All thoughts are zoned, but very few come to be known by the name of a place. Though Jena was the site of a remarkable flourishing of thought in the 1790s it never acquired the legacy of an eponym; similarly, the milieu called âpoststructuralismâ by Americans was never really a âParis Schoolâ despite the almost total confinement of the phenomenon named by the term to that city. It would appear that neither spatial proximity, nor coevality, nor even resemblance on the terrain of ideas is enough to transform a network of thoughts into the concreteness and determinacy named by a place. It was possible for Frankfurt to become the eponym of a thought, indeed, a synonym for critical theory itself, because that thought was first a âschoolâ â a formalized, articulated institutional machine.
A socialist benefactor whose father made his money in grain; a prudently negotiated affiliation with the University of Frankfurt; a significant network of research and administrative assistants; a spacious building constructed from scratch to house the institute: this is the infrastructural unconscious of perhaps the most comprehensive critique of âadministered lifeâ ever developed (Marcuse 2012, 50).1 Critical theory survived the myriad (mortal) risks of its time, in part on the basis of the durability and material effectiveness of its institutional form. This is neither a guiltily smoking (political) gun nor a banal aside. Whatever its proximity in spirit to the antiâbourgeois avant garde and to the ambient aesthetic nomads and revolutionaries of the interwar period, and however often its members were themselves forced into precarity and flight, critical theory was logistically intentional, organized, and decidedly thisâworldly in its desire to intelligently anticipate the conditions for its own comfortable reproduction. Peace and quiet, a certain institutionalized refuge from disruption (and from the disruption of institutions themselves, the endless meetings and obligations of the traditional university form) are consistently framed by Theodor Adorno as the sine qua non of thought in an age of mass distraction: âbustle endangers concentration with a thousand claimsâ (Adorno 2002, 29). He goes one step further: âfor the intellectual, inviolable isolation is the only way of showing some measure of solidarityâ (26).
There is in this a substantial departure from an earlier Marxist type, that of the vocational or professional revolutionary intellectual. For figures like Lenin, Gramsci, or Mao (and of course for Marx and Engels themselves), invention, creativity, and thought were dialectically inseparable from distraction, risk, and practice: one could only really think in the mess of the event, in the externality and obligation â as much temporal as moral â of the demands placed on the intellectual by the political experiments of the many. Nothing could be further from the spirit of this model than Max Horkheimerâs frank admission that he âlived his life as an individualistâ (1978, 13). For some, it is precisely in the schoolishness of critical theory â its buttressed existence apart â that one can discern the outlines of an enfeebled middleâclass hexis, one which structures from within many of the Schoolâs worst limits, aporias, and failures. György LukĂĄcsâs notorious 1962 suggestion that critical theory had taken up residence in the âGrand Hotel Abyssâ (LukĂĄcs 1971, 22) â a phrase he originally used to characterize the âirrationalismâ (LukĂĄcs 1981, 204) of Arthur Schopenhauer â turns precisely on an imagined alignment between the political pessimism of the School and its comfortable separation from the risks and intensities of actual political struggle. The abyss is not simply taken in from a (seated) distance, an object of enjoyment viewed from a vantageâpoint of comfort. Instead, it is to some extent produced by this watching, and in two senses: not only is the abyss historyâs summum malum â everything cruel made possible by safety â it is also a direct symptom of passivity, the sadness of a body without politics (LukĂĄcs 1971).
Even for those for whom the Frankfurt School names an historical retreat from political praxis, the erudition, provocativeness, and rigor named by the term âcritical theoryâ remains difficult to dispute. This was almost certainly the most sophisticated cultural Marxism ever produced. Its commitment to autonomy, and to an extremely rare (often austere) precision, made it possible not only to be a Marxist philosopher2 (or a Marxist in philosophy), but also to be a Marxist at all in an era of massively redrawn revolutionary horizons. Indeed, after Horkheimer, Benjamin, and Adorno, it was possible to be a Marxist not only in philosophy, but in music, literature, science, and art. The reconceptualization of theory itself as a form of praxis was a strategy of conservation, a way of remaining faithful in thought to a practice without options or agents. For some, it only abetted the collapse of twentiethâcentury socialist praxis, exacerbating the distance between theory and what Marx called its âmaterial forceâ: the brains, bodies, and energies of the oppressed. For others, it was a necessary and principled retreat, a turning back and away that replenishes a body and gives it time to lick its wounds (Marx 1970).
Frankfurt 1924â1935, The Welter of Method
The Institute for Social Research opened under the directorship of Carl GrĂŒnberg in 1924 with the intention of producing a space on the margins of the German academe for the application and diffusion of Marxist social science. Its institutional structure allowed the Institute to share resources (and vital symbolic capital) with the University of Frankfurt, while at the same time granting it administrative control and effective autonomy in the domain of research. This location within and beyond the space of legitimate scholarly discourse was tactical. It was an attempt not just to (subtly) politicize the university, but also to academicize Marxism. If in the wake of the sequence linking October 1917 (in Russia) to November 1918 (in Germany) Marxism could be construed as historically ascendant, its proximity to politics compromised its claims to (positivist) scientificity by sullying its âtruthâvalueâ (the integrity of the opposition between values and facts) in the grit, specificity, and bias of mere interest. The Institute, then, was to be a space of open yet methodologically delimited inquiry that was disciplinarily close to Marxismâs classical emphasis on political economy and history (and to the increasingly prestigious field of sociology). Its mandate was to work unchecked by the threats posed to thought both (from above) by the republican state and (from below) by the communist movement and its militants. Though many of the Schoolâs research assistants were communists and its core faculty avowed the movementâs longâterm objectives, the Institute was to function primarily as a site for depoliticized Marxist analysis, a zone emphatically free of Second International cant and orthodoxy.
Cutting messily across these institutional and political polarities were a set of methodological quarrels associated with the human sciences and, more specifically, the rule of positivism, during the interwar period. Though the Instituteâs plan to formulate a rigorous historical materialist social science should not be conflated with Karl Kautskyâs determinist positivism (the important critiques of this position had already been formulated by Karl Korsch and LukĂĄcs in the early 1920s), it is certainly the case that this period is marked less by overt epistemological considerations and is broadly empiricist in its desire to apply Marxist theory to scrupulously collected social, economic, and historical data. Even the kind of highly theoretical project undertaken by a figure like Henryk Grossman, whose work aimed to express âthe logical and mathematical basis of the law of [capitalist] breakdown,â belongs to a broadly defined tradition of scientific empiricism: theory, in this context, is a means (via schematization, or âsimplificationâ) into the âreal world of concrete, empirically given appearances,â one âtoo complicated to be known directlyâ (Grossman 1992, 2). The characteristic texts emerging out of this period, produced by figures like Karl August Wittfogel (1931) and Friedrich Pollock (1928) â on the economic history of China and on the state of the planned economy in communist Russia respectively â are broadly in line with the kinds of texts being written by Lenin and Rudolf Hilferding, both in terms of object and method. For all their alignment with a broadly Marxian (or even postâKantian) tradition of âcritique,â these representative Marxist projects of the period of the Frankfurt Schoolâs emergence remain distant from âcritical theoryâ properly speaking. The critical theory associated with the Frankfurt School diverges sharply from the mainstream of Marxist thought of the 1920s in its distinctive meshing of philosophy and sociology, as well as its sustained interest in the specificity of the cultural field. The outliers, here, are Leo Löwenthal and Walter Benjamin. Löwenthalâs early research on the sociology of literature, in which he documents on the level of both content and form the traces left by the mode of production in a specific genre or text, would directly anticipate the superstructural turn of the 1930s (cf. Löwenthal 1984). Walter Benjaminâs 1925 (technically failed) habilitation, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, though still idealistâromantic and metaphysical in tenor, would come to play an important role in the development of Adornoâs mature dialectical criticism.
The term âcritical theoryâ was first used by Horkheimer in 1937 and was still employed by Adorno as a rough synonym for dialectical materialist thought as late as 1966 (Horkheimer 1972, 188). The conceptâs broad outlines can be traced to Immanuel Kantâs 1781 insistence that history had passed into a definitive new register â an âage of criticismâ (1998, 100) â in which the unquestioned dogma of Church and King (established theology as much as the dogmatic political absolutism it absolved) would finally be supplanted by the transparent sovereignty of reason: that which exists would no longer be left to the brutal contingency of interest, but brought under the jurisdiction of rational and moral law, Kantâs enlightened (if not still purely regulative) âkingdom of endsâ (2012, 48).
If Kant, however, did not reject religion, but allotted it â like Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Rousseau â a supreme social utility, critical theory pushes beyond his strategically curtailed rationalism toward a Marxist reason that is openly â indeed constitutively â atheist. This is a stance it adopts in opposition to positivismâs (postâmetaphysical) interdiction against deciding either way. Along with LouisâAuguste Blanqui, critical theory discerns within the agnosticâs punctilious restraint the residues of a âbourgeois skepticismâ that prefers its metaphysics unconscious (Adorno 2004, 394). Uncertainty about the nature of being falls away into a profitable practice that answers the question in hard cash. Materialism, however, is not simply one metaphysics among others, but an objective (though never unmediated) encounter with the world as it is. Eschewed here is any attempt to reduce the death of God to the local subjectivism of a Weltanschauung (a world view) or to a mere ideology in the sense imputed to this term by Karl Mannheimâs relativist sociology of knowledge (a position...
