Critical theory

The philosophical stance of the Frankfurt School might not have been dubbed ‘critical theory’ until the 1950s but the words themselves had certainly occurred in the writings of the School’s principal membership. In 1937, for example, in the Institute’s journal Zeitschrift fur Sozial- forschung (to become, from 1940 onwards, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science), Horkheimer published a landmark article entided ‘Traditional and critical theory’. It was accompanied by an article by Herbert Marcuse, ‘Philosophy and critical theory’.

The term ‘critical theory’ suggests a coherent body of thought but, given the turbulent history of the Institute and the varied backgrounds, widely different disciplines and strong personalities of its membership, it would be most surprising if a unified approach, and therefore a ‘School’ in the true sense of the word, had emerged. Wolin writes of ‘a number of significant intellectual tensions within the inner circle of the Frankfurt School itself and of ‘various competing epistemological conceptions embraced by the School’s individual members’ (1992, p. 40). In the judgment of Jurgen Habermas, who joined the Institute in the mid-1950s as Adorno’s research assistant, a united approach did not emerge at any stage. ‘For me’, Wiggershaus records Habermas as stating, ‘there was never a consistent theory’ (Wiggershaus 1994, p. 2). Wiggershaus himself asserts that ‘the terms “Frankfurt School” and “Critical Theory” had never corresponded to a uniform phenomenon’ (p. 657).

What did Horkheimer mean by critical theory in his essay of 1937? His disjunction of ‘traditional’ theory from ‘critical’ theory in the tide of that essay points up the opposition he posits between a theory that merely reflects the current situation and a theory that seeks to change the situation. The need to change the situation was crystal-clear to Horkheimer. ‘Benjamin’s notion of history as incessant process of ruination and decline, a Verfallsgeschichte\ writes Wolin (1992, p. 41), ‘appears to have exerted a dominant influence on the thinking of Adorno and Horkheimer’. Horkheimer is in pursuit of a theory that is wedded to practice in the service of a more just organisation of life in society. He wants ‘a theory which becomes a genuine force, consisting in the self- awareness of the subjects of a great historical revolution’. Traditional theory is not what he is after. It is not wedded to practice. It is not a genuine force. Why not? Because, Horkheimer believes (1982, p. 231), of its ‘Cartesian dualism of thought and being’.

Horkheimer’s 1937 article reflects the program he had set for himself and the Institute in his inaugural address as its director in January 1931. In that address Horkheimer recognises the dichotomy in German thought between the vitalism that had become the dominant philosophy—a Lebensphilosophie that values the immediacy and flux of direct experience and has no time for empirical data—and a positivist science that reduces valid knowledge to what can be verified statistically, thus robbing experience of its vitality. He seeks a wedding of philosophy and the various forms of science. He wants a social theory that brings together philosophical construct and empirical detail. He has no interest in a social science that remains bogged down in the mire of aimlessly accumulated facts and does no more than mirror the fragmentation characteristic of contemporary society. Nor does he want a philosophy divorced from the lived reality of social life. What he wants to see is philosophy and science informing each other in dialectical fashion. Were that to occur, we would have a social philosophy that stands as a critical theory of society and is able to ‘escape the fate of becoming sheer ideology: the intellectual masking of an indigent social reality’ (Wolin 1992, p. 50).

This programmatic statement provided direction for the Institute’s research activities throughout the 1930s, first in Frankfurt, then in New York. On it was founded an interdisciplinary program wherein philosophical reflection is ‘measured against the concreteness of empirical social findings’, the outcome being ‘the methodological reconstruction of reality as a “concrete totality’” (Wolin 1992, pp. 48-9). One outcome of this research thrust is the Institute’s Studies in Authority and the Family, which was published in 1936 and contains a significant empirical component.

In the 1940s, however, with Horkheimer’s move to California and the forging of his very close partnership with Adorno, there occurred an important turn in his thinking. Wolin reminds us that Adorno became a member of the Institute’s inner circle only in 1938:

But from that time on, the orientation of the Institute as a whole changed decisively. In Adorno, Horkheimer found the gifted philosophical spirit he had long been seeking as a collaborator for his book on ‘dialectical logic’. It is not hard to see that Adorno, whose interests were exclusively philosophical and aesthetic, weaned Horkheimer further away from the empirical side of his 1931 program and in the direction of a social philosophy unencumbered by empirical moorings. (1992, p. 60)

The Adorno who allegedly moved Horkheimer from his ‘interdisciplinary materialism’ to a philosophy of history was bom in 1903. He was given the name of Theodor Wiesengrund-Adomo. The hyphenation joins the surname of his father to part of the name of his mother, who was of Corsican descent. During his time in California in the 1940s, he changed his surname to Adomo, Wiesengmnd becoming just an initial.

Adomo was a musical composer and musicologist as well as philosopher. Aesthetic considerations were never far from his thought. The ideas expressed in Dialectic of Enlightenment, written with Horkheimer between 1941 and 1944, came to maturity in his later works, Negative Dialectics (published in 1966) and Aesthetic Theory (left unfinished at his death in 1969 but published posthumously).

Already in Dialectic of Enlightenment Adomo is railing against the domination exercised by the ‘concept’. He and Horkheimer write of the ‘rigidity and exclusiveness’ that concepts assume (Horkheimer and Adomo 1972, p. 22). The ‘universality of ideas as developed by discursive logic’ is set in apposition to ‘domination in the conceptual sphere’ and said to be ‘raised up on the basis of actual domination’ (p. 14) This is impoverishing as well as oppressive. We substitute concepts for what they represent but no concept can ever capture the richness of the reality. Adomo points out that ‘objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder’ (1973, p. 5). There is a ‘“more” which the concept is equally desirous and incapable of being’ (1973, p. 162). So we are beset by ‘wretched cover concepts that will make the cmcial differences vanish’ (p. 152). Adomo feels so strongly about this that he does not hesitate to draw a literally shocking analogy. ‘If thought is not measured by the extremity that eludes the concept’, he warns, ‘it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims’ (1973, p. 365).

Yet we need to conceptualise. Part of this need is our urgent desire to make realities our own, to overcome the distance between us as subject and them as object, to reduce ‘difference’. This is what Adorno brands identitarian thinking. It is an identity logic. And it stands in the tradition of German idealism, which has untiringly sought to identify subject and object and reduce the irreducible Other. What Adorno wants us to do, to the contrary, is to ‘defend the irreducibility of non-conceptual material (of the real in its opacity) against the ravenous power of the concept’ (Tertulian 1985, p. 91).

In truth, all concepts, even the philosophical ones, refer to nonconceptualities, because concepts on their part are moments of the reality that requires their formation, primarily for the control of nature. What conceptualization appears to be from within, to one engaged in it— the predominance of its sphere, without which nothing is known—must not be mistaken for what it is in itself. Such a semblance of being-in-itself is conferred upon it by the motion that exempts it from reality, to which it is harnessed in turn. (Adorno 1973, p. 11)

Adorno wishes to strip conceptualisation of the ‘predominance’ it has arrogated to itself and restore predominance to the object instead. ‘Identitarian thinking is subjectivistic even when it denies being so’, claims Adorno, whereas ‘the critique of identity is a groping for the preponderance of the object’ (1973, p. 183). Adorno ‘s negative dialectics calls upon us to pay attention to the Other and, at all times, to ‘release the nonidentical’ (1973, p. 6). ‘Dialectics’, he tells us, ‘is the consistent sense of non-identity’ (1973, p. 5).

How are we to ‘release the non-identical’? How can we maintain ‘a consistent sense of non-identity’? How might we ‘grope for the preponderance of the object’? Certainly not by looking to traditional philosophy for direction. According to Adorno, the original sin of all philosophy is that it tries to grasp the non-conceptual through conceptual means. He reverses the process (hence his negative dialectics): philosophy must ‘strive by way of the concept to transcend the concept’ and ‘thus reach the nonconceptual (Adorno 1973, pp. 15, 9). Adorno wishes to reach, by way of the concept, a ‘sphere beyond control, a sphere tabooed by conceptuality’ (1973, p. 14).

In our traditional ways of thinking, we multiply resemblances in order to identify and classify realities and establish a system that will bring things together for us as a manageable totality. This process leads to the loss of many precious differences, even if it offers us the security of making realities ‘our own’. Adorno cites Nietzsche’s dictum that ‘to perceive resemblances everywhere, making everything alike, is a sign of weak eyesight’ (1974, p. 74). Adorno’s negative dialectics, his nonidentity mode of cognition, does not fall into this trap. ‘The matters of true philosophical interest at this point in history’, Adorno claims (1973, p. 8), ‘are nonconceptuality, individuality, and particularity— things which ever since Plato used to be dismissed as transitory and insignificant’.

Not that Adorno believes we can simply cease to identify and classify. ‘To think is to identify’, he reminds us (1973, p. 5). Yet, if we cannot resolve the contradiction, we can at least dwell in it dialectically. We can maintain a creative tension between the conceptual and the non- conceptual, the general and the particular. It is ‘up to dialectical cognition to pursue the inadequacy of thought and thing, to experience it in the thing’ (1973, p. 153).

Adorno practices dialectical (or nonidentical) cognition, which functions by multiplying difference while preserving resemblances rather than assimilating them through identification. Analogy and similitude (as opposed to conceptual definition) characterize this kind of mimetic cognition. It attempts to use concepts non-conceptually, not as instruments that circumscribe but as tentative acts of expression that suggest rather than fix meaning. In turn, this mimetic cognition serves Adorno as a model both for renovated human conduct (which he calls aesthetic or mimetic) and the social and political arrangements that would encourage such conduct. (Posnock 1991, pp. 106-7).

Here Posnock repeatedly uses the word ‘mimetic’. This, along with the noun ‘mimesis’, is prominent in Adorno’s vocabulary. Etymologically, mimesis and mimetic mean ‘imitation’ and ‘imitative’, respectively. Plato employs the word mimesis in attacking poetry and the arts generally. He accuses artists of engaging in trickery because they offer mere replicas of things and not the realities themselves. For him, the prisoners in his allegory of the cave are in the lowest form of being because they see only the shadows or copies of things. Artists make things worse because they produce imitations of imitations. Adorno stands in a tradition, however, that eagerly embraces precisely what Plato scorns. For Adorno, we are essentially imitative beings.

We have already noted the importance of role playing—initially playful and game-based role playing—in Mead’s social psychology. Without it, according to Mead, we would not enter into the attitudes of the community and could not achieve personhood. Imitation plays a central role in Adorno’s analysis too. In fact, he is ready to privilege mimesis and challenges the primacy that ‘bourgeois morality’ accords to genuineness and authenticity. In accordance with the dictates of bourgeois morality, the individual is bidden to ‘be wholly and entirely what he is’. This morality, in Adorno’s judgment, is not true. ‘The untruth is located in the substratum of genuineness itself, the individual’ (Adorno 1974, p. 152). The call to genuineness is untrue because the image on which it is based—the image of the autonomous, all- responsible individual—is untrue.

To assert this is to fly in the face of contemporary affirmations of the individual self. Adorno wants ‘to call for the abolition of the spell of selfhood hitherto promoted by the subject’ (1984, p. 195). He denies to the self the defined and abiding character, and the autonomy and authority, that the liberal tradition has emphasised so passionately. The self, he claims to the contrary, owes its very being to society.

Precisely as an absolute, the individual is a mere reflection of property relations. In him the fictitious claim is made that what is biologically one must logically precede the social whole, from which it is only isolated by force, and its contingency is held up as a standard of truth. Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense. All its content comes from society, or at any rate from its relation to the object. It grows richer the more freely it develops and reflects this relation, while it is limited, impoverished and reduced by the separation and hardening that it lays claim to as an origin. (Adorno 1974, pp. 153-4)

A few sentences later and Adorno is asserting, ‘Genuineness is nothing other than a defiant and obstinate insistence on the monadological form which social oppression imposes on man’. ‘Monadological’, of course, derives from Leibniz’s monads, which for Leibniz are the basic individual substances making up the universe. A monad is seen as entirely self-sufficient and for that reason is often described as ‘windowless’. It serves as a metaphor for the self-sufficient, controlling individual which the term ‘person’ tends to evoke today. This is an image of the person that Adorno regards as ‘itself compulsive in nature’ (1973, p. 222). He wants to challenge it.

Equally, Adorno wants to challenge the call to authenticity that accompanies this image. Nietzsche reproached Wagner for play acting but, as Adorno sees it, an actor should be reproached not for play acting but for any denial of play acting. To be sure, an inauthenticity wherein something claims to be what it is not deserves to be convicted of lying.

Yet, says Adomo (1974, pp. 154-5), ‘authenticity itself becomes a lie the moment it becomes authentic, that is, in reflecting on itself, in postulating itself as genuine, in which it already oversteps the identity that it lays claim to in the same breath’. The discovery of genuineness is ‘a last bulwark of individualistic ethics’ and we should recognise the ungenuineness of the genuine. ‘The ungenuineness of the genuine stems from its need to claim, in a society dominated by exchange, to be what it stands for yet is never able to be’ (1974, pp. 154-5).

As Adomo would have it, we should warmly embrace mimesis and engage unashamedly in mimetic behaviour. We should dwell in the object of our experience, seeking simply to mimic what we experience as fully as possible rather than believing we can capture what we experience conceptually. Here Adomo borrows from Benjamin the notion of ‘constellation’. Instead of building a theoretical system, we delineate a constellation. In the case of a constellation, unlike that of a conceptual system, no claims to fullness or completedness are advanced. Adomo refers to the ‘trial arrangement’ of constellation (1977, p. 131). It is a temporary stmcture only, for negative dialectics means thinking in such a way ‘that the thought form will no longer turn its objects into immutable ones, into objects that remain the same’ (Adomo 1973, p. 154).

By themselves constellations represent from without what the concept has cut away within: the ‘more’ which the concept is equally desirous and incapable of being …

… what is indissoluble in any previous thought context transcends its seclusion in its own, as nonidentical. It communicates with that from which it was separated by the concept. .. The inside of nonidentity is its relation to that which it is not, and which its managed, frozen self-identity withholds from it. It only comes to in relinquishing itself, not in hardening…

Cognition of the object in its constellation is cognition of the process stored in the object. As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers. (Adorno 1973, pp. 162-3).

Mimetic behaviour is, of course, the quintessential behaviour of the aesthete. Art, Adomo tells us, is ‘a refuge for mimetic behaviour’ and its subject ‘takes up varying positions vis-a-vis its objective other from which it is always different but never entirely separate’ (1984, p. 79). Works of art ‘defy every pre-established universality’ (1984, p. 123). They ‘take an advance on a praxis that has not yet begun’ (1984, p. 124). Paradoxically, therefore, rather than art copying reality, Adorno believes that reality should imitate art. ‘Works of art represent a class of objects the truth of which can only be imagined as the truth of an inner domain. And imitation is the royal road that leads into this inner domain. (Adorno 1984, p. 183).

In this fashion Adorno (1973, p. 221) calls for non-identity and bids us look for a ‘dawning sense of freedom’. This, he tells us, ‘feeds upon the memory of the archaic impulse not yet steered by any solid I’. He invites us to ‘yield to the object’, which ‘means to do justice to the object’s qualitative moments’ (1973, p. 43). And he urges us, as we have seen, to experience the inadequacy of thought and thing ‘in the thing’ (1973, p. 153). All this sounds quite phenomenological, doesn’t it? Adorno’s words have the ring of phenomenology’s ‘Back to the things themselves!’. His insistence (1973, p.ll) that all concepts ‘refer to nonconceptualities’ and that conceptualisation is ‘harnessed’ to reality is most reminiscent of the phenomenological notion of intentionality.

Mind you, Adorno is very critical of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and, while sharing some of their concerns, he rejects the existentialism of the existential phenomenologists. Despite that, it may be suggested that what Adorno is proposing, and what he leads Horkheimer to engage in, is a form of phenomenological critique rather than the more directly social critique instituted by the Frankfurt School earlier on. We may recall that, in our discussion in Chapter 4, phenomenology commended itself as ‘first critique’, propaedeutic to further critique along one or other sociological line. Adorno’s thought lends itself to this view of things, that is, to accepting the need for a critique of consciousness that in turn informs a critique of society. ‘For Adorno’, writes Pauline Johnson (1984, p. 83), ‘the subversive character of Marxism in the contemporary situation rests with its ability to provide a critique of the prevailing consciousness which serves to perpetuate the system’.

In this way, Adorno brings social action and non-identity thinking together. As Tertulian makes clear (1985, pp. 90-1), Adorno engages both in ‘brutal transitions from the socio-historical to the philosophical level’ and in a ‘brutal retroversion of philosophical theorems into socio- historical realities’. He points up ‘the concept’s power to master non- conceptual heterogeneous material’ and insists that this power of the concept ‘merely prolongs, on the level of thought, domination on the social level’. The battle must be fought on both fronts, then. Adorno calls for ‘immanent criticism’. This is a critique from within rather than one that purports to be from without and in it we experience the inadequacy of thought and thing ‘in the thing’. Yet it is not to be set over against social action. In this immanent critique we are already looking to society and calling it to account.

Hence immanent criticism cannot take comfort in its own idea. It can neither be vain enough to believe that it can liberate the mind directly by immersing itself in it, nor naive enough to believe that unflinching immersion in the object will inevitably lead to truth by virtue of the logic of things if only the subjective knowledge of the false whole is kept from intruding from the outside, as it were, in the determination of the object..

. Dialectics cannot, therefore, permit any insistence on logical neatness to encroach on its right to go from one genus to another, to shed light on an object in itself hermetic by casting a glance at society, to present society with the bill which the object does not redeem. (Adorno 1981, p. 33)

Accordingly, we should not take Adorno’s invitation to return to the ‘archaic impulse not yet steered by any solid I’ to be akin to Bergson’s vitalism, which looks to intuition as the entree to the living flow of immediate reality. Rorty writes of ‘Bergsonian nostalgia for the rich, whooshy, sensuous flux we bathed in before conceptual thought started to dry us out’ (1983, p. 33). Adorno is not inviting us to such intuition or a bathing of that kind. He sees Bergson’s philosophy of life as ‘a cult of irrational immediacy’. ‘Every cognition including Bergson’s own needs the rationality he scorns’ (Adorno 1973, pp. 8-9). What Jay says of Horkheimer is true of Adorno also: Adorno, like Horkheimer, believes that Bergson and similarly minded philosophers ‘had gone too far in emphasising subjectivity and inwardness’ and ‘had minimized the importance of action in the historical world’ (Jay 1973, p. 51).

So Adorno’s negative dialectics by no means indicates that he has joined the ranks of the philosophers for whom Marx had such scorn— people content to interpret the world but with no interest in changing it. Freeman-Moir (1992, p. 103) talks of an academic Marxism in which the two revolutionary moments of theory and practice are tom apart. ‘Intellectuals are left only with the activity of interpreting the world and the vision of change becomes more and more diluted’ (p. 114). As we have seen already, Adomo is not guilty of any such retreat from action for change. If he is concerned with consciousness, it is because, in his view, proletarian consciousness has lost its revolutionary character. If he is concerned with art, it is because, in his view, art has a social role that is at once subversive and redemptive.

The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. (Adorno 1974, p. 247)

We might note that the picture of Adorno emerging for us here is not the picture that Jurgen Habermas (1929-) paints. In the person of Habermas we encounter the so-called second generation of Frankfurt thinkers and arrive back at our own times. He is one of several scholars who stand forth in clear relief as we begin to look at critical thought since the start of the 1960s. Paulo Freire is another. A third is Louis Althusser.

Althusser’s name has already emerged for us. His is a structuralist Marxism and we will leave our consideration of it until the last chapter, where we will be discussing structuralism in the context of post­structuralism and postmodernism. Habermas and Freire we need to deal with now. And we need to sum up what this tradition of critical thought means for research today.

This will preoccupy us in the chapter that follows.

Source: Michael J Crotty (1998), The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process, SAGE Publications Ltd; First edition.