected the notion of a historical subject capable of generating the natural environment and the social totality (Adorno 1973: 22–4, 189–92; Jay 1977: 147–74). Horkheimer agreed (Abromeit 2011: 121). Accordingly, the programmatic documents of the Institute for Social Research, under the directorship of Max Horkheimer, describe the critique of reification in terms of the ubiquity of ‘calculation’ and ‘equivalence’. Despite refusing his terminology, however, their synthesis of Marx and Weber is without question an extension and development of the problematic inaugurated by Lukács (Buck-Morss 1977; Rose 2014).

Instrumental reason: Reification plus repression

Frankfurt School Marxism, then, or ‘Critical Theory’ (Horkheimer 1982: 188–252), deliberately diverges from the Hegelian-Marxist formulations of Lukács in some crucial respects. The most significant of these is that Adorno and Horkheimer add Freud to Marx and Weber, thus combining repression with reification in the single figure of ‘instrumental reason’. But the importance of that innovation only emerges clearly against the background of the other three – the development of an interdisciplinary materialism, the critique of labour as inherently alienated and ‘sympathy for the devil’ of counter-Enlightenment philosophy.

To provide an alternative to the expressive totality generated by Hegelian Marxism, it was necessary for Adorno and Horkheimer to develop an interdisciplinary theory capable of grasping social complexity. In Horkheimer’s inaugural lecture (1931), and in subsequent programmatic documents (1937), this innovation in historical materialism was prudently described as Critical Theory, rather than as Marxism (Horkheimer 1982: 188–252). The Institute’s survival in a hostile academic and political environment was not the only consideration motivating Horkheimer’s euphemism, however, for the dialectical methodology of Critical Theory differs from Lukácsian totalization in major respects.

For Lukács, the crisis tendencies of capitalism are a direct expression of the principal contradiction of the social formation: in an economic collapse, ‘the true structure of society appears’ (Lukács 1971: 101). Consequently, although Marxist theory is constantly evolving in light of historical developments, a single homogenous theoretical medium (Marxist method and its empirical findings) suffices to describe bourgeois society (Lukács 1971: 1–26).

By contrast, anticipating contemporary theories of social complexity, Frankfurt School Marxism took into consideration the relative autonomy of the functional structures of capitalist society. For the Frankfurt School, society is a complex arrangement of relatively autonomous social institutions, involving the economy, the state (including both law and politics), cultural apparatuses – and the family. It therefore acknowledges the need for discipline-specific inquiry into the fields of economics, politics, jurisprudence and culture. Yet, although each set of social institutions has its own evolutionary dynamic and social conflicts, their interaction is mediated by what Adorno calls ‘the principle of equivalence’ (Adorno 1973: 178).

To grasp this complexity requires a critique of the bourgeois disciplines in materialist terms, by historicizing their categories of inquiry (in accordance with the history of their objects), before integrating these conclusions into a complex totality. The implication is that Horkheimer’s proposal for methodological totalization of the research findings of an interdisciplinary materialism replaces the ‘category of totality as the bearer in theory of the principle of revolution’ (Lukács). This recasts the problem of transcending conceptual reifi...