Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis This page has been left blank intentionally Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis Beyond Reification

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Stefano Giacchetti Ludovisi Loyola University Chicago, Rome Center, Italy © Stefano Giacchetti Ludovisi and the contributors 2015

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Critical theory and the challenge of praxis : beyond reification / [edited] by Stefano Giacchetti Ludovisi. pages cm includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4724-4773-9 (hardcover) -- ISBN 978-1-4724-4774-6 (ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-4724-4775-3 (epub) 1. Critical theory. 2. Social sciences--Philosophy. 3. Political science--Philosophy. I. Ludovisi, Stefano Giacchetti, 1969– hM480.C74 2015 300.1–dc23 2014046290

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Printed in the United Kingdom by Henry Ling Limited, at the Dorset Press, Dorchester, DT1 1HD Contents

Notes on Contributors vii

1 Introduction 1 Stefano Giacchetti Ludovisi

2 Adorno’s Global Subject 5 Deborah Cook

3 Adorno’s Criticism of Marx’s Social Theory 19 Stefano Petrucciani

4 Adorno as Marx’s Scholar: Models of Resistance Against the Administered World 33 Stefano Giacchetti Ludovisi

5 The Question of Praxis in Adorno’s Critical Theory 51 James Gordon Finlayson

6 Praxis in the Age of Bit Information and Sham Revolutions: Adorno on Praxis in Need of Thinking 69 Idit Dobbs-Weinstein

7 Against the Reification of Theory and Praxis: On Critical Theory and Empirical Social Research 85 Karin Stögner

8 Normative Ambivalence and the Future of Critical Theory: Adorno and Horkheimer, Castro-Gómez, Quijano on Rationality, Modernity, Totality 101 Rocío Zambrana

9 Realizing Philosophy: Marx, Lukács and the Frankfurt School 117 Andrew Feenberg vi Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

10 On the Critique of Rights: Adorno, Critical Theory and Natural Law 131 Robert Fine

11 Rethinking Critical Theory Once Again: Immanent Critique and Immanent Normativity 145 Alessandro Ferrara

12 How Practical Can Critical Theory Be? 159 Marcos Nobre

13 Habermas on Solidarity and Praxis: Between Institutional Reform and Redemptive Revolution in Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis 173 David Ingram

14 The Color of Adorno’s Thought: On Hito Steyerl’s Adorno’s Grey 189 Samir Gandesha

15 An Astonished Facticity: Toward a Meta-fetishist Ethnography 205 Massimo Canevacci

Index 221 Notes on Contributors

Massimo Canevacci is Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Digital Arts and Culture at the University of Rome “La Sapienza.” He is currently Visiting Professor at the Institute of Advanced Study of the University São Paulo (IEA-USP). His books include: SincretiKa. Explorações etnográficas sobre artes contemporâneas (Studio Nobel, 2013, translated in English by Sean Kingston Publ. and already published in Italian), The Line of Dust. The Bororo Culture between Tradition, Mutation and Self-representation (Canon Pyon, Sean Kingston Publ., 2013, published in Italian and Portuguese), and Digital Auratic Reproducibility, in ‘An Ethnography of Global Landscapes’ (ed. L. Naidoo, InTech, 2012).

Deborah Cook is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Windsor, Canada. Her books include: Adorno on Nature (Acumen, 2011), Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society (Routledge, 2004), The Culture Industry Revisited: Theodor Adorno on Mass Culture (Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), and The Turn towards Subjectivity: Michel Foucault’s Legacy (Peter Lang, 1993). She also edited Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts (Acumen, 2008). Currently, she is writing a book that compares the critical theories of Adorno and Foucault.

Idit Dobbs-Weinstein is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University. Her books include: Maimonides and St. Tomas on the limits of Reason (SUNY Press, 1995), Maimonides and His Heritage (SUNY Press, 2009, edited with Lenn Goodman and James Grady), and Spinoza’s Critique of Religion and Its Heirs: Marx, Benjamin, Adorno (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

Andrew Feenberg is Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, where he directs the Applied Communication and Technology Lab. He also serves as Directeur de Progamme at the College International de Philosophie in Paris. His books include: Questioning Technology and Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History (Routledge, 1999 and 2005) Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity (MIT Press, 2010), a co-edited collection entitled Community in the Digital Age (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), a co-edited collection entitled The Essential Marcuse (Beacon Press, 2007) and another co-edited volume entitled (Re)Inventing the Internet (Sense Publishers, 2012). His most recent book is The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Lukács and the Frankfurt School (Verso Press, 2014). viii Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

Alessandro Ferrara is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” and former president of the Italian Association of Political Philosophy. His books include: Reflective Authenticity: Rethinking the Project of Modernity (Routledge, 1998), Justice and Judgment: The Rise and the Prospect of the Judgment Model in Contemporary Political Philosophy (Sage, 1999), and The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment (Columbia University Press, 2008). Recently he has published The Democratic Horizon: Hyperpluralism and the Renewal of Political Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Robert Fine is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK. His books include: Of Cosmopolitanism (Routledge, 2007), Political Investigations: Hegel, Marx, Arendt (Routledge 2001), Being Stalked (Chatto and Windus, 1997), Labour and Liberation in South Africa (Pluto, 1990), and Democracy and the Rule of Law: Marx’s Critique of the Legal Form (Pluto, 1985 and Blackburn, 2002). Recently he co-edited a special issue of European Societies on “Racism, antisemitism and Islamophobia” (2012) and a special issue of Journal of Classical Sociology on “Natural law and social theory” (2013). He is currently co-authoring a monograph on Cosmopolitanism and Antisemitism (Bloomsbury, 2015).

James Gordon Finlayson lectures in philosophy at the University of Sussex, where he is also Director of the Centre for Social and Political Thought. He is author of Habermas: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2005), and co-author and editor of Habermas and Rawls: Disputing the Political (Routledge, 2010), and has written many articles on Adorno’s Critical Theory, in places such as the European Journal of Philosophy, Telos, Harvard Theological Review and The Oxford Handbook to Continental Philosophy. He is currently writing a monograph on Immanent Critique, and a book on Adorno’s life and work, with Henry Pickford, for the Critical Lives series.

Samir Gandesha is Associate Professor of Modern European Thought and Culture in the Department of Humanities and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. He is co-editor with Lars Rensmann of Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations (Stanford, 2012), has translated (with Michael Palamarek) Adorno’s early piece Theses on the Language of the Philosopher and has published articles in several collected volumes, including the Cambridge Companion to Adorno. His book Poetry of the Future: Marx and the Aesthetic (co-edited with Johan Hartle) is currently under review at Columbia University Press. He is also co-editing (with Johan Hartle) a book on reification and spectacle and completing a book entitled Homeless Philosophy.

Stefano Giacchetti Ludovisi teaches philosophy at the John Felice Rome Center and the Chicago Campus of Loyola University Chicago, as well as at the Rome Notes on Contributors ix

Campus of St. John’s University. He has published the volume (as editor and contributor) Nostalgia for a Redeemed Future: Critical Theory (University of Delaware Press, 2009).

David Ingram is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University of Chicago. He is the author of several books on critical theory, including Habermas (Cornell University Press, 2010), Habermas and the Dialectic of Reason (Yale University Press, 1987); Critical Theory and Philosophy (Paragon House, 1990), and Reason, History and Politics (SUNY Press, 1995). He has also published four other books on group rights, identity politics, ethics, and law; and has edited three anthologies, including: Critical Theory: The Essential Readings (Paragon House, 1991), The Political (Blackwell, 2002), and From Critical Theory to Structuralism: Volume Five: The History of Continental Thought. He is currently writing a book on human rights and global justice.

Marcos Nobre is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Campinas and Senior Researcher at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP). Among his publications in Portuguese are The negative dialectics of Theodor W. Adorno: The ontology of the false state (Iluminuras, 1998), Critical Theory (Jorge Zahar, 2004), Free Course on Critical Theory (editor, 2008), and Immobility in Motion: From Redemocratization to the Dilma Government (Companhia das Letras, 2013).

Stefano Petrucciani is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Rome “La Sapienza.” His books include: Introduzione a Habermas (Laterza, 2000), Modelli di filosofia politica (Einaudi, 2003), Introduzione a Adorno (Laterza, 2007), Marx (Carocci, 2009), A lezione da Marx. Nuove interpretazioni (Manifestolibri, 2012), and Democrazia (Einaudi, 2014).

Karin Stögner teaches social theory in the Department of Sociology at the University of Vienna and is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Conflict Research, Vienna. Her recent books include: Antisemitismus und Sexismus. Historisch- gesellschaftliche Konstellationen (Nomos, 2014) and Religion, Säkularisierung und Geschlecht (with K. Bischof and F. Oberhuber, Wiener Verlag für Sozialforschung, 2014).

Rocío Zambrana is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. She is the author of essays on Kant, Hegel, and Frankfurt School Critical Theory that have appeared in Continental Philosophy Review, Idealistic Studies, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, and Critical Horizons. Her book on Hegel’s science of logic, Hegel’s Theory of Intelligibility, is forthcoming with The University of Chicago Press. This page has been left blank intentionally Chapter 1 Introduction Stefano Giacchetti Ludovisi

On Marx’s grave, in London, his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach is recorded: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” After Marx, those philosophers who were not trying to change the world, those who were “only” trying to interpret it, were condemned by Marxists as “bourgeois,” as implicitly defending the status quo. Critical Theory wanted to remain faithful to Marx’s precept that the point is to change the world, but the drastic change that can be witnessed in our contemporary society has to do with the social actor that can bring forth such revolutionary plans. In other words, who is capable today of changing the world? According to a classical Marxist perspective, it is the objective situation of exploitation that determines the revolutionary consciousness of the working class. The proletariat, as the social class that has achieved an objective awareness of their situation of oppression, can become the true subject of a revolutionary change of our social structure. While this held true between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, after World War II and the disastrous experiences of Fascism and Nazism first, and then of the Stalinist turn of the Soviet model, this faith in a revolutionary social actor gradually disappeared. At the same time, the standardization of culture in capitalist societies transformed the consciousness of the exploited class into the most passive acceptance of consumerism and conservative political models. Horkheimer clearly summarizes this problem: “not even the situation of the proletariat in this society is a guarantee of correct consciousness.” While some members of the Frankfurt School (and in particular Marcuse) tried to find new actors capable of bringing forth the revolution, identifying revolutionary subjectivity in various grassroots movements such as environmentalism, feminism, student rebellions, etc., others (such as Adorno and Horkheimer) never envisioned a new social class able to fulfill such a task. In both cases, Critical Theory chose a more difficult path: the identification of the original reasons for the failure of the formation of a revolutionary group. In its search for the causes of our contemporary inability to form a self-conscious revolutionary class, Critical Theory questioned not only the economic structure of our society but, most importantly, the type of rationality which determines it. It thus becomes clear how for critical theorists the solution for subverting the capitalistic order necessarily requires first a thoroughgoing critique of the structure of rationality. The point, as Marx admonished, is still to change the world, but this 2 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis goal will not be achieved without a change in our model of rationality occurring at the same time. The rationality that is responsible for the domination of nature determined the three major disappointments of the twentieth century, which Critical Theory tried to address. The first disappointment was originated by the failure of the dream of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was supposed to free us from any dogmatism and make us step out of a “self-imposed immaturity,” as Kant formulated it in his essay An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? Critical reason was supposed to replace dogmatism in formulating autonomous and free judgments, but a model of instrumental rationality imposed itself on social formations, and the domination of nature became the main purpose of this rationality. The outcome of such a form of rationality became most evident with the rise of Fascism in the early twentieth century, and at that point the Enlightenment created the opposite effects of what it proposed. Freedom and autonomy were erased by authoritarian forms of social control. The second disappointment addressed by the Frankfurt School was related to the affirmation of a “socialist” society in the Soviet Union. The Marxist project of creating a classless society was transformed into the authoritarian control of a bureaucratic class. With the Stalinist regime, any hope in the affirmation of a valid alternative to capitalism collapsed. Also in this case, freedom and autonomy were suffocated by authoritarianism. The third disappointment, which has a more contemporary relevance, was determined by the experience in western democracies. The first impact of several members of the Frankfurt School exiled in the United States was traumatic. The “affluent” society still promised freedom, but beyond the glittering mask ofa society based on the fanciest commodities a similar authoritarianism was hidden. Capitalism reduced human life to the same existence as lab-rats, trained to produce in order to consume in an endless cycle that repressed the possibility of any genuine self-affirmation. Freedom and autonomy in this case were presented as a concrete reality, but they could not be experienced by the acritical masses. How was society finally supposed to escape the cumulative trauma of these successive blows? How was it possible to finally affirm freedom and autonomy in a radically different form of society? Critical Theory tried to give an answer to these questions, recognizing that there was no easy solution to them. The point was to maintain a Marxist framework for criticizing capitalism without falling into the dissolution of individuality in forced conformism. At the same time, the point was to determine the extent to which it was still possible to affirm critical thought with the advance of the culture industry. These problems still remain unsolved, and the globalization of certain standards of the domination of nature are leading us towards catastrophe, on both the personal and the environmental levels. Finding a valid alternative to the domination of nature implied in the model of rationality that guides our social formations is still the mandatory goal of Critical Theory. This book seeks to contribute to the contemporary debate on how to affirm alternative models, inspired by Critical Theory, to the “miserable reality” of today. Introduction 3

We are collecting here a series of chapters developed in the context of the International Critical Theory Conferences held at the John Felice Rome Center of Loyola University Chicago since 2010. The common theme of these contributions revolves around the crucial debate over the possibility of constructing a new political reality on the basis of the philosophical analysis of the early stages of the Frankfurt School. One of the main critiques of the Frankfurt School has in fact addressed the highly speculative aspects of Critical Theory. This criticism spans from the concentration on aesthetics of Adorno, to the metaphysical pessimism of Horkheimer and, in general, to the outdated political context of the theories of Benjamin and Marcuse. This book aims to show that this criticism is not well grounded. Critical Theory can be an invaluable tool not only for developing a critique of contemporary society, but also for originating alternative models of political praxis. The important aspect of Critical Theory is that it presents itself as incompatible with a fixed and dogmatic model of politics, and therefore the political perspectives that can be developed out of it can vary significantly: from the articulation of political models inspired by a new form of Marxism, to the more contemporary “dialogical” models centered on the politics of identity. The common theme remains the envisioning of new ways of contrasting alienation and reification from the perspective of contemporary forms of social organization. The book is divided into thematic sections which address the contemporary political relevance of the works of Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Habermas and Honneth. The first part (Chapters 2 to 6 ) addresses the contemporary debate over the convergence of the theory of Adorno with political praxis. This part supports both a new reading of Adorno’s work as open to a political transformation of capitalism and the project for a new form of Marxism which can be applied to contemporary society. The second part (Chapters 7 to 13) addresses a new perspective on the idea of criticism as the basis for reconciling Critical Theory with normativity and a theory of rights and justice. This second part covers both the early stages of Critical Theory (in relation to nationalism and colonialism), as well as its more contemporary formulations. The final part (Chapters 14 and 15) discusses the relationship between aesthetics and politics in Critical Theory. This relationship is analyzed through the contemporary use of traditional and new media. I would like to thank, first and foremost, the contributors of this book, both for their work published in this volume, and for their consistent participation in the conferences in Rome. I would also like to thank Andrew Cutrofello, Hugh Miller, David Schweickart, Mark Bosco, Susana Cavallo and all the other faculty members at Loyola University Chicago who supported these conferences throughout the years. My thanks go also to Bahar Tahsili as well as to all my students who collaborated with me in Rome, Chicago and San Diego. This page has been left blank intentionally Chapter 2 Adorno’s Global Subject Deborah Cook

In a well-known passage in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx complained that, as long as mere survival remains paramount for workers, the activities of eating, drinking, excreting, and reproducing will continue to be their “sole and ultimate ends.” Workers now feel themselves to be free only while engaging in these activities, while in their “human functions”—the activities that should allow them to develop their potential qua members of the species—they do not feel themselves to be “anything but an animal.”1 For Marx, of course, it is the labor process under capitalism that has turned human functions into a mere means to the end of sustaining individual life.2 Rather than affirming themselves as members of the species, workers spend their lives struggling to preserve their individual, biological existence over and against the existence of others in a Hobbesian war of each against all. Following Marx, Adorno agrees that self-preservation remains the primary aim of individuals under monopoly conditions. In fact, he claims that the “present condition is destructive” precisely because it requires the “loss of identity for the sake of abstract identity, of naked self-preservation.”3 Focused exclusively on acquiring the means to feed, house, and clothe themselves, individuals self-destructively “balk at their real dependence on the species as well as at the collective aspect of all forms and contents of their consciousness.”4 Nevertheless, Adorno also speculates about how this situation might be changed when he argues that genuine progress requires the emergence of a global subject that will enable individuals to actualize the more universal dimension of their existence as members of the species. In this chapter, I shall elaborate on Adorno’s claims about the global subject and species being while exploring some of their more problematic aspects.

1 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Mulligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 111. Marx also qualified this statement: “Certainly eating, drinking, procreating, etc. are also genuinely human functions. But abstractly taken, separated from the sphere of all other human activity and turned into sole and ultimate ends, they are animal functions.” 2 Ibid., 112. 3 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum Books, 1973), 279. 4 Ibid., 312. 6 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

Determinate Negation and Critique

To begin, it is important to note that Adorno denies that our current predicament—in which individuals focus exclusively on their own survival to the detriment of survival of the species—was historically necessary. In Negative Dialectics, he criticizes both Hegel and Marx for dismissing “all doubts about the inevitability of totality.” 5 Here Adorno expresses the view that history is contingent, if only on heuristic grounds: “Only if things might have gone differently; if the totality is recognized as socially necessary semblance, as the hypostasis of the universal pressed out of individual human beings; if its claim to be absolute is broken–only then will a critical social consciousness retain its freedom to think that things might be different some day.”6 In “Progress,” however, Adorno states much more forthrightly that the parlous situation in which we find ourselves is “man-made, and therefore revocable.”7 But if he rejects Hegel’s and Marx’s teleological accounts of history, Adorno shares Marx’s view about what is needed to make radical social change possible. For Marx, as Moishe Postone notes, change must be rooted, not in the “abstract” negation of existing conditions but in their “determinate historical negation.”8 To wrest free of exchange relations and the equally subsumptive abstractions of identity-thinking, the specific forms of damage that these abstractions continue to inflict on human and nonhuman life must be negated. In the first instance, however, Adorno contends that this negation of the negative takes the form of critique. Critics must reflect on our compulsive domination of nature which, by keeping us in thrall to nature in the form of survival instincts, now threatens to destroy all life on this planet. Calling determinate negation a methodological principle,9 Adorno also declares that it is “the only form in which metaphysical experience survives today.”10 Depicting life today as irrational, distorted, even hellish, Adorno negated damaged life in order to arrive at ideas about what a better life might look like. Although he placed a ban on positive images of utopia (ND, 207), this ban does not rule out any and all attempts to envisage something better. In fact, Elizabeth Pritchard rightly rejects influential readings of Adorno’s ban on images on the grounds that they often confuse it with negative theology. To be sure, determinate negation does not yield fully positive images of a better life, or a positive theology of what Adorno

5 Ibid., 321. 6 Ibid., 322. 7 Theodor W. Adorno, “Progress,” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 156. 8 Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 372. 9 Theodor W. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 28. 10 Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 144. Adorno’s Global Subject 7 sometimes called “redemption.” Yet Adorno also criticized those who appeal to “the ‘wholly other’ character of the absolute (negative theology).”11 Indeed, Pritchard argues that Adorno refused to endorse a complete ban on images because such a ban would risk leaving the status quo unchallenged.12 With determinate negation, Pritchard explains, Adorno revealed “the features of damaged life that preempt redemption” in order to “indicate something determinate about that redemption, without thereby presuming its immanent arrival.”13 Adorno makes this point in a discussion with Ernst Bloch (which Pritchard does not cite):

If the question of utopia is so complex, it is because we are forbidden to generate images of it. But this has another disturbing consequence: the more it becomes possible to talk only negatively about the things that should exist, the less one can imagine anything definite about them. But, even more disturbing, this prohibition on giving concrete expression to utopia tends to discredit and absorb the utopian consciousness on which the will that things should be different depends. [ … ] I am certainly not competent to say … what is possible given the current status of humanity’s productive powers, but I am certain that this can be said concretely, simply, and without arbitrariness. If it is not said, if this image does not appear–I almost want to say ‘in a tangible way’–then basically one does not know what the goal of the whole thing is, why whole structure has been set in motion.14

A ban on images of a better world would effectively stymy resistance against this one. Nevertheless, Adorno’s negative dialectics does agree “with the theological ban on images” to the extent that it does not permit an entirely positive depiction of a reconciled state.15 Moreover, even as Adorno negates the negative aspects of life

11 Elizabeth A. Pritchard, “Bilderverbot meets Body in Adorno’s Inverse Theology,” Theodor W. Adorno, Vol. I: Philosophy, Ethics and Critical Theory (London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2004), 193. In a note on page 205, Pritchard insists that the Bilderverbot should not be confused with negative theology’s view of the divine as unknowable because the ban on images only forbids making and worshipping images. She also notes that Adorno described his own work as an inverse, not a negative, theology. 12 Ibid., 187. 13 Ibid., 193. 14 Ernst Bloch and Adorno, “Etwas fehlt … Über die Widersprüche der utopischen Sehnsucht,” Tendenz-Latenz-Utopie, Werkausgabe, Ergänzungsband (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985), 362ff. Quoted in Gerhard Schweppenhäuser, Theodor W. Adorno zur Einführung (Hamburg, Junius Verlag, 1996) p.181n124. English translation: “Something’s Missing: A Discussion with Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions in Utopian Longing,” The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1988), 12–13. The translation offered here is based largely on the German original. 15 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 207. 8 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis under late capitalism to provide a glimpse of an improved state of affairs, he also acknowledges that there are difficulties with this procedure. Before considering his critique of existing conditions in which self-preservation runs wild and reason “regresses to nature,”16 I shall examine briefly his caveats regarding determinate negation, along with objections that have been levelled against it. Transcendence, says Adorno, “feeds on nothing but the experiences we have in immanence.”17 Here Adorno endorses ideas of transcendence that are evoked by concepts derived from the negation of determinate aspects of damaged life. Yet he also admits that thinkers who attempt to “nail down transcendence can rightly be charged … with … a betrayal of transcendence.” Since it is impossible completely to transcend existing conditions, any attempt to provide fully positive images of redemption is illusory.18 Our ideas about the good life are rooted in damaged life, and they are also tainted by that negativity. The critique of damaged life may indicate what is right and better, but it does so only indirectly. Negating existing states of affairs, determinate negation discloses something equally negative: namely that what exists is not yet what it ought to be, and that what ought to be does not yet exist. In other words, the negation of the negation only yields more negativity. To this, Fotini Vaki objects that Adorno retains only the “first dimension of Hegel’s determinate negation” when he sets “the object against its own internal tensions, contradictions and inconsistencies, manifesting thereby the object’s failure to fulfil its own concept.” Vaki alleges that Adorno rejects the second dimension, namely that determinate negation will lead to “more coherent and complete forms of life and consciousness.”19 Against these objections, however, I would argue that what Adorno rejects in Hegel is his view that determinate negation necessarily leads to more coherent and complete forms of life. In other words, he denies that the real will become rational of necessity, or that it will, in Vaki’s terms, inevitably lead to more coherent and complete forms of consciousness. Vaki also questions how far Adorno can go “by relying only on the recognition of contradictions.”20 She charges that Adorno’s normative standpoint “is only glimpsed indirectly in a completely unspecified way,” and that he never clarifies the conditions under which ideas derived from determinate negation would become “a concrete possibility.”21 Yet, Adorno readily concedes these points. Determinate negation neither offers a direct glimpse of improved conditions, nor promises that these conditions will be fulfilled. In a vivid metaphor Adorno explains that

16 Ibid., 289. 17 Bloch and Adorno, “Etwas fehlt … Über die Widersprüche der utopischen Sehnsucht,” 398. 18 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, [p. no?] 19 Fotini Vaki, “Adorno contra Habermas and the Claims of Critical Theory as Immanent Critique,” Historical Materialism 13.4 (2005), 111. 20 Ibid., 114. 21 Ibid., 116. Adorno’s Global Subject 9 critical thinkers must attempt to do “what the miner’s adage forbids: work their way through the darkness without a lamp, without possessing the positive through the higher concept of the negation of the negation, and immerse themselves in the darkness as deeply as they possibly can.”22 To the charge that Adorno lacks a firm basis for his social criticism, Adorno could simply counter that no more secure standpoint for critique exists. We can only start from where we are: our ideas about improved conditions arise historically in our lived experiences of existing ones. Society’s rational potential discloses itself only to those who resist its irrationality: the good life can be glimpsed today only “in resistance to the forms of the bad life that have been seen through and critically dissected.” This negative prescription is the sole form of guidance that Adorno can provide.23 Indeed, Adorno not only problematizes his own critique, he exacts humility from those who might otherwise claim to occupy a morally or intellectually superior standpoint. Even the most uncompromising critic is not authorized to put herself in the right because the concepts she wields are derived from, and sullied by, the very world she wants to change.24 Since determinate negation targets specific conditions at particular points in time, it can do no more than evoke varying and historically conditioned ideas about a better—because more rational—society. Fashioning “entirely from felt contact” with the world, perspectives that “displace and estrange it,” Adorno’s critical social theory attempts to reveal the world to be “as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.” On the one hand, estrangement is “the simplest of things” because “consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror-image of its opposite. On the other hand, estrangement is very difficult to achieve because our ideas about the “opposite” of negativity are marred by “the same distortion and indigence” that we are trying to escape.”25 The estranging critique of “consummate negativity” is often forged in the crucible of our painful experiences of damaged life. Pain and negativity are “the moving forces of dialectical thinking” because, through them, we have historically gleaned reality’s better potential.26 Adorno’s colleague, Max Horkheimer, made a similar remark in Eclipse of Reason: “At all times, the good has shown the traces of the oppression in which it originated.”27 And, as Herbert Marcuse explains, the emphatic concepts derived from determinate negation “conceptualize the stuff of

22 Adorno, Metaphysics, 144. 23 Theodor W. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 167–8. 24 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 352. 25 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 247. 26 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 202. 27 Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: The Seabury Press, 1974), 177. 10 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis which the experienced world consists, and they conceptualize it with a view of its possibilities, in light of their actual limitation, suppression and denial.”28 These claims about determinate negation help to explain why Adorno thinks that truth wrested from reality by negating it offers at least some grounds for hope. Even as he recognizes the limits to determinate negation as a methodological principle, Adorno also suggests that there are fragments of good in the world. Yet these appear only obliquely; they are glimpsed by those who resist (in thought, action, or both) injustice, unfreedom, intolerance, and oppression. Society’s rational potential manifests itself wherever individuals confront and contest the limits to their freedom, in their struggles against their status as mere cogs in the wheels of the economic machinery, or in their challenges to multifarious forms of state oppression.29 With determinate negation, then, Adorno follows the lead of those who resist oppressive social and economic conditions under late capitalism—conditions that now threaten all living things.

Species Being

Adorno applies determinate negation to the current form of self-preservation under late capitalism in an attempt to emancipate the “concept of ends, to which reason rises for the sake of consistent self-preservation … from the idol in the mirror.”30 On the basis of his critique of self-preservation—which reveals that mere survival has become an end in itself rather than a means to a further end—Adorno argues that self-preservation will become rational only when it serves the end to which it has always been implicitly directed, namely the preservation of the species as a whole. In fact, he insists that the preservation of the species is “inexorably inscribed within the meaning of rationality.” It is not just the case that reason remains an organ of adaptation to the environing natural world, or that it has helped to ensure the survival of our species. For reason “should not be anything less than self-preservation, namely that of the species, upon which the survival of each individual literally depends.”31 Citing Max Weber, Adorno declares that, when it is emancipated from “the contingency of individually posed ends,” the “subject of ratio, pursuing its

28 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 215. See also, 222: “To the degree which consciousness is determined by the exigencies and interests of the established society, it is ‘unfree;’ to the degree to which the established society is irrational, consciousness becomes free for the higher historical rationality only in the struggle against the established society.” 29 The last two sentences appear in my “Response to Finlayson,” Historical Materialism 11.2 (2003), 192. 30 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 349. 31 Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” Critical Models, 272; emphasis mine. Adorno’s Global Subject 11 self-preservation is itself an actual universal, society—in its full logic, humanity.”32 Indeed, it is important to stress that Adorno is not arguing, as Fredric Jameson claims, that the need for survival instincts should be “removed.”33 Rather, he thinks that reason should retain, and even strengthen, its links with self-preservation because human behavior can be deemed rational only “in so far as it serves the principle that has been regarded … as the truly fundamental principle of every existent being: suum esse conservare, self-preservation.”34 To cite David Kaufmann: it is not self- preservation per se, but rather the “limited rationality of self-preservation … that leads to the irrationality of a reason devoted entirely to means, to how things should be done rather than to what should be done.”35 Expanding self-preservation to include the preservation of all humanity (and even, at one point, the preservation of all other species),36 Adorno not only observes that the survival of individuals depends upon the survival of the species, he also suggests that individuals can flourish only if all other members of the species flourish as well. In other words, individuals will fully realize themselves as individuals only when everyone has the opportunity to actualize the more universal dimensions of their existence qua human. However, to avoid misunderstanding, it should also be noted that the phrase “species being” does not refer to a preexisting human essence that we have lost and might recover one day. As opposed to endorsing a prelapsarian view of a “pure” humanity, Adorno follows Hegel and Marx when he states that the notion of species being, Gattungswesen, is “a result, not an εÍδος.”37 More specifically, “species being” refers to a species that has more fully developed its powers and potentialities—powers that have not yet manifested themselves owing to the ways in which our societies have been organized. In other words, “species being” points forward to a newly instantiated humanity. Nick Dyer-Witheford emphasizes this point: what is at issue in Marx’s critique of estrangement is not our estrangement from a “normative, natural human condition,” but “who or what controls and limits the processes of ceaseless human self-development.”38 And, for both Marx and Adorno, it is capitalism that controls

32 Ibid., 272. 33 Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (London and New York: Verso, 1990), 102. 34 Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, 137. 35 David Kaufmann, “Correlations, Constellations, and the Truth: Adorno’s Ontology of Redemption,” Theodor W. Adorno, Vol. 1: Philosophy, Ethics and Critical Theory, ed. Gerard Delanty (London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2004), 175. 36 See PMP, 145, where Adorno expresses concern that, if self-preservation is directed to the preservation of the human species alone, we might simply continue to legitimate our blind domination of nature. Here Adorno praises Schopenhauer for insisting that other species be preserved as well: morality must include compassion towards all other animals, the end of their exploitation and maltreatment. 37 Adorno, “On Subject and Object,” Critical Models, 258. 38 Nick Dyer-Witheford, “Species-Being Resurgent,” Constellations 11.4 (2004), 477. 12 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis and limits these processes. Yet Adorno believes that it is already possible to orient productive forces towards the preservation of the species as a whole, while freeing individuals from the need to spend the greater part of their lives in dehumanizing, reifying, and alienating labor. In fact, he also alleges that individuals have outgrown the more limited form of self-preservation because they are “no longer confined by direct necessity to compulsive self-preservation, and … no longer compelled to extend the principle of mastery over nature, both inner and outer nature, into the indefinite future.”39 To be sure, self-preservation was “precarious and difficult for eons.” This is why “the power of its instrument, the ego drives, remains all but irresistible.” Today, however, technology “has virtually made self-preservation easy.” Our situation has become objectively irrational because our exertions as members of the labor force have been rendered “superfluous by the state of the productive forces.” The more “enhanced” these forces become, “the less will the perpetuation of life as an end in itself remain a matter of course.”40 Although Adorno claims that change has always been possible,41 he thinks that the prospect of living lives that are no longer devoted primarily to the end of individual self-preservation is all the more realizable today because “the technical forces of production are at a stage that makes it possible to foresee the global dispensation from material labor, its reduction to a limiting value.”42

Species Being and the Global Subject

In his lectures on history and freedom, Adorno insists that one of the central tasks of his critical theory is “to make transparent the dialectic of individual and species.”43 At the same time, however, he issues a strong warning: if the preservation of the individual can now, in principle at least, be extended to embrace the species, the species must not be hypostatized. On the one hand, it is “part of the logic of the self-preservation of the individual that it should … embrace … the preservation of the species”44 because the “transfer of self-preservation from the individual to the species is spiritually coagulated with the form of the ratio,” of reason. On

39 Adorno, Metaphysics, 129. 40 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 349. 41 See Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–5, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge and Malden MA.: Polity Press, 2006), 67–8: “I should add, very speculatively and perhaps rashly, that this possibility of making a leap forward, of doing things differently, always existed, even in periods when productivity was far less developed.” 42 Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” Critical Models, 267. 43 Adorno, History and Freedom, 264. See also Negative Dialectics, 284:“theory should carry out the dialectics of individual and species.” 44 Adorno, History and Freedom, 44. Adorno’s Global Subject 13 the other hand, Adorno is concerned that this transfer risks pitting the “general rationality” against “particular individuals.”45 To embrace the preservation of the species is problematic because “there is an intrinsic temptation for this universal to emancipate itself from the individuals it comprises.”46 To be sure, if reason were oriented towards the preservation of the species as a whole, it might eventually succeed in freeing itself “from the particularity of obdurate particular interest,” or from the contingency of particular ends. Yet, if it is oriented towards the species, reason may also “fail to free itself from the no less obdurate particular interest of the totality.” Kant himself recognized this problem when he noted that “the idea of species reason” contains, “by virtue of its universality, an element restricting the individual”—an element that could “turn into an injustice on the part of the universal towards the particular.” Here Adorno adds that neither philosophy, nor “the organization of the human race,” has solved the problem of relating the universal and the particular. “It is for this reason,” Adorno tells his students, “that I do not think I am exaggerating when I say it is a problem of the greatest possible gravity.”47 With his critique of the antagonisms between the universal and the particular, however, Adorno seems to take away with one hand what he has given with the other: if the technical forces of production now make the emergence of species being a real possibility, Adorno questions the prospects for its emergence when he stresses the difficulties that accompany any attempt to avoid the blanket identification of the individual with the species, its complete subsumption under the “universal.” This problem is only compounded when Adorno states that there is no “idea of progress without the idea of humanity,” while endorsing Marx’s view that humanity does not yet exist. If we must appeal to humanity to make any progress that is worthy of the name, it is also the case that we do not yet know what humanity is.48 The argument becomes even murkier when Adorno speculates that the progress that will bring humanity into being depends on the emergence of a global subject. For Adorno, this subject is a necessary condition for progress: “[e]verything else involving progress must crystallize around” a global subject because “humanity’s own global societal constitution threatens its life if a self-conscious global subject [ein seiner selbst bewußtes Gesamtsubjekt] does not develop and intervene.”49 In the face of the increasingly totalitarian expansion of capital, Adorno contends

45 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 318. 46 Adorno, History and Freedom, 44. 47 Adorno, History and Freedom, 44–5. 48 Adorno criticizes the notion of humanity in PMP, 169: “the term ‘humanity’ … is one of the expressions that reify and hence falsify crucial issues merely by speaking of them. When the founders of the Humanist Union asked me to become a member, I replied that ‘I might be willing to join if your club had been called an inhuman union, but I could not join one that calls itself ‘humanist.’” 49 Adorno, “Progress,” Critical Models, 144. 14 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis that only a global subject can successfully challenge the potentially catastrophic threats to human and nonhuman nature that the relentless and ruthless pursuit of profit now poses. By global subject, he explains that he is not referring to “an all- embracing terrestrial organization” such as the United Nations, but to “a human race that possesses genuine control over its own destiny right down to the concrete details.”50 We will become the subjects of our own history only in a global attempt to resist exploitative and oppressive socio-economic conditions. Although Adorno’s argument appears to be circular—since the global subject needed for the emergence of humanity seems to presuppose that humanity already exists—he offers at least one clue that may resolve this problem. This clue appears when he endorses the view of the avant-garde artist Peter Altenberg that “extreme individuation is the placeholder for humanity.” Following Altenberg, Adorno asserts that humanity is to be conceived “only through this extreme form of differentiation, individuation, not as a comprehensive generic concept.”51 Equally important, he implies here that critical, and self-critical, individuals may act temporarily as stand-ins for the species. These individuals are forerunners of humanity to the extent that their concerted attempts to think for themselves, to criticize the conditions that adversely affect their own capacity for autonomous thought and action, make them more mature—mündig—in the Kantian sense than those who simply adapt to these conditions. In fact, their critique is already “a comportment, a form of praxis;” it is “more akin to transformative praxis than a comportment that is compliant for the sake of praxis” because it serves as a resistive force.52 Responsibility for initiating the changes that may facilitate the emergence of a global subject now falls upon critical, and self-critical, individuals.53 Adorno makes this point frequently: “In contrast to the collective powers that usurp the world spirit in the contemporary world, the universal and rational can hibernate better in the isolated individual than in the stronger battalions that have obediently abandoned the universality of reason.” He rejects Bertolt Brecht’s claim that a thousand eyes see better than two on the grounds that it expresses “that fetishizing of the collectivity and organisation that knowledge of society has the supreme duty to break through.”54 Repudiating Brecht’s claim that “by abandoning one’s own reason and judgment one is blessed with a higher, that is, collective reason,” Adorno counters that “to know the truth one needs that irreducibly individual reason that is … supposedly obsolete.”55

50 Adorno, History and Freedom, 143. 51 Ibid., 155–6. 52 Adorno, “Resignation,” Critical Models, 293. 53 Adorno, “Opinion Delusion Society,” Critical Models, 122. 54 Adorno, “Individuum und Organisation,” Soziologische Schriften 1 (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), 455; my translation. 55 Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” Critical Models, 267. Adorno’s Global Subject 15

A staunch champion of the individual, Adorno only underscores his lifelong concern “with the utopian particular that has been buried beneath the universal–with that nonidentity which would not come into being until realized reason has left the particular reason of the universal behind.”56 Those who denounce the status quo with the ultimate aim of changing it speak on behalf of all; they exhibit the need to “lend a voice to suffering”—a need which Adorno famously called one of the conditions “of all truth.” Since so much human suffering has been caused by the preponderance of society over individuals, those who lend a voice to suffering through their criticism reveal “the objectivity that weighs upon the subject.” Speaking on behalf of those who are exploited and oppressed, whose instincts and needs are manipulated and controlled to benefit a few, whose infrequent and often ineffective attempts to improve their situation are met with harassment, tear gas, Tasers, arbitrary arrests, even torture, critical theorists may objectively convey individuals’ most subjective experiences.57

Squaring the Circle

Those who criticize existing conditions are able to channel their rage into resistance to the status quo. Theirs is “the happiness of humanity” because “[t] hought is happiness, even where it defines unhappiness: by enunciating it.”58 But, general and sustained human happiness—the prolonged happiness of the human species as a whole—ultimately depends on reconciling individuals with society by organizing society more rationally so that it succeeds in preserving individuals “according to their unfettered potentialities.”59 Reconciliation is all the more urgent today because society remains as antagonistic towards the individuals who make up its substance as it is towards nonhuman nature. The more capitalism “goes global,” the greater its tendency to dissociate itself from individuals, to follow its own independent course, thereby endangering not just our species, but all other species as well.60 In Negative Dialectics, Adorno made use of determinate negation in a preliminary attempt to square the circle of reconciling the individual with society. Focusing on human psychology, he remarked that the superego consists in internalized social norms. In other words, the individual’s moral conscience is derived from the “objectivity of society … the objectivity in and by which men live and which extends to the core of their individualization.” Yet it is also the case that “antagonistic moments” rend this objectivity. Although moral conscience contains moments of “heteronomous coercion,” such coercion may nonetheless

56 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 318. 57 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 17–18. 58 Adorno, “Resignation,” Critical Models, 293. 59 Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” Critical Models, 273. 60 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 346. 16 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis give rise to “the idea of a solidarity transcending divergent individual interests.”61 For Adorno, who calls this inversion the dialectic of progress,62 “solidarity is only able to develop on the back of … oppression, which … solidarity then annuls.”63 Just as freedom is the inverted image of unfreedom, so the social solidarity needed to sustain a global subject is the inverted image of the pressurized adaptation and conformity that foster damaged forms of collective life today. After stating that “it takes the repressive form of conscience to develop the form of solidarity in which the repressive one will be voided,”64 Adorno assesses Kant’s attempts to carry out “the dialectics of individual and species.” Although there are problems with Kant’s idea that “everyone’s freedom need be curtailed only insofar as it impairs someone else’s,” Adorno contends that what is “encoded” in it is “a reconciled condition.”65 With this idea, Kant “discovered a highly original framework with which to stabilize … the relation between freedom and law.”66 In fact, his idea is of a piece with his categorical imperative which marks a further attempt to mediate between subjective reason, or the “self-preserving rationality of the individual,” and objective reason, or the “objective rationality of the moral law.”67 More explicitly still, Kant made the unity of subjective and objective reason a goal in “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” when he speculated that “conflicts between the interests of individuals work towards the creation of a global situation in which something like freedom and reason have been realized.”68 In his discussion of Kant, Adorno also argues that the dialectic of subjective and objective reason must supersede both “the bad universal, the coercive social mechanism,” and “the obdurate individual who is a microcosmic copy of that mechanism.” In other words, this dialectic must “rise above both the individuals who exist and the society that exists.” Individuals in a more rational society will no longer “frantically be guarding the old particularity”69 because the “old particularity” is largely a sham owing to the homogenizing and levelling effects of reification. Indeed, Adorno sounds an Hegelian note when he objects that “the fixation on one’s own need and one’s own longing mars the idea of a happiness

61 Ibid., 17–18. 62 Adorno, “Progress,” Critical Models, 150. 63 Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures, 264. 64 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 282. 65 Ibid., 283. 66 Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, 122. 67 Ibid., 141. 68 Ibid., 142, also See Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” Kant’s Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 44: “The means which nature employs to bring about the development of innate capacities is that of antagonism within society, in so far as this antagonism becomes in the long run the cause of a law- governed social order.” 69 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 283. Adorno’s Global Subject 17 that will not arise until the category of the individual ceases to be self-seclusive.”70 Conversely, of course, a rational society will not “agree with the present concept of collectivity” because that concept is as shambolic as the concept of the individual.71 Adorno summarizes these ideas succinctly in History and Freedom: “Just as individuals have not existed hitherto, so too there has been no global subject; the two are corollaries to one another.”72 Envisaging a relation between the individual and society that is both nonreductive and nondualistic, Adorno suggests that, not just that individuality will be completely transformed, but that individuals will play a far more active and autonomous role in a rational society than they currently do in our irrational one. For Adorno, there is “no available model of freedom save one: that consciousness as it intervenes in the total social constitution [Gesamtverfassung] will through that constitution intervene in the complexion of the individual.”73 Simply put, freedom requires that society and the individual mutually condition one another. Rather than being pawns of socio-economic forces that make a mockery of their individuality, individuals will finally shape the institutions that in turn shape them. A more fluid dialectic between universal and particular will enable us to communicate with each other even as we preserve our differences.74 Borrowing a phrase from Baron von Eichendorff, Adorno expresses this idea poetically: in a reconciled condition, human beings will grant proximity to the “beautiful alien” (das schöne Fremde), while simultaneously allowing the alien Other to remain “distant and different, beyond the heterogeneous and beyond that which is one’s own.”75

Concluding Remarks

For Adorno, “hope, wrested from reality by negating it, is the only form in which truth appears.”76 However, since the determinate negation of the current antagonistic relation between the individual and society can do little more than intimate what a reconciled condition would look like, Adorno does not describe this condition in any detail or depth. This paucity of detail may disappoint, but

70 Ibid., 352. 71 Ibid., 284. 72 Adorno, History and Freedom, 118. 73 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 265. 74 Adorno, “On Subject and Object,” Critical Models, 247. 75 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 191. The sentence referring to von Eichendorff is missing from the English translation. In German it reads: “Über die Romantik hinaus, die sich als Weltschmerz, Leiden an der Entfremdung fühlte, erhebt sich Eichendorffs Wort ‘Schöne Fremde.’” See Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973), 192. I am translating this sentence as follows: “Hovering over romanticism, which experienced the suffering caused by alienation as world-weariness, is Eichendorff’s phrase: ‘Beautiful Alien.’” 76 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 98. 18 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis it is consistent with Adorno’s cautionary remarks about the limits to determinate negation. If determinate negation outlines “the only permissible figure of the Other,”77 that Other will never be fully, positively, visible. The fleshing out of what can now be gleaned only by negating the negative must be left for those who will carry forward in practice the project of reconciling the universal and particular, species and individual, objective and subjective reason. In “Notes on Kafka,” Adorno again commends the power of determination negation when he praises Kafka for seeking “salvation in the incorporation of the powers of the adversary.” Following Kafka, Adorno wants “to beat the world at its own game” by making “the moribund become the harbinger of Sabbath rest.”78 Negating the moribund, the damaged life that does not live, critical theorists are tasked with developing new conceptions of social solidarity that will enable individuals to flourish within groups rather than being absorbed and subjugated by them. In order to facilitate the emergence of the global subject that is needed to bring about radical social change, critical theorists must try to glimpse through their critique of existing forms of solidarity, new forms of solidarity in order to resolve the fraught dialectic of individual and species—even if what they glimpse has only been refracted through the dark lens of determinate negation.

77 Adorno, “Toward a Portrait of Thomas Mann,” Notes to Literature, Vol. 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992) p. 18. Cited in Elizabeth A. Pritchard, “Bilderverbot meets Body in Adorno’s Inverse Theology,” 193. 78 Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1967), 270. Chapter 3 Adorno’s Criticism of Marx’s Social Theory Stefano Petrucciani

The discussion of Marx’s thought characterized every phase of Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophical itinerary: from his early conference on the Actuality of Philosophy, in which he employed the Marxian analysis of commodity as a grounding paradigm for his theoretical remarks, to the considerations he made in 1968, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Marx’s birth. My aim is to highlight one particular aspect of Adorno’s references to Marx: his reflections on the Marxian theory of classes and capitalism. I will delimit my field of analysis by focusing on two writings in which, with no doubt, Adorno’s engagement with Marx’s thought reaches its highest point. These writings date back to very different, although equally crucial, times in the history of critical theory: the first text, titled Reflections on Class Theory, was written in 1942 and published posthumously in the collection Soziologische Schriften;1 the second was presented in 1968 as a keynote lecture to the sixteenth Congress of the German Sociological Society; on that occasion Adorno engaged himself with the question: Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?2 He presented this text also at the famous conference on Marx which took place in Paris from the 8 to the 10 May 1968 (a crucial time and place) with the title Is Marx Obsolete?3 In performing a comparison between the writing from 1942 and the text from 1968, I also aim at highlighting, on the one hand, the permanent features of Adorno’s reflections on Marxian social theory, and, on the other hand, the changes that intervened over the years in his theoretical stance.

Reflections on Class Theory (1942)

The essay Reflections on Class Theory, which was written by Adorno in 1942 and only appeared posthumously, can be considered a preparatory or “side work”

1 Theodor W. Adorno, “Reflexionen zur Klassentheorie”, in Th. W. Adorno, Soziologische Schriften I (Frankfurt a. M.: Surkhamp, 1972), 373–91; trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Theodor W. Adorno, Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 93–110. 2 Theodor W. Adorno, “Spätkapitalismus oder Industriegesellschaft”, in Adorno, Soziologische Schriften I, 354–70; trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Adorno, Can One Live After Auschwitz?, 111–25. 3 Theodor W. Adorno, “Is Marx Obsolete?”, Diogenes 16 (1968): 1–16. 20 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis to the Dialectics of Enlightenment. It should be analysed in comparison with a text that Horkheimer wrote in the following year, entitled Zur Soziologie der Klassenverhältnisse4 [On the Sociology of Class Relations]. Both Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s essays belong to a clearly defined time in the history of critical theory: in that period, through the analysis of Nazism and thanks to Friedrich Pollock’s research on State capitalism, Adorno and Horkheimer started developing their new concept of domination (Herrschaft) which was to be at the centre of the Dialectics of Enlightenment. Horkheimer and Pollock maintained that a sort of State capitalism was imposing itself not only in Nazi Germany, but also as a general trend. State capitalism is a monopolistic kind of capitalism, in which class domination does not appear anymore in the mediated form of economic coercion; on the contrary, so to say, class domination sheds its disguise and reveals itself as direct and immediate political domination, as plain power of command. “Nach der materialistischen Theorie”, Horkheimer writes, “beruht soziale Macht auf der Monopolisierung der Produktionsmittel”5 [“according to the materialistic theory, social power rests on the monopoly of the means of production”]; this Marxian economic genealogy of power, he continues, has however been historically put into question by the changes resulting from the crisis and the overcoming of liberal and competitive capitalism; by consequence, Horkheimer aims at giving a completely different interpretation of social domination, which he expounds, in a rather lapidary way, in another unpublished text related to the Dialectics of Enlightenment: “Die Grundform der Herrschaft ist das Racket”6 [“the basic form of domination is the racket”]. These themes, which are peculiar to Horkheimer’s thought, are also the focus of Adorno’s reflections as developed in his essay. . According to Adorno (who, in this phase of his theoretical development, was strongly influenced by Horkheimer’s and Pollock’s perspectives), the Marxian critique of political economy discloses the contradictions immanent in capitalism; these contradictions, as Marx rightly pointed out, undermine the possibilities of the survival of capitalism itself. Marx, taking liberal political economy at its word, demonstrated that capitalism, as a result of its immanent dynamics, produces a systemic catastrophe, or that, at least, it gives rise to socially unsustainable consequences, such as the constant growth of the industrial reserve army and the increasing pauperization of the working class. These are consequences that, according to Marx, the capitalistic economic mechanism necessarily generates when left to itself, and which can compromise the very reproduction of the existing power relations. In Adorno’s opinion, the main problem, however, is that societies never really worked according to this

4 Max Horkheimer, “Zur Soziologie der Klassenverhältnisse”, in Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften 12. Nachgelassene Schriften 1931–1949 (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1985), 75–104. 5 Ibid., 77. 6 Max Horkheimer, Die Rackets und der Geist, in Adorno and Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften 12: 287–91, 287. Adorno’s Criticism of Marx’s Social Theory 21 model. It was overcome, once and for all, at the time of the authoritarian or interventionist States which came into power after the great crisis of 1929. The newly-affirmed primacy of politics over economy, the current rise of monopolies and the elimination of economic competition shed light also on the past; they invite us to abandon every “economism” and to read the economic dynamics in terms of power struggles between groups, elites – or better, as Adorno and Horkheimer say, between gangs and rackets. For example, the success of certain groups in market competition mainly owes itself to extra-economic factors: “their success depends on the power of their capital outside the competitive process, a power they already possess before entering the marketplace. It depends further on the political and social power they represent, on old and new conquistador spoils, on their affiliation with feudal property that a competitive economy has never entirely liquidated, and on their relations with the direct governing apparatus of the military”.7 Thus, according to Adorno, we should overturn the usual Marxian perspective: class domination cannot simply be explained with reference to the exchange between capital and labour (which Marx analysed in its dual nature of equal exchange and exploitation); nor is the dominant class a mere component part of the mechanism, subordinated to it and to its laws (as emphatically stated in Marx’s Capital). On the contrary, the relations of property and, thus, of domination, pre-exist capitalism and perpetuate themselves thanks to its mechanisms. They even preserve themselves by overcoming capitalistic dynamics when these are no longer suited to the ends of the dominant classes:

the laws of exchange have not led to a form of rule that can be regarded as historically adequate for the reproduction of society as a whole at its present stage. Instead, it was the old form of rule that had joined the economic apparatus so that, once in possession, it might smash it and thus make its own life easier”.8

In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, the passage stating that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles constituted a hyperbole through which Marx could reveal present injustices by means of past injustices. According to Adorno, this statement should now be overturned: “In the image of the latest economic phase, history is the history of monopolies. In the image of the manifest act of usurpation that is practiced nowadays by the leaders of capital and labor acting in consort, it is the history of gang wars and rackets”.9 Adorno, moreover, maintains that the extra-economic aspects, that in Marx’s theory appeared to be external variables or “modifying factors” in relation to the laws of capital, “lie outside the system of political economy, but are central to the history of domination”; “the ruling class is not just governed by the system”, in the

7 Adorno, “Reflections on Class Theory”, 98. 8 Ibid., 100. 9 Ibid. 22 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

Marxian sense according to which the capitalist is a simple agent of accumulation that must obey to the laws of capitalism; the ruling class, instead, “rules through the system and ultimately dominates it”.10 From this point of view, the very concept of bourgeois class should be destructured, as it falsely unifies what should, instead, be kept well apart: the dominant clique, on the one hand, and the mere executors of its aims, on the other: “The egalitarian form of the class serves as an instrument to protect the privilege of the dominant segment over its supporters while concealing it”.11 It hides “the direct economic and political command of the same capitalists that used the same threat of the police against both their own supporters and the workers”.12 In his reflections on the totalitarian experience and on the usurpation of power by outlaw gangs or influential elites, Adorno thus proposes an anti-determinist and anti-economistic reading of the relations of power; this interpretation is different from the traditional Marxist one because it underlines, in a much more definite way, the role of the political-strategic subjectivity of the dominant classes, and the unpredictable variability of the power relations that in a given moment exist in society (“the objective historical trend is a delusion unless it harmonizes with the subjective interests of those who use history to order history about”).13 From these considerations, however, Adorno does not draw the conclusion that we should drop the concept of class. On the contrary, he states, our society remains nonetheless a class society, because the cleavage between exploiters and exploited is still very much present in it; a division that, nowadays, acquires even more coerciveness and stability. Today’s exploitation, however, cannot be understood anymore as Marx did: through the laws of the market. These, in fact, if left free to act, would generate growing poverty; this is why they are curbed and blocked in their most dangerous effects and the workers are ensured a better standard of living than the one that the free dynamic of economic competition would allow them: “the higher standard of living is paid for out of income or monopoly profits, not out of variable capital. It is unemployment benefit, even if it is called by some other name”. “The ruling class is so well fed by alien labor that it resolutely adopts as its own cause the idea that its fate is to feed the workers and to ‘secure for the slaves their existence within slavery’, in order to consolidate its own”.14 Better retributions, thus, according to this Adornian statement, still preserve the semblance of wages, but are actually already social assistance. In conformity with the model of the racket they provide at the same time terror and protection; and this is one of the elements that brings Adorno to affirm that the concept of class still photographs the objectivity of oppression, but not anymore the possibility of becoming aware of it. At first glance, the idea that the hegemonic class actively

10 Ibid., 104. 11 Ibid., 98. 12 Ibid., 99. 13 Ibid., 106. 14 Ibid., 105. Adorno’s Criticism of Marx’s Social Theory 23 supports the dominated classes can seem paradoxical; however, it is not as strange as it might appear: in fact, it is actually through the “charitable” distribution of a certain number of benefits that the system can maintain its balance. The Marxian theory of the immiseration of the proletariat, by consequence, is definitely rejected by Adorno. He does not deny the fundamental improvements of the living standards of the working classes:

Measured against conditions in England a century ago as were evident to the authors of The Communist Manifesto, their standard of living has not deteriorated but improved. Shorter working hours, better nutrition, housing and clothing, protection of family members and for the worker in his old age, and an average increase in life expectancy – all of these things have come to the workers with the development of the technical forces of production.15

Therefore “the proletariat does have more to lose than its chains” and “there can be no question of their being driven by hunger to join forces and make a revolution”.16 The perspective of a revolutionary unification of the proletariat has completely lost its viability; at the same time, the mass parties of the working class have succumbed to the oligarchic tendencies highlighted in Robert Michels’ sociology of parties (the correctness of Michels’ analysis is not affected by his eventual adhesion to fascism).17 The result of these processes is “the intrinsic reality of the oppressed in the system, who used formerly to stand out because of their wretchedness”. Adorno maintains, thus, that the most important transformation of the present times is that the proletariat cannot anymore be seen as a social class external to or intrinsically different from the classes benefiting from the capitalistic economy. The proletariat is completely integrated or assimilated into the capitalistic system, through a process of inclusion to which, according to Adorno, pertains an “extra- economic” nature. The exceptional assimilatory capacity of late capitalism depends, on the one hand, on the seductive role of material goods as means of expansion and gratification of the human self and as a relief to everyday frustrations (a theme that Adorno had already developed in his 1938 essay On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening); on the other hand, its assimilatory capacity rests upon a tangible and not-at-all-ideological improvement of material conditions (longer life expectancy, increased and better nutrition, better housing, etc.) and is also legitimized by a technological-scientific knowledge more and more involved in the forms and in the praxes of social life. In Reflections on Class Theory, moreover, Adorno devotes a passage to the alienation of the workers in the Fordist era; this is a particularly remarkable circumstance, since Frankfurt critical theorists have rarely engaged themselves

15 Ibid., 103. 16 Ibid. 17 Adorno refers to it, 107. 24 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis in considerations attaining to the sociology of work. On this occasion, Adorno affirms that it is not true, as is often stated in the criticism directed at the Fordist organization of work, that in the Fordist factory the worker is unaware of the complete process leading to the end product; on the contrary, since all work processes are standardized and simplified, he is perfectly able to grasp the whole productive operation. The worker understands the productive process perfectly well, since the individual operations all respond to the same logic: “the man on the production line at Ford, who always has to perform the same action, knows very well how the finished car works, since it contains no secrets that cannot be imagined on the model of that action”.18 But it is exactly because of this inescapable technical and rational invariability of the productive process, that today the workers are shaped by it much more than in the past. This is the effect of what Adorno and Horkheimer call the “technological veil”: the socially produced illusion according to which certain processes obey only the neutral logic of science and technology. From these reflections, the conclusion can be drawn that the critique levelled by “bourgeois sociology” at Marxian class theory, although apologetic insofar as it conceals the class relations and the reality of exploitation behind the neutral concept of “social stratification”, has in itself a content of truth; in other words, the critique made by “bourgeois sociology” is misleading inasmuch as it does not speak of class domination, but rather of supremacy of the elites (“wherever the sociological gaze seeks the stones of class, it discovers only the bread of the elites”),19 attributing thereby a supra-historical character to a category of dubious legitimacy. On the other hand, however, to a certain extent, this critique hits the mark: “the fact that the dialectic of class ends in a naked clique system spells the end of sociology, which always intended that very thing. Its formal invariant factors turn out to be predictions of the latest material trends”.20

Adorno on Marx in 1968

If compared to the reflections developed by Adorno in the 1940s, the paper he wrote in 1968 for the sixteenth Congress of the German Sociological Association (Is Marx Obsolete?) seems to imply, at least at first sight, a return to more Marxian positions. In what follows, I will assess whether this shift in Adorno’s thought is only apparent or substantial. It is not easy to give a clear-cut answer to this question, but it is nonetheless necessary to bear it in mind when analysing Is Marx Obsolete? While keeping in mind the considerations that Adorno develops in Reflections on Class Theory (which were certainly also influenced by his close relationship with Horkheimer), I will now try to determine what the permanent

18 Ibid., 108. 19 Ibid., 101. 20 Ibid., 102. Adorno’s Criticism of Marx’s Social Theory 25 elements of the Adornian post-Marxism are, and what are, instead, the aspects that, in it, seem more problematic and uncertain. First of all, with great continuity, in 1968 Adorno restates his thesis on the current unavailability of class consciousness: “one cannot speak of a proletarian class consciousness in the foremost capitalist countries”;21 this statement, however, does not imply that classes do not exist anymore. The absence of class consciousness, in fact, derives from the fact that the workers “are increasingly integrated into bourgeois society and its way of thinking”, in contrast to the nineteenth century, when “the industrial proletariat was recruited from the pauper class and stood half outside society”.22 What are the consequences to be drawn from this absence of class consciousness? If “in the countries that serve as prototypes in the matter of class relations, no more class consciousness appears for long periods; if the question of the proletariat turns into a picture-puzzle, then quantity turns into quality and the suspicion of conceptual mythology can certainly be suppressed by decree but not eliminated in thought”.23 Adorno’s answer is not very clear, but his perspective is, substantially, that neither to the industrial working class, nor to workers in general, can nowadays be attributed any capacity for assuming an antagonistic stance with regard to the dominant relations of production. In affirming this thesis, he is consistent with his previous positions. What makes them quite striking, however, is the fact that they are reaffirmed by Adorno in 1968, the very year that would see an extraordinary revival of social movements (not only of students, but also of workers) in important European countries such as France and Italy. According to Adorno, workers are not able anymore to give rise to conflicts aiming at a general social transformation; nor do these conflicts seem susceptible of being activated by other social subjects (as stated, in the same period, by Herbert Marcuse). But what is the point of a critical theory completely detached from any possibility of social transformation? This is a very important problem, one which we will need to return later. A second crucial point, which in Is Marx Obsolete? is expressed in a particularly clear way, concerns the Marxian dialectic between productive forces and relations of production. For Marx this constituted the second perspective, besides class conflict, from which to look at the possibility of a process of social revolution. According to Adorno, however, this dialectic has now ceased: the productive forces, instead of exploding the cage constituted by the relations of production, are by now perfectly functional to these same relations.

The relations of production have ‒ for pure self-preservation ‒ used a stitch there, and taken particular individual steps to keep the forces of production, now that they had been let loose, under its control. The predominance of the relations

21 Adorno, “Is Marx Obsolete?”, 5. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 26 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

of production over the forces of production, which have long mocked them, is the trademark of the age.24

This, according to Adorno, means that the social dialectic that Marx had envisioned is blocked on every front: both on the side concerning the class contradiction between proletariat and capitalists, and on the side regarding the structural contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production. Or better: the workers are exploited and the relations of production are actually obsolete, but this does not bring the consequences announced by Marx. The proletariat, in fact, is consumeristically integrated, and the relations of production (which predominate over the productive forces) are kept alive through ad hoc interventional measures. As we have seen, between the late 1930s and the early 1940s, Adorno and Horkheimer maintained that the primacy of politics was imposing itself (or had been restored) over the previous primacy of economy. In the work from 1968, Adorno’s diagnosis seems, however, to be more nuanced. On the one hand, he states that “the possibility that the steering of economic processes might be transferred to the political powers does indeed follow from the dynamics of the deductive system, but also tends towards an objective irrationality”, because it makes more difficult the elaboration of an internally consistent and “quasi-systematic” theory, as the Marxian one was.25 Only a few lines later, nonetheless, in reaffirming the validity of the concept of capitalism, he writes that “human beings continue to be subject to domination by the economic process. Its objects have long since ceased to be just the masses; they now include those in charge and their agents”.26 And this is why, he adds, the much-discussed problem of the so called “managerial revolution” (as reads the title of the famous book by James Burnham) is of entirely secondary importance. Owners and managers are, in fact, to be considered as mere functions of the abstract logic of capitalist accumulation. In this passage Adorno seems not only to attenuate, but even to reverse what he had said in his essay of 1942, in which he had written that “the ruling class rules through the system and ultimately dominates it”.27 Also Adorno’s judgement on the State’s intervention over the economy is not very clear: “The power of resistance of the system has proved itself in interventionism; but so, indirectly, has the theory of collapse; the transition to power independently of the market mechanism is its end”.28 In other words, at first Adorno restates, in his 1968 text, the thesis he had already expounded in 1942: the immanent dynamic of the system would have led to all the consequences Marx had predicted, if it were not for the changes imposed on the capitalist system by

24 Ibid., 10. 25 Adorno, “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?”, 115–16. 26 Ibid.,116; my emphasis. 27 Adorno, “Reflections on Class Theory”, 104. 28 Adorno, “Is Marx Obsolete?”, 14. Adorno’s Criticism of Marx’s Social Theory 27 a conscious political will. He also reasserts the thesis that “the model according to which capitalism operated was never as pure as liberal apologias supposed”.29 Adorno’s diagnosis, therefore, is substantially consistent with the one he formulated in 1942 (that is, the catastrophic consequences of the capitalistic economic mechanism have been avoided thanks to a conscious political intervention); the conclusions he now draws from this same diagnosis, however, are quite different. To the idea that today’s capitalism is still staying alive thanks to interventions by the State and to forms of mild economic planning, and therefore should not even be called “capitalism” anymore, Adorno objects that “the social fate that befalls the individual is as arbitrary as it ever was”; even if we are heading towards a “unified society”,30 we have not yet entered a completely new historical phase, the one Horkheimer (and Adorno) had theorized about in the 1940s in terms of State capitalism and of the primacy of politics over the economy. We are, indeed, still inside capitalism: “production takes place today, as then, for the sake of profit. And far exceeding what was foreseeable in Marx’s day, human needs that were potentially functions of the production apparatus have now become such functions in fact, rather than the production apparatus becoming a function of human needs”.31 The break with the old, more-or-less liberal capitalism, however, is significant; it can be summarized by considering the following aspects: primacy of the relations of production over the productive forces; social integration through consumerism and consequent end of class consciousness; transformation of the relation between production and needs, resulting in the fact that material production, instead of orienting itself to the satisfaction of already given needs, now directly generates the needs it should satisfy; control and stabilization of the economic cycle through intervention by the State. In other words, we are confronted by a new form of capitalism which differs from the State capitalism that Pollock and Horkheimer had in mind in the 1930s; nonetheless, this new form of capitalism stands in continuity with the old one, inasmuch as it prosecutes and accomplishes the process of social alienation that characterized it:

people are still what they were in Marx’s analysis in the middle of the nineteenth century: appendages of the machine, not just literally workers who have to adapt themselves to the nature of the machines they use, but, far beyond that, figuratively, workers who are compelled right down to their most intimate impulses to subordinate themselves to the mechanisms of society and to adopt specific social roles without reservation.32

29 Adorno, “Late-Capitalism or Industrial Society?”, 123. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 117. 32 Ibid. 28 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

On the whole, concerning these aspects, Adorno’s view is that the Marxian critique of capitalism had become obsolete. That critique remains completely valid, however, under two other very relevant points: first of all, it allows the preservation of the category of social alienation: the social relations generated by human subjects dominate these same subjects as a foreign fate, which governs its creators instead of being governed by them. Secondly, the Marxian critique gives adequate attention to another fundamental characteristic of the capitalistic mode of production: in capitalism, material production is not directed to the satisfaction of social needs, but, instead, to the achievement of profits. As Hegel already knew, this entails that the capitalistic society, as rich as it may grow, might leave basic social needs unmet; needs which could be easily fulfilled thanks to the forces of production already available in society. The fact that whole nations still have to suffer hunger, and that even in the richest counties some fundamental needs are not universally satisfied (for example, as Adorno writes, the housing need),33 represents one of the many contradictions of a productive system in which the fulfilment of social needs is only an accidental by-product of the striving for profits. The capitalistic system of production, moreover, can partially guarantee the satisfaction of basic social needs by maximizing the production not only of superfluous goods, but also of the destructive weapons created by the armaments industry, whose commercial demand is crucial to ensuring that the capitalistic mechanism can run continuously. Adorno, thus, underlines again and again the integrative potential of the contemporary social system; this, however, does not mean that we are in the presence of a system without contradictions, antagonisms and conflicts. From a general point of view, the fundamental contradiction is that the very basic presupposition of modern bourgeois society (the relation between free and equal individuals) clashes with the forms of domination that this society continuously reproduces. The concept of society, which is specifically bourgeois and antifeudal, implies the notion of an association of free and independent human subjects for the sake of the possibility of a better life and, consequently, the critique of natural social relations. The hardening of bourgeois society into something impenetrably and inevitably natural is its immanent regression. Something of the opposing intention was expressed in the social contract theories. No matter how little these theories were historically correct, they penetratingly remind society of the concept of the unity of individuals, whose consciousness ultimately postulates their reason, freedom and equality.34 The modern bourgeois society, based on the principle of exchange, inevitably refers also to the principle of self-government by individuals and to democracy; as

33 Ibid. 34 Theodor W. Adorno, “Einleitung”, in Theodor W. Adorno et al., Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie (Neuwied-Berlin: Luchterhand, 1969); trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby, in Theodor W. Adorno et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (London: Heinemann, 1976), 1–67: 25. Adorno’s Criticism of Marx’s Social Theory 29

Adorno states in his lectures on the concepts of history and freedom, democracy should be understood as the constitution of “a social form in which people are the subjects and not the objects of society”; that is, as “the socio-political form that expresses the self-determination of mankind”.35 And it is precisely on the contradiction between bourgeois society as it is and as it pretends to be that critical thought can assert its demystifying power. Even if it has become inhospitable ground for the flourishing of a proletarian class consciousness, bourgeois society is marked in fact, nonetheless, by its antagonistic and conflict-generative character. In Anmerkungen zum sozialen Konflikt heute36 [Remarks on Social Conflict Today], Adorno writes that the integrating effect that capitalism performs over the social subjects has neutralized all the open manifestations of class struggle; the objective antagonisms of society, however, as well as the economic processes that constantly reproduce class division, have not changed. The conflicts that previously took place in society have been removed from the public sphere, and they are now to be found, according to Adorno, under different forms and in other social spaces: for example, in the many explosions of rage and resentment that flow through our society, in the micro-struggles taking place in the private as well as in the public domain. Adorno, however, is careful in noticing that these displaced forms of social conflict could also have counterproductive effects with regard to the aim of emancipation: they constitute, in fact, a reserve of rage and aggression that, at any moment, could be unloaded against the unpopular social minorities or the groups and individuals that hold non-conformist political positions. These minority groups, therefore, run the risk of the energy of class struggle, deprived of its primary target, being utilized as a reactionary weapon against them.

Conclusions

In comparison to the Marxian view of capitalism, Adorno’s critical theory is characterized, thus, by a relevant shift of perspective. Capitalistic society remains marked by contradictions and antagonisms, and for this very reason it constitutes, in principle, a contingent form that can be finally overcome. At the same time, however, it is not possible to point out any evident, or readily available direction, through which the existent social order could be concretely overcome. The first manifestations of the student movement in 1968 seem indeed to have sparked some hope in Adorno. In April 1968, in fact, he wrote that “only recently

35 Theodor W. Adorno, Zur Lehre von der Geschichte und von der Freiheit, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2001); trans. Rodney Livingstone, History and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2006), 76. 36 Theodor W. Adorno, “Anmerkungen zum sozialen Konflikt heute”, in Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 8. Soziologische Schriften I (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1990), 177–95. 30 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis have traces of an opposite tendency become visible, precisely among bourgeois youth: resistance to blind conformism, freedom for rationally chosen aims, a reckoning with the possibility of change”.37 But this cautious optimism disappeared in the following months, when Adorno’s confrontations with the student movement became harshly polemical and he reverted to his early pessimism. As he wrote in the epistolary controversy with Marcuse in 1969,38 every form of emancipatory praxis is precluded, and every attempt in that direction can only worsen the existing situation. Therefore, Adorno ended up finding himself in a rather paradoxical stance: on the one hand, he held himself faithful to the Marxian critique of capitalism and of social alienation, by preserving a certain Marxian “orthodoxy” which led him, for example, to plan a critique (although without ever actually putting it into writing) of the social-democratic program of Bad Godesberg. On the other hand, however, as can be noticed in the 1969 debate with Marcuse, he kept his critical and intellectual production apart from every practical action effectively oriented to changing society; in this way, he ended up reducing his critical ideas to purely theoretical principles, from which, in the present time, no real course of action can be drawn. This position easily assumes a paradoxical or contradictory character: to criticize an unchangeable situation would be as meaningless as criticizing the force of gravity. Adorno, of course, was well aware of this; therefore, in his writings, he never describes the situation he criticizes as unchangeable, but rather as contingent, as torn by contradictions that could lead to its collapse. At the same time he maintains, however, that in present society there are no possibilities for a critical, transformative action; for sure, this diagnosis considerably weakens, or even denies, the idea that our society could be, in principle, transformed according to the ends of human emancipation. And, deprived of this thesis, the very idea of a critical theory would completely lose its meaning. These are the problems affecting Adorno’s thought when, on some crucial points, he distances himself from Marx. In my opinion, however, there are some open issues also on the other side of his reflection – that is, in the writings where he retains his Marxian orthodoxy. Adorno’s critique of alienation, or, in other words, the critique of the situation in which human beings, through their mutual relations, create an autonomous social process that dominates them as a foreign fate, is perfectly in line with the Marxian analysis (especially with the Marx of the Grundrisse or with the theorization of commodity fetishism in the Capital). This same critique, however, runs the risk of reproducing also the most problematic aspects of Marx’s thought: the autonomy and the overhanging power that social

37 Adorno, “Is Marx Obsolete?”, 12. 38 Cf. for example the letter Adorno wrote to Marcuse on 19 June 1969: Theodor W. Adorno, “Brief an Herbert Marcuse, 19. Juni 1969” in Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegeung: Von der Falschenpost zum Molotowcocktail 1946–1995, Band 2: Dokumente, ed. Wolfgang Kraushaar (Hamburg: Roger and Bernhard bei Zweitausendeins, 1998), 651–52; trans. Esther Lesilie, New Left Review 233 (1999): 123–6. Adorno’s Criticism of Marx’s Social Theory 31 relations gain over the subjects constitute indeed, on the one hand, a typical feature of market society, resulting from its unplanned and anarchical system of production. On the other hand, however, as Durkheim would have said, they are also a side-effect of the social relations as such. Marx’s mistake, faithfully reproduced by Adorno, lies in ignoring the specificity of these two instances, therefore making the latter collapse into the former. A social critique which mainly focuses on the theme of alienation, unilaterally following the route that Lukács had opened in 1923, is helpless against the objection according to which the alienating effect it attributes to capitalism is, instead, already induced by the very relation between the intentional acts performed by the individuals and the global consequences of the mutual intertwining of these same individual acts. Alienation, thus, can be more or less pervasive, but this is not univocally correlated to specific modalities of social relation. In conclusion, Adorno seems to keep himself faithful to the philosophical framework developed by Marx, while, at the same time, refuting all the Marxian theses concerning the conflicts and contradictions that concretely take place in capitalism; he follows, so to say, only the Marx of Grundrisse, and not also the Marx of the Class Struggles in France. In this way, Adorno proposes an outlook on society in which the alienating domination exerted by the economic process – a process that develops itself, with its own logic, over the heads of the subjects – is accompanied by a complete absence of the political dimension, of social struggles and of conflicts for hegemony. In Adorno’s view, as we have seen, the underestimation of the political dimension and of the element of social struggle (an abstraction which already characterized Marx’s critique of political economy, but not the Marxian theoretical system as a whole), is further radicalized. This problematic outcome, however, in my opinion should be put in connection with Adorno’s biographical experience: his life was deeply marked both by the trauma of the emigration to the United States (the only advanced capitalist society in the world where no socialism exists – an issue which constitutes the theme of a famous essay by Werner Sombart), and later by the return to a divided Germany, where all political Marxist or communist positions where substantially silenced by the charge, addressed to them, of bringing grist to the mill of the East European dictatorships. Two countries, the United States and Germany, where a political praxis of radical emancipation seemed to be completely excluded from the realm of possible things. It is also for this reason, probably, that Adorno’s relation with Marx’s thought remains, in many respects, an unsettled relation. Adorno is definitely acute and foresighted when he strongly insists on the novelties (first of all, the culture industry) which permanently modify the social features Marx had analysed, and which generate effects of integration that go far beyond what the author of the Communist Manifesto could have possibly imagined. Adorno, however, also follows to the letter the Marxian thesis according to which the alienated economic process dominates the human beings by whom, instead, it should be actively mastered; he accepts this idea without realizing the problems it entails, 32 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis and, moreover, he radicalizes it to the point of losing sight of the dimension of social conflict and of hegemonic struggle. The aspect of struggle, in Marx, even if not present in the works devoted to the critique of political economy, was central nonetheless. Paradoxically, it could be said that Adorno holds a nearly “ultraorthodoxical” position with regard to Marxian thought, through which the limitations of Marx’s original stance are also clearly revealed. In conclusion, Adorno’s interaction with Marx appears as a strained relation, leading to mixed results: on the one hand, Adorno reaches many significant acquisitions inasmuch as he manages to fruitfully develop determinate aspects of the Marxian theory; on the other hand he makes use of a conceptual framework whose problematic characteristics he fails, instead, to notice. Chapter 4 Adorno as Marx’s Scholar: Models of Resistance Against the Administered World Stefano Giacchetti Ludovisi

Theory and praxis in Adorno have often been considered as incompatible, to the point that being Adornian has become synonymous with being a mandarin, far removed from reality and its contingencies. From Lukács’s “Grand Hotel Abyss”1 to Bertolt Brecht’s character of “Tui,”2 even the closest areas of influence for Critical Theory in Marxism condemned Adorno’s philosophy as a typical, sterile bourgeois condemnation of capitalism which is incapable of offering revolutionary alternatives. Adorno, in fact, was not a revolutionary in Marxist terms; he did not envision an antagonistic social class (whether the proletariat or a more generic class of the “oppressed”) that can finally construct a free and truly democratic society. But ever since class consciousness has been turned into the most passive acceptance of capitalist ideology, who can expect a Marxist revolution today? Adorno’s most systematic works, Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, seem to support this pessimistic perspective, leaving art as the only form of practical resistance. It seems, then, that in order to provide an interpretation of Adorno’s theory that allows the development of a concrete model of praxis, we should not consider his aesthetic theory as the conclusive answer he proposes for the construction of an alternative to the social model of domination. His theory considers the aesthetic dimension as a moment of complete transcendence from the reified world of commodities, as the last shelter for the creation of images of utopian “total otherness”; but the transcendence of “total otherness” does not pertain to a metaphysical sphere which is irremediably unattainable, as the late “Schopenhauerian” considerations of Horkheimer seem to conclude. The inference that Adorno’s theory cannot offer any practical alternative to the present social totality is, at a first glance, mistakenly grounded in the identification of his thought with Horkheimer’s. This type of misinterpretation is encouraged by reading their work Dialectic of Enlightenment as a definitive philosophical treatise.

1 Lukács included Adorno among the guests of Schopenhauer’s “Grand Hotel Abyss” in his 1962 preface to Theory of the Novel. 2 Tui was the protagonist of the project for Brecht’s novel inspired by the figure of Adorno, and his name meant “Tellect-ual-in,” the figure of the twisted intellectual prejudiced against the practical solution of problems due to a purely highbrow attitude. 34 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

As Martin Jay showed in his precise historical reconstruction,3 the members of the “Frankfurt School” had different political and theoretical backgrounds, and these differences are particularly relevant in the case of Adorno and Horkheimer. While they shared the project of developing a Marxist theory of society that could face the new aspects of capitalism in the twentieth century, they developed different approaches the question of how to continue Marx’s tradition. The recent publication of several protocols regarding Adorno and Horkheimer’s intention to write a second text on dialectics4 suggests that Adorno and Horkheimer differed on a number of points, most notably stemming from the Schopenhauerian drift in Horkheimer’s thought. According to Adorno, Horkheimer’s reception of Schopenhauer’s doctrine prevented him from constructing a concrete alternative to domination, and led Horkheimer to a “metaphysically” pessimistic view about the future. In Adorno, salvation is by no means either a merely aesthetic or a theological category, but consists in the possibility of constructing an alternative to domination. This requires going beyond instrumental and identifying reason as the cause of a reified social totality. Yet, for Adorno the negation of the reified totality should not be transformed into the “identification” of certain aspects of “first nature” (such as passions) that could claim a status of authenticity. Adorno’s main concern seems to be to avoid Nietzsche’s mistake of arbitrarily affirming some impulses as the basis for “better” values; we should first question the authenticity of our impulses, that is, we should first consider how and to what extent they are distorted by the dictates of the market. For Adorno, the affirmation of certain impulses would already be an identification of nature’s non-identity, which would propose anew the same type of rationality. In this way, it seems that Adorno is giving a central value to the negation of suffering, rather than to a direct affirmation of undistorted pleasure. Avoiding the suffering related to the deprivation of the means for self- preservation seems the only way in which we can establish a normative value for pleasure. This normative value is “rationally” established through negative dialectics, as the acknowledgment of the social nature of needs. But to what extent can we define the avoidance of suffering in Adorno as “normative”? Following Nietzsche’s argument, according to Adorno normativity always has a negative connotation of restraint of personal autonomy.5 This perspective has consequences in Adorno both on a theoretical and on a practical level. Since negative dialectics

3 See, in particular, M. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination. 4 Most of these protocols are transcriptions of discussions between Adorno and Horkheimer held around 1945 and 1946 (most likely drawn up by Gretel Adorno), and they were published in German in 1985 (in the 12th volume of Horkheimer’s Gesammelte Schriften) and in Italian in 1999 as I Seminari della Scuola di Francoforte. 5 As Habermas observed in his The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, the lack of normativity in Adorno’s thought would put him in a position of skepticism analogous to Nietzsche’s. Habermas’s conclusions are sustained by his ascertainment of an identification of reason and domination in Adorno. While such identification is not sustained by Adorno, Adorno as Marx’s Scholar 35 prevents the formation of a fixed outcome (an identity, a “conclusive harmony” in aesthetic terms) from the dialectical movement, the sense of the negativity of Adorno’s dialectic is expressed, at a theoretical level, in the refusal of any type of Weltanschauung. At a practical level, negative dialectics prevents as well the establishment of a fixed parameter or set of rules that would constitute a sort of “recipe” for a free and emancipated society. Adorno’s theory remains open to a redemptive praxis only insofar as it does not ground itself in a static paradigm. He rejects any philosophical “system” which claims to explain any phenomenon starting from an ultimate truth that is valid once and for all. A free society for Adorno is founded on everyone’s autonomy of thought, so the envisioning of a free society should be the outcome of a process of emancipation from ideology. The obstinacy of Adorno in avoiding any description of how we could achieve a free society can favor an interpretation of his aesthetic theory as elitist and, overall, of his theory based on negative dialectics as irremediably separated from practice. In his “critical model” on theory and praxis,6 though, Adorno repeatedly affirms the interdependence of these two categories: “A consciousness of theory and praxis must be produced that does not divide the two such that theory becomes powerless and praxis becomes arbitrary.”7 Adorno certainly cannot be accused of having fostered a position whereby “praxis becomes arbitrary.” But was he really able to prevent his theory from becoming powerless? His theory is definitely not powerless in terms of a radical critique of alienation and reification, in terms of fostering a critical consciousness that can lead us to the refusal of complicity in domination. Is this the convergence of theory and praxis that Adorno is calling for? For Adorno, critical thought is already a form of practice: “through its autonomization, theory becomes a transformative and practical productive force.”8 But to what extent the reverse is true? Can the autonomization of “practical” productive forces from capitalistic modes of production transform consciousness? That this happens in art, following Adorno’s aesthetic theory, is evident. It is precisely because an artwork is not under the “spell of labor” that it achieves its autonomy from ideology. But can this happen in work, outside the sphere of artistic production? In Adorno’s writings we find several “hints” that this is possible, but his scarce familiarity with the processes of material production in society prevented him from thoroughly developing this argument; his primary model remains artistic production. What we should try to see here is how it is possible to “spell out” these hints in Adorno, concerning in particular a form of another point of Habermas’s critique remains valid, namely, that the lack of normativity in Adorno prevents him from developing a genuine political theory. 6 Adorno develops his analysis of the relationship between theory and praxis in one of the essays in his Critical Models: “Marginalia to theory and praxis” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 259–78. 7 T.W. Adorno, Critical Models, trans. H. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 261. 8 Ibid., 264. 36 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis labor based “on free collaboration and solidarity, with shared responsibility.”9 This primarily means that we have to see if we can adopt a Marxist conception of non- alienated labor in Adorno’s theoretical framework. In order to do so, we should first analyze Adorno’s interpretation of Marx, and then see whether a model of workplace democracy can be sustained inside Adorno’s theory. According to Adorno, one of the greatest merits of Marx is that he did not create a philosophical system in a traditional sense. Following his interpretation, Marx’s dialectics is essentially open and negative since it does not lead to a definitive conclusion, and for Adorno it is essential to interpret Marx in this sense in order to differentiate Marx’s thought from so called “orthodox” or “dogmatic” Marxism and in order to understand some apparent incoherencies of Marx’s theory. Marxian praxis has often been assimilated into the “mediation” of the Hegelian Idea, as the movement that determines and suppresses the negative and leads to total rationality, to the fulfillment of history in which the contradiction and the negative are entirely suppressed. Some of the writings of the young Marx seem to legitimate this interpretation, such as segments from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, where he states that communism is “the riddle of history solved and knows itself as the solution.”10 Yet, Marxian praxis should not be considered as a process of suppression of the limit, of the other, but on the contrary as an acceptance of this limit as its own reason for being. Adorno would have fully subscribed to this observation of Bloch:

What disappears in Marx is Hegel’s interpretation of dialectics as a mere to- and-fro conversation in a cosmic discourse, so to speak, of a world architect with himself: Marx completely abandons this false mental subject of Hegel’s. But dialectics as an actual process, once the idealistic appearance falls away, becomes truly visible for the first time; it is the law of matter in motion [ … ] as dialectical, processual matter which retains its openness.11

This difference with Hegel already appears in the Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic and Philosophy in General, where Marx shows his critical awareness of the basic flaw of Hegelian philosophy, that is, the abstractionism produced by a speculative or idealistic dialectic which, as a movement of consciousness with itself, can present “nothing but the history of the production of abstract, that is, of absolute, logical, speculative thought.”12 According to Adorno’s critique of rationality, this movement is expressed in the refusal to assimilate the non-identical to the

9 T.W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E.F. Jephcott (Surrey: Gresham Press, 1979), 129. 10 K. Marx, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, trans, D. Easton (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 304. 11 E. Bloch, On Karl Marx, trans. J. Maxwell (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), 107–8. 12 Marx, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, 317. Adorno as Marx’s Scholar 37 identifying principle of that subject which acts according to a rationality of domination. Marxian and Adornian dialectics seem then to coincide in the fact that they do not have as an end the absolute or the annulment of the otherness in the subject or of the subject in the otherness, but they are dialectics based on what Adorno addressed as the “primacy of the object” (materialism) and “non-identity.” Their dialectical perspective would prevent the affirmation of either theory or praxis as self-sufficient, while an immediate “unity” of theory and praxis, which suppresses their difference, would also be undialectical. The dogma of the unity of theory and praxis, contrary to the doctrine on which it is based, is undialectical:

it underhandedly appropriates simple identity where contradiction alone has the chance of becoming productive. [ … ] The relationship between theory and practice, after both have once distanced themselves from each other, is that of qualitative reversal, not transition, and surely not subordination. They stand in a polar relationship. [ … ] Marx’s reticence concerning theoretical recipes for praxis was hardly less than that concerning a positive description of a classless society. Capital contains numerous invectives, most often against economists and philosophers, but no program for action [ … ]. Marx by no means surrendered himself to praxis.13

For Adorno the peculiarity of Marx’s materialism lies in its authentic dialectical nature, and in the fact that it does not propose itself as a Weltanschauung. Dialectical materialism has the function of raising the physiological basis of life—as it expresses itself through passions and needs—to the center of philosophical analysis, but, contrary to the other forms of materialism, it does not claim the absolute exhaustiveness of a theoretical system. Marx’s materialism is in fact that form of praxis which leads to the suppression of materialism itself:

Marxian materialism has a goal which differentiates it from the other materialistic philosophies: if material conditions of humanity will be completely fulfilled, that is, if the reproduction of the human species and the satisfaction of human needs will be finally freed from exchange value, from the theme of profit, humanity would then cease to live under the yoke of matter; the complete fulfillment of materialism will be at the same time also its end.14

Only an approach to the works of Marx that realizes how his thought rejects any definitive and absolute conclusiveness is capable of giving an account ofthe apparent incoherencies which can be found in some of Marx’s crucial conceptions. Most of these incoherencies are related to Marx’s fundamental distinction between

13 Adorno, Critical Models, 277. 14 T.W. Adorno, Terminologia Filosofica, vol. 2 (Torino: Einaudi, 1975), 471 (my translation). 38 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis structure and superstructure. According to Adorno, the first step towards a correct interpretation of this distinction in Marx is to consider the notion of structure strictly as a historical category, rather than a “true” essence. The core of Marx’s economic materialism is the notion of structure as material production (or labor) which, in philosophical terms, represents the relationship between man and nature.

Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. [ … ] Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.15

But this relationship between man and nature is essentially vitiated by alienation, which is responsible for the moment of domination that shapes the structure. The alienation of labor, which is determined by the element of domination that regulates the relationship between man and nature, is the cause of the falsity of our social totality, and through its negation it is possible to develop an emancipated society. Structure is molded by the principle of domination of nature, and only a praxis of non-domination—what Adorno sometimes explicitly addresses as the “pacification of nature”—can finally propose an alternative to amerely instrumental and identifying reason. In Marx the link between domination of nature and the product of identifying reason is made explicit by his theory of value. Through labor humans transform natural material into useful products that aim at the satisfaction of their needs, so that the outcome of their work can be considered in terms of use-value. This process, though, is completely distorted by the establishment of the “social hieroglyphic” of exchange-value which is given to commodities. For Marx, beyond the abstract equivalence of commodities, there is always hidden the advantage that a minority gains, which Marx indicates as profit. Profit becomes the only parameter for establishing not only the value of a commodity, but also the productivity of work. Adorno remarks the importance of this passage:

The crucial point is that only the work which falls within the capitalistic process of valorization, that is, that which produces exchange-value, is considered as productive in the sense of the dominating capitalistic system; that which does not produce exchange-value—however productive it might be in a higher sense—is not productive work, according to the rules of the game of society, even if society very often talks about ideal values.16

We can now see how the concept of structure has in Marx a preeminently critical meaning: it indicates the process of material production—the fundamental relationship between man and nature, subject and object—which is ideologically

15 K. Marx, Selected Writings, trans. L.H. Simon (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 274. 16 Adorno, Terminologia Filosofica, vol. 2, 468 (my translation). Adorno as Marx’s Scholar 39

“false” since it is grounded on a concept of value molded by the model of domination that aims at profit rather than the satisfaction of human needs. The whole social construction acquires in this way the character of appearance and falsity since it is built on abstraction from material needs. This is the radical difference between Hegel’s and Marx’s dialectics:

The Marxian system can be defined as a negative or critical system, an absolutely critical theory. The world is certainly a system, but it is a system which has been imposed on humans, and which is alien and heteronomous to them; it is a system of appearance which has nothing to do with their freedom. This system is ideology, and the whole, which for Hegel is true, is instead, according to the Marxian theory, false.17

According to Marx, the contradictions and the conflicts of capitalism—which were already considered by Hegel as the element that brings a given social system to the overcoming of itself—cannot be reconciled by the state, as Hegel’s theory concluded. The institutions built on a false structure are the means through which the capitalist minority looks after its interests and defends its profit. Adorno basically shares this distrust over bourgeois institutions which, according to his broad conception of the bourgeoisie, are identified in any type of institution that hides a structure of domination. The substantial difference between Marx and Adorno can be detected in the fact that Adorno substitutes the notion of structure that was developed by Marx in reference to capitalism with a general notion of “domination of nature.” The definition of domination of nature includes capitalism, but it is extended beyond its historical formation in modernity, indicating material production in its basic meaning of relationship between man and nature. For Adorno, then, the overcoming of capitalism is not related to the abolition of a specific form of relations of production, but is related to a more generic abolition of domination in the relationship between subject and object. Both Marx’s and Adorno’s theories converge in the acknowledgment that a free society coincides with the abolition of a class society (that is, with the abolition of domination), but the means through which this will occur are different. Following Adorno’s reconstruction, the proletariat is basically in no different situation from that of all the other exploited classes in history; the alienation of labor does not put them in a privileged position in terms of critical consciousness. For Adorno critical consciousness is achieved through a radical redefinition of subjectivity, which has affirmed the principle of identity as the sole parameter for rationality. If the flaw of this rationality is that in the end it does not pursue any goals, in order to change the structure of society—and negate its falsity—it is necessary to restore the telos to the rationality of domination which has been reduced to a mere calculation of the means. This telos can be expressed with Adorno’s generic notion of “pacification of nature”; rationality finally aims at the fulfillment of the capacities of humans as

17 Ibid., pp. 456–7. 40 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis an organic part of nature, rejecting that form of identification which is the basis for the process of exchange that creates profit. According to Adorno, Marx’s proposal of the proletariat as the class that can bring forth a revolutionary change of society is based on an explicitly deterministic principle: the contradictions of society will be solved by the internal movement of history. Capitalism’s economic structure will lead to its own collapse and suppression: “capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a natural process, its own negation.”18 This conclusion might represent Marx’s dialectical movement of history as analogous to the one proposed by Hegel. In both cases, we would be facing a conception of social conflicts—whose solution is already contained in the historical development of rationality—which is ultimately grounded on the ascertainment that the real is rational. But, as Adorno suggests, the radical difference between Hegel and Marx lies in the fact that in Hegel the rational (which is “true”) has a positive connotation, while in Marx it is false, since reality is structured on a principle of exploitation which aims at the creation of profit rather than the fulfillment of needs. The truth of the present in Marx is its falsity. If, on one hand, it is true that Marx was not able to free himself from the determinism of Hegelian dialectics, on the other hand the negativity of his dialectics shows all the potentialities for going beyond a philosophy of history that has been arbitrarily transformed into “science” by official “diamat.”19 This step forward has been taken by Adorno’s negative dialectics, which is entirely grounded in the ascertainment of the falsity of the social totality and which aims at the resolution of social conflicts through the establishment of the pacification of nature as the authentic goal towards which rationality must be oriented. The elements of the superstructure are not ideological insofar as they completely transcend and negate the social totality built on domination of nature. We can therefore establish a liberating purpose for the superstructure not by “identifying” a new system which will substitute for the old one, but by rejecting the idea of system itself. Just as Adorno distances himself from Marxism in his analysis of artistic expression, affirming its emancipatory potential to transcend the false totality, at the same time he sustains a form of political praxis which is permanently reformed according to the principle of pacification of nature: “the quest for the good life is the quest for the right form of politics.”20

18 Marx, Selected Writings, 300. 19 Soviet acronym for “dialectical materialism.” The expression “dialectical materialism” is in general used by Engels rather than Marx, who would address his philosophy as “historical materialism.” By “diamat” is usually indicated the filtering of Marxism through neo-positivistic theories, that tried to propose Marx’s materialism as a science. 20 T.W. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, trans. R. Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 176. Adorno as Marx’s Scholar 41

Although the consequence of Adorno’s rejection of any type of system consists in the fact that we cannot construct a definite and stable image of how this political praxis would look, we can definitely outline the fundamental changes that it proposes. The rationality which sets the pacification of nature as its objective operates in a manner opposite to that of a merely instrumental reason: it finally has its social goal towards which it can orientate its means. On an individual level, a liberating praxis has the characteristics of what Adorno defines as “resistance,” a form of behavior which immediately recalls Nietzsche’s model; fully autonomous thought.

At least something negative can be said about the concept of the real person. He would be neither a mere function of the whole, which is inflicted upon him so thoroughly that he cannot distinguish himself from it anymore, nor would he simply retrench himself in his pure selfhood: precisely that is the form of a bad rootedness in nature that even now still lives on. Were he a real person, then he would no longer be a personality but also not less than one, no mere bundle of reflexes, but rather a third entity. It flashes up in Hölderlin’s vision of the poet: “Therefore, go thus unarmed / forward into life, and fear nothing!”21

On a social scale, as Adorno observes, “the Archimedean point—how might a nonrepressive praxis be possible – is how might one steer between the alternatives of spontaneity and organization.”22 Mostly discouraged by the experience of the totalitarian drift of revolutionary parties in “real” socialism, and completely diffident of the function of political parties in capitalistic countries, since they mainly fulfill an ideological function of preserving of bourgeois interests, Adorno prefers the alternative of spontaneity of antagonistic social movements. But in order to avoid the moment of rigid organization of these movements, which would lead them to the suppression of personal autonomy of thought, Adorno qualifies this spontaneity as regulated by the “primacy of the object”; the primacy of undistorted needs.

Praxis rightly understood is what the object wants: praxis follows the object’s neediness. But not by the subject adapting itself, which would merely reinforce the heteronomous objectivity. The neediness of the object is mediated via the total societal system; for that reason it can be determined critically only by theory.23

Here, once again, Adorno is affirming the fundamental complementarity between theory and praxis. The lack of access to the satisfaction of needs (especially the basic ones, as they might be expressed by social movements for the abolition of

21 Adorno, Critical Models, 165. 22 Ibid., 274. 23 Ibid., 265. 42 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis world hunger) is the basis for an antagonistic social practice, but theory needs always to fulfill its task of unmasking the ideological value of those needs that are artificially induced by the market only for the purpose of increasing profit.24 Theory then absolves a function of “organization,” but merely in a critical form. Social movements can then antagonize capitalism where capitalism shows its brutal contradictions; world hunger, wars and massacres for economic imperialism, destruction of the environment etc. (the list is tragically long).

Spontaneity, which would be animated by the neediness of the object, should attach itself to the vulnerable places of rigidified reality, where the ruptures caused by the pressure of rigidification appear externally.25

But if so far we have seen the opening of Adorno’s theory to individual forms of “resistance” and to the possibility of their convergence in social “antagonistic” movements, this opening regards mainly forms of practice reactive to domination. This resistance is in fact exercised after the damages caused by capitalism are perceived. But is it possible to develop from Adorno’s theory also a proactive form of practice, namely, a change in the system of production? If, as Adorno sustained, exchange-value is the form in which reification affirms itself in our society, a proactive approach to the change of our society would necessarily involve the creation of an alternative model of production. Marx’s solution in this sense was clear: alienation and reification can be abolished only through the affirmation of democratic control over production and the collective ownership of the means of production. We should see to what extent we can affirm a similar perspective in Adorno. In order to do so, we need first to see what features capitalism has developed ever since Marx formulated his theory. These changes are in fact responsible for the inadequacy today of Marx’s revolutionary perspective. Capitalism has now the features of an “administered world” that represses the formation of a critical consciousness. The analysis of the administered world is a prerequisite of the change of perspective on how to achieve its suppression. For Adorno, resistance primarily means acting autonomously according to a pacifying reason. It is opposition both to the standardization and the egoism (as affirmation of identities imposed by a “constitutive subjectivity”) of an identifying reason. The greatest obstacle to this non-dominative praxis of resistance is the increasingly powerful coercion towards standardization created by social forms of control, whether this coercion is explicitly carried on through violent repression of any antagonistic movement or subliminally perpetrated through ideological and apologetic mass-culture. This is why Adorno’s sociological analysis is

24 Adorno’s refusal to give his support, among other movements, to the students’ movement of 1968 was primarily sustained by his suspicion that this movement still mainly expressed regressively destructive impulses. This suspicion was also alimented by his mistrust of the theoretical support for the movement’s aims. 25 Ibid., 266. Adorno as Marx’s Scholar 43 primarily focused on authoritarian forms of social control and on the element of standardization in mass-culture. The totality of reified society has presently reached a level of cultural standardization where potentially every attempt at self-expression is, at most, relegated to the private sphere, while any social manifestation of a valid alternative is immediately rejected as dysfunctional and repressed with violence. What contemporary capitalism has accomplished is a fake horizontal distribution of wealth, where each single petty bourgeois can feel his participation in the economic system through the insignificant share of stocks to which his future is relegated. This social class is bound up in the illusion of actually possessing a part of capital, while monopolism is spreading under the camouflage of the speed through which the new economy can move. The concentration of monopolistic groups at a multinational level has made major corporations the principal institutions of present capitalism, with a gross product which is often higher than that of many nations. The early stage of capitalism was tied to a real production which was often physically located in factories and directed by a relatively small number of bourgeois families that still resembled the previous situation of the nobility, allowing the rise of a form of consciousness among the exploited class of workers, who were still able to individuate those responsible for their inferior status. With the increasing mobility of capital this process has become virtually impossible. The proletarian class in Western societies has been absorbed into the strictest dependence on the rules of the market, while those who still work in a factory cannot even determine who will be the owner of that enterprise the following day. All of those who still have not been able or who purposely refuse to adhere to this productive mechanism live under the permanent threat of unemployment and of being reabsorbed at any time into absolute destitution. The new slaves of contemporary capitalism have become invisible; all the horrors that are striking the so-called third world are just ignored, or in the best scenario seen as a natural consequence of overpopulation. The process of bureaucratization which is active at the productive level, through the separation of managing functions and the consequent proliferation of controlling tasks, has involved the whole reproduction of society. The trend towards a “scientific organization of work,” the process of rationalization defined by Max Weber as the “essence” of capitalism, has obtained social consequences that are typical of the alienation implied in this organization, drastically tightening up the division between intellectual and manual work. The fragmentation and the repeatability characteristics of the Tayloristic organization of work have determined the loss of a global outlook on the production process, making the absence of preparation and politicization completely functional to this system. The manipulation aimed at obtaining consent, in the democratic-representative State, involves any cultural process at a mass level—through a constant “sales promotion” of the most destructive consumption of commodities—as well as at the level of scientific production. In this way, the bureaucratic scheme includes 44 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis the institutional level and any kind of science which must be functional to its management, so that the reductions of complexity appear as efficient instruments of control directed by an increasingly restricted power structure which tends to the preservation of a fragmented society. Representative democracies have then become the best tool through which increasingly small economic powers can still make the population feel as if they are defending their collected alms from always new enemies. Fascist ideology has always been extremely fruitful in accomplishing the primal goal of Mussolini’s slogan molti nemici, molta gloria. Closed in its wretched shabbiness, the middle-class majority can struggle only against itself, like vultures struggling for the crumbs that capital leaves them. If the soviet threat is no longer capable of producing scapegoats, new ones are created by military lobbies as the enemies of global democratization. The strict rules of adherence to the vicious circle of contemporary capitalism—the alternative that Adorno and Horkheimer identified as the basic role of rationality, between command or obedience, deceit or failure—which regulates our daily existence are reproposed in the same form at the international level. The consequences of this process immediately involve the cultural sphere, reducing even traditionally critical areas to functional parts of the production system. The positivist trend of the early twentieth century has been able to expel from the official academic world any consideration of the social and economic totality as a residual of ancient metaphysics, since it was unable to demonstrate it in empirical terms that would fit the functionality of disciplinary subdivisions. Sociology has been reduced to an increasingly accurate instrument for measuring the social response to the dictates of the market, while philosophy is mostly struggling to find a precise analytical parameter through which reason’s logic can obey itself. The involvement of the masses in artistic production, through the new techniques of accessibility and mechanical reproduction, turned out to have the opposite effect. Instead of determining an opening for the masses to the enjoyment of that which once was addressed only to a small elitist minority, the culture industry has reduced cultural standards to the lowest level. Even the word “artist” has now changed its meaning; anybody can be called an artist, since originality does not have any function in the pure system of reproduction that the marketing structure requires. Adorno’s concept of totality has presently reached such a stage of maturity and perfection that all its rules have become so strict and perfectly functional that even the smallest opportunity to escape from this cage has become a threat which must be immediately repressed. This totality has become so omni-pervasive that it can actually deceive us to the point of considering it the consequence of a “natural” state of things. But we should not judge Adorno’s theory as pessimistic for the “melancholy” through which he describes social totality, since for Adorno this situation is historically determined and false, and as such it can be subverted. The relationship between subject and object, which is currently based on domination, Adorno as Marx’s Scholar 45 can be effectively pacified through the affirmation of forms of material production founded on solidarity:

Those who neither give themselves up wholly to the individualism of intellectual production nor are prepared to pitch themselves headlong into the collectivism of egalitarian interchangeability, with its inherent contempt for man, must fall back on free collaboration and solidarity, with shared responsibility. Anything else sells off the intellect to forms of business and therefore finally to the latter’s interests.26

The concrete alternative to the capitalistic form of production cannot be found in the centralization of the state’s and bureaucracy’s power—since these institutions have been planned to sustain a model of domination—but in an authentic participation and responsibility of workers in their occupation. Marx’s model of a structural change of society seems compatible with Adorno’s theory. A change of the capitalistic production system follows these directives: production needs to be redefined on the basis of the social use-value it creates, so that the individualistic goal of profit will be replaced by the social goal of the satisfaction of those needs which are not ideologically induced by an economic system of exploitation. This process is guided by a rationality which finally considers solidarity as the means to self-preservation, and which therefore rejects any form of domination:

precisely because the whole or the totality of society maintains itself not on the basis of solidarity or from the standpoint of a comprehensive social subject, but only through the antagonistic interests of human beings, this society of rational exchange is infected in its constitution and at its very root by a moment of irrationality which threatens to disintegrate it at any moment.27

A decisive step towards the substitution of profit-seeking with satisfaction of needs as the drive behind economy consists of the substitution of the falsely democratic control over production by shareholders with the control democratically exercised by the workers. A democratic form of government cannot be relegated to the merely formal aspects of the decision-making process—so that it actually becomes a cover for authoritarian forms of plutocracy—but it has to become an integral part of the daily practice of everybody. This substantial broadening of democracy does not correspond to the plebiscitary ruling of the masses, which are more and more ideologically controlled by those who hold economic power, but it actually coincides with the assignation of economic rule to the workers.

26 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 129. 27 T.W. Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, trans. E. Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 43. 46 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

In recent times there has been a proliferation of literature28 on the successfulness and convenience of workplace democracy over capitalistic control of production, which substantially shows an effective remedy for alienation at its very core, that is, the process of work. A form of production that is founded on solidarity and cooperation is certainly in line with the development of a rationality of pacification of nature, insofar as it is capable of sustaining the welfare of society as a whole rather than the restricted interests of a particular sector of it. The most immediate advantage of workplace democracy is that it brings democracy into the everyday reality of individuals’ lives, allowing the democratic model to be experienced in its effective concreteness. This concrete experience of the democratic process would make possible the development of a social and political consciousness among the members of a community. Workplace democracy would also invest each individual with the responsibility for the efficiency and fairness of an enterprise, since everyone would realize that in order to fulfill their own potentials they need to acknowledge their dependency on the growth of the others. While we will not reach here the details of the different approaches to the establishment of workplace democracy, it is important nonetheless to note that these theories are not based on a violent revolutionary praxis as was the one envisioned by Marx, but they rely on empirical evidence that previous forms of cooperative economy have actually proven to be not only feasible, but in many cases even more efficient and productive than capitalistic corporations. Adorno’s affirmation of a rationality based on the pacification of nature can becomean ulterior enrichment for these theories through the consideration of at least two basic points he sustains. First, on a general level, these theories should never be taken as universal and rigid formulas, but they should always be capable of reforming and correcting themselves on the basis of different experiences and contexts. Second, it is necessary to consider human labor as the basic form of self-expression, and productivity as defined by its social use-value. This type of observation prevents the formation of a work ethic which would propose a new domination of nature and alienation, as both Taylorism and Stakhanovism imply, while it fosters the rise of a social and political consciousness among workers which aims at the pacification of nature. An alternative model to the domination of nature which is perpetrated by our social totality cannot set aside the respect for the moment of non-identity which characterizes nature, and this respect becomes in actual praxis the acknowledgment of diversity and difference as the authentic wealth of nature. This fundamental acknowledgment of differences—which rejects the model of what is eloquently defined in capitalism as “human” or “natural resources”—represents an actof resistance against the globalization of a model of exploitation and alienation, and it becomes the model for a free and equal relationship among different subjects. On a human scale, the inter-subjective relations cannot be biased by any claim

28 A few examples of this interpretation are the works of Robert Dahl, Carole Pateman, David Schweickart and Edward Greenberg. Adorno as Marx’s Scholar 47 of superiority based on distinctions of gender, cultural background, ethnicity, physical ability or personal preferences of any type (addressing religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation, etc.). On a broader, natural scale we cannot claim a hierarchical distinction among living beings in general. Inter-subjective relations which exclude the element of domination necessarily include the relations between any living being, since “subjects” are qualified as such not by some abstract metaphysical qualities (such as “spirit” or reason), but by the fact that they have needs, and therefore they are capable of experiencing pain and pleasure. Fundamental points shared by the critics of rationality are in fact a firm support for the protection of the environment, which can no longer be considered a mere instrument for the unconditional satisfaction of human needs, and an affirmation of equal dignity between humans and animals. Solidarity and respect for diversity—the necessary practical completion of a theory of pacification and non-identity—are the grounds for resistance to authoritarian forms of domination. Even if the margins for this praxis of resistance from a reified social totality are increasingly small, it is possible and necessary to refuse a passive adhesion to the destructive mechanisms of a merely instrumental reason. Adorno does not consider totality as a self-regulating machinery which will necessarily lead to its own overcoming, since for him the collapse of totality corresponds to complete catastrophe for nature and therefore for humans. The only alternative which we have is of inverting reason’s destructiveness through the establishment of its authentically social goal, which corresponds to the affirmation of democratic models of control over material production that aim at sustainable economic and technological development. Technology, as any other means developed by rationality, needs to be requalified on the basis of reason’s authentic goal of pacification. The development of technological means, once it has been subtracted from a purely profit-creating purpose and integrated into a democratic process of decision-making, can finally direct us towards the fulfillment of our needs and the “end of materialism.” Adorno did not pessimistically ignore this possibility:

Material needs, which long seemed to mock progress, have been potentially eliminated; thanks to the present state of the technical forces of production no one on the planet need suffer deprivation anymore. Whether there will be further want and oppression—which are the same thing—will be decided solely by the avoidance of catastrophe through the rational establishment of the whole society as humanity.29

Adorno was probably more Nietzschean than Marxist on the question of how to rationally establish the whole society as humanity. The changes he proposes for reason are in fact close to Nietzsche’s perspective regarding a “poetic reason,” that is, a form of reason that finally recognizes and respects the moment of non-identity

29 Adorno, Critical Models, 144. 48 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis of nature. But while this Nietzschean model for Adorno has a crucial critical value, he did not follow it in its irrationalist conclusions. Reason in Adorno maintains its calculative moment, but it directs this moment towards the fulfillment of the fully social category of freedom. Even his conclusions on the social actor that can transform the totality resemble more a new humanity as it was envisioned by Nietzsche in his Übermensch, than a class of the oppressed, whose consciousness is enslaved to an ideology of domination. Adorno was able, though, to integrate the value of absolute autonomy of thought of Nietzsche’s Übermensch with the social consideration of the process of reification. What this analysis is trying to achieve is not an impossible interpretation of Adorno’s theory as proposing a full disclosure of a positive image of praxis, but to develop his own interpretation of Marx into an active subversion of the false totality. In the first place, this means to go beyond the interpretation ofMarx in terms of historical determinism and to reaffirm his critique of ideology and alienation as the key to a conception of humanity as autonomous and free. Our hope for a life that finally lives,30 in the Unwesen of our social totality, lies today in our “reasonable” ability to resist the globalization of domination. Going back to Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach,31 what we wanted to show here is that the critique of rationality sustained by Adorno is not a mere “interpretation” of the world. This critique, in fact, is a fundamental prerequisite of the affirmation of a radical alternative to the catastrophic consequences of capitalism. The point, though, is still to change the world. This change will not occur through a merely aesthetic critique of the “false totality.” The aesthetic model needs to become practical. Adorno’s philosophy needs to be brought back to the original Marxist task of changing the economic structure of society. Adorno’s critique is an invaluable tool for raising consciousness against the administered world, but it leaves completely open the question of how to change this world. His fear that any positive image of political practice would immediately transform itself into a restraint on the autonomous “quest for the right form of politics”32 shows its limits, which can be summarized in Martin Jay’s observation that Adorno’s politics “is clearly more a politics of attitude than of programmatic or procedural substance.”33 Forcing an interpretation of Adorno as a “political theorist” would be counterproductive; at best, it would propose an individual resistance to heteronomy. The value of the tradition of critique of rationality that we have analyzed here lies in its ability to provide the Marxist task of a structural change of society with a critical insight on the causes that have prevented its fulfillment. The “Grand Hotel Abyss” is on

30 As the answer to the opening quotation of Adorno’s Minima Moralia, according to which “life does not live.” 31 “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it.” 32 Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, 176. 33 M. Jay, “Review of Hespen Hammer’s ‘Adorno and the political’,” in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (Notre Dame 5/2006). Adorno as Marx’s Scholar 49 a perfect location for seeing the causes of the unfulfilled dream of a free society. The acknowledgment that we are blindly proceeding towards catastrophe, the refusal of a blind optimism in a rationality grounded in domination is necessary for stepping out of the vicious circle of productivity in capitalism; the circularity of production, consumption and death. Critique of rationality, though, must become practical. Adorno’s theory, as Feenberg observes, “takes no risks and offers no prospects.”34 That Adorno took no risks in proposing a model of political practice seems undeniable, but it is equally undeniable that he took all the risks of affirming absolute autonomy of thought. At the same time, the prospects that he offered for a change in our model of rationality are decisive for counteracting the domination implied in a merely instrumental reason, but the prospects for social change are too tenuous for constructing a solid political theory.

34 A. Feenberg, Heidegger and Marcuse (New York: Routledge, 2005), 133. This page has been left blank intentionally Chapter 5 The Question of Praxis in Adorno’s Critical Theory James Gordon Finlayson

Correct revolutionary theory … assumes final shape only in connection with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement. Lenin

A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery … A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. Mao

The Disorder of Western Marxism

In a defense of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1920, Lenin set out three conditions he thought necessary to the successful achievement of its aim “to overthrow the bourgeoisie and transform the whole of society.” These conditions were: first, sustaining the class-consciousness of the revolutionary vanguard, andits devotion to the revolution; second, maintaining contact and even merging with the proletariat and “the non-proletarian masses of working people”; and third, ensuring the correctness of its leadership and its “political strategy and tactics.” In other words, there is a virtuous circle between correct theory and revolutionary praxis that is mediated by the revolutionary vanguard’s connection with the mass of working people, a unity which Lenin notes, is not a dogmatic and external imposition, but an endogenous development of “correct revolutionary theory … which assumes final shape only in connection with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement.”1 Perry Anderson takes this sentence from Lenin as motto and conclusion to his Considerations on Western Marxism, a book which perfectly exemplifies the Marxist left’s assessment of the Frankfurt School’s attitude to praxis, and of Adorno’s in particular. In Lenin, Anderson sees an “organic unity of theory and

1 V.I. Lenin, 1968 [1920], “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, https:// www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch02.htm. 52 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis practice” from which lofty summit leads the meandering downward trail to the politically desert plains of Western Marxism.2 Western Marxism, according to Anderson, is a crippled and impotent descendent of an earlier more vigorous ancestor. In general, he claims that Western Marxists were academics, preoccupied with questions of method, who consoled themselves for their alienation from politics by writing about aesthetics and culture, rather than matters of political and economic substance. Their work was the product of “defeat” and “political isolation and despair.”3 According to Anderson, this was less true of the earlier generation, for example Lukács, who still had experience of party politics, than it was of the later generation, who did not. It is the later generation, to which Adorno belongs, that marks the real decline and fall of Marxist theory from praxis. With them Marxism “migrated virtually completely into the universities—precincts at once of refuge and exile from the political struggles in the world outside.”4 As professional philosophers they had an unhealthy interest in Hegel, and while this was “not necessarily a philosophical recidivism” they inevitably came under the bad influence of idealist and religious theories.5 Adorno, in particular, was “saturated with Hegelian influence” and as a result his Marxism “represented, by the sixties, an extreme version of its renunciation of any discourse on classes or politics.”6 This caricature, which is familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of critical theory, is of Adorno performing deathly feats of dialectical abstraction, and writing tortuous texts on avant-garde music and literature, uninterested in participating in any political activities that might actually be effective in bringing about the transformation of the society he criticized, has become widespread.7 Not only the caricature has stuck, so has the summary judgment of Adorno’s critical theory as crippled by a relentless pessimism with regard to the prospects for political change, which amounts to “pessimism as quiescence.”8

2 Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso, 1989[1976]), 29, 11, and 105. 3 Anderson, Considerations, 43. 4 Ibid., 50. 5 Ibid., 60–61. 6 Ibid., 72. 7 Though more detailed and more wordy, the criticism is essentially no different to Lukács’s coruscating remark that Adorno had “taken up residence in the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’” which Leftist critics of Adorno subsequently queued up to repeat. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971) 22. 8 Anderson, Considerations, 93. The Question of Praxis in Adorno’s Critical Theory 53

The Student Critique of Frankfurt School Critical Theory

There is something wrong with this view and Anderson’s version of it is unoriginal, simplistic and unjustified. However, it cannot be dismissed out of hand. These views are strikingly similar to those of Adorno’s students shortly before and after 1968. Not only were they much closer to Adorno himself; they were more familiar with his work, and far more sympathetic to Adorno’s philosophy and to Adorno himself than Anderson. It is instructive to look at their critique closely, because Adorno’s most important thoughts on the relation between theory and praxis are formulated in reply to those criticisms. To be properly assessed, the students’ objections need to be examined in the context of the Federal Republic of Germany in the late sixties. This was a time when the Vietnam War was raging, and social unrest was rising in the US and in Europe. Governments were unpopular and a demographically significant generation of young people—the Baby boomers—wanted change. In the FRG a peculiar concentration of domestic issues gave rise to a highly volatile political climate. The Grand Coalition between the CDU/CSU and the SPD had effectively eliminated internal parliamentary opposition in the FRG, which fueled the suspicion that it was a technocratic, authoritarian and anti-democratic state. This perception inspired the formation of the “extra parliamentary opposition” (APO). At the same time the Federal Government planned to introduce university reforms, reducing the time in which students were allowed to graduate, limiting student numbers, and tying university courses more closely to the needs of the economy. In the students’ eyes the universities were backward, undemocratic, authoritarian institutions, in need of democratization. At the same time the government was about to take advantage of their parliamentary majority to enact Emergency Laws into the German Basic Law. In the light of recent history, this was widely regarded as a threat to democracy and a potential opening to totalitarianism. This already volatile atmosphere was detonated by a single event in Berlin on June 2, 1967, when a literature student at the F.U., Benno Ohnesorg, was shot in the back by a plain clothes policeman, Karl-Heinz Kurras. Ohnesorg was on the fringes of a protest against the Shah of Iran outside the Opera House in Charlottenburg, which turned nasty when the police attacked the students. Kurras’s defense in court, was that he had been attacked by knife-wielding students and that his gun had gone off “by accident.” The story did not fit the facts, which indicated a deliberate, execution-style killing by the plain-clothes officer. Kurras was predictably acquitted on all charges. It stunk of a cover up.9 The right- wing media, notably Axel Springer’s popular tabloid, Bild-Zeitung, conducted a prolonged campaign designed to discredit student protesters, and to foment popular resentment against them. B-Z cynically took the side of the police in the Ohnesorg

9 Many years later an investigation showed that the police, police authorities, medical staff and hospital authorities and not least the media, took part in the conspiracy. http:// www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-65489959.html. 54 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis affair, blaming the students for his death, and likening them to Nazi storm troops, who had brought “terror” to free Berlin. In the months following Ohnesorg’s death B-Z continued to hound the SDS (Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund) and to discredit its leader, Rudi Dutschke. Their campaign was fatally successful. Less than a year later, Dutschke himself was shot by a Nazi sympathizer and devotee of B-Z, leading students, professors and some liberal establishment figures to condemn B-Z for incitement.10

* * *

Let’s turn to some concrete examples of the students’ objections to Adorno’s critical theory and its relation to praxis.

(i) Rudi Dutschke’s incipit into political activism was a cryptic notice fly-posted by a group of left activists and performance artists, influenced by situationism, who called themselves “Subversive Action.” Mimicking a classified ad, the notice comprised six passages from Adorno’s work. Underneath, it read: “We believe that knowledge is not accomplishment. If you also find this disparity between analysis and action unbearable, then write, under the heading ‘Antithesis’ to P.O. Box 8, Munich 23.”11 This was in 1964. The small-ad was soliciting inquiries from people dissatisfied with Adorno’s critical social theory because of its distance from praxis. Intrigued, Dutschke replied and was subsequently initiated into Subversive Action.12

(ii) In a panel discussion on “Authority and Revolution” in September 1968 in Frankfurt, Hans-Jurgen Krahl, Adorno’s doctoral student, related the following anecdote.

During an occupation of Frankfurt University Adorno was the only professor who turned up and appeared at the sit-in. He was met with an ovation and headed straight for the microphone. But just as he got there, he abruptly turned off and headed into the philosophy department. So, just before praxis, back into theory. That is basically how things stand in critical theory today. It rationalizes

10 Norbert Frei, 1968. Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest (München: DTV, 1968), 114–21. See Habermas’s Interview with Die Zeit, May 31, 1968, one month after Dutschke’s shooting, where he specifically accuses B-Z of manipulating the press against the students. Wolfgang Kraushaar ed., Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung. Von der Flaschenpost zum Molotovcocktail 19466–1995, Vol. 2 (Hamburg: Rogner & Berhnard, 1998), 400. 11 Although the passages are unattributed, at the foot of the notice, a fake declaration of legal responsibility for the content of an advertisement stated: “Verantwortlich Th. W Adorno, 6 Frankfurt/Main, Kettenhofweg 123.” 12 Kraushaar ed., Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung 2, 176. The Question of Praxis in Adorno’s Critical Theory 55

its resigned and subtly individualistic fear of praxis, by claiming that praxis is to a certain extent impossible, and that one has to retreat into the edifice of philosophy.”13

(iii) In the same panel discussion, Karl-Dietrich Wolff asked Adorno to imagine the effect, had someone with a “voice, reputation and significance” such as his, marched with the students against the Emergency Laws in Bonn, and broken through the police cordon. Adorno’s response is well known: “I don’t know if corpulent elderly gentlemen are the right people to march with on demonstrations.”14

(iv) On December 4, 1968, a leaflet written by a group of sociology students at Frankfurt, and distributed in the department, claimed that; “The professional critical critics of the Frankfurt School, with theoretical solicitude, renounce left-wing theory … We have had enough of this situation.” The offensive notice concluded with the observation that students are not prepared “to play the left idiots of the authoritarian State, who are critical in theory, but conformist in practice … .”15 (The “critical critics’ remark alludes to Marx’s satirical name for Bruno and Edgar Bauer and their followers, whom he and Engels disparaged as utopian socialists, purveyors of well-meaning but useless ideas.)

The basic objection is that Adorno’s critical theory is insincere and ineffective, because he refuses to participate in protests which aimed to bring about social change. Adorno, they charge, is more concerned with the niceties of his philosophy than with making a practical commitment to a cause he purports to believe in. Hence, the students conclude, he is tacitly complicit with the ruling powers, and partly responsible for existing conditions remaining unchanged. The charges of quiescence and theoreticism resembles Anderson’s critique, Although whereas he objects to the lack of a connection between Adorno’s critical theory and the organized workers’ movement and the revolutionary masses, the students primarily complain of the unwillingness of their professors to participate in symbolic and collective action such as demonstrations and protests. It is somewhat ironic that the conflict between the Frankfurt Professors and their students developed in the context of a campaign against the government’s (and for their own) proposed university reform, a campaign of which Adorno, Horkheimer, Ludwig von Friedeburg, and Habermas were supportive. They welcomed, for

13 Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung 2, 462. 14 Ibid., 464–5. This is no doubt a rationalization in the Freudian sense. Adorno was actually a keen walker. He was also an implacable opponent of the Emergency Laws. However, he had an almost allergic repulsion to participating in collective action. 15 Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule 2, 374. Adorno responds in kind to this scholarly insult, almost certainly directly, at the end of “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis.” T.W. Adorno, Critical Models, 278. 56 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis example, more student representation—up to a third—on the relevant administrative bodies.16 Though the change was not in gift of their professors, the students were pushing at an open door, and Adorno rated their possibilities of success as “very high indeed.”17 He defended the student’s tactics of spontaneously breaking up seminars with “sit-ins and go-ins” from the charge of fascism that was leveled by their right wing opponents. There was all the difference in the world, he countered, between the actions of fascists, and those of these students which he viewed as “a potential for change within the rules of democracy.”18 These were actions by students who were already “mündig” (politically mature or autonomous) aimed at reforming an antiquated university system in a state of “Unmündigkeit.” Provided the students actions targeted “quite concrete Higher educational aims” they could count on their professors’ wholehearted support.19 However, as the students’ self-assurance grew, buoyed by a wave of solidarity following their brutal treatment by the police and the media, so their demands escalated. In December 1968 the Strike Committee handed a list of demands to the Sociology Faculty, including: the demand that students be able to determine their own teaching and research; that these have equal recognition to that of existing courses; that they be handed the means to accomplish this aim, which meant administrative support and at least 30% of the Sociology departmental budget. A document of the self-proclaimed Spartakus-Seminar (Spartacus-Department) a group who occupied the Sociology department, the so-called Negativkatalog, declared also that students should have 50% representation on departmental committees, so they would not be tyrannized by the majority of the faculty.20 By all appearances the students were not out to reform the university, but to conquer it. Habermas saw this clearly, and took the attack to the students. He argued that the core group of students (including Dutschke and two of Adorno’s doctoral students in Frankfurt, Oskar Negt and Hans-Jürgen Krahl), were deploying the tactic of “confrontation at any price” and using the motive of curriculum reform “merely as a vehicle to destroy academic activity as such” on the misconceived grounds that academic “Wissenschaft itself is a form of oppression that should be

16 Ibid., 325. Adorno was, however, opposed to any changes that resulted in the lowering of the academic level required of the students, and adamant that the teacher pupil relation was intrinsically asymmetrical and thus that universities could not be run entirely democratically. See his discussion with Szondi in Rolf Tiedemann ed., Frankfurter Adorno Blätter VI (Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, München, 2000), 142–55. 17 Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule 2, 327. See also Tiedemann, Frankfurter Adorno Blätter VI, 160–61. 18 See for example Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule 2, 328–9, and Tiedemann, Frankfurter Adorno Blätter VI, 167. 19 Tiedemann, Frankfurter Adorno Blätter VI, 170. Habermas’s support was conditional: their actions had to aim at clearly defined changes of the existing institution that would be sanctioned by law. Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule 2, 502. 20 Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule 2, 502. The Question of Praxis in Adorno’s Critical Theory 57 abolished.”21 The attempt “to exert plebiscitary control over teaching arrangements, was not legitimate, but disastrous” he declared.22 Habermas and Adorno objected to these demands as manifestations of “actionism.” Habermas understood actionism as “a praxis that avails itself of every opportunity for mobilization, merely for the sake of mobilization, rather than justified tactical action with clear targets and a good chance of success.”23 Adorno construed “actionism” as action for action’s sake, essentially pointless activity which could not be explained in reference to the students explicit goals and intentions, but called for a deeper social-psychological explanation. (We will return to the critique of praxis as actionism below.) Needless to say the students’ did not view their own actions as either pointless, or conducted for their own sake. Indeed, in their eyes aim of reforming existing institutions had been “historically superseded,” because, as Krahl put it, the institution of the university would permit no “immanent reform.”24 This was also Dutschke’s position about West German society in general: “This society is incapable of bringing about qualitative change on its own.” Thus Dutschke argued that “the politicization of the university is the point of departure for … the transformation of society.”25 The students were talking about a revolution; and they were not just talking. They were following Marighella’s maxim (much quoted by Che Guevara) that “the first duty of the revolutionary is to make the revolution.” Thus Dutschke informed Spiegel that the students were aiming to bring about “continuous revolution in all spheres of bourgeois life.”26 Negt claimed that the student protest movement is “at this time the only revolutionary potential of advanced industrial society” and that “revolutionary protest is the only medium in which theory and praxis … can be mediated,” while Krahl announced to the liberal press: “we are not revolutionary dreamers. Objective conditions have long made revolutionary liberation in the metropolitan cities the order of the day.”27 In the students’ eyes, the university, not excepting the Institute for Social Research, was part of the existing order, and the existing order needed to be overthrown. Revolutions, however, are seldom to be had without violence.28 The students had experienced the state’s monopoly on armed violence at first hand. In turn, they had thrown tomatoes, and—legend has it—copies of Wilhelm Reich’s Mass

21 Ibid., 503–4, 507. 22 Ibid., 251. 23 Ibid., 249. 24 Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule 2, 326. See Dutschke’s answer to the question about the role of a revolutionary. Rudi Dutschke, “Wir fordern die Enteignung Axel Springers” Spiegel-Gespräch mit dem Berliner FU-Studenten, Rudi Dutschke (SDS), Spiegel, July 10, 1967, 29. 25 Dutschke, “Wir fordern die Enteignung Axel Springers,” 30. 26 Ibid., 29. 27 Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule 2, 300, 347. 28 Of course there are notable exceptions, which include the last phase of the struggle for Indian Independence, where Mohandas Gandhi’s policy of non-violent direct action was 58 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

Psychology of Fascism, a large tome, and an excellent missile symbolically, but no match for armed police. Yet the student leaders were uncharacteristically coy about the question of violence. Krahl raised the question of how unarmed opposition can revolt and overthrow the state, with its monopoly of arms. However, he proposed no answer.29 Dutschke, for his part, accepted that “violence is a constituent of power” that has to be “answered with demonstrative violence,” but did not elaborate further. Rather, he denied the need for an “incitement to violence, murder and killing” in the metropolitan cities, and claimed it is “wrong” and “counterrevolutionary.”30 The best chance of overthrowing the existing order, he maintained, consisted in building a broad coalition of opposition and creating new forms or living. This left important questions unanswered. Is armed revolt morally justified? Is it necessary? And if so, how will the students overthrow a state with only tomatoes, copies of Wilhelm Reich, and, at the limit, a few stones and a handful of Molotov cocktails? While the students increasingly saw protest as a means to revolution, they did not see their actions as merely instrumental, as necessary steps toward revolution and no more: they had a value in themselves. Negt, and later Krahl, understood the value of protest against the Vietnam war to consist in the “building of a political morality,” a “morality of political action, of practical resistance.”31 Just how this squared with their Marxist critique of bourgeois morality, is unclear, but for Negt it was enough to allay the charge that it was action for action’s sake. Nor did the fact that they considered themselves to be in what Dutschke called “a very, very long and complicated transitional period” mean that nothing concrete could be achieved in the here and now.32 Rather than wait for the mechanisms of power to bring about legally sanctioned educational reforms, the students planned to institute an “anti-university” that was to be run by graduate students and junior faculty, as an “appendage of the existing university.”33 An alternative idea was to institute the anti-university elsewhere. It would teach “revolutionary science,” courses on “the Chinese revolution and its relevance to the present conflict,” and would also offer “sexual enlightenment” to young workers, and legal and practical advice on strike organization.34 In other words, the praxis envisaged by the students was not simply a strategy for overthrowing the existing order, and of merely instrumental value, nor was it confined to the negative mode of criticism and protest. Their praxis successfully implemented, and the Velvet Revolution of Winter 1989, which brought down the Communist government of Czechoslovakia. 29 Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule 2, 276. 30 Dutschke, “Wir fordern die Enteignung Axel Springers,” 32. 31 Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule 2, 299, 347. Again, one can see the inspiration of Adorno here. 32 Dutschke, “Wir fordern die Enteignung Axel Springers,” 30. 33 Dutschke, “Wir fordern die Enteignung Axel Springers,” 31. 34 Ibid., 31. See also Negt, “Über die Idee einer kritischen und antiautoritären Universität” in Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule 2, 415–17. The Question of Praxis in Adorno’s Critical Theory 59 was constitutive of, and was to help to generate, a counterculture, a new society gestating in the interstices of the old. And it was already happening. The students lived in communes, which exhibited and enacted a critique of traditional family living arrangements and “bourgeois” practices such as monogamy and monoandry. They extended the boundaries of the political to include many aspects of personal life, and to domains of social life hitherto deemed private and of no political significance. Moreover, the new institutions they created were anticipations and pre-figurations in the present of the better ones to which they aspired. For example, the autonomous, student-run “anti-university” (or “critical university”) would be organized along soviet lines; run from below by “worker’s councils.” As Krahl put it “permanent university revolt would constitute a demonstrative anticipation of the practical claim to an effective control from below in the sense of a ‘soviet democracy.’”35 Dutschke proposed that not just the university but the whole of West Berlin could serve as an example of “direct soviet democracy in which free individuals could be freely and directly elected, on a temporary and rotating basis, in every area of social life … factories, schools, universities, administrative bodies etc.”36 Adorno claimed that he wanted to “develop a theory that remain(ed) faithful to Marx, Engels and Lenin.”37 So did the students, but in their case the theory was to be embodied in their revolutionary praxis

Varieties of Praxis

At this point we need to separate out some of the various different meanings of the polysemous term “praxis” that are in play in the preceding discussion. For it is clear that several quite different kinds of activity are being canvassed under the same term. In particular we should distinguish between the following different notions, which fall roughly into two groups of three.

1. Partying-organization, and associated grass roots activity required to build a revolutionary mass movement. 2. Revolution in the sense of the (usually) violent overthrow of the ruling power, the bourgeoisie, and its political, judicial and military apparatus. 3. The establishment of new institutions, practices, and forms of organization, a) in the transitional period immediately following a communist revolution or b) as these would be developed under full-blown, settled communism.

35 Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule 2, 250. I use the term “soviet democracy’ as a translation for the German “Rätedemokratie,” which literally means democracy by council. 36 Ibid., 257; See also Dutshke, “Wir fordern die Enteignung Axel Springers,” 29. 37 T.W. Adorno, “New Manifesto,” 69. By Anderson’s lights the students efforts must be deemed a failure, though not the same kind of failure as Adorno’s: Adorno’s critical theory failed to engage properly with revolutionary praxis: the students revolutionary praxis failed to produce a revolution. 60 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

4. Protests and demonstrations aiming at revolution in sense 2. 5. Protests and demonstrations geared to achieving reform, possibly radical—root and branch reform—of existing institutions. 6. The creation of new institutions, a counter-culture in a non-revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situation.

These notions do not exhaust the meaning of the term “praxis” and are not meant to, but they form a spectrum that broadly covers all notions in play in the criticisms we have looked at so far. Nor are these distinctions sharp; they bleed into each other. But they are importantly different, and these differences should not be ignored. For one thing, they show that there are as many doctrines of the so-called “unity of theory and praxis” as there are relevant conceptions of praxis. For instance, the first three concepts resemble the ones in the Lenin passage. It is these, Anderson claims, that are disconnected from Frankfurt School critical theory. By contrast, the last three are the ones in play in the students’ criticisms. Though both objections target the alleged lack of a unity between theory and praxis, they can (and do) mean quite different things. Finally, Adorno, when he is not criticizing an opposed conception of praxis, rarely uses the term “praxis” in any of the above senses, and generally means something different again.

Adorno’s Conception of Praxis

Adorno’s views on praxis have to be seen against the backdrop of his diagnosis of contemporary society. Adorno paints a picture of society which is “totally administered, radically and pervasively “evil,” in the sense that it is completely in thrall to a system of production and consumption which is “false to its innermost core.”38 Society is structured like a system, in that each aspect of social life is forcibly integrated into the whole, and in which, consequently there is “nothing harmless left.”39 This is what Adorno means by the “false” life, in which, he claims, “there is no right living” and that is replete with active tendencies to totalitarianism and fascism.40 The precise shape of Adorno’s diagnosis is a matter of debate. On my view, Adorno is an austere negativist. By this I mean he holds there can be literally no “right-living,” that is, no untarnished moral principle or intrinsic value; and no conception of the good that has not been thoroughly compromised by its entanglement in the administered world. According to Adorno, under present conditions, not only can we not live rightly, we cannot so much as conceive of what it would be to live an ethically and morally right life.

38 T.W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge 2000), 31. 39 T.W. Adorno, Minima Moralia. Reflections from a Damaged Life. trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1991), 5. 40 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 39 (translation amended). The Question of Praxis in Adorno’s Critical Theory 61

Although ostensibly a thesis about ethics, which for Adorno refers to individual conduct in the sphere of private life, austere negativism, as he recognizes, has implications for politics also.41 One such implication is that radical and sweeping social change is required if human beings are to be capable of right-living.42 Nothing short of a total social transformation of the whole society, a revolution in people’s minds and actions, will do, because the very ways human beings have come to think and to act—viz. “identity thinking” and “instrumental rationality”—are underlying causes of the existing oppression. In a nutshell: only a revolution will do.43 We need to make clear that by “revolution” here is meant radical, far-reaching social change. Adorno, the arch-critic of capitalism, is no advocate of communism, actually existing or not. Indeed, he is severely critical of Soviet communism.44 Moreover, Adorno never speaks of the means by which such a social transformation is to obtained, and he explicitly rules out the violent overthrow of the ruling powers.45 The idea that only a revolution will do, is not a call for a communist revolution or an uprising against the bourgeois state. Another implication of the idea is that mere reform of what exists is not enough. Adorno argues that human consciousness and rationality have been completely integrated into the social system, so that the very same capacities required to bring reform about are what need to be changed. Piecemeal reform will thus only result in either a superficial modification, or a perpetuation, of what exists.46 Now, as we have seen, the students also believed that only a revolution will do, albeit without the caveats concerning the meaning of the term “revolution.”

41 As Adorno notes “the quest for the good life is the quest for the right form of politics.” T.W. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 176. 42 T.W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. R Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972) vol. 8, 579. Henceforth GS. 43 Adorno talks of “praxis in the emphatic sense” rather than of revolution. By this he generally means total social transformation, and not communist revolution or the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie. Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule 2, 652; Adorno, Critical Models, 4. 44 Adorno is highly critical of the Soviet Union for its use of state terror. Adorno, GS 20.1, 391. Speaking in private to Horkheimer in 1956 he goes so far as to say that the “Russians are fascists” and not socialists. T.W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “Towards a New Manifesto,” New Left Review 65, 2010, 49. In Minima Moralia, Adorno criticizes communism by implication when he claims that the abolition of private property leads to “a loveless disregard for things, which necessarily turns against people too.” Adorno, Minima Moralia, 39. C.f. Adorno, “New Manifesto,” 59. 45 Adorno claims that the only meaningful transformative praxis that he can imagine would be a non-violent one. Kraushaar Frankfurter Schule 2, 261–2 Although he allows that violence might be appropriate in the most extreme situations, he denies that such a situation obtains. Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule 2, 263. However, he also claims that reform “cannot be brought about by peaceful means.” Adorno, “New Manifesto,” 37. 46 Adorno, Critical Models, 268. See also Adorno GS 8: 579. 62 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

And they also agreed with Adorno that the existing social system was incapable of immanent reform.47 This is why Marcuse rightly points out to Adorno that the very students who turned against him were “influenced by us (and certainly not least by you).”48 That said, this convergence on the view that only a revolution—and not reform—could produce the required social change, concealed deeper underlying differences. Adorno’s austere negativism meant not only that revolutionary praxis in sense 6 (a positive pre-figuration in the present of new institutions inthe future) is impossible, but also that any ideas the students had that demonstrations and protests had intrinsic moral worth, or might contribute to the institution of a counterculture with intrinsic worth, were illusory. Austere negativism is incompatible with central aspects of the students’ understanding of their actions. But by far the most significant difference between The Frankfurt School theorists and their students was on the historical and social question of whether they were in a revolutionary situation. The Frankfurt Professors were adamant that the volatile situation in Germany was not anywhere close to revolutionary. Even Marcuse, denied it.49 Habermas was unequivocal. He told the students: “We are not facing a revolution either today or tomorrow.”50 For his part, Adorno had consistently maintained that one of the chief tasks of philosophy and social theory was to reflect on the fact that in the advanced Western nations no revolution had occurred.51 The chief reason for this, he maintained, was the integration of workers and their consciousness into the capitalist system. This integration was itself a complex process with numerous canalizations, economic, cultural and social-psychological.52 Importantly, though, it was not only, or even primarily, due

47 See note 24 above. One important difference is that the students insist that the university is immune to immanent reform, and in hock to the capitalist system, whereas Adorno claims that the University is open to reform. Incidentally, Habermas rejected both the diagnostic premise of austere negativism and the conclusion. He firmly believed that constitutional democracy, dynamized by a democratic public sphere, had the capacity to recuperate and reform itself, and argued that the students should be militating for reforms in accordance with the Enlightenment principles enshrined in the Basic Law. 48 Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule 2, 602. 49 In an interview with Le Monde, on May 11, 1968, Marcuse claimed “in the USA the situation is not in the least revolutionary, nor even pre-revolutionary.” Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule 2, 380, 381. In correspondence with Adorno he wrote: “We know and they know, that the situation is not a revolutionary one, not even a pre-revolutionary one.” Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule 2, 602; also 653, 656. 50 Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule 2, 344. See also 249, 255. 51 This is one of several meanings behind the famous opening sentence of Negative Dialectics: “Philosophy … lives on because the moment of its realization was missed.” Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 15. 52 Adorno, Critical Models 14, 72. On this topic, see the excellent article by Deborah Cook, “Ein Reaktionäres Schwein? Political Activism and Prospects for Change in Adorno,” Révue Internationale de Philosophie, 227 (2004): 47–67. The Question of Praxis in Adorno’s Critical Theory 63 to false-consciousness. The incipient welfare state and its provisions really had eased the pain of social suffering and helped pacify class-conflict, while the return to full-employment after the two World Wars saw tangible economic and social improvements in the lives of workers. As a consequence, Adorno argued, “the very possibility of alliance and mass revolution has become questionable.”53 Note that this analysis rests on historical and socio-economic evidence, and is independent of the more metaphysically extravagant and empirically questionable doctrine of austere negativism. Still, they evinced the same conclusion that, as Adorno put it, “praxis—in its emphatic sense … is blocked.”54 Not only do we “not live in a revolutionary situation,” Adorno said, but the horror is (and this is an implication of austere negativism) “we live in a world in which we can no longer imagine a better one.”55 To take stock for a moment, this is already a good answer to Anderson’s criticism. Adorno’s Marxism is not shaped by revolutionary praxis in senses 1–3, and in fact consciously eschews organic unity with these, because it responds to a social situation where revolution neither occurred nor threatened. Nothing further need be said about the nefarious influence of Hegel, the retreat into academia, or the consolations of avant-garde art. At the same it is also a rejoinder to Krahl’s objection that Adorno’s critical theory suffers from a political contradiction, because his private horror of social suffering never translated into “an organized partisanship of theory for the liberation of the oppressed.”56 What Krahl presents as the political contradiction in Adorno’s theory, is simply the objective, if conflicted, situation that Adorno’s critical theory undertakes to explain; in a nutshell, that only a revolution will do, but no revolution is near. This is what I call the paradoxical principle of Adorno’s conception of praxis, and point of departure for his late thoughts on the relation of theory and praxis.

Adorno’s Countercriticisms

Adorno’s defense against the students’ criticisms consists in several different lines of arguments. Two theses are recurrent motifs, and it would seem that Adorno holds them to be of especial significance. The first thesis is that theory has primacy over praxis under present conditions. In the last interview Adorno gave, he stated: “I am a theoretical person” and “I value theory more highly at this point,” while adding that his turn from praxis was nothing new, since his work “has always stood in a very indirect relation to

53 Adorno, “Reflexionen zur Klassentheorie,” GS 8, 384; “New Manifesto,” 61. 54 Kraushaar Frankfurter Schule 2, 652; Adorno, Critical Models, 4. 55 Adorno, “New Manifesto,” 61. 56 Hans-Jürgen, Krahl, “Der politische Widerspruch der Kritischen Theorie Adornos,” Frankfurter Rundschau, August 13, 1969, reprinted in Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule 2, 673–75. 64 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis praxis.”57 Behind this thesis are three different arguments which I shall expound and comment on in turn.

1. Understanding how the actuality of late capitalist society, in which constitutional democracy and the welfare state have contained capitalism’s inherent tendencies towards inequality and crisis, is a more pressing concern for critical theory, Adorno insists, than agitating for the revolution manqué. (This is a good point, though its force here is limited. It only shows the primacy of theory over certain kinds of revolutionary praxis in a non-revolutionary situation.) 2. Adorno claims that theory, as he practices it is better apt to resist assimilation into the administered world, than is praxis.58 This is because theory is inherently reflective, and as criticism, manages to preserve the present state of abeyance, acting as a “placeholder for freedom in the midst of the unfree.”59 This idea is connected to his austere negativism, according to which the only way to preserve the integrity of a genuinely revolutionary (i.e. transformative) practice is through the criticism of presently existing “radically evil” institutions. Thinking is more utopian—in the good sense—than acting. Or as he puts it: “Open thinking points beyond itself,” a claim he also makes about some works of autonomous art.60 It is thus better able to canvass the possibility that things might be otherwise, than an adventitious praxis that tends, in spite of itself, to reproduce what exists. (There is something suspiciously self-serving about this argument, which implies that Adorno’s preferred activities—philosophy and art—are genuine forms of criticism, and that the students’ actions aren’t. It also overlooks the point that actions can be reflective too. Not all action is blind and unreflective. And, besides, it seems arbitrary to say that only works of philosophy and certain works of art have the capacity to “point beyond themselves” and thus hold open a better future. Insofar as it is convincing at all, the argument depends on Adorno’s correlative critique of “actionism.” 3. Theoretical criticism, in virtue of the discipline it imposes, and the time and effort it takes to formulate, has the effect of subduing and sublimating rage and anger. While action often serves as a conduit for pent-up aggression and rage, genuine critical thinking, even if it does not aim at persuasion and eliciting agreement, is never violent: “He who thinks is, in all their criticism, not enraged.”61 Consequently, properly reflected theoretical criticism is essentially non-violent, whereas the actions of enraged students

57 Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule 2, 621. 58 Adorno, Critical Models, 293/GS 10.2, 798. 59 Adorno, Critical Models, 263/GS 10.2, 763. 60 Adorno, Critical Models, 293/GS 10.2, 798. 61 Ibid. The Question of Praxis in Adorno’s Critical Theory 65

often manifests itself in aggression and violence.62 (This is a bad argument, and moreover one that Adorno is very poorly placed to make. There can, and have been non-violent revolutions. And non-violent direct action has proved an effective means of achieving social change, especially in the age of broadcast media. It is true that actions are sometimes the product of rage and anger, but such emotions can also be justified and proportionate. As Marcuse points out, terrible situations often evince “biological and physiological” reactions.63 These are not unruly passions that need to be subdued by the intellect. That is the kind of rationalist prejudice against the passions one finds in Plato, Hobbes and Kant, and which Adorno, with his emphasis on the legitimacy of the somatic response to the world, is elsewhere keen to refute. That some kind of emotional reaction forms the moment of decision at which the process of reflection turns into action, in no way detracts from the resulting action.

Most of Adorno’s claims about the primacy of theory are formulated contrastively. Adorno’s defense against the students objections is dependent on his counter- critique of “actionism.” Again, his position is a complex of different arguments. Under “actionism” Adorno understands collective actions which are based on the principle of conformism. A small number of self-proclaimed leaders, a dominant clique, manipulate the thoughts and actions of others.64 In the name of praxis, he claims, dissent and criticism is discouraged. Agreement is thus quickly won, but at the expense of due reflection, hence not in fact freely bestowed, and is at bottom a form of compliance with authority. Actionism is thus not what it seems to be to the agents, and calls for a social-psychological explanation. On Adorno’s view, it is born partly out of ego weakness, and the desire to fit in, because it compensates the students for their own objective powerlessness and despair. Unwittingly then, the students exhibit the same authoritarian structures and social hierarchies they claim to be fighting against.65 In a similar vein, Adorno asserts that actionism is an effect of the atrophy of rationality to instrumental reason. Discussion of ends is discouraged, and supplanted by questions of means and strategy. Actionism is thus an example of “bourgeois instrumentalism and the fetishism of means” every bit as the administrative institutions that are the object of its critique.66 The result is that action is conducted for its own sake, rather than for the sake of any worthwhile end. In both these last respects, then, praxis as actionism is a continuation of the prevailing ideology, and not a force of resistance to it.

62 Adorno, GS 21.1, 274–82. 63 Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule 2, 602. See also Marcuse,“Revolution aus Ekel,” Spiegel-Gespräch, July 28, 1969, in Kraushaar, 660. 64 Adorno, Critical Models, 269/GS 10.2, 770. 65 Ibid., 772. 66 Adorno, Critical Models, 269/GS 10.2, 771. 66 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

Adorno criticizes actionism as a variety of pseudo-activity, activity which actually serves no purpose other than to keep people busy, to distract them from acknowledging their objective powerlessness, and to alleviate their despair.67 In a radio broadcast with Peter Szondi, Adorno likens the students’ actions to the aggressive movements of a caged animal, also born of hopelessness and desperation, movements which serve to vent its pent up rage, but not to help it escape.68 However, Adorno runs together the valid point that a blind or insufficiently reflected action is useless and unworthy of the term “praxis,” with the specious argument that actions with little or no chance of success do not count as “praxis.”69 The specious argument colors Adorno’s whole view of the students’ campaign against the Vietnam war. The cause of ending the war is bound to fail, he maintains. The students’ solidarity with that cause is “narcissistic” and “delusional,” their actions “inane” and their motives self-righteous.70 But this objection fails, and the underlying assumption is too sweeping and cynical. There was a time when the civil rights protesters’ chances of overturning Jim Crow, and the black South Africans’ chances of ending Apartheid, were slight. That did not render their actions pointless, or mean that they were not right to try. The same holds of the anti-Vietnam War protest.71 Adorno was wrong to question its legitimacy, and to denigrate the motives of the protesters. He was also wrong in fact. The students’ protests against Vietnam (and the German students’ influence on the US students’ and thus on the broader anti-war protest should not be forgotten) played a significant role in Nixon’s eventual withdrawal. The cause of stopping the war, like all causes, gathered momentum, and what at first looked like an improbable and idealistic campaign ended up being an unstoppable political force. Theory is praxis. The second thesis that Adorno adduces in his defense is that theory is itself a kind of praxis.72 This looks inconsistent with the first thesis, but

67 Ibid., 292. See Also Tiedemann, Frankfurter Adorno Blätter VI, 42–117. 68 Tiedemann, Frankfurter Adorno Blätter VI, 152. 69 “Praxis without theory … must fail, and praxis in keeping with its own concept, would like to succeed. False praxis is no praxis.” Adorno, Critical Models, 265. 70 Adorno, Critical Models, 274. 71 For that matter there was little chance of the Coalition not passing the Emergency Laws. the Allies had made it a condition that had to be met before they would transfer full sovereignty to Bonn. That the campaign against them was highly unlikely to be successful did not hinder Adorno from speaking out and writing against their introduction. 72 Adorno, “New Manifesto” 52. When Adorno says that “even the most rarefied form of mental activity contains an element of the practical,” Horkheimer remains skeptical. In his comprehensive and mostly convincing article Fabian Freyenhagen defends Adorno’s argument that thinking and writing are “forms of activity … just as much as revolutionary activity” and that in this sense the distinction between theory and praxis “breaks down.” However this line of argument is unpromising. There is a trivial sense in which theorizing and making a revolution are both “forms of activity,” but that does not engage with, or problematize, the relevant contrast, which is not that between mere The Question of Praxis in Adorno’s Critical Theory 67 is not.73 Adorno claims that that theory is closer to “transformative praxis” than “a comportment which is compliant for the sake of praxis” because of its capacity for resistance.74 It is true that thoughts, written or spoken, are actions in a platitudinous sense, and Adorno is justified in saying to his Spiegel interviewer that his thoughts and writings are “a genuine form of praxis.” However this is not because thinking is an activity, but because some written or spoken thoughts are indeed political practical interventions.75 Merely thinking thoughts is not. Expressing thoughts in public is a different matter, and it makes a difference in what context and to whom they are expressed. Sometimes, though, thinking, even when critical, and expressed in speech or writing, is not enough. Witness the eloquent words of philosophy student and civil rights activist Mario Savio: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even tacitly take part and you’ve got to put your bodies on the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.”76 The question is, had that time been reached in 1968? The students thought it had. Adorno did not. In my view, on Vietnam, on the Emergency Laws, on Springer and Ohnesorg, the students were right. Indeed, most of Adorno’s comments on the Anti-Vietnam War protests that were written at the height of his conflict with his students are ill-informed and cynical, and exhibit an uncharacteristic lack of judgment. He doubts that Vietnam is “robbing anyone of sleep” since everyone is to some extent affected by “bourgeois coldness” and hence their ability “to identify with another’s suffering is slight.” He then adds that the Vietcong practice “Chinese methods of torture” as if that robbed the students’ of reasons for protesting.77

* * *

The dispute between Adorno and his students over theory and praxis is a better indication of how human conflict arises historically than it is an advertisement for the arguments of the critical theorists. The grounds for the dispute lie somewhere activity and sheer passivity, but between, say, theorizing about non-identity and going on a demonstration or taking part in direct action. Fabian Freyenhagen, “Adorno’s politics. Theory and praxis in Germany’s 1960s,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, August 5 doi: 10.1177/0191453714545198. 73 Adorno would contradict himself if he claimed that theoretical praxis is revolutionary praxis, but he does not, and it would make no sense for him to do so. 74 Adorno, Critical Models, 293/GS 10.2, 798. See also Adorno, Critical Models, 264/GS 10.2, 765, where he claims that “through its autonomization thinking becomes a practical productive force.” 75 Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule 2, 622. 76 Mario Savio cited in Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year that Rocked the World (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004), 93. 77 Adorno, Critical Models, 274; See also Letter to Marcuse April 5, 1969, in Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule 2, 624–5. 68 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis between what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences” and what one might call the difference of small narcissisms. The students were narcissistic in that they persuaded themselves they were in the vanguard of an imminent revolution—against all the evidence, since they lacked the support of the workers and the unions—and chided Adorno for not joining them. They failed to acknowledge the depth and the sincerity of Adorno’s support for their campaign to reform the university, or his practical contribution to their cases, so far as writing, broadcasting and public speaking—activities that suited his temperament—were concerned. Adorno for his part steadfastly refused to be cowed into taking part in demonstrations whose violence he believed unjustified and counterproductive. But whether due to austere negativism, or the paradoxical principle, or to both, he managed to convince himself that the only genuine forms of praxis currently available were the ones he engaged in, criticizing works of philosophy and of modern art, and that all collective political action was adventitious, and counterproductive. Indignant at the cruelty of his students’ treatment of him, Adorno ratcheted up his critique of “actionism” to the point where he could no longer differentiate between legitimate and effective protests and the illusory activities of would be revolutionaries. Chapter 6 Praxis in the Age of Bit Information and Sham Revolutions: Adorno on Praxis in Need of Thinking Idit Dobbs-Weinstein

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. “The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats, 1919

Avant-propos or Apologia

The last five lines of Yeats’ short apocalyptic poem resonate most poignantly today in concrete historical, that is material, ways significantly different than they did in the aftermath of WWI, The Great War, or the War to End All Wars, as well as the Russian Revolution, and the imminent civil war in Ireland. In a more crystalized form, a form juxtaposing the tension in a dialectic of extremes, those lines can and need be re-written: “multiform anarchies are loosed upon the world. Blood saturated tides have swelled, and everywhere the claims to innocence are long belied. The best have lost all conviction, while the worst are full of zealot sincerity.” Most troubling, perhaps, is that now it is extremely difficult to distinguish between best and worst among claims to hopeful innocence, ennui cynicism and fanaticism, forms of consciousness each of which expresses competing current forms of anarchy, theodicy, secular theology or, which is the same, a simultaneous reversion to both tribalism and barbarism. And as if in a nightmare déjà vu 70 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the barbarism unleashed by almost all forms of European tribalism is explicitly and publicly focused on Europe’s “universally hated tribe, the Jews,” deploying perennially favorite stereotypes. Before proceeding I wish to emphasize the fact that when I first began this chapter, I had no intention of “returning” to the “Jewish Question,” or living “After Auschwitz.” Recent events, however, demand that I situate the collusion between “the Age of Bit Information” and “Sham Revolutions” in relation to the persistence and intensification of the conditions that made Auschwitz possible in the first place, which conditions, as 70 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

Adorno reminded us, inter alia, in “Education After Auschwitz,” persisted not only in 1966 but continue now, albeit in materially concrete different forms, which forms require, quite literally, human sacrifice.1 Once again, the line between Right and Left anti-Judaism in Europe is completely blurred, as it was in the aftermath of WWI. This is not merely the case in Russia and the former Soviet satellites, e.g., Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, the Ukraine; it is equally the case in Western Europe, ranging from Italy, to France, to Belgium, to Great Britain, etc. More alarming still is the fact that overt anti-Judaism has, once again, become respectable, especially so among academics on the Left, and more pervasive in the aftermath of the 2008–2009 devastating Israeli invasion of Gaza.2 On the Left we find intellectuals, such as Gianni Vattimo, positively re-evaluating the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and embracing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. On the Right, under the guise of a protest against François Holland and the French Socialist party, we find black-shirted mobs marching down the streets of Paris, raising their arms in Nazi salute, and chanting, “Juif, Hors de France,” “Juif: Casse-toi, la France n’est pas a-toi,” and other equally frightening, hate-filled rhyming slogans. In a recent event, an anti- Jewish protest in Antwerp attended by some members of parliament, protesters were chanting “death to the Jews.”3

1 In this chapter I focus exclusively on Europe and the US, the purportedly secular, industrially and technologically advanced so called first world nations, precisely because I wish to highlight the theologico-political nature of western culture and the modern nation state whose secular claims shield its constitutive barbarism from critique. The theologico-political nature of the extreme violence outside of Western Europe, its explicit celebration of human sacrifice, is all too evident. No critical response to it would be adequate, if at all possible, unless we first understand the radical difference between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. 2 The uneven reporting on current brutalities and ‘third’ round of the Gaza war(s) further “legitimates” European anti-Judaism—the violent anti-Jewish incidents in Western Europe, with their virulent rhetoric, continue to mount. More important, the uneven reporting will further contribute to the radicalized polarization within both Israel and Palestine. The violent and virulent escalation in brutalities of the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict requires a detailed and careful analysis independent of, and distinct from, either the analysis of the barbaric and anarchic situation in Western nations or of the current cauldron that is the Middle East. En passant, it is important to note that Israel is witnessing unprecedented and previously unimaginable spread of barbarism in deed as well as speech. Clearly, the disregard for Western opinion, including that of the American administration, by Israeli right-wing extremists as well as a significant portion of the Knesset and Cabinet, will need to be considered in relation to the rise of European anti-Judaism. Finally, it must be remarked that this is a new phenomenon, distinct from the on-going disdain for liberal Jews in the diaspora, let alone the Israeli Left. 3 This particular protest took place on July 15, 2014. Tabulating these would be absurd first because there are protests organized daily—hate has always been themost effective way to deflect critical reflection—but, more important, second, because it is not a matter of numbers. The grotesque calculus of casualties in Gaza vs. Israel presented daily in the social media—the vehicles of bit information—and popular press is an obscene Praxis in the Age of Bit Information and Sham Revolutions 71

In both cases the radical difference between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism should be strikingly evident. It is equally striking that this difference remains unacknowledged, a conscious gap, and gap in consciousness which render possible its exploitation in a manner such that, at the ideological level, this occlusion has generated a hybrid coalition of Right Wing political movements and European Arabs and sympathizers, e.g., in France and Italy. This is simultaneously ironic and jarring, two groups whose rhetoric and identification is specifically racialized, often in opposition to one another, rightly opposed because of the materially concrete historical experience of colonial violence, wrongly united into a monstrous unified entity whose existence depends upon the erasure of history. Insofar as this erasure—the erasure of the contradiction between triumph and suffering– requires either the denigration or the outright denial of the contradictory experience(s) constitutive of this unity the conscious gap or gap in consciousness undermines the very possibility of self-consciousness, a consciousness which can only come about through a concrete contrary experience which will render this monstrosity impossible. That the current form of European anti-Judaism is a “new” form of the old stereo-type becomes amply evident in an interview with Gianni Vattimo published on January 17, 2014 in “Corriere Della Sera.” After denying that his strong opposition to Zionism and the Jewish State is a form of anti-Semitism or a belief in a Jewish masonic plot, Vattimo added: “Let’s remember that the Federal Reserve is owned by Rothschild and Rockefeller.” I doubt that I need to comment on the last proviso, issuing as it does not from Zizek or Ranciere, not from a millenarian anarchist, but from a philosopher who is also a former member of the European Parliament.4 Precisely in the light of the need to continue critically to condemn actions undertaken daily by the “Jewish State,” the poignant irony emerging from the uncritical or cynical exploitation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through recourse to the most repulsive, a-historical, even anti-historical, perennial, stereo-types of the Jew as moneylender, as the real force behind global economy (including the most decisive control of the American economy—alleged ownership of the Federal Reserve, whose relation to the bailout of corrupt financial institutions after the economic meltdown is clearly intended by Vattimo) is that, in its unleashing of mob violence against Jews, it only serves to validate and reinforce claims to the concrete, material, historical need for a democratic Jewish state.5 It is no accident exploitation. The death of a single child on either side is one death too many. And the list keeps growing daily. 4 The results of recent elections in Europe, the significant gains of extreme right wing parties, which gains are in turn reflected in MEP representation is, to say the least, alarming. However, the anti-Semitism characteristic of these parties is again distinct from the perennial medusa of European anti-Judaism. Recent interviews with Vattimo are far more egregious and unworthy of comment. 5 Note that instances such as Gianni Vattimo’s re-evaluation of the “Protocols” are instances not merely of revisionist histories but also of the denial of the Shoah, which denial 72 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis that “last year, a record 3,289 French Jews … [immigrated] to Israel—a 63 percent hike from 2012.” Nor is the estimation of the Jewish Agency unwarranted that this figure could spike to 5,000 as early as this year and dramatically change the face of Israeli immigration as well as France’s own Jewish community, the largest in Western Europe.6 In fact, in the most recent survey approximately 75 percent of French Jews said that they were considering emigration following the rapid escalation and frequency of violence against French Jews.7 And in the US, in an expression of sympathy with the Neo-Nazi, Klansman murder of two individuals at a Jewish Community Center on the eve of Passover, the mayor of Marionville, MO, Steve Clevenger, publicly announced his respect for the shooter and his anti-Jewish blogs, accompanied by the following proviso: “just because some people like running those corporations that are destroying us, that doesn’t mean that the rest of the race or religion or whatever is bad. I don’t stereotype.” Not that different from Vattimo, after all, simply less articulate and hence, ironically less virulent or inflammatory. For, reference to Jewish ownership of the Federal Reserve is far more powerful than reference to “those corporations that are destroying us,” and echoes the Protocols. As will become evident, however, in the age of bit information and virtual friendships as well as enmities, Capital is detached, or free floating independent of national or global interests; it exists, quite literally, in a continuously shifting virtual space, that is, no-where and everywhere, or as the new “Utopia.”8 Viewed in this light, the new stereo-type “Jew” too must exist in a different Utopia, one in which there are no longer any Jews. If in the nineteenth-century anti-Jewish prejudice was “the socialism of fools,” as August Bebel stated, then today it is the radicalism of fanatics and cynics alike, in whose rhetoric the delusional is the real and the real the delusional, to paraphrase Hegel.

is often at the center of the rejection of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in favor of a single, non-Jewish state. 6 “French Jews Migrate to Israel Citing Rising Anti-Semitism,” Huffington Post, February 8, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/08/french-jews-israel_n_ 4748532.html. 7 Stephanie Butnick, “Hundreds of French Immigrants Arrive in Israel: As tensions rise in Paris, young families make aliyah en masse,” Tablet, July 16, 2014, http://www. tabletmag.com/scroll/179423/hundreds-of-french-immigrants-arrive-in-israel. The ongoing daily, many violent, anti-Jewish demonstrations throughout Europe as I am writing this are highly likely to compel further emigration from Western Europe and thus change the demographics of both Europe and Israel/Palestine. The number spiked following the murder of four individuals at the Hyper Casher Jewish grocery store concomitant with the Charlie Hebdo massacre. 8 The Koch brothers’ attempts to reshape the political landscape in the US (thus far successful) even at the micro-level of city-government (e.g., Nashville: public transit and education), is an attempt by the force of vast capital to create a new Utopia: “down with Federalism, up with an individual dynasty.” They represent a new form of anarchy that is nonetheless governed by a single family. Praxis in the Age of Bit Information and Sham Revolutions 73

Bit Information, Sham Revolutions, and the Generation of Stupidity

In what follows, I shall very first briefly sketch the relation between rapidly developing and constantly changing technology and mass mobilization in order to bring into relief the dialectic between current forms of instrumental reason in the service of capital detached both from national and global interest and the generation of stupidity by cynics and fanatics alike. Now, I am not an economist nor do I propose here a form of a critique of political economy. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty First Century does a brilliant job of reconsidering Marx in the context of the regression and concentration of Capital in the second “Gilded Age or Belle Époque,” although it is highly doubtful that most of the participants in “Occupy Now” were aware that his (and a few colleagues’) work is the origin of the slogan “The One Percent.” Rather, its success as a mobilizing slogan was brought about through a ‘translation’ into popular blogs and digestible books, most notably of political-economist, turned Left, populist pundit, Robert Reich. It is worth noting that Reich’s Beyond Outrage: What Has Gone Wrong with Our Economy and Our Democracy and How to Fix It, is dedicated to “the occupiers and all others committed to taking back our economy and our democracy” (a noble goal indeed). But, it is equally worth noting that Piketty’s statistical charts, tables, and figures are replaced in Beyond Outrage by Reich’s cartoonish illustrations. Nevertheless, the extent to which Reich, as well as more somber political- economists, such as Paul Krugman, are reviled by American Republicans, especially tea-party members, is, ipso facto, testimony to their perception as a political threat, a threat precisely because their intervention is informed by critical self-reflection upon concrete material, historical conditions and, at least in the case of Piketty and Krugman, by a recognition of the urgent need of thinking for praxis.9 In the light of current events, I wish to insist that such praxis is precisely the praxis opposed to actionism, emphasized by Adorno, be the actionism generated by Right or Left ideologies, precisely because as current events make amply evident, the abhorrence to complete sentences characteristic of the most popular social media and the celebration of bit information as knowledge, has exponentially increased the likelihood that, in the absence of thinking, and in face of the threat of total reification of consciousness, mass movements will be exploited by ideologues and degenerate into violence. Examples abound, ranging from Egypt, to Syria, France, Belgium, and Britain to the Ukraine, Venezuela to Brazil, to name but a few.10

9 The flurry of attempts to refute and rebut Picketty’s analyses and conclusions, originating with the Financial Times economic editor Chris Giles, exemplifies the extent to which Piketty and economists such as Krugman are viewed as a political threats by right wing economists. (See FT May 23, 2014, followed by rebuttals in the NYT henceforth.) 10 I must admit that I do not quite know how to read, let alone write, tweets, and I am a trained medievalist, very much at home with abbreviated script. Nonetheless, in passing and wearing the Medievalist hat, I want to acknowledge a fascinating transformation in language whose dual form requires a careful dialectical consideration whose extremes are 74 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

Now, I cannot overemphasize the fact that the concurrence between the anarchic and the apocalyptic moments in the current movements (the rallying cry for the dissolution of the nation state—even in a Europe still trying to maintain unity or become a different kind of commonwealth in the aftermath of the decline of the Nation State), evident in attempts to violently intervene in objective condition, depends upon an appeal to a subjective consciousness, often expressed in apocalyptic terms. That is, insofar as the appeal to solidarity is an appeal to race and language, even if they are not expressly stated in religious terms, it is a regression to a “primitive” form of religion or totemism. That is, such appeals to solidarity are secular religions with new totems. What is especially striking about all current forms of communication, especially those which confuse or conflate quantity with quality, a tendency that began with and continues the transformation of the social sciences, is that now they seek to render not only theory but also science obsolete. The title of a 2008 article by Chris Anderson in Wired Magazine crystalizes it. It reads: “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.”11 More troubling though is the strange convergence among different versions of a disillusioned Left, in the face of the demise, in fact decimation, of the political Left, against theory or, more precisely, against critical theory. Instead of a critical, that is, theoretically informed analysis of the dialectical relation between the rise of the far Right with its recourse to the totems of political theology and the demise of the political Left, the old destroyer of idols by reason, the new Left now presents theory as the foe, an enemy which it demonizes as an escape from politics, i.e., it is but a new version of the rejection of Adorno’s call for thinking as the very condition of genuine praxis and situated against actionism. This convergence too has created the strangest bed-fellows ranging from Richard Rorty’s, 1998 Achieving Our Country. Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America,12 through the novelist turned Marxist public intellectual and founding member of N+1, Benjamin Kunkel, in Utopia or Bust, Commonism, and a recent LRB less than charitable review of Capital in the Twenty first Century,13

(1) added grammatical inflection in English, e.g., the transformation of nouns into verbs, as in trend-ing, and philosophically more important (2) the emergence of a new form of equivocation whereby the same word has contradictory meaning, e.g., “viral.” The latter will require a new consideration of the nominalist—realist debates and perhaps will finally ‘put them to rest’ as onto-theological relics. 11 Wired Magazine, 16.07, June 23, 2008 (accessed August 2, 2014), http://archive. wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory. 12 I thank my colleague Scott Aiken for bringing this book to my attention. 13 Thomas Kunkel, “Paupers and Richlings,” LRB 36, July 3, 2014: 17–20. Kunkel’s criticism is decidedly a-historical, faulting Piketty, inter alia, for being an economist rather than a 19th–20th century political economist, such as Ricardo, Marx, and Keynes. It is not surprising then that Kunkel rejects what he takes to be Piketty’s unrealistic belief in “the possibility of the democratic restraint of capital … ” and presents the utopian possibility of a socialist revolution as more likely. Praxis in the Age of Bit Information and Sham Revolutions 75 to the virtual, and for-profit, social website “Upworthy.” Rorty and the editors of “Upworthy” represent the extreme forms of pandering to the lowest common denominator, albeit in an idiom fitting for their specific or targeted audiences In fact, I am hard pressed to believe that Achieving Our Country will have been published by Harvard University Press had the name Richard Rorty not been attached to the manuscript. The Left which is presented as the enemy by Rorty, N+1, Kunkel, “Upworthy,” etc. is a caricature and one that is nowhere to be found, let alone in the US. Rorty’s Left, the Left that is demonized for its call for theory, is a hybrid of a caricature version of Foucault’s understanding of power, Lacanian psychoanalysis or “some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism.”14 After he claims that the Left’s commitment to theory is a commitment “which is entirely too much like religion,” in a feat of magical conversion, like a zealot pastor, Rorty not only states that “the ubiquity of Foucauldian power is reminiscent of the ubiquity of Satan, and thus the ubiquity of original sin—the diabolical stain on every human soul,” but then proposes to replace this Satanic religion with Dewey’s and Whitman’s “civic religion.” Moreover, Rorty’s magical political transformation or alchemy is a transformation of the Marxian Left into the Deweyan pragmatic liberal. Why bother with Rorty? Because his version of the old Left, a Left insisting on theory, is the version that was prevalent in literature departments in the American academy in the 1980s, fashioned after one version of the academic French Left, and the one informing negatively the books (e.g. Verso), magazines, and social networks that seek “to educate” the masses in order to mobilize them. All too often the more popular sites, in feats of magic similar to Rorty’s, simultaneously demonize critical thinking as elitist and valorize making knowledge (read: bit information) “as compelling as reality TV.”15 Indeed, when the “good of the company is identical to the good of mankind,” then anyone who questions these media’s capacity to promote the masses to critical thinking is “a cynic, nitpicker, hypocrite, or elitist.” Ironically, unlike populist academics, such as Robert Reich or Jodi Dean (The Communist Horizon, Verso, 2012,), let alone anti-academic “Upworthy,” in an interview with Vulture, part of the New York Magazine network, Benjamin Kunkel indirectly acknowledges the fact that Occupy was more a frustrated symbolic protest than revolution.16 Kunkel’s idiom, which

14 Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 93. 15 Nitsuh Abebe,”Watching Team Upworthy Work Is Enough to Make You a Cynic. Or Lose Your Cynicism. Or Both. Or Neither,” New York Magazine, March 23, 2014, http:// nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/03/upworthy-team-explains-its-success.html. 16 David Wallace-Wells, “How Benjamin Kunkel Went From Novelist to Marxist Public Intellectual,” Vulture, March 11, 2014, http://www.vulture.com/2014/03/benjamin- kunkel-marxist-novel-utopia-or-bust.html. In this interview, Kunkel rightly recognizes the primacy of objective condition and institutions of power. What he fails to acknowledge is that at the moment of extreme institutional crisis, an agenda based upon critical self-reflection may have turned the movement into a more formidable and potentially transformative force. But, this is precisely the moment where the movement’s anarchic character comes 76 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis reflects the prevalent mood of the disillusioned Left, already evident in the title Utopia Or Bust, is religious, precisely insofar as it expresses the two fundamental theologico-political passions, hope and fear, which in the face of catastrophe now are expressed as hope and despair. Kunkel admits:

Sometimes I read the paper and I think, What is the point of this? This is just, “Get out as early as you can and don’t have any kids yourself.” And other times I think the nonviability of capitalism is becoming pretty clear to people. No doubt some really terrible things will happen before any fundamental change takes place. But I think that there’s a chance.17

Terrible things continue to happen. The rejection of theory or of critical thinking, its replacement either with utopian possibility, as if it were a real, i.e., concrete possibility, or bit information will only ascertain their perpetuation and acceleration. Anarchic actionism is no praxis and at the instigation of demagogues may contribute to the perpetuation of “terrible things.” The claims that mass data can replace science with respect to accurate prediction (the trending of bit information) and that Deweyan, liberal participatory pragmatism can and should replace theory are based upon uncritical assumptions about both science and theory. Both abhor complexity, dialectical tensions, and assume empirical transparency that is not only unwarranted but contributes to the growing stupidity of the masses on whose behalf they claim to advocate.

Against Delusion: Neither too much Clarity in Science nor Fear of Theory

The fear of page long paragraphs [is] a fear created by the marketplace—by the consumer who does not want to tax himself and to whom first editors and then writers accommodated for the sake of their incomes, until they finally create ideologies for their own accommodation, like lucidity, objectivity, and concise precision.18

There is no thought in which the remnants of opinions do not inhere. They are at once both necessary and extrinsic to it. It is in the nature of thought to remain loyal to itself by negating itself in these moments. That is the critical form of thought. Critical thought alone, not thought’s complacent agreement with itself,

into view. Occupy wanted action now, before thinking could have “directed,” perhaps even restrained, some of the spontaneity. 17 The alternative utopia Kunkel presents as really possible in his critique of Piketty belies the recognition here of the primacy of objective conditions. See note 13 above. 18 Theodor Adorno, “Punctuation Marks,” Notes to Literature, Vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 95. My emphasis. Praxis in the Age of Bit Information and Sham Revolutions 77

may help bring about change.19 (Das ist die kritische Gestalt des Gedankens. Sie erst, nicht sein befriedigtes Einverständnis mit sich selbt mag zur Veränderung helfen.)

Why return to early critical theory, specifically to Adorno, now? The simplest answer is: precisely because of the usurpation of politics by religion, now tribal and totemic, greatly facilitated by the advanced technological capability of mass mobilization to which (even if we bracket off the overt anti-Judaism of the European, academic Left, or the Rortian a-philosophical, contempt for theory) the philosopher’s response is entirely inadequate. Radical historical catastrophic changes notwithstanding, dominant forms of the philosopher’s responses continue the a-historical, and a-political “founding moment” of Modern philosophy or the refusal to confront the present as catastrophe. On the one hand, analytic political philosophers continue to insist on the power of reason over the affects; on the other, philosophers of all ‘denominations’ desperately turn to religion and/or theology in search of meaning in the face of the unreason unleashed, on the one hand, by religion, and on the other, by the recent collapse of capitalism. The collusion between instrumental or useful reason and capitalist economy—the cornerstones of Modern liberal democracies—continues, all concrete evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. I can think of no philosopher other than Adorno whose understanding of dialectics, especially the dialectics of extremes understood politically and historically,20 is better able to begin to confront the dialectical opposition between the current forms of barbarism evident in the relapse to tribal, totemic religions and the form of reason instrumental to the technology of mass mobilization. More important, Adorno’s thought, especially in the radio addresses where he explicitly seeks to intervene politically, makes possible an insight into the ways in which instrumental reason, especially reason as a tool of capital, produces, sustains, and increases unreason. That reason produces unreason is not new. That reason differently, that is critically understood, is necessary to resist barbarism politically is also not new, although it is still little understood or acknowledged, as the preceding discussion should have made amply evident. Critical reflection upon the manner in which the delusional projection that is the new “Jew” is the radicalism of fanatics and cynics alike makes evident the fact that not even the critical analyses in “Elements of Antisemitism,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment are adequate for understanding current events precisely because of those events’ concrete, material historical specificity. That is, insofar as delusions too are the subjective forms of consciousness expressing concrete objective, material conditions, the new concept “Jew,” here as the a-historical ever-same,

19 Theodor Adorno, “Opinion Delusion Society,” Critical Methods: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press), 122. (GS 10.2, 594.) My emphasis. 20 Exemplary here is Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 78 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis is never the identical, but is being exploited to serve “new” ideological, even if delusional, interests. In short, there is an urgent need for a new “Elements.” That is, just as Philosophy of New Music is a third excursus to Dialectic of Enlightenment,21 so there is an urgent need for a fourth excursus but this time clearly distinguished as “Elements of Anti-Judaism,” to accompany the current form of “Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” My ambition in the remaining part of the chapter, however, is far more modest, although I hope that it may begin to indicate a direction for such critique. Rather than turn to “Critique” and “Resignation,” two addresses explicitly concerned with thought’s relation to praxis in the face of actionism, upon which I intended to focus prior to immersing myself in the current trajectory of history (heeding Adorno’s “caute” in “Why Still Philosophy”), i.e., in the light of the current events, I first turn to the less known 1961 radio address entitled “Opinion Delusion Society,” (Meinung Whan Gesellschaft), a performative title which, in the absence of punctuation between the words, already anticipates the dynamic proximity, at times indistinguishability, between opinion and delusion as social, that is, public expressions of reified consciousness. Adorno begins the address by questioning the widely accepted dichotomy between healthy, normal opinions and extreme, pathological ones, associated with fringe or lunatic groups. As an example of a concrete purveyor of extreme, fascistic delusions then considered farcical, because they have been “conclusively refuted,” Adorno presents The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that monstrosity that Gianni Vattimo has reevaluated positively 53 years after Adorno’s address. At the outset, Adorno points out that it may well be the “element” of madness that is “the very ferment of their effect,” and that precisely for this reason we must question the uncritical conclusion that “in the majority the normal opinion necessarily prevails over the delusional one.”22 Against this neat and false distinction, false because a- or even anti-historical, Adorno presents history, especially the history of mass movements, as permeated with pathological opinions originating in “prejudice, superstition, rumor, and collective delusion.” Against any progressive teleological view of history, let alone the Kantian or Hegelian ones, Adorno insists that historically both ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ opinions have been “verified as reasonable.” In light of current events, can we really distinguish the normal from the pathological when considering the philosopher Vattimo’s “revised opinion” of the “Protocols” and the mayor of Marionville endorsement of the “delusions” of the Klan? As Adorno argues, not only is the dynamic between healthy opinion and deformed delusion intrinsic to the concept of opinion, but, more important, in this dynamic “inheres the real dynamic of society, a dynamic that produces such opinions, false consciousness, necessarily.” Moreover, society is what lends authority to the veracity of opinion as well as authorizes the distinction between mere opinion and truth. In a formulation that will be repeated in different forms

21 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, Preface, 5. 22 Adorno, “Opinion Delusion Society,” 105 (GS 573). Praxis in the Age of Bit Information and Sham Revolutions 79 in many of the radio addresses concerned with praxis in need of thinking, both at the subjective and the objective level, in terms of subjective consciousness and objective, historical conditions, Adorno insists that resistance to the social dynamic that produces and authorizes delusions can only be effective when “the tendency toward pathological opinion [is] derived from what is taken to be normal opinion.”23 Moreover, at the objective level, “[t]he border between healthy and pathogenic opinion is drawn in praxi by the prevailing authority, not by informed judgement.”24 The more blurred the border, the more dangerous the opinion, the more resistant, even hostile, it is to “falsification” by contrary experience, let alone critical thinking. According to Adorno, the relation of thought to its object is the condition for the transformation of opinion into knowledge. Only by saturating itself in its object does thought free itself of arbitrariness; that is, thinking is not “merely a subjective activity but … essentially the dialectical process between subject and object in which both poles first mutually determine each other.” Politically understood, this is the dialectical process expressing the mutual determination of theory and praxis.25 Calling prudence “the organ of thinking,” Adorno insists that it is not merely a subjective power of forming concepts and judgments but also that its activity extends to its object. Implicitly refusing the separation between the cognitive and the psychological (against positivists and skeptics alike) Adorno presents prudence’s activity as cathexis, an affective investment in the object which, rather than being extrinsic to knowledge, is its condition of truth. Nonetheless, here as elsewhere Adorno is explicit that in a reified world governed by the principle of exchange, a world divested of genuinely human relations (social networks are exemplary of such a world) “false opinion cannot be transcended through intellectual rectification alone but only concretely,” precisely because opinion is not private but rather is imposed and sustained by structures of domination. More poignantly Adorno once again repeats the concern first articulated in Minima Moralia that if there is no correct form of life in the false life, then there can be no correct consciousness in it either, a concern repeated at the beginning of the lecture course Problems in Moral Philosophy. There, Adorno also marks the likelihood that impatience with the uncertainty of practical life, i.e., the demand for false clarity, would be “easily linked to resentment toward thinking,” rejection of theory, and denunciation of intellectuals.26 That Adorno’s critical and somber comments reflect his own experience there is little doubt; that they are far more poignant and demand more attentive heeding now, there is even less doubt.

23 Ibid. 106. My emphasis. 24 Ibid. 109. My emphasis. 25 See Theodor Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” Critical Methods: Interventions and Catchwords, 259–78. 26 Theodor Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 3. 80 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

The Possibility of Praxis or on the Difference between the Mob and the Masses27

That the diverse phenomena of sham, seemingly democratic, revolutions made possible and sustained by bit information are instances of group psychology there can be little doubt; there is significant doubt, however, concerning the adequacy, both theoretical and practical, of Adorno’s deployment of Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.28 My aim in the remaining part of the chapter is not so much to defend either Freud’s diverse discussions of group formation (that must be read in tandem rather than individually as self-enclosed monads) or the “meta-theoretical” adequacy of Adorno’s deployment of it. To do so, in my view, would be to betray, precisely, the Marxian (vs. Marxist) anti- teleological, i.e., anti-utopian, materialist core of Adorno’s concern with praxis, which concern is all the more urgent now. Rather, in the face of the extreme violence currently unleashed in Europe against the “Jews,” which violence is now legitimized through rapid dissemination of propaganda accompanying horrifying photographs,—the new virus or pathology of “going viral”—and which is carried out by groups whose unification/identification would have seemed impossible until now, I seek to bring into relief the nature of this new type of “group” in order to begin to explore whether or not its destructive energy can be transformed. More precisely, I wish to explore whether or not, and how, such an anarchic mob could be transformed into a political mass now, precisely at this concrete historical trajectory. Clearly, given the limitation of time and perspective, given that what is presented as “fact” by the anti-critical, and decidedly interested media not only is not transparent but cannot become available to some unmediated experience,29 this

27 Note that (1) the term translated by “group” in Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, is “Masse,” which is more properly translated by “mob” or “rabble” The latter is the term preferred by Adorno in “Freudian Theory” most likely because it was written in English and takes its orientation from the situation in the USA at the time where the common terms in use were “agitator and rabble rouser.” Theodor Adorno,”Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,”The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Bloomsbury Academic 1982), 118–37. 28 The virulent criticism of Adorno as a theoretical mandarin are well-rehearsed and documented so that I need not document them here. An exemplary instance of a criticism of its theoretical consistency or adequacy is found in Espen Hammer, Adorno & the Political (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 56–64. It is highly ironic that Hammar accuses Adorno of failing as a dialectician and proposes a correction with Habermas, whom he admits is otherwise an undialectical thinker par-excellence. I do not propose to engage Hammer’s criticism within the constraint of this chapter. For now, suffice it to point out that Hammer’s demand for a metacritical analysis of Freud’s metacritique is decidedly a-historical. 29 In an article entitled “At front Lines, Bearing Witness in Real Time,” but could just as aptly be entitled “In Praise of Twitter,” David Carr notes without irony that (1) what he calls “bearing witness in the crucible of real time” permits “no pause for reflection,” and “is Praxis in the Age of Bit Information and Sham Revolutions 81 conclusion can only be a sketch for further reflection or critical thinking—thesine qua non condition for praxis. Once again I take my cue for “Why still Philosophy” from Adorno who, at the end of this radio address, in fact, crystallizes not so much the question “why” but rather the question “how still philosophy?” To ask the question “how still philosophy” for Adorno in 1961 was to ask what praxis is against smug academic complacency or actionism; to ask it now over 50 years later is to ask it in the midst of anarchy and totemic, extra-political regression into tribalism. Insofar as the concrete historical conditions changed, so must the analyses. Differently stated, from a materialist Marxian perspective, to ask why is always already to ask how; it is an irreducibly historical question. Nonetheless, in the light of the current plunge of the academic Left into the anti-Jewish fray, Adorno’s conclusion to “Why Still Philosophy” proves most poignant:

Philosophy should not with foolish arrogance set about collecting information and then take a position; rather, it must unrestrictedly, without recourse to some mental refuge, experience. It must do exactly what is avoided by those who refuse to forsake the maxim that every philosophy must finally produce something positive.

Most succinctly, possibility is always concrete and depends upon objective conditions and facts, especially in the age of bit information, are never transparent, although they are presented as such. As I pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, the radical difference between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism in Europe amply evident in current events “remains unacknowledged, a conscious gap and gap in consciousness” which serves both to occlude and shield from critical self-reflection the monstrous, hybrid entity that emerged recently as a coalition of extreme right wing political movements, including neo-Nazis, Moslems, Arabs, and left wing purported sympathizers with the Palestinians united in rabid anti-Jewish, virulent word and violent deed or action.30 As I also pointed out above, the very possibility of this “unity” depends immediately distributed and responded to globally,” (2) it is not edited for accuracy, (3) it has become a requirements of “mainstream journalism,” i.e., of capitalist competition, and most troubling (4) “[o]ften, it is a single image that comes to represent a big complicated event.” New York Times, Media, July 27, 2014 (my emphases). Carr concludes the very short article extolling the “significant value” of ‘posts and images from the target area” and, again without a touch of irony, claiming that this form of bearing witness “gives meaning to what we see” ibid. For a recent, vivid presentation of the inaccuracy and deliberate false presentation of “single images,” see YouTube “How accurate are images on social media of Gaza under attack” # BBC tren-ding, July 7, 2014. The degree of deliberate falsification is astounding. Images presented as representing current violent actions in Gaza not only date back to other incidents in Gaza but also several are imported from other zones, e.g., Syria! 30 I seriously doubt that most “sympathizers,” distinguish between Muslim and Arab, remember Christian Arabs or acknowledge that most European Muslims are not Arabs, 82 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis upon an erasure of history in which racist, colonial oppression and violence was carried out against an inferior, external other significantly different than “the Jew,” the other within, the one “Judaizing” European culture, i.e., the threat that must be eliminated.31 That this “new” type of group poses a serious threat to European politics, especially democratic politics, there can be little doubt. How to respond to it without suspending democratic commitments to freedom demands a reflection on its nature as a group, demands, in other words a mediation by thought, an activity disdained by actionists and now prevented, to the extent possible, by bit information.32 The first paragraph of “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda” makes evident that, for Adorno, the distinction between “rabble” and “the masses,” depends upon how the group is constituted into a unity and that the objectionable term “rabble” “expresses the atmosphere of irrational emotional aggressiveness purposely promoted by our would be Hitlers.”33 The most important distinction that characterizes the “rabble” as rabble is “the inclination to violent action without any sensible political aim.”34 Although never explicitly stated, it is clear that “the rabble” is a species of “the masses.” Before proceeding, it is important to emphasize the dialectically inseparable facts that (1) the “rabble’s violent actions lacks “a sensible” political aim rather than lacking some political aim, and (2) the “ultimate unity” of the rabble expresses the political aim of the agitator, namely, “the abolition of democracy through mass support against the democratic principle” which is systematically accomplished by means of propaganda.35 Adorno’s succinct summary of the agitator’s technique (whose two main components are monotonous, i.e., mind- numbing, endless repetitions and “scarcity of ideas,”) could easily serve as an apt description for the current anti-Jewish propaganda throughout Europe, except that now it is disseminated with astounding speed and literally countless repetitions. etc. Conversely and ironically, the academic, opportunist cynics, and “outlawed,” political entities, such as Hamas, in full awareness of these differences, promote and exploit mass ignorance. 31 European history is replete with claims about Jewish conspiracies and the Judaizing of culture. For a thorough study see, David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: Norton, 2013). A recent review essay by James Loeffler, “Wagner Anti-Semitism Still Matters,” provides a fine, clear and succinct analysis of the claims to Judaizing in European music (New Republic, July 4, 2014, http://www.newrepublic.com/ article/118331/forbidden-music-michael-haas-reviewed-james-loeffler). The recent release of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks and responses to it provides another sobering example. 32 I do not exempt myself from the criticism of the pursuit of “bit information” in the current situation. When immediate family and closest friends are at risk of losing their lives, souls, or both, it would be “monstrous” to remain calm and a struggle to maintain the uninterrupted ability for critical self-reflection. 33 Adorno, “Freudian Theory,” 119. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. Praxis in the Age of Bit Information and Sham Revolutions 83

Now, it cannot be overemphasized that it is not the affective dimension or passion that constitutes the violent irrationality of the “rabble” as distinct from the “masses;” on the contrary. As I pointed out above, Adorno rejects the separation between the psychological and the cognitive and presents the activity of prudence, that power that since Aristotle has governed “praxis,” as cathexis, that is, an affective investment in the object, the sine qua non condition for the transformation of opinion into knowledge. And, prudence consists precisely in the ability to distinguish concrete possibility from idealist utopia. If, indeed, as Adorno insists and as I concur, only by saturating itself in its object can thought lose its arbitrary nature, and if thinking is a dialectical process between subject an object which politically is expressed as the dialectical relation between theory and praxis, then I do not believe that the current rabble in Europe can be transformed by praxis into a group whose political agenda is either rational or possible. The reason for my resistance to such a false utopia is simple: unlike the masses or other groups whose unity emerges from the “same” cathexis i.e., libidinal investment in the same object or ego-ideal which is positive, the current European, anti-Jewish “rabble” is constituted by a negative cathexis, or an intense libidinal investment in an object of “hate,” which object is an object of mass delusion whose existence cannot be falsified given its origin and modes of dissemination. Unlike the hatred of outside groups that is the result of primary cathexis constituting the unifying force of other groups, both natural (e.g., race, nation) and artificial (e.g., church, army) membership in this group is strictly negative; absent this negative identification the members of this group would be hostile to one another in virtue of a primary positive racialized totemic cathexis. This conclusion is not resignation, only a call to more reflection as the best current mode for resistance to bit information. Resistance to bit information, its critique even when unpopular, is a form of praxis. In lieu of a proper conclusion, I let Adorno make the final gesture, a gesture that crystalizes my insistence that we need to attend carefully to Adorno’s insights. Reflecting once again upon Rimbaud’s statement “il faut être absolutement moderne,” at the end of “Why Still Philosophy,” and in a ‘response’ alluding to his critics, Adorno states that “it is neither an aesthetic program nor a program for aesthetes: it is a categorical imperative of philosophy. Whatever wants nothing to do with the trajectory of history belongs all the more truly to it. History promises no salvation and offers the possibility of hope only to the concept whose movement follows history’s path to the very extreme.”36

36 Theodor Adorno, “Why Still Philosophy,” Critical Methods: Interventions and Catchwords (New York, Columbia University Press), 17. This page has been left blank intentionally Chapter 7 Against the Reification of Theory and Praxis: On Critical Theory and Empirical Social Research Karin Stögner

When Marx Horkheimer took over the position as director of the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt in 1931, he and his fellow members of the institute soon began to focus on the intertwining of theory and individual sciences. Based on the belief that philosophical reflection was no longer capable of providing any kinds of wider systems, but should rather refer to results of empirical research, the institute’s task, according to Horkheimer, was

to organize investigations stimulated by contemporary philosophical problems in which philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians, and psychologists are brought together in permanent collaboration to undertake in common that which can be carried out individually in the laboratory in other fields. In short, the task is to do what all true researchers have always done: namely, to pursue their larger philosophical questions on the basis of the most precise scientific methods to revise and refine their questions in the course of their substantive work, and to develop new methods without losing sight of the larger context.1

By dialectically integrating leading philosophical questions into the empirical research process, the interdisciplinary research program was meant as a lever for breaking up scientific reification. Consequently, the answers to these questions themselves were depending on the advance of empirical knowledge, thus resulting in a “continuous, dialectical penetration and development of philosophical theory and specialized scientific praxis.”2 The research program would set the stage for a certain philosophical meta-reflection of specialized empirical results, thus being able to pursue larger philosophical questions. Yet, we ought not to assume that the relationship between a socio-philosophical approach and individual scientific research was an egalitarian one. Since empirical findings were regarded

1 M. Horkheimer, “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Task of an Institute for Social Research,” https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/ horkheimer/1931/present-situation.htm. 2 Ibid. 86 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis as merely pre-scientific, they needed to be considered in a more reasonable theoretical context. Thus, empirical social research was rather given the status of an auxiliary discipline.3 According to Horkheimer, philosophical reflection in the research process was to assume the vital role of the problem-sensitive medium that integrates the results of individual sciences. “Philosophy—as a theoretical undertaking oriented to the general, the ‘essential’—is capable of giving particular studies animating impulses, and at the same time remains open enough to let itself be influenced and changed by these concrete studies.”4 Hence, empirical social research would only show itself to be fruitful “if its underlying questions and answers prove to be essential for an insight into society (and its transformation).”5 This chapter seeks to outline critical theory’s conception of the relation between theory and empirical social research, particularly focusing on the relationship between the abstract and the concrete, the general and the particular as well as between society and the individual. Current issues regarding research on nationalism and anti-Semitism will be discussed in the final part of the chapter. A dialectical understanding of the categories mentioned above will allow us to shed light on the relation between theory and practice. Or, to put it more precisely, a theory conceived in this way will always be practice itself, for theory reflects on itself not only as a means of production and a productive power, but also as a social relation of production. In his 1932 article Notes on Science and Crisis Horkheimer gets to the heart of the issue of the entanglement of science and social relation of production:

Society in its present form is unable to make effective use of the powers it has developed and the wealth it has amassed. Scientific knowledge in this respect shares the fate of other productive forces and means of production: its application is sharply disproportionate to its high level of development and to the real needs of mankind. Such a situation hinders the further development, quantitative and qualitative, of science itself.6

In the light of Marx’s critique of political economy, the interdisciplinary organization of research gears at the emancipation of science’s productive powers as a means to a more reasonable organization of society.7

3 Th. W. Adorno, Philosophie und Soziologie (Berlin: Suhrkamp 2011) 126; Cf. Th. W. Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” inCritical Models. Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press 1998) 707, on the difference between administrative research und critical social research. 4 M. Horkheimer, “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Task of an Institute for Social Research,” https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/ horkheimer/1931/present-situation.htm. 5 Th. W. Adorno, Philosophie und Soziologie (Berlin: Suhrkamp 2011), 127. 6 M. Horkheimer, “Notes on Science and Crisis,” in Critical Theory. Selected Essays (New York: Continuum 2002), 4. 7 Cf. G. Schmid-Noerr, Gesten aus Begriffen. Konstellationen der Kritischen Theorie (Frankfurt: Fischer 1997), 64. Against the Reification of Theory and Praxi 87

On that understanding, the major difference between traditional theory (comprising both metaphysics and empiricism) on the one hand and critical thinking on the other hand becomes evident. Horkheimer grounded Critical Theory on a motivational foundation and practical intention that aim to bring an end to avoidable suffering: “its concern is the abolition of social injustice.”8 Theory is to be regarded as the intellectual side of the process of social emancipation and thus needs to reflect on current political problems. In the early 1930s for example, with the shadows of National Socialism already looming, the leading questions related to the failure of proletarian revolution. This was the major background for initiating the broad Studies on Authority and Family. The in-depth investigation of the problem of authority was carried out theoretically as well as empirically.9 It would therefore appear that Critical Theory is indissolubly linked to socially transformative practices. In their 1956 published “Sociological Excursus,” a collection of various seminar debates, Adorno et al. explicitly state that

a theory of society that is to be more than just empty words is forced to acknowledge the power of repugnant facticity. If it does not so it risks remaining a helpless dream that will only benefit the power of the existing conditions. Without disregarding the negative aspects of the affinity between empirical research and praxis, it is precisely this affinity that holds the potential to overcome self-deception and thus is able to effectively and precisely intervene in reality. The eventual legitimacy of the procedure will be rooted in a unity of theory and praxis that will neither lose itself to floating thoughts nor will it drift into a biased hustle.10

The question of social antagonism being at the core of Critical Theory, theoretical efforts and empirical work revolve around certain clashes of interests within the bourgeois society. Though the antagonism of interests needs to be demonstrated case-by-case, Critical Theory does not abandon its orientation towards the general and the essential. Here this concept is based on the ideology-critical distinction between appearance and essence, yet, it does not perceive the essence as an original and unchangeable positivity sui generis. According to Adorno, the historical “context of entanglement” or “guilt in which everything individual is entwined and which manifests itself in every individual entity, especially in the division of labor

8 M. Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory. Selected Essays (New York: Continuum 2002), 242. 9 Still, the mediation between the theoretical parts of the study with the empirical case studies was reached only partly. M. Horkheimer, E. Fromm and H. Marcuse, Studien über Autorität und Familie. Forschungsberichte aus dem Institut für Sozialforschung (Lüneburg: Zu Klampen 1987). 10 Institut für Sozialforschung, Soziologische Exkurse (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt 1956), 114. 88 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis and the law of exchange”11 are the essence of society. By no means conceptualized as static, the essence rather grasps the objective laws of motion within society that the single phenomenon is infused by. It is precisely the penetration of the particular by the general that Hegel is referring to when he assumes that “immediacy is mediated.”12 By isolating particular phenomena without reflecting upon the whole, empiricist science runs the risk of fetishizing the mediated as something immediate and first. Positivism rejects the idea of an essence being the basis of the facts and simultaneously going beyond them as a metaphysical remnant that cannot be verified through scientific methodology. The object of investigation is thus isolated from its context and regarded as timeless. Hence, it fails to address the idea of social phenomena as historically created entities, but rather grounds its experience on mere snapshots in time. Metaphysical concepts, on the other side, do not conceive of the essence as “an epitome of the antagonistic relations between subject and object that occur on different levels,”13 but rather as an eternal and spiritual entity high above the depths of empirical evidence. The dichotomy between empirical research and theory is thus a reflection of the consistent division of labor within the bourgeois society. The reified work processes are alienated from historical totality and appear as independent from each other.14 Just as according to Walter Benjamin the historical subject “is filled with now-time (Jetztzeit),”15 so conversely each current object is charged with history and needs to be perceived as a result of the process of social reproduction. The past is not just past, for every object contains the long-buried possibility that all could be different. Hence, in critical materialism we find a reciprocal relation between theory and its material that is able to reveal the essence of antagonistic relations and criticize them. In dialectics, the laws of motion are thus not a static given, but the essence is rather a becoming, an effect; in this instance the concept of the essence implies its own changeability. “But these essential laws are valid only to the extent that they express themselves in social phenomena, and not if they are no more than a mere deduction from pure concepts.”16 If theory does not bring the concept to bear on the material and does not keep itself open to change, social laws of motion will remain uncovered yet accepted. Even more, they will remain protected: by empiricism without theory that will dispel the question of the essence as a metaphysical illusion that cannot be solved; by theory without empirical grounding by perceiving the essence as something that is static, original and hence

11 Th. W. Adorno, Einleitung in die Soziologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1993), 40. 12 Cf. Th. W. Adorno, “Drei Studien zu Hegel,” in Gesammelte Schriften 5 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1997), 28. 13 Th. W. Adorno, Einführung in die Dialektik (Berlin: Suhrkamp 2010), 37. 14 cf. M. Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory” and “The Latest Attack on Metaphysics,” in Critical Theory. Selected Essays (New York: Continuum 2002). 15 W. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings Vol. 4 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press 2003), 395. 16 Th. W. Adorno, Einleitung in die Soziologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1993), 42. Against the Reification of Theory and Praxi 89 unchangeable. In this sense and by means of ideological concepts, traditional theory will give way to the idealization of social reality and subsequently foster reconciliation with the status quo.17 Either way, “thought is reified as an autonomous, automatic process, aping the machine it has itself produced, so that it can finally be replaced by the machine.”18 Adorno’s analysis pointedly highlights the importance of mediation between theory and praxis for recognizing and criticizing the essential laws of society: “If the task of a theory of society is to relativize critically the cognitive value of appearance, then conversely it is the task of empirical research to protect the concept of essential laws from mythologization. Appearance is always also an appearance of essence and not mere illusion. Its changes are not indifferent to essence.”19 Critical Theory requires a permanent reflection on its current and possible future roles and thus also on its praxis. It must always bring the concept to bear on the material, for neither can stand alone. Additionally, critical thinking needs to come face to face with the material basis of the reproduction of society in order to be able to trace its laws of motion in single phenomena. In doing so, it will tackle corresponding tendencies of historical development and the consequences they might have without intervening praxis. Straightway hereupon arises the question of cui bono, in other words, what are the real social interests that stand to benefit from the essential laws? And how do they infuse certain phenomena? The point of this is to trace and reveal very real social conflicts as well as the potential for a social change they might contain.20 Critical thinking (as critical praxis) is thus driven by real possibilities of social change. Therefore, inquiring into the existing reveals a certain intention to detect the becoming. Critical thinking has to trace the conjunctivus potentialis—the becoming in which the being turns into what it is only in that it becomes what it not yet is. This is basically the claim to understanding: “to grasp existing things as such, not merely to note their abstract spatial-temporal relationships, by which they can then be seized, but, on the contrary, to think of them as surface, as mediated conceptual moments which are only fulfilled by revealing their social, historical, and human meaning.”21 Since the empirical finger cannot be put on society as a whole, critical theory tries to find traces of society in single phenomena, for in facts there appears always something that they are not themselves.22

17 Cf. Institut für Sozialforschung, Soziologische Exkurse (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt 1956), 112. 18 M. Horkheimer and Th. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2002), 19. 19 Th. W. Adorno, “Sociology and Empirical Research,” http://www.autodidactproject. org/other/positivismusstreit/adorno-empirical.html. 20 Th. W. Adorno, Einleitung in die Soziologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1993), 159. 21 M. Horkheimer and Th. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2002), 20. 22 Th. W. Adorno, “Introduction to the Positivist Dispute,” http://www. autodidactproject.org/other/positivismusstreit/adorno-intro1.html. 90 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

Etymology shows that a fact is by no means a given or something that is derived hic et nunc. The Latin word factum is defined as deed, act, something done or performed and refers to the primarily process-oriented act of human labor. A factum is part of a constellation and thus open for changes. Like the concrete, it itself is mediated. However, positivism looks at mere findings as though they were concrete. Also, the common use of the term concrete appears to be inconsistent with its etymological-philological meaning: the Latin word concretum means something grown together. Or to put it bluntly, the concrete is the whole.23 The abstraction of mere findings is required to gain insight into the whole, thus it is highly relevant to dwell on the factors that act in and through the factum. Critical Theory starts out from the contention that the concrete is basically a result. As for positivistic science, Adorno detects “a curious affective charge which has attached itself to the concept of the concrete” that itself can only be explained by the essential laws of society that again are blocked out by concretism: “our world is so dominated by abstract regularities, and the relationships between people have themselves become so abstract that the concrete has become a kind of utopia [ … ] the allegedly concrete, the facts, are themselves to a large extent an expression of the abstract order of relationships.”24 Social concepts, formed “inductively,” derive their critical coloring from the fact that

the rift between ideal and reality is typical of the totality of modern culture. This leads us to the hypothesis that society is a ‘system’ in the material sense that every single social field or relation contains and reflects, in various ways, the whole itself. [ … ] Induction in social theory [ … ] should seek the universal within the particular, not above or beyond it, and, instead of moving from one particular to another and then to the heights of abstraction, should delve deeper and deeper into the particular and discover the universal law herein.25

23 Cf. Th. W. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie I (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 2012), 31. 24 Th. W. Adorno, Einleitung in die Soziologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1993), 86; cf. M. Horkheimer, “The Latest Attack on Metaphysics,” in Critical Theory. Selected Essays (New York: Continuum 2002), 154f. 25 M. Horkheimer, “Zur Tätigkeit des Instituts. Forschungsprojekte über den Antisemitismus,” in Gesammelte Schriften 4 (Frankfurt: Fischer 1988), 375f. The notion that the concrete and the abstract are concepts of mediation and thus will find their destination only in and through the respective other is further clarified by Walter Benjamin’s reference to the monadic structure of a particular historical moment: the determinate alienation of the object here and now is used to examine the past in the light of the present. Or as Benjamin puts it, the monad is blasted out of his historical constellation. Yet, a movement of thought that seems to resemble archaeological excavation precedes this blasting out: the object that lay buried in the soil (of the past) not only contains its original determination. By digging through the layers of history we are able to discern all the determinations that have been added and are now incorporated into the essential characteristics of the object. Cf. W. Benjamin, “Excavation and Memory,” in Selected Writings Vol 2 (Cambridge, MA: Against the Reification of Theory and Praxi 91

Positivism, on the other side, celebrates the almost cultic notion that the most simple is ‘more true’ than what is composed. In fact, simplicity becomes a value criterion of social scientific knowledge.26 In the system of this methodological schematism, isolated phenomena are turned into “senseless ruins which remain after the liquidation of idealism, without interpreting, for their part, both liquidation and what is liquidated, and rendering them true. Instead, positivism is concerned with the disparate, with the subjectivistically interpreted datum and the associated pure thought forms of the human subject.”27 The manifold in the object, the basically unlike, the in itself conflicting is thus brought into one single concept. As opposed to this, the concept in dialectics is always moving, never standing still. It marks totality as reality and appearance, and though it is overcast by the general dialectic brings justice to the particular without hypostatizing it. The whole is broken and antagonistic, and this brokenness needs to be mirrored by the concept. Hence, Critical Theory of society converts the concept it brings along into a concept that springs to mind when considering the object, transforms it into that which the object itself would like to be. That is to say, it mediates the object with the becoming and, uno actu, confronts what it pretends to be with what it is. In a Benjaminian sense this means to endow things with the ability to lift their gaze. Critical Theory thus moves between the poles of possible and real, of is and ought to be. If the world is what is the case (Wittgenstein), then this world is itself an abstractum, since “only single states of affairs—something, for their part, abstracted—can be ‘the case.’”28 To limit our thinking to what seems to be the case, i.e. to mere positivistic findings, means neglecting the ephemeral experience of the non-identical, of what is more in the world and other than what is “the case.” The world is a reality come true. As a constitutive relation it always bears the possibility that everything could also be different, for reality itself is a contradictory unity of being and possibility. Thus, when we take a conceptual look on single phenomena we need to capture empirically whether there is something growing inside them that yearns at becoming different from what it actually is. In the dialectical movement of thought, concepts are immanently and determinately related to the material world. According to Hegel, a concept signifies the simple

Belknap Press 1999), 576. In the The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press 2002), 475, this reads as follows: “If the object of history is to be blasted out of the continuum of historical succession, that is because its monadological structure demands it. This structure first comes to light in the extracted object itself. And it does so in the form of the historical confrontation that makes up the interior (and, as it were, the bowels) of the historical object, and into which all the forces and interests of history enter on a reduced scale. It is owing to this monadological structure that the historical object finds represented in its interior its own fore-history and after-history.” 26 Adorno, “Introduction to the Positivist Dispute,” http://www.autodidactproject. org/other/positivismusstreit/adorno-intro1.html. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 92 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis unity of determinations that belong to a whole. Marx’ exposition of the commodity as a simple unity takes the opposite route from the research process: it begins with the effect. Concrete concepts like commodity and exchange of equivalents are the result of a process of thought, of what is called a real abstraction; they convey the most opulent determinations and express a totality that itself is a precarious unity of the manifold within various determinations that are compressed and by all means contradictory. It is precisely the contradiction within these concepts that makes it possible to grasp the world. Derived from empirical findings, they reveal how the factum is contradictory in itself. Adorno exemplifies this by reference to the exchange of equivalents:

The assertion of the equivalence of what is exchanged, the basis of all exchange, is repudiated by its consequences. As the principle of exchange, by virtue of its immanent dynamics, extends to the living labours of human beings it changes compulsively into objective inequality, namely that of social classes. Forcibly stated, the contradiction is that exchange takes place justly and unjustly.29

This process of “inductive” terminology displays how relations between people are disguised as relations between things. Though this reification has to be taken seriously, it must at once be exposed as an illusion. A mere fact that is isolated from its constellation is infinitely destitute. Only when it is lifted to a concept can it be released from its common form and finally be recognized. Not until then will we witness the unification of two aspects of criticism: namely the logical criticism and the emphatic practical criticism that understands the need for society to change.30 A concept composed in such way expresses the non-identity between thought and object. Although concept and object cannot exist independent of each other and thinking is influenced by both the subjective and the objective content, we are faced with a great gap that needs to be reflected upon in order to interpret empirical results. According to Hegel, it is only the idea that saturates itself with the weight of its object, rather than shooting out beyond it without delay. Yet, this requires interpretation in order to unveil the social physiognomy of the appearing and identify the totality behind the factum, which “cannot be translated into substantial immediacy [ … ] Interpretation means to become aware of the totality that emerges from the traits of the social given.”31 To become aware of the unseen constellation of social totality, theory of society needs to employ an “interpretation that construes the being in relation to its non-being.” So understood, the identical gets its wholeness only through the non-identical. This is why dialectical knowledge “should not be taken too literally” because there is always the non-identical that shimmers through. Effort needs to be made, to not only bridge the gap between

29 Ibid. 30 Cf. Th. W. Adorno, Philosophie und Soziologie (Berlin: Suhrkamp 2011), 145. 31 Ibid., 42. Against the Reification of Theory and Praxi 93 thought and object, but also include it in the reflection on the object. “Without the broken and improper no insight can be any more than a classifying repetition.”32 Adorno points out this theory of Hegel’s “has, of course, entered the service of the apologetic aspect, the legitimation of what exists,” thus defaming all that is deviating from reality, integrating all that is contradictory and consequently passing off the existing as reasonable.33 Backhandedly, the once critical concept turns into a homogeneous unity, thereby neglecting its immanent contradictoriness and intractability as well as the non-identity between the general and the particular. The abstract general is lifted up while the particular that lies in the contradictory and ambiguous character of the concept is taken off and smoothed out. This development in which enlightenment runs the risk of falling back into mythology corresponds to the universal, authoritarian identification in bourgeois society: “Nothing is allowed to remain outside, since the mere idea of the ‘outside’ is the real source of fear.”34 Following positivist criteria of what is to count as scientific, unanimity and consistency are the internal scholarly consequence of this process of civilization. Conceptual work was not left untouched by the pull of capitalism and the standardization of production, even more so as any science must be perceived as a social productive capacity that affects the reproduction of the whole. This can be demonstrated using the example of ideologically charged concepts like nation and Volk. One can see how the whole, that according to Hegel is the “accomplished epitome of the antagonistic relations between subject and object that unfold at different stages,”35 has been turned into a key idea in nationalist ideology to which the particular had to be sacrificed. At this stage, the Volk was construed as a whole, as a seamless unity, whereas the repugnant was either integrated or excluded. Contradictions, though objectively existent, are masked by the ideology of ethnic nationalism. “So great has the tension become between the poles that never meet that it has ceased to exist.”36 In such way, even the contradictory, repugnant moment works to endorse the status quo. As for ideology critique, to lift the veil of the seamless unity means to unmask its fetish-character. In more precise terms, the alleged unity of Volk and nation must be embedded in the whole of society, i.e. in the process of social labor in a production process that is unified by the baton of capitalist value realization. Thus, the object has to be made transparent as to how it is infused by the essential laws of society; through its determinate negation we find insight into society as a whole. Again, this process reflects the “inductive” character of conceptual work in CriticalTheory.

32 Ibid., 44f. 33 Th. W. Adorno, “Drei Studien zu Hegel,” in Gesammelte Schriften 5 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1997), 320. 34 M. Horkheimer and Th. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2002), 11. 35 Th. W. Adorno, Einführung in die Dialektik (Berlin: Suhrkamp 2010), 37. 36 Th. W. Adorno, “Reflections on Class Theory,” inCan One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2003), 97. 94 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

But Volk and nation are not mere matters of the individual conscious or unconscious. They are objective constellations. While they pretend to be the whole, they are in fact an expression of the particular, of certain interests in a society that itself is based on inequality. To be able to analyze them in depth we once again need to draw on the concept of the actual whole, i.e. the universal context of entanglement. Thus it will be possible to bring our attention to the mediation between subject and object, particular and general, individual and society without ever hypostatizing one part or the other. However, current research and theory development tend to historicize and individualize nationalism and antisemitism—a tendency that reflects the tension between theory and empirical research. Also, the individualization of social processes must be seen as yet another sign for a non-dialectical approach to the whole. In this scenario, the dialectical entanglement of individual and society is neglected. Instead the individual’s lack of power is whitewashed by blaming it for something against which it is increasingly powerless. On the other hand, the description of society as an autopoietic, self- organizing system that does not include a mediated notion of human action is just the other side of one coin. Both the absolutization and the negation of the subject are key to today’s creation of ideologies. Against this, an ideology critical approach that aims to bear the potential for a change of society needs to pick up a dialectical understanding of subject and society, of the individual and the collective. This holds especially true for the research on antisemitism and nationalism. If we fail to embed nationalism and antisemitism in the totality of capitalist socialization, yet if the concept of totality is dismissed altogether, they appear as mere manifestations of the individual conscious and/or unconscious that is again not sufficiently mediated with the objective conditions. In this perspective the individuals simply seem incapable of keeping track with the social and institutional development of a society that is increasingly anchored on international networking, globalization, and a supposed loss of significance of the nation-state; a society that seems to have left behind nationalism and antisemitism. Like relics of the past, nationalism and antisemitism appear to be effective in the individual only due to a cultural lag, whereas contemporary society would rather aim to promote different models of identification, namely the postnational. Jürgen Habermas’s early 1990s book The Post-National Constellation was composed against the background of the European integration process as well as the public debates on history, notably on National Socialism and antisemitism.37 Consequently, Habermas situates nationalism in the framework of economic and social processes of modernization: nationalism therefore appears as a specifically modern manifestation of collective identity,38 a modern phenomenon of cultural integration.39 But (and this reflection is a prerequisite for his concept

37 J. Habermas et al., Historikerstreit (München: Piper 1987). 38 J. Habermas, Eine Art Schadensabwicklung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1987), 165. 39 J. Habermas, Faktizität und Geltung. Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1992), 634. Against the Reification of Theory and Praxi 95 of constitutional patriotism) the exaltation of pathological nationalism in National Socialist Germany and the associated “shock” thereafter have led to a disruption of the narratively constructed continuity of Germany’s national history;40 and this disruption precludes recourse to nationalism as a means for collective identity formation today in Western societies. From this perspective, nationalism today appears as an anachronism, an irrational, outdated tradition. The undeniable persistence of nationalism, its upswing since the beginning of the new millennium, is nowadays primarily explained by the needs of the individuals. Yet this explanation at times fails to address the relation between the individual and the whole of society, for it is exactly the needs of the individuals that have to be examined to discover its true core. Embedding individual needs in the whole allows us to draw conclusions about the whole itself. However, contemporary concepts often retreat to the psychologization and individualization of nationalism. Accordingly, social psychology tends to replace a social theory of the whole, instead of being regarded as subjective mediation of objective social structures that works to keep individuals under control. This complies with a certain ideological surface that was already highlighted by Adorno et al. in their analysis of the Authoritarian Personality and is further deepening in today’s neoliberal phase of late-capitalist society: Individualization and psychologization act as a disguise of people’s dependence on the system as a whole and their overall powerlessness against it, leaving the impression that behavior and modes of response, which actually can only be assessed with regard to the degree of socialization, were something that individuals developed out of themselves. “The more dependent people are upon the system and the less they can do something about it, the more they are intentionally and unintentionally led to believe that everything depends on them.”41 It is worth mentioning that also The Authoritarian Personality was subject to such misinterpretation because it was not read as a “literary expression” of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, most notably the “Elements of Antisemitism.” According to Adorno, this explains “the criticism that the authors had attempted to ground antisemitism, and beyond that fascism, merely subjectively, subscribing to the error that this political-economic phenomenon is primarily psychological.”42 It shows the difficulty to find an adequate way of presenting empirical results in mediation with their theoretical basis. Eventually, also The Authoritarian Personality missed the central task that empirical research needs to terminate in theoretical insight. For a better understanding it is necessary to refer to the “Elements of Antisemitism” that theoretically shift “racial prejudice into the context of an objectively oriented Critical Theory of society.” 43

40 J. Habermas, Eine Art Schadensabwicklung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1987), 167. 41 Th. W. Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” in Critical Models (New York: Columbia University Press 1998), 231. 42 Ibid., 230. 43 Ibid. 96 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

The misinterpretation that antisemitism and nationalism were primarily psychological moments or individual responses relatively remote from the whole of society can further be fuelled by a one-sided focus either on empirical findings that lack theory or on theory that does not bear on its material. Empirical evidence for the omnipresent return of nationalism is rather persuasive, yet it is met with perplexity precisely because analysis based on empirical results does not target and uncover the essential laws of society within them. The same is true for certain theories, be it modernization theory or grand theories, where the concept of totality that mediates between the general and the particular is refused as metaphysical- philosophical ballast. In this sense, they closely resemble the opposition of those who heavily promote empirical fact finding. Evidently, neither can explain the contradiction between is and ought to be, between the reality of nationalism and the potentiality of postnationalism. In summary, both fail to offer the opportunity for an effective intervention in political practice. Subjective methods of research may be essential as a corrective force against rigid thinking as is fostered from above. Yet, by referring to the hegemony of the system, this thinking is not sufficient to scrutinize the specific association between the system and those it is comprised of. To truly understand the phenomena we need to apply a concept that apprehends the whole both as true (that is as an expression of the objective laws of motion of society) and untrue (because the antagonism remains unresolved, the whole stems from unfreedom and pathologies like nationalism and antisemitism are perpetuated). Failure to do this makes it impossible to convert empirical survey into society-changing praxis. This was made evident in the Studies in Prejudice: Viewing prejudice as an individual and psychological category prevents us from overcoming it in praxis. Rational argumentation is doomed to fail if the motivation of prejudiced personalities to exclusively identify with a so-called national in-group and thereupon to exclude the “other” is not conceived as an intertwining of objective and subjective moments. The need for exclusive national identification in purportedly postnational societies, characterized by globalization, transnationalism, loss of importance of the nation-state, etc., this contradiction can only be explained by the essential laws of this very society formation. If we assume a postnational constellation we need to be able to trace it also in the single phenomenon. Otherwise the postnational constellation would be an abstract construct that may be able to give an idea about a potentiality, but disregards current social reality. Given the increase of nationalism one can hardly speak of a postnational constitution of contemporary societies. To view nationalism as a museum piece cannot explain its persistence. Whatever the widespread rumors of the obsolescence of nationalism and antisemitism—they often do not contain an explanation of what exactly is obsolete in the phenomenon and thus rather appear as a means to cover old wounds, instead of truly dealing with the subject. That which is called obsolete often comprises of certain moments of a society that have been repelled and sealed off from the public conscious. It is precisely this kind of “unfinished Against the Reification of Theory and Praxi 97 business” that matters.44 A Critical Theory of nationalism is needed to raise awareness for what is left by localizing the individual need for national identification in the context of the whole. Approaches to a Critical Theory of nationalism can be found in Horkheimer’s notes from the 1950s and 1960s. As for the current constellation his writings further elucidate that the new (i.e. the postnational constellation) is actually infused by the old. 45 Following Horkheimer, “nationalism is a tool of manipulation in the interest of the ‘rackets’”46 functioning as an integrating ideology, and the nation is the form of organization these rackets use to push through their own interests to disadvantage of society as a whole. “That the whole would be the nation is pure ideology. Nationalism stands in opposition to the benefit of society, although this is what it preaches.”47 Nationalism emphasizes the subordination of the individual to the nation “which can act as party and clique exactly because it ignores the individual.”48 Nationalism as a tool of the “racket” means organizing the masses to pursue particular interests in the name of the nation. It thus serves to conserve obsolete social relations in which the power groups who “protect” and hold down the majority of people can reproduce and increase their power. According to Adorno “the idea of the nation [ … ] has itself become a barrier to the obvious potential of society as a totality.” That is why nationalism has become obsolete. Yet Adorno claims that nationalism finds its actuality

as the traditional and psychologically supremely invested idea of nation, which still expresses the community of interests within the international economy, alone has sufficient force to mobilize hundreds of millions of people for goals they cannot immediately identify as their own. Nationalism does not completely believe in itself anymore, and yet it is a political necessity because it is the most effective means of motivating people to insist on conditions that are, viewed objectively, obsolete.49

44 Th. W. Adorno, Einleitung in die Soziologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1993), 163. 45 The following chapter on Horkheimer’s theory on nationalism was written in cooperation with Johannes Höpoltseder. Cf. also K. Stögner and J. Höpoltseder, “Nationalism and Antisemitism in the Postnational Constellation. Thoughts on Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas,” in Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity, ed. by Charles A. Small (Boston, Brill 2013), 121–34. 46 M. Horkheimer, “Nachgelassene Schriften,” in Gesammelte Schriften 14 (Frankfurt: Fischer 1988), 381. 47 Ibid., 334. 48 Ibid., 115. 49 Th. W. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” in Critical Models (New York: Columbia Univ. Press 1998), 97f. 98 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

The explanation of nationalism as a political tool of manipulation, however, is not sufficient. Were there not a moment of truth in it, people could not be manipulated.50 Nationalism satisfies the individual’s need to get out of its meaningless isolation and join a community. “This is all the more true the less the bourgeois individual plays an important role.”51 With the demise of religion in Western secularized societies the individual is reduced to its own miserable identity. This results in the irrefutable yearning for a superior concept. Since the only common meaningful goal, the mediation through a third party, as Marxism would have it, ceases to exist, this yearning can only be satisfied by a commitment to the nation. In this sense, nationalism acts to free the individual from its isolation. According to Horkheimer, for the average human being there is no alternative.52 The nation takes on god’s role, it becomes the immanent god, a phenomenon of cultural integration and hence the only religion that remains a vivid experience. Though in a distorting manner, nationalism still includes the relation between individual and collective, yet its “mediation is merely a lie,”53 a poor replacement that cannot satisfy the need for the absolute. The finite nation pretends to be the absolute and demands theonomy. This idolatry of the nation forms the basis for a fanaticism behind which the “factitiousness of one’s own faith” is vaguely perceptible. Consequently, “the resulting rage is directed against those who do not believe.”54 According to Horkheimer, the topicality and persistence of nationalism in late capitalism comes about quasi automatically from the development blockade of bourgeois society that again was unable to resolve the contradiction between the individual and the general. In the antagonistic society, the hypostatization of the bourgeois individual corresponds with the absolutization of the (national) collective. Despite their being one, both are abstracts and equally wrong. Hence, we remain confronted with the same recurring question of what comes first, the individual or society? “From a logical point of view, nationalism is as true as individualism.”55 For historically speaking, the collective comes first and the individual is merely a “creature of society.” “That’s where nationalism draws its strength from.”56 Therefore, nationalism is no more or less than the individual’s rational (or quasi “natural”) reaction to its own hypostatization, yet due to immanent reasons any attempt to bridge the gap between individual and people is bound to fail.

50 M. Horkheimer, “Nachgelassene Schriften,” in Gesammelte Schriften 14 (Frankfurt: Fischer 1988), 337. 51 Ibid., 381. 52 Ibid., 428. 53 Ibid., 402. 54 Ibid., 429. This mechanism became recently apparent in the genocide of the Jecides and other atrocities committed by the murder gangs of Islamic State (IS) who, blinded by wild fury yet highly civilized, rage against everyone who does not resemble them, even their fellow believers. A closer look at the entanglement of postnational and post-secular would thus be worthwhile. 55 Ibid., 375. 56 Ibid. Against the Reification of Theory and Praxi 99

As a “messianism [that] changes into conquest”57 nationalism is only a poor synthesis. Even so, individuals cannot evade from this modern phenomenon of integration. Despite being glorified, they are repeatedly confronted with their own nothingness. In response to overwhelming conditions and the pressure of the status quo, the more or less powerless and isolated individual has no choice but to subordinate to the national collective. As a constantly evolving reaction pattern within, nationalism bars the individual from protecting itself from ideological patterns and the pressure for integration. Especially in modern societies, nationalism constantly reproduces itself as a “justified reaction to the absolutization of the individual,”58 that is, until “the rational and autonomous negation of the individual into a society where it can truly participate in”59 is finally realized. In this respect, nationalism is an indicator for society’s inability to consciously shape its own conditions. Hence, nationalism cannot just be negated or denied. Instead any ideology critical approach needs to elaborate on the heart of the issue and employ “the concept of a good society to understand nationalism and put it in its place”60 and thus sublate its positive elements in determinate negation. The theoretical challenge is the “translation of certain legitimate elements [ … ] into the concept of a right society.”61 In a letter to Paul Massing that relates to the thesis of collective guilt (which, according to Horkheimer, was invented to restore the national collective in Germany after 1945) Horkheimer writes “for critical thought there is no other option than to overcome the antithesis between collective and individual. [ … ] A thorough analysis of these concepts will help us to recognize the act of violence by the collective against the individual and vice versa—the bad identity that can only be abolished when the antithesis is overcome.”62 The overcoming of the antithesis between individual and collective is necessary in theory and praxis. However, a theory that localizes the energy of contemporary nationalism and antisemitism in the individual while insisting on postnationalism on a structural level and implicitly setting hope on a corresponding “evolution” of consciousness runs the risk of confusing the law of probability (A follows B) with the practical effort to bring about real change. Consequently, emphatic praxis not only refers to singular social manifestations, but also to the whole structure of society. It thus demands a theory of the history of society that is to be made evident by means of single phenomena. In this sense, manifestations of nationalism and

57 Ibid., 405. 58 Ibid., 375. 59 M. Horkheimer, “Notizen 1949–1969,” in Gesammelte Schriften 6 (Frankfurt: Fischer 1991), 310. 60 M. Horkheimer, “Nachgelassene Schriften,” in Gesammelte Schriften 14 (Frankfurt: Fischer 1988), 428. 61 Ibid., 429. 62 M. Horkheimer, “Briefwechsel 1941–1948” in Gesammelte Schriften 17 (Frankfurt: Fischer 1996), 814f. 100 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis antisemitism today are to be taken seriously and investigated in depth. They need to be made transparent as to the social structure within which they emerge. This will have repercussions on any praxis directed against nationalism and antisemitism, for recognizing its aims will provide us with possibilities of intervention. In a nutshell, only the knowledge of a prior totality that presides over the individual will spur the desire for a change. Chapter 8 Normative Ambivalence and the Future of Critical Theory: Adorno and Horkheimer, Castro-Gómez, Quijano on Rationality, Modernity, Totality Rocío Zambrana

When in his Philosophical Discourse of Modernity Habermas argued that Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment was a dark chapter in the history of Critical Theory, he set terms for the debate about the very idea of critique that are with us to this day.1 Habermas’s view that Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of western rationality at best led to inconsistency and at worst led to political pessimism changed the status of critique from an account of the paradoxes of capitalist modernization to an account of the normative standpoint that can distinguish between the positive and negative developments of modernity. The legacy of Habermas’s insistence on tackling first and foremost the problem of “normative foundations,” as he put it in his Theory of Communicative Action, continues today in the work of what is often considered as third generation Frankfurt School Critical Theory.2 Exemplary here is Axel Honneth, who has developed his critical theory of society by reconstructing Hegel’s notions of recognition and ethical life as the normative concepts that make possible a diagnosis and critique of the neoliberal present. Critics of Habermas and Honneth, however, have shown that they fail to properly theorize the paradoxical development of capitalist modernity. Habermas’s distinction between lifeworld and system and Honneth’s insistence on reconstructing modern societies as recognition orders cannot account for the hybrid character of our present, commentators within and beyond the Frankfurt School have maintained. In previous work, I have also pointed out the limits

1 See Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), chap. 5. 2 See Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984). See also Axel Honneth’s reconstruction of the intellectual legacy of the Frankfurt School in “Social Dynamics of Disrespect: On the Location of Critical Theory Today,” reprinted in Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (London: Polity Press, 2007). 102 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis of Habermas and Honneth’s accounts.3 Rather than the details of their critical theories of society, however, I have argued that we should call into question basic philosophical assumptions underlying the turn to normative justification for critique. The paradoxes of neoliberal capitalism, I have shown, call for a different understanding of critique. Critical theory remains critical if and when it understands that its critical concepts and normative criteria are not exempt from capitalist resignification. The philosophical task of critical theory, I have suggested, should thus theorize normative ambivalence—the coextensive positive and negative meaning and effects of capitalist modernization—as the basis for critique. In what follows, I articulate the concept of normative ambivalence by examining three problems that have been at the center of Critical Theory since its inception in Hegel and Marx—modernity, rationality, and totality.4 Returning to rather than rejecting Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is helpful, since this text is exemplary of the promise as well as the perils of conceptions of modernity, rationality, and totality. Indeed, rather than a dark chapter in the history of the development of Critical Theory, Adorno and Horkheimer develop a powerful perspective for an analysis of the paradoxical logic of capitalist modernization. However, an analysis of the dialectic of enlightenment is only a starting point. It theorizes the paradoxical character of capitalist modernity, but fails to think through ambivalence. In my view, theorizing ambivalence requires reformulating modernity, rationality, and totality. The way to do so, I argue, is to engage the decolonial critique of Critical Theory. I thus propose to return to the Dialectic of Enlightenment yet reconstruct its power and reject its weaknesses through Santiago Castro-Gómez and Aníbal Quijano’s critical engagement with Adorno and Horkheimer’s text as well as the problems that it famously develops. With this analysis, I begin to suggest that the future of Critical Theory depends on our ability to decolonize it.

A Dialectic of Enlightenment

In the Preface to the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer announce the central theoretical insight of their “philosophical fragments.” “Myth is already enlightenment,” they write, “and enlightenment reverts to mythology.”5 Understanding the meaning of this insight first and foremost requires getting clear on the status of these two propositions. We should begin by rewriting Adorno and Horkheimer’s formulations into their properly speculative-dialectical form: myth

3 See my “Paradoxes of Capitalism and the Tasks of Critical Theory,” Critical Horizons 14:1 (2013). 4 See Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1984). 5 T.W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), xvi. Normative Ambivalence and the Future of Critical Theory 103 is enlightenment and enlightenment is myth.6 Both propositions are what Hegel called “speculative propositions.”7 The copula does not affirm a straightforward identity. Rather, it points to the fact that the dynamic of each of its concepts (myth, enlightenment) determines the meaning of both. The structure and strictures of myth is (a form of) enlightenment. The structure and strictures of enlightenment is (a form of) myth. The notion of a dialectic of enlightenment is developed by understanding the two speculative propositions together. The speculative identity of myth and enlightenment structures, in other words, the dialectical development of enlightenment. It is therefore the ground of the analysis of the development of capitalist modernity pursued in the book. The speculative identity of myth and enlightenment announces that the subject matter of the text is rationality itself. A dialectic of enlightenment is an exposition of the strictures of western rationality. Myth is already enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer argue. It is a form of account giving, since it is a type of narrative that offers an explanation of natural phenomena. Myth already “sought to name, tell of origins,” they write, “but therefore also to narrate, record, explain.”8 Such explanation, Adorno and Horkheimer argue, responds to human vulnerability in the face of the power of nature. Nature is not only unknown. It is most importantly a site of danger. Fear, then, is the impetus for account giving, for explanation, indeed for naming. The crucial point, however, is not that fear is the source of our will to know. It is rather that fear points to the strictures of western rationality. Distinctive of western rationality is an attempt to master nature.9 “Enlightenment understood as the advance of thought,” Adorno and Horkheimer write, “has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters.” Mastery is key to the analysis that Adorno and Horkheimer offer in the rest of the book. The “disenchantment of the world” is the result not of an attempt to know nature, self, society, but rather to master it. Quantifiability, calculability, equivalence, utility are principles of order that respond to the impulse to master nature. Reason as mastery is expressed in the Baconian ideal of knowledge as power as well as in the commodity form whereby the use value of the commodity is reduced to exchange value. Enlightenment reverts to mythology, Adorno and Horkheimer also maintain. “[J]ust as myth already entails enlightenment,” they write, “with every step

6 See Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Athlone Press, 1981) and Simon Jarvis, “What is Speculative Thinking?” Revue Internationale De Philosophie 58:227 (2004). See Adorno and Horkheimer’s gloss on determinate negation on 18ff. 7 See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford:, Oxford University Press, 1977), par. 61. 8 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 5. 9 See Jay Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and “Love and Law: Hegel’s Critique of Morality,” Social Research 70:2 (2003). 104 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis enlightenment entangles itself more deeply in mythology.” Above I argued that this second proposition must be rewritten as enlightenment is rather than reverts to myth. And indeed, Adorno and Horkheimer’s point is that enlightenment is itself a myth. It bears unquestioned authority akin to pre-modern and religious modes of account giving. Enlightenment rationality seeks to explain nature, self, society on the basis of what they call the “principle of immanence.”10 “The explanation of every event as repetition, which enlightenment upholds against mythical imagination,” they write, “is that of myth itself.”11 Nature, self, society, history are understood in terms of regularity, causality, indeed in terms of identity. Identity is the principle of truth. Quality, difference, deviation must be reduced to equality with all else through the leveling principle of identity. Identity guarantees the necessary and universal status of scientific explanation and economic exchange. It does so while at the same time sacrificing the identity of anything with itself.12 In a word, identity sacrifices singularity. “Abstraction is the instrument of the enlightenment,” they therefore suggest.13 The point is that “equivalence is … the new fetish,” as they put it.14 For this reason, enlightenment must be understood as our new myth. It in fact functions like a god—it bears unquestioned authority in every area of life.15 What the speculative identity of myth and enlightenment reveals is their common root: rationality as mastery. This in turn allows us Adorno and Horkheimer to give an account of the development of Western modernity. Having distilled the identity within difference that structures the two theses, they move on to argue that “the trajectory of European civilization is an attempt to break the compulsion of nature by breaking nature.”16 They add that this compulsion “only succumbs more deeply” into itself, into the compulsion to master—from modern science to capitalist commodification. The development of modernity follows the impulse to master. Their account of modernity, then, rejects more familiar notions of the advent of modernity in the scientific revolution, the ‘discovery’ of the Americas, or French and German enlightenment. Their account functions at a different register altogether. They challenge the standard periodization whereby the ancient and the modern are seen as irreducible to each other. Principles of pre-Socratic philosophy (the moist in Thales, the undivided in Democritus) are but “early rationalizations.”17 Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Plato’s insistence on mathematical truth is a “longing for demythologization.” Odysseus is proto-bourgeois. Western civilization is not a

10 See Bernstein, Adorno. 11 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 8. 12 Ibid., 8. 13 Ibid., 9. 14 Ibid., 12. 15 Enlightenment depends on metaphysics, yet “suppressed the status of universals as superstitions” (ibid., 4). 16 Ibid., 9. 17 Ibid., 3. Normative Ambivalence and the Future of Critical Theory 105 matter of historical events, but rather “built” on the threat of nature and the impetus for “control of both external and internal nature.”18 An analysis of the development of modernity is thus a history of power. Power here refers to the compulsion to mastery—“under the compulsion of power, human labor has always led away from myth, and under power it has always fallen back under its spell.” This dialectical rather than factual history of modernity, then, is what the text reconstructs. Reason as mastery and modernity as the development of the impulse to master internal and external nature, Adorno and Horkheimer maintain, account for the totalizing character of capitalist commodification. It is the account of reason itself that makes necessary understanding late capitalist modernity as a totality. It makes necessary, in other words, understanding the commodification of all areas of life—not only economic and scientific practice, but also desire and culture. More importantly for our purposes, it makes necessary constructing a narrative about the development of modernity in light of a single logic—the logic of identity distinctive of instrumental rationality. The history of western modernity is a history of the elimination of meaning, the reduction of sensuous particularity to equivalence, the distinction between a subject of fear/mastery and its other—external and internal nature. The concept of totality in the Dialectic of Enlightenment is thus not reducible to the Weberian trope of a totally administered society or an application of the Lukácsian view of reification.19 It is not reducible to the bureaucratic culture of capitalist modernity, which holds efficiency as the main social good (Weber). Neither can it be reduced to the reversal whereby the social relation is among things rather than people, while relations between people follow a logic of things (Lukács). Adorno and Horkheimer seek to make a much more formal point.20 The stricture of western rationality—mastery—is the ground of rationalization and reification. The impulse and development of western reason, then, explains why instrumental rationality distorts all areas of social and psychic life and why instrumental rationality is the distinctive feature of capitalist modernity/modernization. It is precisely by giving an account of the totalizing logic of western rationality and its development under the banner of western modernity that critique takes place in the text. Rather than a critical category or normative perspective that purports to be freed from its historical origin or context, critique is resolutely immanent and perspicuously transformative. The “endorsement of history as totality is false,” yet its power lies in reflecting the “real totalization in

18 Ibid., 24. 19 See Jay, Marxism and Totality, chap. 8. Specifically note the interpretive difference between Susan Buck-Morss and Gillian Rose, which in my view is productive. 20 This is precisely what Habermas missed when he charged Adorno and Horkheimer with philosophical abstraction. An account of the totalizing logic of western rationality is possible given the logical rather than historical perspective of the text. 106 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis natural-historical experience.”21 The presentation of western rationality and modernity as a totality, in other words, exhibits its coextensive truth and falsity. It is true in its reality, since commodification is a fact of modern life, yet it is false in its actuality, since it betrays the falsity (read: injustice) of life in late modern capitalist societies. Accordingly, the speculative identity of myth and enlightenment is the diagnostic key of the text, since it allows the authors to articulate its common root in reason as mastery. The coupling of the two speculative theses in a dialectic of modernity is the transformative key of the text, since it allows the authors to articulate the logic of historical development as both true and false. Exhibiting the strictures of western rationality, then, makes possible diagnosis and avenues for transformation at the same time. The totalizing logic of western rationality, in sum, is used to the advantage rather than the detriment of critique. The Dialectic of Enlightenment pursues a decidedly immanent form of criticism, since it is an account that employs reason (account giving) to criticize reason itself (account giving as mastery). Through such an account, it exhibits the entanglement of reason and domination. As Simon Jarvis has convincingly argued, in the final analysis, Adorno and Horkheimer’s point is that enlightenment is not enlightened enough.22 Rather than crass philosophical inconsistency that denies the power of reason yet uses it to analyze its entanglement with domination, Adorno and Horkheimer are quite clear that enlightenment must “assimilate its regressive moment” for otherwise “it seals its own fate.” What is more, they maintain that the “self-destruction of the enlightenment” must be analyzed in light of a “necessary admission”: “that freedom in society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking.”23 It is precisely the work of reason, then, as the immanent exhibition of its own paradoxical structure that makes possible not only distinguishing but also analyzing its entangled negative and positive effects. The exposition of the strictures of western rationality, in other words, exposes its dangers as well as the key to its overcoming. To be sure, Adorno and Horkheimer’s text remains a presentation of the problem. It forgoes an articulation of a solution—clarifying a critical concept or normative perspective for critique or offering an account of ethical-political possibilities within a thoroughly commodified culture. The mode presentation that the account offers is, in my view, its strongest contribution. Indeed, the power of Adorno and Horkheimer’s account resides in exhibiting the paradoxical structure of rationality and modernity in its totality or as a totality. And yet, Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis remains lacking. It accounts for the paradoxes of western rationality, but it does not account for the ambivalent character of such logics of social and historical unfolding. It remains an account that seeks to clearly distinguish between the positive and negative development of modernity

21 And indeed, they are clear that “the very idea of universal history” “must be construed and denied.” 22 Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction, 22. 23 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xvi. Normative Ambivalence and the Future of Critical Theory 107 without accounting for the production of coextensive heterogeneous, opposite, contradictory, indeed paradoxical realities, desires, forms of life. It thereby misses its central claim—that western rationality is the site of freedom and domination at the same time. In order to distill the promise of Adorno and Horkheimer’s conception of immanent critique, we must call into question the assumption that rationality can be understood in light of a homogeneous logic and that modernity can be understood as a homogeneous development. We must also call into question the assumption that critique requires clear distinctions between freedom and domination at a philosophical register and entertain the possibility that such distinctions must be drawn through a process of political and cultural negotiation. Heterogeneity and negotiation are precisely the two features that Santiago Castro-Gómez proposes as responses to what he sees lacking in Adorno and Horkheimer’s account. In order to see the significance of heterogeneity and negotiation, however, we must account for the logic of capitalist modernization beyond the western context. It requires a critique of Latin American reason.

A Critique of Latin American Reason

In his Critique of Latin American Reason, Castro-Gómez launches a powerful critique of the way in which Latin American social scientific and philosophical discourse reinscribes the colonial gesture of the West by affirming the “absolute exteriority” or “radical alterity” of Latin-American rationality.24 Such reinscription is inadvertent, since the thinkers he has in mind seek to articulate a genuinely Latin-American rationality in order to confront the colonial legacy.25 The distinction between an authentic Latin American rationality and the external imposition of western rationality is problematic, for Castro-Gómez, since its insistence on affirming cultural origins denies the historicity of practices thereby depoliticizing them.26 In the attempt to locate a foundation or ground of an authentic identity, rationality, way of life, we forgo the possibility of analyzing the singularity of these very identities, rationalities, ways of life. Singularity is a product of specific, “local practices,” rather than the ontological or transcendental ground of a “sub-modern” reality. Relevant to our purposes is the way in which, according to Castro-Gómez, the Weberian concept of rationalization is distorted in Adorno and Horkheimer’s “tragic reading” of capitalist modernity. This distortion, he maintains, inflects influential accounts of the logic of modern rationalization in the Latin American context. In the chapter entitled “Modernity, Rationalization, and Cultural Identity

24 Santiago Castro-Gómez, Crítica de la razón latinoamericana, 2nd ed. (Bogotá: Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2011), all translations are my own. 25 Ibid., 47. 26 Ibid., 89. 108 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis in Latin America,” Castro-Gómez’s elaborates a critique of Pedro Morandé and Cristián Parker based on a critique of Adorno and Horkheimer’s understanding of Weber. Morandé and Parker, he argues, seek to articulate an authentic Latin American rationality appealing to the tragic reading of Weber developed in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. It is via this critical encounter that Castro-Gómez develops important reflections on rationality, modernity, and totality crucial to the notion of critique that I seek to develop—one that responds to the strictures of normative ambivalence. Albeit in slightly different ways, both Morandé and Parker draw a distinction between the pathos of western rationality and the ethos of Latin American custom. Unlike western modernity and its logic of instrumental rationality, Latin America is a “formed and indeed consolidated cultural ethos.”27 The distinction allows them to speak of two rationalities. Latin-American rationality is not pre- but rather “sub-modern.” It is distinguished by the fact that while western rationality is a matter of “discourse,” Latin American rationality is a matter of “religious ritual.”28 Western rationality is based on formal law, while Latin American rationality is based on the custom of el pueblo.29 The former is centered on the subject of private property, while the latter is a matter of publicity, given the priority of oral tradition and religious festival—one that continues with the Catholic “sacramentalization of ritual” in the Counter-Reformation.30 The crucial point is that the distinction between these two rationalities, Castro-Gómez argues, inflects the account of the process of modernization in Latin America. Modernization is conceived as a process based on the encounter between these two rationalities. On Morandé’s account, both maintain their integrity despite such encounter, while in Parker’s account western rationality is subsumed and indeed symbolically transformed by Latin American rationality, which remains untouched.31 This reconstruction of Latin American rationality should be called into question, Castro-Gómez argues, given that it contains two “problematic conceptions.”32 First, it operates with a “substantive and unified concept of popular culture that serves as the foundation (Grund) capable of subsuming in its basic logic all rationalities exterior to it.” Second, it functions with a unilateral reading of the concept of rationalization developed by Max Weber.” The problem is that the grounding notion of absolute exteriority cannot account for the heterogeneous and indeed ambivalent relation between western rationality and Latin American rationality. It cannot account for the convergences and divergences between two forms of rationality, which according to Castro-Gómez are mutually albeit asymmetrically transformed by their encounter. Absolute exteriority cannot account for the

27 Ibid., 47. 28 Ibid., 47. 29 Ibid., 48. 30 Ibid., 48. 31 Ibid., 50. 32 Ibid., 50. Normative Ambivalence and the Future of Critical Theory 109 processes of modernization in Latin America, then, neither with respect to how Latin American rationality is thereby transformed nor with respect to how western rationality is also transformed. The crucial point is that the encounter between western and Latin American reason yields singular forms of life that cannot be reduced to either a purely western or a purely non-western perspective. Given these problems, Castro-Gómez argues, Morandé and Parker’s account of Latin American ethos is but a “nostalgic myth.”33 These two problematic conceptions are rooted in Adorno and Horkheimer’s “tragic reading” of Weberian rationalization.34 Morandé and Parker’s failure is thereby tracked back to the account of rationality, modernity, and totality offered in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. By describing Adorno and Horkheimer’s account of the dialectic of enlightenment as “tragic,” Castro-Gómez points to the way in which Adorno and Horkheimer understand modernity in terms of the fate of reason as mastery. Modernity follows the fate of a reason that seeks to master external and internal nature thereby leading to its own destruction. The account of rationality and modernity is here monolithic—it follows a single logic unleashed by a central tension internal to reason itself. Adorno and Horkheimer are speaking of one rationality and hence one modernity. They analyze what they see as the negative development of western reason and can no longer understand the way in which reason itself transforms with its negative advance. For Castro-Gómez, despite their insistence on exteriority and indeed two rationalities, Morandé and Parker are working within Adorno and Horkheimer’s framework. They cannot account for the mediating interaction between the two rationalities. Weber understood rationalization very differently, Castro-Gómez maintains. The Weberian notion of rationalization is more precisely that of “the methodic organization of life and the subjection of human conduct to a specific set of rules for the sake of obtaining expected results.”35 Following this gloss on rationalization, the Catholic Church and the Evangelization of the indigenous population are figures of rationalization—just as much as early modern science or capitalist commodification. They do not appear as sites of resistance that subsume western rationality “yanking it from its Cartesian roots.”36 If we follow Weber, then, there “never existed that Latin American ‘exteriority’ vis-à-vis western modernity.”37 In fact, we see that modernization has been “assimilated in our context (medio)” thereby generating “hybrid identities.”38 Rejecting the opposition between the two

33 Ibid., 53. 34 Ibid., 53. 35 Ibid., 53. 36 Ibid., 50. 37 Ibid., 53. 38 Ibid., 54. For example, he argues, technology should not be seen as colonial intervention but rather as mode of mediation that articulates anew sociality within the Latin American household. The telenovela, for instance, serves as a form of mediating and articulating personal and collective identities staging racial and socio-economic tensions, 110 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis forms of rationality accordingly allows us to understand that popular culture in Latin American is the “result of the asymmetrical interaction between multiple rationalities.”39 Such interaction should be understood in terms of “symbolic productions related to rationalized practices that are inscribed in dispositifs of power,” à la Foucault, and which “function on the basis of a logic of exclusion and inclusion.”40 This means that “modernity has never replaced the traditional.”41 Rationalities coexist—sometimes entangled, sometimes side-by-side. “[T]hey are so closely linked,” Castro-Gómez argues, “that it is impossible to know where one begins and the other one ends.” To be sure, Castro-Gómez is not arguing that rationalization and hence modernization occurred in the same way in Latin America as it did in Europe. Rather, he is proposing to chart the different ways in which rationalization and modernization unfolded in a particular context.42 To grasp rationality and modernity within the Latin American context is thus to attempt to articulate its singularity (and I add) in its ambivalence. The conception of critique that we can develop, in both its diagnostic and transformative dimensions, is accordingly that of negotiation.43 Castro-Gómez writes that in the first place this means “that we should face up to the fact that the reference points of identity are no longer solely found in religious ritual, in oral culture and folklore, but rather in symbolic goods that circulate through electronic media, the globalization of urban life, and the transnationalization of the economy.”44 We must face up to the fact, in other words, that Latin American identity is the result of multiple rationalities that radically generating a sensed or immediate relation to such tensions, and functioning as a meeting ground within the household. See, 55–6. 39 Ibid., 56. Castro-Gómez elaborates the syncretism of formal aesthetic features and folklore in Latin American art to make this point. See, 57–8. 40 Ibid., 57. 41 Ibid., 54, 60. Latin American must be thus conceived as a Tamaramérica, which refers to Italo Calvino’s symbolic hyperreality, rather than Macondoamérica, which refers to the origin and foundation of Gabriel García Márques’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. That is to say, it should be understood as a “city-labyrinth (Tamaramérica) where all symbolic experiences fuse together in a vertiginous dance of signs that go from the most archaic forms of social-political common life to familiarity with the videotext, the fax, and the microelectronic.” 42 Ibid., 53. 43 Ibid., 61. 44 Ibid., 61. As such, identity is settled and unsettled in a community of consumers—of heterogeneous subjects that no longer share a common language, religion, and territory, but rather tastes, desires, and modes of reading symbolic goods. I am not entirely convinced by the way in which Castro-Gómez describes cultural hybridity—anchored in technological mediation—but I think that the theoretical point stands. I am also weary of the argument that a Marxist approach is reductive, thereby focusing on cultural identity. This seems to me to go counter his own account of hybridity, which would require an analysis of the ambivalent interaction between cultural and economic logics. Normative Ambivalence and the Future of Critical Theory 111 transform each other. It is not an ethos exterior to modern rationality that defines Latin American identity, then, but rather a “crisscrossing of the symbolic, [a] relocation of the discursive, and [a creation of] hybrid cultures.”45 Because the very notion of alterity is rendered inadequate, negotiation must be thought as a process of “articulation and difference.” Castro-Gómez’s account is insightful, since it allows us to give an account of not only the paradoxes but also the ambivalence of capitalist modernization. To be clear, the distinction between origin and its distortion is denied not in favor of critical, moral, or political skepticism. Rather, it is denied in order to find ways of acknowledging the hybrid realities—the singularities—that we seek to assess. Indeed, an account of the strictures of historical singularities is a matter of empirical not philosophical reflection. The philosophical point, however, is that such acknowledgment requires that we rethink what we take to be a critical perspective. What makes a critique of Latin American reason so powerful and indeed necessary for critique in general, then, is the fact that it sheds light on the mediating interaction between western and non-western rationality, instrumental rationality and cultural ethos, thereby yielding positive and negative meanings, desires, and effects. Rather than giving us grounds for rejecting Adorno and Horkheimer’s text, however, Castro-Gómez helps us reformulate their understanding of immanent critique. Via Castro-Gómez’s work, we can begin to suggest that critique presents or exhibits a logic of heterogeneous rationalities, which constitute singularities within and beyond the Latin American context. So understood, critique requires a notion of totality, which Castro-Gómez vehemently rejects. To be sure, I am not suggesting that we revive a notion of totality that follows from the argument about instrumental rationality. I am rather suggesting that the mode of presentation must account for mediation between heterogeneous rationalities. Therefore, it must necessarily give an account of a totality that sustains the structuring pattern of any such mediation. This is to say, then, that critique must account for such totality and present it as a totality, albeit one constituted by heterogeneity. Aníbal Quijano forcefully develops the notion of totality that I am suggesting is necessarily implied in Castro-Gómez’s account. He does so under the banner of the coloniality of power.46

The Coloniality of Power

Aníbal Quijano developed the concept of “coloniality of power” in order to articulate the “most general form of domination today, once colonialism as an

45 Ibid., 62. 46 Quijano argues against what he understands as the postmodern impulse. Castro- Gómez would be an example of a thinker committed to postmodern insights, so my turn to Quijano is in part a way of distancing myself from this perspective. 112 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis explicit political order was destroyed.”47 It is a concept that seeks to shed light on ongoing processes of domination that exceed a political paradigm. It therefore challenges the view that we are in a post-colonial age managing the legacy of colonialism, since it shows not only the root but also the continuation of colonial domination in all areas of human existence. Power, according to Quijano, is the attempt to gain control over basic areas of human existence. “As we know it historically,” Quijano writes,

on a social scale, power is a space and net of social relations of exploitation/ domination/conflict articulated basically in function of and centered around the dispute over the control of the following areas of social existence: (1) work and its products; (2) given the former’s dependence on it, ‘nature’ and its resources for production; sex, its products and the reproduction of the species; (4) subjectivity and its products, material and intersubjective, which include knowledge; (5) authority and its instruments, in particular, of coercion in order to secure the reproduction of this pattern of social relations and to regulate its changes.48

Coloniality, in turn, is the specific form of domination constitutive of the world capitalist system, which Quijano argues originates in and is indeed established as a global pattern (patrón) with America.49 Coloniality thus refers to (a) the racial classification of the world’s population via the racialization of relations between the colonizer and the colonized; (b) the configuration of a new system of exploitation that articulates under one pattern, namely, capitalism, all forms of control of labor—wage labor, slavery, indentured labor, small commodity production; (c) Eurocentrism as a new mode of production and control of subjectivity; and (d) the nation-state as a new system of collective authority that excludes populations racialized as inferior.50 As such, coloniality is a “constitutive element” and indeed “specific to the global pattern patrón( ) of capitalist power.”51 Quijano argues that the notion of “modernity/rationality” represents an “axis of articulation” (eje de articulación) distinctive of Eurocentrism. Modernity/ rationality is constituted as a “universal paradigm of knowledge and of the relation between humanity and the rest of the world” at the same time that European

47 Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality, Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies 2–3 (2007), s 170. 48 Aníbal Quijano, “Colonialidad del Poder y Clasificación Social,” inFestschrift for Immanuel Wallerstein, Journal of World Systems Research 2 (2000), 345; all translations are my own. Quijano also writes that power “is a matter of the capacity of one group to obtain and find, to impose itself over others and articulate existence under its control, and indeed to reduce heterogeneous histories to one new social structure.” 49 Ibid., 342. 50 See María Lugones for an important modification to Quijano’s notion of coloniality of power, especially “The Coloniality of Gender,” World and Knowledge Otherwise (2008) and “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia 25:4 (2010). 51 Quijano, “Colonialidad del Poder y Clasificación Social,” 342. Normative Ambivalence and the Future of Critical Theory 113 colonial domination was consolidated in America.52 It is a “cultural complex” that structures not only epistemic relations around the dichotomy between subject and object, nature and reason. It also structures urban, legal, economic relations based on the dichotomy between the individual and the social. It thereby consolidates the hegemony of an atomistic picture of human existence. If we consider liberal and historical materialist critiques of modernity, Quijano maintains, we see that they are both Eurocentric perspectives. They attempt to give an account of social relations and historical development in light of strictures set by this axis of articulation. The problem is not that they privilege the hegemony of a western point of view. It is rather that these modes of knowledge, which are in fact modes of power, cannot possibly account for “historical experience.” Key here is the notion of totality germane to Eurocentrism—a notion that Quijano will reject in order to articulate an alternative notion crucial to a decolonial perspective. It is precisely this alternative concept of totality that is important for the notion of immanent critique that I seek to develop. Liberalism and historical materialism, the former “hegemonic” and the latter “subaltern,” are a conglomeration of ideas that follow the same set of assumptions. They are indeed based on the same Eurocentric logic albeit from opposite directions.53 In all of its diversity, the liberal paradigm accounts for social order in light of individual needs. From classical liberalism to neoliberalism to versions of postmodernism and empiricism, the idea is that social totality is an order that responds to the historically invariant needs and rights of the individual. Although it would seem that the part-whole logic distinctive of liberalism is one in which the parts determine the whole, for Quijano, the whole here is a matter of the principle of individualism. Individualism constitutes a structuring logic. Although the subaltern perspective, historical materialism is the most Eurocentric, Quijano argues. It reduces social reality and historical development to the primacy of the whole structured around a single logic—“work and relations of production”—which develops akin to the dynamic of fate of Greek tragedy.54 “Eurocentrism,” Quijano argues in sum, “has led virtually everyone to admit that in a totality the whole has absolute determining primacy over each and one of the parts, and thus that there is one and only one logic that governs the behavior of the whole and each and every one of the parts.”55 It follows from this, he continues, that the “variable possibilities within the movement of each part are secondary, without affecting the whole and recognized as particularities of a general rule or logic of the whole to which they belong.”

52 Quijano, “Coloniality, Modernity/Rationality,” 171. 53 Quijano, “Colonialidad del Poder y Clasificación Social,” 345–7. 54 I disagree with Quijano here, since I think that there is much more to be said of Marx, although it is clear that versions of historical materialism have developed reductive versions of Marx’s critique of capitalism. 55 Ibid., 352. 114 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

The crucial point is that one could only entertain the liberal and historical materialist accounts of society and history by completely ignoring what Quijano calls “historical experience.”56 They ignore, more precisely, the “historical- structural heterogeneity of power.” Rather than rejecting the concept of totality tout court, Quijano develops an alternative conception that does justice to the heterogeneous and indeed ambivalent character of the coloniality of power. Historical experience teaches us that, far from a monolithic totality following a single logic, the global pattern of capitalist power is “a matter of a structural articulation between historically heterogeneous elements.” These elements “derive from specific histories and space-times distinct and distant from each other, thereby having not only different but discontinuous, incoherent, and conflicting forms and characters in each moment and throughout long periods of time.”57 That wage work coexists seamlessly with slavery, indentured servitude, and small commodity production is a feature of the power of capitalism to articulate these relations in their heterogeneity, discontinuity, inconsistency, and conflict in light of the aims of capital. Capitalism is thus a totality. “As a field of relations, it behaves as a totality,” Quijano argues.58 But we must understand that it is a pattern (patrón), rather than an order or static whole. A social-historical totality, then, should be understood as “a field of social relations structured by the heterogeneous and discontinuous articulation of diverse areas of social existence, each of which in turn are structured by elements that are historically heterogeneous, temporally discontinuous, and conflicting.” Understanding totality in light of a rejection of the logic of part-whole of both liberalism and historical materialism impacts how we understand historical development. Quijano argues that “the parts in a field of power relations are not simply parts.” They are parts with respect to the whole (conjunto) of the field, but they are unities onto themselves. They “move in general within the general orientation of the whole,” yet they are not particularities of a universal logic. They are “singularities”—specificities given their unique history.59 To describe the global capitalist system as a totality is thus to describe it as an organizing pattern that does not reduce each of its parts to its logic, but rather that it is a mode of power that has traction or grip by gaining control over a heterogeneous multiplicity. Such a pattern does not behave as an “organism” or a “mechanism,” then. It is not systematic and cannot constitute a stable entity. It bears no single logic. Hence, historical development cannot be reduced to a gradual “unilineal, unidirectional, unidimensional” unfolding.60 But it is neither mere discontinuity, a

56 Indeed, he argues that we cannot find any such pattern of power in which its components act in such a way over a long period of time. 57 Ibid., 347. 58 Ibid., 351. 59 Ibid., 354. 60 Ibid., 355. Normative Ambivalence and the Future of Critical Theory 115 logic of the event. It cannot be reduced to “jumps” of discontinuous events.61 Both models of historical development imply an untenable account of historical change. “[C]hange would imply,” Quijano argues, “a complete exit from the historical scene of a totality and its components so that an other derived from it takes its place.” Or change would imply an absolute “epistemological rupture,” which is an equally untenable exit from history. If we consider historical experience—specifically, the American context—“we see that change affects components of a historical field in heterogeneous, discontinuous ways.”62 Change is a matter of local practices, relations, histories transformed in equally local ways by a process that exceeds them yet that is only possible by organizing them. Global capitalism is a pattern expressed by the coloniality of power, which finds traction locally, heterogeneously. The concept of the coloniality of power, then, gives an account of historical singularities in their heterogeneity, discontinuity, tension within an overall pattern that has developed in similarly heterogeneous and discontinuous ways throughout history. The capitalist global pattern of power is thereby accounted for in its totality. More precisely, it is presented as a totality in heterogeneity. Such presentation makes possible critique or, rather, is the form of critique pursued in the text. In stressing the significance of totality for critique, it helps us rewrite what is powerful in Adorno and Horkheimer. Critique here, I suggest, gives an account of a totality and from the perspective of totality. This is to say, it seeks to present a pattern that organizes heterogeneous parts through an equally heterogeneous articulation of economic, cultural, racial, gendered relations. It thereby opens avenues for thinking transformation outside of the logic of historical necessity or discontinuity, both of which we have seen assume an exit from history and historicity itself. Change, transformation, is a matter of local practices that provide traction to the global pattern. The aims of the global mode of articulation, of the coloniality of power distinctive of global capitalism, can be resisted, transformed, resignified in heterogeneous ways. In order to intervene in such local practices and therefore possibly affect the global pattern, however, we must face the hard task of distinguishing between the positive and negative meanings and valences of these practices or singularities. We can no longer appeal to a notion of progress/regress or a notion of exteriority, given the analysis that I have developed in this chapter. We can only hope to settle meaning and valence as a singularity conscious of its ambivalence. As a pattern that organizes a social field with aims external to it, as a mode of power understood as control/domination/exploitation, capitalist global order is but an expression of coloniality that we must clearly resist. The difficulty, however, is assessing how it has in heterogeneous, incompatible, conflicting ways transformed social relations. Because singularities are the product of a transformation of aspects of human existence that may or may not have become engrained, may or may not have articulated experiences of freedom, the task of establishing normative

61 Ibid., 355. 62 Ibid., 355. 116 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis valence must remain a local task. This, in sum, is the challenge that critique ought to address. And it is a challenge that can only be properly met if the notion of immanent critique developed by Hegel, Marx, Adorno and Horkheimer all the way up to Honneth is transformed through the decolonial challenge. Chapter 9 Realizing Philosophy: Marx, Lukács and the Frankfurt School Andrew Feenberg

Introduction: Metacritique

In 1844, Marx wrote that “Philosophy can only be realized by the abolition of the proletariat, and the proletariat can only be abolished by the realization of philosophy.”1 Adorno later commented, “Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed.”2 What is the meaning of this strange concept of a “realization” of philosophy? The purpose of this chapter is to sketch an answer to this question which is more fully developed in my book, entitled The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Lukács, and the Frankfurt School.3 Gramsci used the phrase “philosophy of praxis” as a code word for Marxism in his Prison Notebooks. It has come to signify interpretations of Marxism that follow his lead in situating all knowledge in a cultural context, itself based on a class specific worldview. Gramsci called this “absolute historicism.” It characterizes the Hegelian Marxism of Marx’s early work, Lukács, Korsch, Bloch, and the Frankfurt School. I will refer to this trend as philosophy of praxis to distinguish it from other interpretations of Marxism. The philosophy of praxis holds that fundamental philosophical problems are in reality social contradictions abstractly conceived. These contradictions appear as practical problems without solutions, reflected in cultural dilemmas. Philosophy treats them as theoretical antinomies, insoluble conundrums over which the thinkers struggle without reaching a convincing solution or consensus. They include the antinomies of value and fact, freedom and necessity, individual and society and, ultimately, subject and object. Traditional philosophy is thus theory of culture that does not know itself as such. Philosophy of praxis does know itself as cultural theory and interprets the antinomies accordingly as sublimated expressions of social contradictions.

1 K. Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Karl Marx: Early Writings, trans. and ed. T.B. Bottomore (London: C. A. Watts, 1963), 59. 2 T.W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Seabury, 1973), 3. 3 A. Feenberg, The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Lukács and the Frankfurt School (London: Verso, 2014). 118 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

This argument has two implications: on the one hand, philosophical problems are significant insofar as they reflect real social contradictions; on the other hand, philosophy cannot resolve the problems it identifies because only social revolution can eliminate their causes. As Marx says in his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”4 But as we will see, the change envisaged by philosophy of praxis encompasses nature as well as society, creating new and puzzling problems. The most developed version of this argument is Lukács’s notion of the “antinomies of bourgeois thought.” Hegel claimed that the fundamental task of philosophy is overcoming the antinomies and reconciling their poles. Lukács accepted Hegel’s view but argued that this is not a speculative task. The antinomies arise from the limitations of capitalist practice, its individualistic bias and technical orientation. Lukács calls the world created by such practice “reified.” Its antinomies cannot be resolved theoretically but only through a new form of dereifying practice. His argument clarifies the earlier contribution of Marx and explains the later attempt of the Frankfurt School to create a “Critical Theory.” Consider the “antinomy” of value and fact. Philosophy has struggled with this antinomy ever since scientific reason replaced Aristotelian teleology. Most modern philosophers have tried to rationally justify moral values despite the fact that nature no longer has a place for them. The philosophers of praxis argue that this procedure is misguided. The underlying problem is the dominant understanding of rationality and the corresponding concept of reality in capitalist society. Science exemplifies these philosophical categories but they have a social origin in the structure of market relations and the capitalist labor process. It is in this context that values appear opposed to a reality defined implicitly by obedience to economic laws indifferent to humanity. Lukács sums up this dilemma: “For precisely in the pure, classical expression it received in the philosophy of Kant it remains true that the ‘ought’ presupposes a being to which the category of ‘ought’ remains inapplicable in principle.”5 So far the argument appears relativistic and reductionist, but Lukács reached the startling conclusion that a transformation of social reality can alter the form of rationality and thus resolve the antinomy. I call this a “metacritical” argument. It takes the abstract concepts of value and fact, grounds them in their social origin and then resolves their contradiction at that level. The application of this approach to the antinomy of subject and object is foundational for all versions of philosophy of praxis. The argument has three moments: First, sociological desublimation of the philosophical concept of the subject which, from its idealist definition as transcendental cogito is redefined as a living and laboring human being. This move follows from Feuerbach’s original critique

4 K. Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, trans. and ed. L. Guddat and K. Guddat (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 402. 5 G. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. R. Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 160. Realizing Philosophy 119 of the alienation of reason: “What lies in the other world for religion, lies in this world for philosophy.”6 To disalienate philosophical reason the real subject must be discovered behind the theological veil. Second, reconceptualizing the relation of the desublimated subject to the objective world in accordance with the structure of the cognitive subject-object relation in idealist philosophy. That relation is summed up in the concept of the identity of subject and object which guarantees the universal reach of reason. It reappears in many guises in the philosophy of praxis, from Marx’s ontological interpretation of needs to Lukács’s “identical subject-object of history” to the attenuated identity implied in the notion of mutual participation of human beings and nature in the later Frankfurt School. Third, resolving the antinomies that arise in this context through projecting a revolution in the relations of the desublimated terms. Revolution appears as a philosophical method in place of the speculative methods of modern philosophy since Descartes. Metacritique in this sense underlies the philosophy of praxis and can still inform our thinking about social and philosophical transformation. The various projections of such transformations distinguish the four philosophers I discuss in this chapter. They develop the metacritical argument under the specific historical conditions in which they find themselves. Differences in these conditions explain much of the difference between them since philosophy of praxis depends on a historical circumstance—the (more or less plausible) revolutionary resolution of the antinomies at the time they are writing.

Philosophy of Praxis in Marx

Marx’s early writings first proposed a consistent version of the philosophy of praxis. He wrote at the beginning of the proletarian movement in a backward society with a sophisticated philosophical culture, conditions that favored a broadly speculative conception of the future. He projected a total revolution, transforming not only society but also experience and nature. He dismissed modern science as alienated and promised a new science uniting history and nature: “There will be,” he argued, “a single science.”7 The rather fantastical quality of these speculations gave way to a sober scientific analysis of capitalism in later works that restrict the metacritical argument to political economy. The early Marx sought a resolution of the antinomies through revolution. His concepts of the subject as a natural being, of objectification of human faculties through labor, and the revolutionary overcoming of capitalist alienation correspond to the three moments of metacritique. From this perspective the Manuscripts of

6 L. Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, trans. M. Vogel (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 70. 7 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 164. 120 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

1844 appear as a historicized ontology with a normative dimension. They promise the “realization” of philosophy in social reality. Marx’s argument begins with an analysis of the place of revolution in political philosophy. Revolution has been justified in modern times either on the grounds that the existing state is an obstacle to human happiness, or because it violates fundamental rights. These are described as “teleological” or “deontological” grounds for revolution. Marx introduced an original deontological ground: the “demands of reason.” Idealism originally formulated these demands as the resolution of the antinomies of thought and being, subject and object. The early work developed the argument in three stages. Marx started out from the antinomy of moral citizenship in the bourgeois state versus economic need in civil society. Citizen and man are moved by completely different and conflicting motives, the one by universal laws, the other by individual advantage. In the first stage of the theory, he showed the importance of transcending this opposition but did not explain how needs can be harmonized and universalized to overcome their competitive nature. He argued next that the proletariat is the agent of revolution and as such tasked with resolving the antinomy of man and citizen. But this argument creates a new antinomy of (Marxist) theory and (proletarian) practice. Has the existing proletarian movement anything to do with Marx’s project? What sort of practical, material motivation would correspond with Marx’s philosophical goals? The third phase of the argument answered these questions with a metacritical deconstruction of the antinomy of reason and need. The key to understanding Marx’s Manuscripts is their radical redefinition of need as the ontologically fundamental relation to reality. Marx writes, “Man’s feelings, passions, etc., are not merely anthropological characteristics in the narrower sense, but are true ontological affirmations of being (nature) 8 ….” If need rather than knowledge is fundamental, the claims of idealist philosophy to derive being from the thinking subject are overturned. But Marx did not simply reject the idealist formulation. On his ontological account, need is not accidentally related to the natural means of satisfaction but is essentially correlated with nature. The correlation is lived out in work, which objectifies human faculties in nature while fulfilling needs. This is the “true” unity of subject and object. It is similar in form and function to the cognitive unity of subject and object in idealism. The liberation of the subject of need from the law of the market thus satisfies the demands of reason and grounds Marx’s revolutionary critique of the alienation of labor. The antinomies are overcome in history, not just the antinomy of man and citizen which emerged from his first essays on politics, but the ontologically fundamental antinomy of subject and object as well. “Thus society is the accomplished union of man with nature, the veritable resurrection of nature, the realized naturalism of man and the realized humanism of nature.”9

8 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 189. 9 Ibid., 157. Realizing Philosophy 121

But is this a plausible claim? The goal of idealist philosophy is to demonstrate the unity of subject and object by showing the constitution of the object by the subject. What happens to this ambition if subject and object are redefined as natural beings? In the context of philosophy of praxis this gives rise to a new antinomy of society and nature: can a living social subject constitute nature? Marx’s Manuscripts answer “yes”: nature is reduced to a human product through labor and, where labor cannot do the job, through sensation, understood as socially informed and thus constitutive of a specifically human dimension of the objective world: “Man himself becomes the object.”10 But surely nature existed before human beings and does not depend on them for its existence. Natural science studies this independent nature which appears as true reality. If this is so, history is an insignificant corner of the universe and human being is a merely natural fact without ontological significance. Naturalism is thus a central issue for philosophy of praxis from the very start. Marx challenges naturalism, arguing that if you imagine nature independent of human beings you imagine yourself out of existence. In short, nature independent of human beings is a meaningless postulate, not a concrete reality. Marx thus rejects the “view from nowhere” as a leftover from the theological notion of a disembodied subject. He argues for what I call “epistemological atheism.” His idea of nature is not that of modern natural science which he dismisses as an abstraction. He conceives nature as it is experienced in need, perceived by the socialized senses, and mastered by labor. This lived nature has a historical dimension that the nature of natural science lacks. Hence Marx’s call for the creation of a new science of lived nature. The concept of a new science only makes sense if the very idea of objective knowledge is transformed. Marx and later Lukács and the Frankfurt School argue for a new conception of what Horkheimer calls “the finitude of thought.” “Since that extrahistorical and hence exaggerated concept of truth is impossible which stems from the idea of a pure infinite mind and thus in the last analysis from the concept of God, it no longer makes any sense to orient the knowledge we have to this impossibility and in this sense call it relative.”11 Knowledge arises under a “finite horizon.” It is based on the socially situated involvement of the subject rather than detachment from the object.

Lukács’s Concept of Reification

Although Lukács’s version of the philosophy of praxis has similarities with that of the early Marx, he was influenced primarily by Marx’s later works. The concept

10 Marx, Ibid., 161. 11 M. Horkheimer, “On the Problem of Truth,” in Between Philosophy and Social Science, trans. G.F. Hunter, M.S. Kramer, and J. Torpey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 244. 122 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis of reification is Lukács’s most important theoretical innovation. This concept synthesizes Weber’s idea of rationalization with Marx’s critique of the fetishism of commodities and his analysis of the relation of the worker to the machine. Although Lukács generally avoids the word “culture,” with this concept he does in fact propose what we would call a critical approach to the culture of capitalism. The critique is articulated in terms drawn from neo-Kantianism and Hegel’s logical writings, but its most basic premise is the Marxist argument that capitalism cannot fully grasp and manage its own conditions of existence. Thus the concept of reification is an original basis for the theory of capitalist crisis. There is much confusion in the literature about the meaning of reification. According to its etymology, “reification” is the reduction of human relations to relations between things. The word “thing” in this context has a specific meaning: an object of factual knowledge and technical control. Reification as Lukács understands it generalizes the scientific-technical relation to nature as a cultural principle for society as a whole. In this sense it constitutes the society through a specific pattern of beliefs and practices. Reification is thus not a mental state but a cultural form that structures society as well as consciousness. Here is how Lukács summarizes his theory. “What is important is to recognize clearly that all human relations (viewed as the objects of social activity) assume increasingly the form of objectivity of the abstract elements of the conceptual systems of natural science and of the abstract substrata of the laws of nature. And also, the subject of this ‘action’ likewise assumes increasingly the attitude of the pure observer of these—artificially abstract—processes, the attitude of the experimenter.”12 Reification is thus the principle of intelligibility of capitalism. It is not a simple prejudice or belief, but the constructive basis of a social world. Writing at a time when invasive social rationalization threatened to overwhelm Europe, Lukács interpreted Marx’s analysis of capitalist economic rationality as the paradigm and source of the modern conception of science and technology. The economic limitations of capitalism show up as limitations of rationality in every sphere. These limitations have to do with what Lukács calls “formalism.” The problem, Lukács argues, is not with this formalistic scientific reason per se, but with its application beyond the bounds of nature, its appropriate object, to society. Reified economic rationality is formal in the sense that it abstracts from specific qualitative contents to quantitative determinations, e.g. price. The form/content dialectic is exemplified by the contradiction between the abstract economic form of the worker as seller of labor power and the concrete life process of the worker which overflows the boundaries of the economic concept. “The quantitative differences in exploitation which appear to the capitalist in the form of quantitative determinants of the objects of his calculation, must appear to the worker as the decisive, qualitative categories of his whole physical, mental and moral existence.”13 The tension between form and content is not merely conceptual

12 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 131. 13 Ibid., 166. Realizing Philosophy 123 but leads to crisis and revolution. The theory of reification thus builds a bridge between Marx’s crisis theory and the intensifying cultural and philosophical crises of early twentieth-century capitalist society, all of which Lukács attributes to the effects of the formal character of modern rationality. Lukács developed this argument through a critical history of philosophy. Reified thought, as exemplified by Kant, takes the scientific-technical relation to nature as the model of the subject-object relation in general. But scientific laws are abstracted from specific objects, times and places. If rationality as suchis modeled on science, much escapes it. With Kant the contradiction of form and content is generalized. Reified formal rationality gives rise to a correlated content it cannot fully embrace. The content that does not go into the formal concepts without remainder appears as the thing-in-itself. The antinomy of subject and object divides the knowing subject from ultimate reality. Kant’s three critiques of pure and practical reason and aesthetic judgment correspond to the three attempts in classical German philosophy to resolve the antinomies of a formalistic concept of rationality. Three demands of reason emerge from this “philosophical experience:” the principle of practice (only a practical subject can overcome the antinomy of form and content); history as reality (only in history is practice effective at the ontological level); dialectical method (dialectics overcomes the limitation of rational explanation to formal laws). Lukács organized his account of post-Kantian philosophy around the struggle to meet these demands which Marxism finally fulfills. Lukács argued that the metacritical desublimation of the concept of rationality in Marxism makes possible a resolution of the antinomies of classical German philosophy, social antinomies such as the conflict of value and fact, freedom and necessity, but also the ontological antinomy of subject and object exemplified by the thing-in-itself. The contradictions are resolved by the revolution which, in overthrowing capitalism, ends the reign of the reified form of objectivity of capitalist society. The revolution, as a practical critique of reification, is the third moment of the metacritique; it satisfies the demands of reason. But the meaning of this argument is obscure. Is the proletariat a metaphysical agent, a constituting subject à la idealism, a version of the transcendental ego, positing the existing world? The contemporary neo-Kantian philosopher, Emil Lask, proposed a theory of logic that helped Lukács avoid this absurd conclusion. Lukács drew on Lask’s distinction between meaning and existence to elaborate his social dialectic of abstract form and concrete content. The meanings supplied by the structure of capitalism are imposed on the contents of social existence. The proletariat mediates these meanings in a continuous process of which it is a part. But in this case Lukács departs from Lask: action at the level of meaning has consequences at the level of existence. Form and content must be understood together in their relation in a “totality.” Lukács calls the proletariat an “identical subject-object” for which knowledge and reality are one. In consciousness of its reified conditionqua mass of exploited individuals, the proletariat rises above that condition and transforms itself and the 124 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis society through collective action. “The worker’s self-knowledge brings about an objective structural change in the object of knowledge … . Beneath the cloak of the thing lay a relation between men … beneath the quantifying crust there was a qualitative, living core.”14 I call this a “methodological” concept of revolution. It does not substantialize the proletariat nor view dereification as the achievement of a final unreified state of affairs. Rather reified institutions and social relations produce collective subjects which contest the reified forms from within. This theory is a permanent source of controversy. The disagreement is especially relevant to Lukács’s considerations on nature and natural science because it is here that the metaphysical interpretation leads to the most dubious consequences. I argue that Lukács is betrayed by his rhetorical references to idealism but actually holds a much more plausible dialectical view. In fact, he denied that nature “in itself” is constituted by historical practice. Is this an inconsistency? How then can proletarian revolution resolve the antinomies if nature “in itself” lies beyond history? Lukács lived in an advanced society in which science and technology played an essential role; he could not envisage their total overthrow as had the early Marx. He had to find a more subtle version of the revolutionary resolution of the antinomy of subject and object. Reification is a form of objectivity, that is, an a priori condition of meaning. This is not exactly a Kantian a priori since it is enacted in social reality by human beings, rather than by an abstract subject that can never be an object. Nevertheless, it operates at the level of the intelligibility of the world even as it plays a material role in the practical activities that constitute that world. Transposing the antinomy of subject and object to this level makes their reconciliation in a unity possible. On these terms, the subject need not posit the material existence of nature to overcome the antinomy. Instead, the question is reformulated in terms of the relation of the subject to the system of meanings in which the world is lived and enacted. That relation takes two different forms which are, in effect, “methods,” both cognitive and practical. What Lukács rather confusingly called the “contemplative” method of natural science posits reified facts and laws. Science is contemplative not because it is passive, but in the sense that it constructs the world as a system of formal laws that cannot be changed by a dereifying practice. The reification of nature is thus unsurpassable. The case is different for social institutions which can be transformed ontologically by human action. Reification of society is not an inevitable fate. Social institutions can be transformed ontologically by human action which, in modifying their meaning, changes their actual functioning. The institutionalization of such a “unity of theory and practice” would create a new type of society which Lukács (all too briefly) describes as follows: “The world which confronts man in theory and in practice exhibits a kind of objectivity which—if properly understood—need never stick fast in an immediacy similar to that of forms found

14 Ibid., 169. Realizing Philosophy 125 earlier on. This objectivity must accordingly be comprehensible as a constant factor mediating between past and future and it must be possible to demonstrate that it is everywhere the product of man and of the development of society.”15 Had he developed this insight he would have given us an original concept of socialism. The methodological distinction between contemplative and transforming practice is central to Lukács’s argument. Both are social, although in different ways. All forms of knowledge depend on historically specific a priori constructions of experience. The nature of natural science is a product of one such cultural form, the contemplative form, and so belongs to history even as it posits a world of facts and laws beyond the reach of historical practice. Its contemplative method produces truths about nature but it is ideological in its social scientific application. Lukács thus incorporated science into history through its a priori form of objectivity, not through the constitution of its factual content. The dualism of nature and society is methodological, not metaphysical and is situated within a larger social framework. It thus satisfies the requirements of philosophy of praxis.

The Frankfurt School

I turn now to the Frankfurt School. Both Adorno and Marcuse acknowledge the influence of Lukács’s theory of reification, and Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts freed Marcuse from Heidegger in 1932. The metacritique of rationality is the most significant link between the Frankfurt School and earlier philosophy of praxis. Like the early Marx and Lukács, these philosophers subscribe to an absolute historicism that grounds a critical perspective on all aspects of the culture of capitalism, including its science and technology. This critique is a direct descendent of Marx’s concept of alienation and Lukács’s theory of reification. These philosophers argue with Lukács that the capitalist construction of experience in modern times is exemplified in the scientific worldview. The limitations of that worldview are manifest in the forms of rationalization characterizing modern societies. However, they reject many of Lukács’s key notions, such as the concept of totality and the unity of theory and practice. Thus in the Frankfurt School, the historical thesis of the philosophy of praxis serves primarily to provide an independent point of view for social critique. Adorno and Marcuse write in the wake of the revolutionary tide that carried Lukács forward to communism. They still believe in the necessity of a practical resolution of the antinomies of philosophy in a time when it has become elusive. This shifts their focus away from the specific consequences of capitalism toward the more general problem of the structure of modern experience which no longer supports the emergence of class consciousness. The analysis of distorted experience

15 Ibid., 159. 126 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis provides a glimpse of what would be revealed by its undistorted counterpart. As Adorno writes, “the true thing determines itself via the false thing.”16 The Frankfurt School philosophers still believe that only the proletariat can resolve the antinomies, but they also claim that it is no longer a revolutionary subject. With Dialectic of Enlightenment the focus shifts from class issues to the domination of nature and the power of the mass media. The concept of instrumental reason in that book resembles Lukács’s concept of reification but cut loose from its original Marxist roots. This text criticizes instrumental rationality in its capitalist form as unbridled power over nature and human beings. The authors invoke the potential of reflective reason to overcome reification and to reconcile humanity and nature. They appeal to “mindfulness (Eingedenken) of nature in the subject” for a standpoint opposed to the dystopian instrumentality that now penetrates even the inner life.17 We get a hint of what we miss by reflecting on our own belonging to nature as natural beings. In so doing we break with the forced imposition of capitalist forms on experience and the reduction of the subject to a mere cog in the social machine. The point is not to reject rationality, and with it modernity itself, but rather to free it from the hubris of domination. This will release the potential for “agreement between human beings and things,” i.e. peace, which Adorno defines as “the state of differentiation without domination, with the differentiated participating in each other.”18 This is as close as Adorno gets to affirming the unity of subject and object. But the prospects for that appear dim. Adorno’s later concepts of identity and non-identity recapitulate the form/ content dialectic of reification. Identity thinking is formal and loses the content which is recaptured by the dialectics of concrete experience. Modern culture impoverishes experience by “identifying” the experienced object with the abstract concepts that subsume it in thought and erasing more complex connections and potentialities. Dialectics uncovers the “constellation” of contexts and concepts which enable thought to attain the truth of the object. Adorno proposed a “rational critique of reason.”19 He recognized the essential role of instrumental reason while resisting the exorbitant form it takes under capitalism. For example, he argued that the machine is both an oppressive instrument of capitalist domination and contains a promise of service to all humanity through its objective form. “The thing-like quality of the means, which makes the means universally available, its ‘objective validity’ for everyone, itself

16 E. Bloch, “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing,” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. J. Zipes and F. Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 12. 17 T.W. Adorno, and M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. J. Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 40. 18 T.W. Adorno, “On Subject and Object,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. H.W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 247. 19 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 85. Realizing Philosophy 127 implies a criticism of the domination from which thought has arisen as its means.”20 He made similar arguments in relation to the market and other modern institutions. This interesting critical approach is never developed beyond brief aphorisms. The concept of “formal bias” I have introduced in my critical theory of technology develops this aspect of Adorno’s argument as a critical method.21 The point is to preserve the emancipatory content of modern institutions while criticizing their biased implementation under capitalism. But because he rejects all revolutionary prospects, Adorno’s version of the philosophy of praxis leads to a dead end that is evident in his and Horkheimer’s 1956 dialogue on theory and practice and in Adorno’s incomprehension in the face of the New Left. Marcuse’s version of philosophy of praxis is influenced by the phenomenological concept of experience and by the New Left. He sees the social movements of the 1960s and ’70s not as a new agent of revolution but as prefiguring an emancipatory mode of experience. Revolution in an advanced society is at least possible in principle on the basis of a generalization of this new way of experiencing the world. This is sufficient for Marcuse to construct a final version of the philosophy of praxis in which the transformation of science and technology plays a central role. Release from the domination of nature and human beings is at least a real possibility in Hegel’s sense. He thus reaches more positive conclusions than Adorno although he too can find no effective agent of change. Marcuse’s “two dimensional” ontology is close to Adorno’s critique of instrumental reason. Like Adorno’s concept of non-identity, Marcuse’s second dimension contains the potentialities blocked by the existing society. But Marcuse also draws on Husserl and Heidegger’s phenomenological concept of the lifeworld and on the existentialist concept of “project” to work out his critique of technology. These phenomenological concepts are invoked to explain the flawed inheritance of science and technology and the promise of the New Left. The civilizational project of capitalism is committed to technological domination. It increasingly restricts experience and knowledge to their instrumental aspects. Revolution requires a transformation of the historically evolved “a priori” conditions of experience. Experience must reveal potentialities as intrinsic to its objects. Marcuse refers to an “existential truth” of experience which resembles Adorno’s concept of constellation. That truth is “a synthesis, reassembling the bits and fragments which can be found in distorted humanity and nature. This recollected material has become the domain of the imagination, it has been sanctioned by the repressive societies in art.”22 With the New Left and its “new sensibility” a new form of experience emerges that foreshadows such a transformed a priori.

20 Adorno, and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 29–30. 21 Feenberg, The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Lukács and the Frankfurt School, 164–7. 22 H. Marcuse, “Nature and Revolution,” in Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1972), 69–70. 128 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

Marcuse’s metacritique of science and technology tied them to their source in the capitalist exploitation of human beings and the earth. “The projection of nature as quantifiable matter … would be the horizon of a concrete societal practice which would be preserved in the development of the scientific project.”23 He related the Frankfurt School critique of reified instrumental rationality to the new mode of experience appearing in the New Left, and later, in the environmental movement. Just as reified “technological rationality” is derived from the lifeworld of capitalism, so a radically different rationality is promised by this new mode of experience. A dialectical rationality will incorporate the imagination as the faculty through which the reified form of things is transcended. Were this new form of experience to be generalized, nature and other human beings would be perceived non-instrumentally, as subjects. Contrary to Habermas’s famous critique, this does not imply conversational familiarity, but rather recognition of the integrity of the object as a substance with its own potentialities. Marcuse proposes a “liberation of nature,” “the recovery of the life-enhancing forces in nature, the sensuous aesthetic qualities which are foreign to a life wasted in unending competitive performance.”24 The subject and object would be united not in an idealistic identity but through shared participation in a community of nature. But there is an ambiguity: how does this vision apply to science and technology? Does Marcuse intend to “re-enchant” nature or is his theory aimed at a reform of technological design? Like earlier philosophers of praxis, Marcuse rejects naturalism; science belongs to history: “The two layers or aspects of objectivity (physical and historical) are interrelated in such a way that they cannot be insulated from each other; the historical aspect can never eliminated so radically that only the ‘absolute’ physical layer remains.”25 The historical a priori underlying modern science can thus evolve and change in a future socialist society under the impact of a new mode of experience. But Marcuse’s primary political concern is not with science but with technology. Science cannot be changed successfully by new laws or social arrangements, but these are the means of technological transformation. Socialism will introduce new technological ends which, “as technical ends, would then operate in the project and in the construction of the machinery, and not only in its utilization.” Marcuse calls this the “translation of values into technical tasks—the materialization of values.”26 The revolution can resolve the antinomies through technological transformation, leaving the transformation of science to the internal evolution of scientific disciplines in a new social context. Marcuse thus constructed afinal version of the philosophy of praxis which I have attempted to develop further in a critical theory of technology.

23 H. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964), 160. 24 H. Marcuse, “Nature and Revolution,” 60. 25 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 218. 26 Ibid., 234. Realizing Philosophy 129

Philosophy of Praxis Today

Much of Marcuse’s thought applies to contemporary social movements, such as the environmental movement, that grew out of the New Left. These movements address the limitations of technical disciplines and designs in terms of the lessons of experience. Often these lessons are reformulated on the basis of counter-expertise in critiques of the dominant approaches. Ordinary people–workers, consumers, victims of pollution–are often the first to notice and protest dangers and abuses. In other cases, users may identify unexploited potentialities of the systems they use and open them up through hacking. This is how the Internet was re-functioned as a communication medium. All these cases exemplify practically the basic structure of the meta-critique. The desublimation of rationality takes the form of a social critique of rational technical disciplines. The place of need in Marx, of consciousness in Lukács and of the “new sensibility” in Marcuse is now occupied by practical-critical experience with technology in the lifeworld. Labor and class, while they continue to be important, no longer occupy a unique place at the center of the theory. Labor is one domain of the lifeworld in which people have significant experiences that are brought into relation with the rational forms of technology through various types of social engagement and struggle. But there are other ways of encountering technology that issue in a critical relation to technical disciplines and designs. Critical theory of technology thus rejects the restriction of much Marxist theory to political economy by critically addressing the whole range of reifications in modern society. These include not only the reification of the economy, but administrative and technological reifications as well as consumption and the capitalist aestheticization of daily life. To be sure, administration, technology and consumption have been shaped by economic forces, but they are not reducible to economics, nor is resistance in these domains less significant for a contemporary radical movement than labor struggle. Contemporary social movements offer no more than prefigurations of a more democratic structure of modernity. Marcuse’s caution in evaluating the promise of the New Left is just as appropriate today. Social struggle can teach us something about a possible transformation of the relation between reason and experience, but that is a far cry from predicting a revolution by simple extrapolation. Nevertheless, we can move beyond the systematic pessimism of Adorno on this basis. The question whether the philosophy of praxis in this new form can resolve the “antinomies of bourgeois thought” is more difficult. The ambitious claims of the early Marx, Lukács and Marcuse assumed that the meta-critical desublimation of philosophical categories permitted a social resolution of the antinomies. Subject and object, which were conceptually sundered by idealism, could be rejoined when redefined in sociological terms. Though problematic, the application of this schema to nature has always been essential to this program. A social account of nature and natural science seems more plausible today than at any time in the past. A generation of work in Science and Technology Studies 130 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis has refuted the positivistic assumptions that separated rationality from its social context. But if rationality is reconceived in that context, then the philosophy of praxis can be grounded in empirical research. The move from a general critique of reason as such to a critique of its various realizations in technologies and technical disciplines renews philosophy of praxis. The philosophy of praxis is significant for us today as the most developed attempt within Marxism to reflect on the consequences of the rationalization of society under capitalism. It was the first to raise fundamental philosophical questions about science and technology from a critical, dialectical standpoint. It attacked capitalism not at its weak points, such as inequality and poverty, but at its strongest points: the rationality of its markets and management techniques, its idea of progress, its technological efficiency. But it does not reject rationality as such. Rather, philosophy of praxis dared to formulate a “rational critique of reason” that identifies the flaws in modernity’s achievements and proposes a rational alternative on a new basis. Chapter 10 On the Critique of Rights: Adorno, Critical Theory and Natural Law1 Robert Fine

Introduction

In the modern age the freedom of the individual is at once elevated as a supreme value and subordinated to the compelling forces of instrumental rationality, class exploitation and state domination. The principle of subjective freedom is expressed in all manner of forms: rights of personality and property, romantic love and individual responsibility, the moral point of view and the voice of conscience, portraiture in painting and character in literature. On the other hand, it is subordinated to the self-valorizing wealth and self-expanding power of capital and the state, which to use Hegel’s phrase from the Philosophy of Right, are turned into ‘earthly gods’. If we remain in hope that these opposites can be reconciled, the wonder of it all is that we can still find ways of living with such intense contradiction. At every critical moment we are confronted with the question of how to handle the hypertrophy of freedom the modern age bestows and the atrophy of freedom it constantly threatens. It seems to me that critical theory understood the barbarism of its times in terms of the disintegration of mediations between freedom and domination: the disintegration both of institutional mediations (the crisis of ‘objective spirit’) such as rights, law, civil society, public life and the rational state, and of subjective mediations (the crisis of ‘subjective spirit’) such as thinking, understanding, judging and criticizing. The logic of this disintegration led critical theory to face up to the scenarios that resulted from the ‘triumph of the will’ over all external limitations, and the triumph of impersonal and abstract forces over all human experience. The former was perhaps most evident in the ‘camps’, the pivotal institution of totalitarianism, where the nihilistic principle that everything is permitted and possible was put into practice. The latter is evident in the subsumption of the

1 This chapter draws in particular from two previously published works: ‘Natural law and critical theory: bringing rights back in’, in Daniel Chernilo and Robert Fine (co-editors) ‘Natural law and Social Theory’, Special Issue Journal of Classical Sociology, 13(2), 2013: 222–39; and ‘Rights, Law and subjectivity: configuring Arendt and Adorno’ in Samir Gandesha and Lars Rensmann (eds) Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Questions, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012, 154–72. 132 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis human spirit to the self-perpetuating and self-valorizing movement of capital and power. Critical theory did not have to invent these terrifying scenarios, for this was what the world became. It was as if the nightmares nineteenth-century social critics had of the impending future of Europe came true. Nietzsche’s premonition of a world in which ‘the highest values devalue themselves’ proved to be understated when totalitarianism became a site where ‘the aim’ really was lacking, where ‘why?’ really could find no answers, where the world really did experience ‘a total extermination and uprooting of culture’, and where ‘everything, contemporary art and science included, serves the coming barbarism’.2 Theodor Adorno wrote that in the experience of totalitarian domination, it looked as if the victims were ‘merely the object of technical and administrative measures’ and as if the perpetrators combined ‘utmost technical perfection with total blindness’.3 If this was the appearance, the reality was more like Nietzsche’s ‘eternal recurrence’ in which ‘each shock not inwardly absorbed’ acts as ‘a ferment of future destruction’.4 Adorno recognized that in this context we have to ‘balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims’ fate’; we simply ‘shudder at the indifference of each individual life’ bespoken by the camps.5 And yet he assumed the responsibility of understanding what happened and of recovering some idea of humanity in the act of understanding itself. The twin temptations he resisted were to treat barbarism on the one hand merely as a blip on the long road to modernity safely tucked away in the misfortunes of the past; and on the other merely as the inevitable outcome of a mechanical process of rationalization to which human agency was subsumed. Totalitarianism did not come from Mars; it was rooted in modern society, but not as its final result. The difficulties of mediating the divisions of the modern world – between subject and object, person and thing, free will and determination, politics and economics – express themselves in the precariousness of human institutions, whose legitimacy and stability are far from certain. The experience of totalitarianism provides us with enduring images of what can happen when human institutions are declared invalid. The human institutions I examine in this chapter, via Adorno and critical theory, is that which constitutes what Kant and Hegel after him called the modern ‘system of right’. It includes the evolving social forms of right: private property, morality, family, law, civil society, political states, international relations, cosmopolitan rights, etc. My question is this: how did Adorno understand the breakdown of these institutions and what was to be done to reconstruct them? My argument posits the revaluation of rights in the cognitive and normative heartlands of critical theory. This thesis takes off from the proposal that the critique of rights is not the same as

2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 148–9. 3 T.W. Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 1996), 55. 4 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 54. 5 T.W. Adorno ‘After Auschwitz’ in Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 1973), 361–2. On the Critique of Rights 133 the trashing of rights; rather they should be seen as opposites. Trashing has as its end the devaluation of rights, which it achieves by demonstrating the chasm that exists between the concept of right and its actual existence, that is, between the idea of universal human freedom and the actuality of concealed material interests, political aims and cultural prejudices. By contrast, the critique of rights has as its end the revaluation of rights, which it achieves by exploring the conditions of their downfall and reconstruction. Critical theory is on the side of critique, not trashing, and indeed an important element of critique is targeted at the spiritless forms of radicalism that substitute trashing for critique. Critical theory recognizes the revulsion thinking people sometimes feel, and should feel, over the gulf between the rights bourgeois society espouses and the misery it imposes in practice. It acknowledges the justified disgust that can arise in a society permeated with the double standards of the bourgeoisie. However, it refuses to endorse the anti-humanist and anti-liberal instincts, which can be fostered by the hypocrisy of humanism and liberalism, or their conversion into the nihilistic hope that the whole society might go down in storms of steel. The tradition of critical theory in its entirety has had to confront successive waves of a spiritless radicalism, contemptuous of and hostile to the idea of right itself, which has caught the imagination of both a radical elite and atomized members of the lonely crowd. Again and again critical theory has faced up to such contempt and hatred for rights as is espoused by those who are indignant at the award of equal rights to people deemed undeserving of them, those who are tired of managing the tension between their words and their deeds and ready to assume a more naked brutality, and those who rail at the duplicity of ‘bourgeois right’ as the very emblem of unacceptable inauthenticity. If contempt and hatred for the idea of ‘right’ emerge again and again, because the forms of modern political community repeatedly renew their grounds, critical theory is a resistance to this spiritless kind of radicalism. My thesis is that the continuity of the tradition of critical theory lies, in part, in its refusal to yield to such spiritless radicalism. I acknowledge, however, that this continuity is by no means self-evident. It has been obscured in the classics of critical theory by setting the natural right philosophy of Kant, read as uncritically idealizing the bourgeois idea of ‘right’,6 against Hegel, read as subordinating the philosophy of right to a philosophy of the state,7 and against Marx, read as offering a revolutionary theory and practice designed to overcome the ideology of bourgeois right. It has also been obscured in more contemporary critical theory (though this is not the topic of the present chapter) by setting one ‘generation’ of critical theorists against another – most famously the ‘generation’ of Adorno against the ‘generation’ of Habermas. Against all such fragmentations and

6 See notably the brilliant rereading of Hegel in Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Athlone, 1981). 7 This was largely Adorno’s understanding of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in Negative Dialectics. 134 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis counter-positions, it is my contention that the continuity of critical theory can and should be recovered through its confrontation with what we might call ‘rights nihilism’ and conversely through the ties that bind its critique of right back to the philosophy of right itself.

Adorno and Kantian natural right philosophy

Adorno looked two ways in relation to Kant’s natural law philosophy of right, which was outlined in his Political Writings and more systematically developed in his Metaphysics of Justice.8 He argued that the irrational side of Kant’s Metaphysics of Justice lay in rationalizing the forms of right of capitalist society, imposing fixed standards of legality on subjects irrespective of their will or welfare, and thereby impeding or halting the advance of self-reflection. As Adorno put it, ‘freedom calls for reflection, which rises above the particular categories of law and chance’.9 On the other hand, Adorno also argued that Kant’s formalism was not merely false, as it was presented by those who ‘have shown their bloody colors in the fascist practice of making blind phenomena, men’s membership or non-membership in a designated race, the criteria of who was to be killed’.10 He commented that in ‘the universal legal norm … despite and because of its abstractness, there survives … something of substance: the egalitarian idea’.11 Drawing on his own experience of an early morning house raid in Nazi Germany 1933, Adorno made reference to the difference between a lawful state based on the separation of powers and a regime based on terror and ideology. In relation to the right of habeas corpus and its absence under totalitarian domination, Adorno wrote:

When someone asks what freedom is … tell him that he needs only to think of any flagrant attack on freedom … I am content to be able to say of freedom … that being free means that if someone rings the bell at 6.30 a.m., I have no reason to think that the Gestapo … or the agent of comparable institutions are at the door and can take me off with them without my being able to invoke the right of habeas corpus.12

8 I. Kant, The Metaphysical Elements of Justice: part 1 of The Metaphysics of Morals (Indianopolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965). 9 Adorno Negative Dialectics, 237 10 Ibid., 236 11 Ibid., 236 12 T.W. Adorno History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–65 (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 140. See also M. Tettlebaum ‘Political philosophy’, in Deborah Cook (ed.) Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), 131. On the Critique of Rights 135

In his discussion of ‘Critique’ in Critical Models Adorno acknowledged in similar vein the value of a constitutional order of checks and balances for the practice of critique:

The conception of the separation of powers upon which every democracy is based, from Locke and Montesquieu and the American constitution up to today, has its lifeblood in critique. The system of checks and balances, the reciprocal overview of the executive, the legislative and the judiciary, means as much as that each of these powers subjects the others to critique and thereby reduces the despotism that each power, without this critical element, gravitates to.13

In upholding the functionality of an institutional framework of legal rights for human freedom, Adorno revealed a recurring indebtedness to Kant’s philosophy of right. Kant recognized that in the modern world concrete freedom requires a complex architectonic of rights based on private law, public law, international law and cosmopolitan laws. Kant saw international law as radically under-developed in his own time (lacking in any international authority to enforce it) and cosmopolitan law as a necessary development that was not yet even conceptualized. He argued, for example, that a sphere of cosmopolitan law should be established to guarantee the right of individuals to visit other countries, initiate contact with other peoples, engage with them in commerce, and appeal to them for help when fleeing from misery or oppression.14 To resolves injustices Kant’s philosophy of right looked to the evolution of the system of rights based on the successive achievement of civil, political, national and cosmopolitan rights. His critique of the then existing system of rights was directed at its fixation at a certain point of under-development and at its treatment of the semblance of rights for the genuine article. For example, he criticized the ‘right of sovereignty’ articulated in European ius gentium as in effect a licence for rulers to go to war as they please and use any means of warfare they deem necessary. After the French Revolution he extended this critical assessment of the European state system to a critique of European colonialism and of the spurious forms of rights-talk used to justify it. Here he argued that the ‘right of hospitality’ was invoked to justify abuses unleashed on non-European peoples, on the thin pretext that they mistreated European ‘travellers’, who were actually armed invaders.15 Even as Adorno sought to break from the natural law tradition, from the notion that rights spring from human nature or reason and indeed from Kant’s precept that ‘the student of natural right … has to supply the immutable principles on

13 T.W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 281. 14 I. Kant Political Writings ed. H. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 107–8. 15 Kant, Political Writings, 106 and 172–3. 136 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis which all positive legislation must rest’,16 he still revealed his own roots in natural law philosophy. On the one hand, he argued against what he saw as ahistorical conceptions of natural law that ‘freedom … is a historical category par excellence’, that ‘the concept of freedom is itself the product of history and has altered with history’.17 He referred, for instance, to the limited scope of freedom possible in the Spartacus uprising or in Babeuf’s conspiracy, as well as to the expanded scope of freedom possible in a future society without want. On the other hand, Adorno immediately offered two provisos. First, he acknowledged that the critical content of Kant’s natural law philosophy lay in the claim that the immutable principles of natural law cannot be based on what the law happens to say in any particular place or time and must in some sense be drawn from the realm of rational laws to which ‘an obligation can be recognized a priori by reason without external legislation’.18 If universal principles were based on empirical reality in the manner of historical or positive jurisprudence, there would be no knowing what form of injustice they might purport to justify – be it slavery or colonialism. Second, Adorno suggested that the concrete possibilities of freedom can be found at every moment of history, wherever and whenever individuality genuinely asserts itself. He maintained that while individuality is a historical category that assumes different forms over time, the possibility of exercising freedom is not itself historically conditioned. The legacy of natural law philosophy remains in Adorno’s practical imperative to ‘preserve the permanent component’ of freedom throughout all the changes it undergoes.19 The permanent component consists for Adorno of the ties that bind freedom to the individual, however much the concept of the individuality is turned into a symbol of conformity to modern society. Adorno further emphasized the generative as well as stabilizing effects of rights, law and legal institutions. His focus was not only on the limits law sets to human action but also on the capacity law has to inspire resistance. The idea of ‘right’ tells us not only what we should not do, but also what we should do even in the absence of any positive legal framework. Adorno’s concern was that the Kantian individual capable of thinking for him or herself was giving way to the ‘mass man’ who hides behind conformity to the norm. However, he resisted any notion of automatic subjugation and wrote of individuals who in the face of terror were still able to tell right from wrong, to follow their own judgments, and to do so freely. A case in point Adorno mentioned was the judge, Fabian von Schlabrendorff, who was involved in the July 20 conspiracy against Hitler: he ‘just couldn’t put up with things the way they were any longer’ and ‘followed the idea that anything would be better than for things to go on as they were’.20 In History and Freedom Adorno called this kind of resistance ‘the true primal phenomenon

16 Ibid., 132. 17 Adorno, History and Freedom, 180. 18 Kant, Political Writings, 26. 19 Adorno, History and Freedom, 180–81. 20 Ibid., 240. On the Critique of Rights 137 of moral behaviour’ and argued that it occurs whenever ‘the element of impulse joins forces with the element of consciousness to bring about a spontaneous act’.21 In Problems of Moral Philosophy he added that the human capacity for moral behaviour reveals the ever-present possibility that ‘things may be so intolerable that you feel compelled to make the attempt to change them’.22 While Adorno did not directly refer to natural law in this setting, his argument invokes some idea of natural right even in historical contexts where the idea of right has no visible, concrete, institutional presence. Behind the ‘spontaneous’ act of resistance lies the generative capacity of the universal and egalitarian idea of right to inspire our actions.

Adorno and Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

In Negative Dialectics Adorno read Hegel’s Philosophy of Right as a realistic rendition of the subjection of the individual to the objective norms and overweening power of the modern state He was transfixed by the ‘consummate negativity’ of the system of right, as Hegel presented it. According to Adorno, Hegel’s great work produced a world of chained and defeated figures walking through social life as in a prison-yard and represented this state of subjection in the guise of human freedom. Even National Socialism, Adorno wrote, is capable of parading itself as the supreme bearer of freedom. Adorno here read Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, through a lens partly crafted by the young Marx, as endorsing a social reality in which the principle of autonomy, which once meant something substantial in the high period of bourgeois ascendancy, has become a mere semblance concealing conformity and terror. Adorno recognized that Hegel’s aim was to reconcile the particular with the universal, the subjective rights of the individual with the objective power of the collective, but he was convinced that Hegel invariably came down on the side of the ‘universal’ against the ‘particular’. He acknowledged that Hegel’s Philosophy of Right started off as a momentous effort to conceive of a state capable of preserving the rights of property-owners, resolving the conflicts of civil society and embodying the universal will; but he was equally convinced that Hegel ended up with an inexcusable paean to a modern state that cares nothing for free institutions.23 Adorno differed from Hegel’s liberal critics in his refusal to attribute this outcome to the claim that Hegel, as an individual, was one of the enemies of the open society. Rather he saw the source of Hegel’s state-worship in his faithful recognition of the dynamics of modern capitalist society. As class conflicts grew more intense, the only solution within existing conditions was to turn the state into an increasingly independent power. Adorno admired Hegel’s realism, a realism

21 Ibid., 240. 22 T.W. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 8. 23 See F. Neumann The Rule of Law (Oxford: Berg, 1986). 138 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis that knew what had to be done for the capitalist state to achieve the necessary integration, and maintained that Hegel’s ‘betrayal’ of his philosophy of freedom was a mirror of a capitalist society that turned the state into an object of worship and degraded individuals into its mere executors. According to Adorno, Hegel dissolved the experience of degradation from a higher philosophical vantage-point by identifying rationality with obedience to the state, by disguising decisions of state as democratic procedures emanating from the people, and by holding individuals always in the wrong when they fail to recognize their own interest in objective legal norms.24 Adorno maintained that Hegel’s degradation of the individual corresponded to the actual indifference of modern states to the lives of individuals. The world Hegel’s Philosophy of Right attempted to sanctify, as he put it, contains ‘an endless procession of bent figures chained to each other, no longer able to raise their heads under the burden of ‘what is’. It is a world that compresses the particular ‘like a torture instrument’.25 Adorno chided Hegel for turning Kant’s philosophy of right into a philosophy of the state: ‘the transposition of the particular into particularity follows the practice of a society that tolerates the particular only as a category, a form of the supremacy of the universal’.26 He argued that Hegel mystified the political primacy of the state over the individual by translating it into the logical primacy of the universal over the particular in speculative thought. Where we find a passage in Hegel’s text that seems to respect the freedom of the individual, Adorno declared it a mere ‘slip of the pen’, something Hegel ‘blurted out’, since Hegel was always on the side of the objective legal norm against individual conscience. The ‘Hegel’ Adorno constructed is one who ‘blackens’ the rights of individuals ‘as a form of narcissism – like a father chiding his son, “Maybe you think you’re something special”’27 – and who thereby reveals the individualistic illusions of liberal thought in contemporary society. Adorno ended up deeply ambivalent: praising Hegel for understanding the developmental forms of capitalist society; condemning Hegel for subsuming the particular to the universal. We might ask what there is to praise in a philosophy that dismisses criticism ‘as the grumblings of the disaffected or the irrational protest of someone who feels pangs of emotion’.28 Faced with this impasse Adorno took himself on a journey down one difficult path after another. He looked to the overcoming of the modern bourgeois system of right as a whole, only to acknowledge that the overcoming would be marked by the same distortions as that which is to be overcome. He claimed that the attachment of freedom to the legal notion of ‘right’ no longer has substance in advanced capitalist society, but acknowledged that the divorce of freedom from the idea of right could only make matters worse. He presented the idea of the

24 Adorno Negative Dialectics, 309. 25 Ibid., 345. 26 Ibid., 334. 27 Adorno Negative Dialectics, 329. 28 Adorno, History and Freedom, 63. On the Critique of Rights 139 formally free individual subject as an anachronism going back to the ‘high period’ of bourgeois society, only to acknowledge the impossibility of abandoning the idea of the formally free individual. He faced up to the negativity of the existing system of right from the ‘standpoint of redemption’ in the hope that this standpoint would delineate the ‘mirror-image of its opposite’, but admitted that ‘it presupposes a standpoint removed … from the scope of existence, whereas we well know that any possible knowledge must not only be first wrested from what is, if it shall hold good, but is also marked for this very reason by the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape’.29 To those who wish to overcome the existing system of right in the name of its rational concepts – who search for new forms of individuality beyond abstract right, new forms of association beyond civil society, and new forms of self-determination beyond the state – Adorno argued that all such attempts at radical separation leave us with an irrational ‘is’ and a purely abstract ‘ought’.30 In a manner reminiscent of natural law, Adorno observed simply that ‘we necessarily apply yardsticks of good and evil to behaviour’ even where the entire sphere of morality has been abolished.31 Since Adorno could find no way through these difficulties, he returned to the idea of right he could no longer find in Hegel. He declared that ‘social analysis can learn incomparably more from individual experience than Hegel conceded’, as if Hegel conceded nothing. He maintained that ‘in the face of the totalitarian unison with which the eradication of difference is proclaimed as a purpose in itself … part of the social force of liberation may have temporarily withdrawn to the individual sphere’, as if Hegel made no concession even to a temporary withdrawal to the individual sphere.32 He defended Kantian formalism against Hegel, as if Hegel would have no truck with it.33 In this intellectual journey Hegel served Adorno as a kind of Doppelganger: while Hegel reduced human action to the ‘twitching of flees’, Adorno could still find a touch of humanity in individual’s ‘damaged life’. However, against the ‘Hegel’ Adorno constructed as his ‘Other’, we see another Hegel: one whose Philosophy of Right turned philosophy toward the social forms of the modern world, toward the contradictory expressions of freedom contained in the idea of right, and toward the evolution of the forms of right in the course of their own ‘proper immanent development’.34 For Hegel, the idea of right was

29 T.W. Adorno Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (London: Verso. 2006), 247 30 See, for example, Herbert Marcuse Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1979), 294. In the words of Simon Jarvis, this utopian vista must fail because it leaves the ‘ought’ without substance and the ‘is’ without intelligibility. S. Jarvis Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), 169. 31 Adorno, History and Freedom, 207. 32 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 17. 33 Adorno, History and Freedom, 252–3. 34 G.W. Hegel Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), §2. 140 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis not only the beginning of this journey but also ‘the soul which holds everything together’.35 Once we are able to perceive this Hegel, the philosopher who denatured Kant’s philosophy of right but also took it as the basis for understanding modern society, then the continuity of critical theory – from Kant through Hegel to Adorno – becomes more visible.36 The task of philosophy, according Hegel, is not to prescribe what the state ought to be but to understand what it is;37 not to side with the ‘universal’ against the ‘particular’ but to trace the human conflicts that ensue once they are abstracted as conflicts between the universal and the particular; not to justify domination but to criticize the domination imposed through the fetishized power of private property, morality and the state; not to subsume subjective right to objective power and interest, but to mine the resources available in the system of right to preserve freedom and resist domination. Perhaps, as Gillian Rose observes, Adorno was unable to see the concreteness of Hegel’s explorations into the social forms of right because it was he, Adorno, who was still held by abstractions.38 Be that as it may, we should not forget that in substance Adorno endorsed Hegel’s judgment of Kant’s philosophy of right: that it expressed the ‘highest spirit’ of its time, and that it was characterized both by the idea of right as the ‘inner pulse’ that beats within the system as a whole and by ‘absence of reverence’ for the existing order.39

Adorno and Marx

Marx is commonly identified with what I have called the ‘trashing’ of rights – their devaluation as a form of egoism, as an instrument of class power, as an ideology of domination, or as a ‘mere semblance’ of freedom and equality. It is true that the temptation facing both Marx and Marxism has been not only to denature natural right by demonstrating that right is a social form of the modern age, but also to devalue the idea of right itself. If my argument for the continuity of critical theory is to have any purchase, however, we should look for what distinguishes Marx’s critique of capitalist society from other forms of radicalism and socialism. It is my contention that there are intimate ties that bind Marx’s critique of modern society to the philosophies of right of Kant and Hegel. Let us, for instance, be mindful of the support Marx gave to rights movements of his day: for example, for free speech and freedom of the press against censorship, for Jewish emancipation against purveyors of the ‘Jewish question’, for use of the commons by the rural poor against landowner prerogatives, for an eight-hour working day against the representatives of capital, and for universal suffrage against the privileges of the

35 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 32. 36 Ibid.,31. 37 Ibid.,21. 38 See G. Rose, The Melancholy Science (London: Verso, 2013). 39 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 21. On the Critique of Rights 141 few. Let us also be mindful of Marx’s sometimes ferocious critiques of a form of radicalism, like that of Bruno Bauer and ‘German true socialism’, which not only opposed the right of Jews to equal civil and political rights but also expressed its contempt and hatred for rights in general.40 To be sure, equivocations are visible in some of Marx’s texts. The young Marx’s critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is indicative: he is normally understood as putting the dialectic back on its feet and as demonstrating that any talk of rights represents a hopeless idealism.41 However, Marx’s mature self-understanding of his own relation to Hegel was one of debt both to Hegel’s logic and to the substance of his work on the philosophy of right. Marx’s critique of capitalist society as a whole may be better understood through the hypothesis that the ‘ideal’ forms of capitalist social relations (rights, morality, contract, law, family, civil society, the state, etc.) are just as real and vital as their ‘material’ forms (value, exchange value, money, capital, interest, rent, etc.). Marx certainly found no profundity in those who simply dismissed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen as a mere abstraction that did nothing positive to change society. True, there are passages in Capital in which Marx speaks of rights as ‘mere semblance’ or ‘mere form’. They have given rise to the view that while ‘equal right’ was something substantial in petty commodity production, it loses all substance with the development of capitalist production. An alternative reading of these passages, however, might entertain the proposition that Marx refers to the ‘semblance of rights’ precisely to reveal the abuse of the language of rights by representatives of capital, who were intent on treating workers as nothing more than instruments of labour, and not to devalue rights as such. Marx actually built up over time a critique of capitalism that emphasizes the juridical significance of the achievement of wageworkers; namely, that they sell their labour-power, their capacity to labour, and not themselves. This insight enabled Marx to see that wageworkers do not, as he and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto, ‘sink to the level of a commodity, the most wretched commodity of all’, but remain at all times owners of at least one commodity, their labour power. For Marx, to the extent that wageworkers are ‘guardians’ of a commodity and are not themselves commodities, this is precisely what makes their labour ‘free’ rather than servile. Marx’s contention is that while capitalist production is based on relations of exploitation and domination, it is not necessarily at odds with juridical freedom and equality. The hypothesis on the margins of Marx’s critique of capital is that the same social relations that transform the products of human labour

40 See K. Marx, ‘On the Jewish question’, in Marx’s Early Writings, edited by Lucio Colletti (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 211–41. See my discussion of Marx’s critique of Bauer’s devaluation of rights in ‘Rereading Marx’s On the Jewish Question’ in Marcel Stoetzler (ed.) Antisemitism and the Constitution of Sociology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 137–59. 41 K. Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State’, in Marx’s Early Writings, edited by L. Colletti (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992). 142 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis into quantities of exchange value also transform the producers, human labourers themselves, into bearers of rights. For Marx, this represents the possibility of progress. It is the beginning of the long journey toward human emancipation. Value and right are two sides of the same coinage of capitalist society. To be sure, Marx’s critique of the fetishism of the commodity has its counterpart in his critique of the fetishism of the bourgeois subject, the subject that appears as a ‘zero point’ of free will divorced from the world and independent of all social relations. Yet this critique of fetishism should not be confused with rejection of the social forms of right that makes it possible for human beings to resist subjection to the self-expanding powers of capital and the state. Never far from the surface of Marx’s texts is the conviction that the ‘right of every human being to have rights’, as Hannah Arendt was later to put it, is the soul that animates struggles for freedom in the modern world.42 Critical theory has long struggled to comprehend Marx’s move from the critique of capital to the critique of capitalist society as a whole. One temptation, after the manner of Georg Lukács, has been to treat the commodity form as a key to the whole rather than to come to terms with the diremptions between object and subject that are the marker of modernity. My argument is that Hegel and Marx should be read not in terms of the opposition between idealism and materialism but together, as one, revealing respectively the ideal and material sides of modern capitalist society. It is also that although Adorno still had an attachment to the Lukácsian legacy, in which the value form was considered more ‘real’ than the form of right, he showed a genuine understanding of the idea of right and its place in the modern world that was rooted in the tradition of critical theory.

Conclusion: Adorno and Natural Law

Let me end with a word on natural law and its supersession in social theory. The idea of a higher law – ordained by nature, elevated above human agency, determining right and wrong everywhere and always, independent of all historical and social conditions – is not attractive to a modern critical consciousness that recognizes the historicity of moral norms, the plurality of co-existing cultures, the relativity of ethical values and the human origins of all law. However, Adorno argued that the very attributes which lead the modern critical consciousness to repudiate natural law may also impede it from facing up to the totalitarian potential of modern times. An emphasis on historicity, transitoriness and relativity may serve to equalize the most criminal of principles with the most elevated, principles that justify mass murder with principles that make human life sacred, and to rob us of the grounds for resisting this equation. Similarly the conviction that all laws are positive laws threatens to remove all limits on what human beings can posit. Adorno argued

42 I have elaborated this argument in Democracy and the Rule of Law: Marx’s Critique of the Legal Form (Caldwell, NJ: Blackburn, 2002), 95–121; and Political Investigations: Hegel, Marx, Arendt (London: Routledge, 2001), 61–6. On the Critique of Rights 143 in this vein that positivist sociology ‘holds a Medusa-like mirror to a society … organized according to abstract classificatory categories’ and ‘hypostatizes the state of affairs which its research methods both describe and embody’.43 His concern was that the transfer of natural scientific models of investigation to the study of society functions to mimic a society in which human beings are in reality reduced to ‘the condition of objects’ and in which the condition of objects is turned into our ‘second nature’. Adorno put the matter thus: ‘the unfreedom of the methods’ bears witness to ‘the unfreedom that prevails in reality’.44 Adorno’s insight is that a positivist sociology, which sees itself as having transcended natural law but which ends up equating moral behaviour with conformity to socially accepted norms, can never get to grips with the human capacity for moral behaviour. If there is something about positivism that situates social life outside the sphere of ethical consideration, the allure of natural law is that it re-instates a rational standard against which to evaluate social systems. Natural law gives rise to the thought that the human condition, that is, the condition of living with others, may itself contain moral imperatives that cannot simply be neutralized by surrounding social forces. Adorno’s engagement with natural law is not dissociable from his critique of the conformist character of positivism. His intuition is that when we lose sight of natural law, we lose our own critical capacity. So it is my contention that it is for this good reason that Adorno looks back both to the legal, institutional theory of Kant’s Metaphysics of Justice and to the ethical and aesthetic philosophy he found in Kant’s Critique of Judgment and kept them together lest the philosophy of judgement succumbed to subjectivism and the philosophy of right succumbed to legalism. While Adorno to my mind was wrong in Negative Dialectics to treat Hegel’s Philosophy of Right as a regression from Kant’s critical cosmopolitanism, rather than as a magnificent philosophical endeavour to move critical theory beyond the limits of the formal-rational paradigm of natural law, he nonetheless revealed something of the cognitive and normative resources natural right philosophy offers to critical theory. In its long history two premises have remained essential to the natural law tradition: first, that natural law is a universal law that must be given definite positive form; and second, that positive laws are invalid if they do not accord with the laws of nature.45 The natural law credo is that natural law is empty and incomplete unless it is given positive form and that positive law is unjust and despotic if it contravenes natural law. It is this classic formula that was cited by Jacques Derrida from Pascal’s Pensées: ‘Justice without force is impotent; force

43 T. Adorno ‘Sociology and empirical research’, in P. Connerton (ed.) Critical Sociology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 237–57 at 244. 44 Ibid., 243. 45 O. Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 144 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis without justice is tyrannical’.46 The unity of natural and positive law means that the universal and the particular, what is true and valid in itself and what is historical and transitory, are in some significant sense indivisible. My contention is that the twofold proposition characteristic of natural law theory gives critical theory its distinctive critical capacity: on one side, it enables critical theory to confront conservative doctrines that convert natural law into an endorsement of the status quo; on the other, it enables critical theory to confront certain radical (and totalitarian) doctrines that subsume positive legal rights to so-called ‘laws’ of ‘nature’ and ‘history’. In both cases, the unity of natural and positive law is severed: on one side by subsuming natural right to positive law and on the other by subsuming positive law to some notion of natural law like ‘the rule of justice on earth’. Against such one-sided doctrines critical theory may be understood as an endeavour to hold the pieces together: to de-nature the idea of right by looking forward to modern social theory, but also to re-value the idea of right by turning back to the tradition of natural law.

46 J. Derrida ‘Force of law: the mystical foundations of authority’, in D. Cornell et al. (eds.) Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (London: Routledge, 1992), 3–68. Chapter 11 Rethinking Critical Theory Once Again: Immanent Critique and Immanent Normativity Alessandro Ferrara

In the world in which we live there is neither a lack of things deserving to be criticized nor any lack of critical perspectives on offer: why then bother with critical theory, the saga of its “generations”, the “ground of criticism”, the distinctiveness of critical theory, the question of whether it is degenerating into “left Rawlsianism”1 and, assuming for the sake of the argument that there is something bad about “left Rawlsianism”, the question of how critical theory could best be rescued from it? Are these questions in our minds because we are critical theorists, in the sense of having been significantly influenced by certain texts and educational experiences with mentors who call themselves critical theorists, or do they bear relevance also for those outside the circle, for whom “critique” represents no particularly significant territory to be patrolled?

Critical Theory as a Proper Name?

I take the first alternative as a “conversation stopper”. There is little else to be said then, from a philosophical point of view, about the “critical” essence of critical theory, and the proper direction for further investigation of the matter should follow the lead of Randall Collins’ monumental Sociology of Philosophies, where schools and traditions of thought from ancient Athens to mid-twentieth-century analytic philosophy are investigated as generationally sequenced, and occasionally intersecting, networks of cross-referencing scholars.2 Thus the thread that begins with the grounding of the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt in 1923, and

1 The phrase was used in Simon Critchley and Axel Honneth, “Philosophy in Germany”, Radical Philosophy, 89, 1998: 27–39. For a discussion, see Alessandro Ferrara, “Left Rawlsianism and Social Philosophy. A Response to ‘Philosophy in Germany’”, Radical Philosophy, 91, 1998: 30–32. 2 See Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 146 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis leads to us in 2014, is from this perspective essentially the sequencing of three or four academic generations, up to a point based in Frankfurt, now spread across many more locations than the approximately 18 countries regularly represented in the yearly Prague Conference. Critical theory so understood is a narrative (or better a cluster of partially overlapping, partially diverging narratives) about the internal relations among the intellectual products of people who identify with critical theory across this span of time (1923–2014), and possibly also a set of more diversified narratives about how members of the critical theory network have interacted or failed to interact with members of other intellectual networks – for example, post-structuralism, postmodernism, liberal-democratic constitutionalism, hermeneutics, theorists of social movements, postcolonial studies, subaltern studies, and the list would be too long to continue.3 But then, even if we adopted this self-representation as critical theorists, still there is this disquietingly common adjective – “critical” – that qualifies our activity as theorists, and that carries an incredibly ambitious thrust, as though we claimed to be able to stand up against the “course of the world” (der Lauf der Welt) and we were the ones best equipped for that. It is also this feeling that urges us to interrogate ourselves continuously on whether that ambitious adjective is well-deserved and it can be proudly claimed as our distinctive trait – when in fact “critique” of the status quo is everywhere, and oftentimes is not particularly sound or inspiring – as well as to interrogate ourselves on what justifies our staking a claim on that adjective. So either way – more directly, if we take the phrase “critical theory” as descriptive of a replicable quality, more indirectly if we take it as a proper name – we need to address not the general question “what does it mean to be critical?”, but the question “what is distinctive about critical theory’s way of being critical?”. This is a question in which I take also an autobiographical interest. I have spent over 30 years of my career doing critical theory, and have witnessed the consolidation of the second generation, with Habermas as a lone star, and then the burgeoning of a much more variegated third generation, to which I myself belong.4

3 For an understanding of critical theory that positively presents it as an “intellectual school”, see David Rasmussen, Handbook of Critical Theory (London: Blackwell, 1999), 11: “Critical theory is a metaphor for a certain kind of theoretical orientation which owes its origin to Kant, Hegel and Marx, its systematization to Horkheimer and his associates at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, and its development to successors, particularly a group led by Jürgen Habermas, who have sustained it under various renditions to the present day”. 4 On the misleading aspect of the narrative of the three “generations” of critical theory, see James Gordon Finlayson, “Political, moral, and critical theory. On the practical philosophy of the Frankfurt School”, in Brian Leiter and Michael Rosen (eds), Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 626–70, in particular pp. 627–8. For an interesting temporalization of post-1980 critical theory into 4 phases connected with 4 foci of reasearch – a) “the status of social theory and analytic philosophy”; b) “the critique of postmodernism”; c) the “appropriation of political Rethinking Critical Theory Once Again 147

Critical Theory as Immanent, and not just “Internal”, Critique

Let me start by pointing out that to my understanding the distinctiveness of critical theory – the one thing that in a way stands between us and having to settle for being a collective “proper name” – is that critical theory holds in one breath both substance and method, content and form. Critical theory is neither the articulation of social criticism from an angle “for the time being taken for granted and subtracted to criticism”, nor a metatheoretical inquiry into the truth of criticism. Critical theory cannot be reduced to a kind of so-called “external” criticism of something in the name of something else – like, for example, the Catholic critique of Protestantism and the modern form of life, the Protestant critique of Catholicism and its premodern traditionalism, the Muslim condemnation of the Western lifeform, the communitarian critique of liberalism, or the libertarian critique of welfare-state liberalism. Nor can critical theory be reduced to an abstract philosophical investigation of the conditions of the possibility of “true criticism”, for “true criticism” would then just be a variant of truth and we would be doing just epistemology or logic or conducting a metaphysical inquiry into the nature of truth. Thus we are left with “internal criticism” and “immanent critique” as the specific domains of “critical theory”.5 I take these two terms to be both related and distinct. They are related insofar as they presuppose the idea that the criticism we articulate must have a conceptual foothold in the thing criticized, but they also differ. Internal criticism consists of articulating a critical appraisal of some aspect of a doctrine, a system of beliefs, an ethical conception, a culture, a life-world on the basis of premises – again of a cognitive or ethical nature – that are part of the same doctrine, belief-system, ethical conception, culture or life-world. This practice was certainly not invented in Frankfurt. It is what Socrates does to Thrasymachus, what Aristotle calls dialectical reasoning from endoxa or what he does when he criticizes Plato’s idea of the good, what Locke does when he deconstructs Filmer’s doctrine of the divine right of kings, what Hegel does when he exposes the bogus formality of the categorical imperative, what Weber claims the rationalization of religious cultures is all about, all the way to Rawls’s idea of how public reason, as opposed to practical reason, functions, and to Scanlon’s notion of something being normatively cogent when it is “reasonably not rejectable”. Immanent critique, instead, in my understanding – though I am aware that one may legitimately want to stay closer to the commonsense intuition of internal and philosophy and law”; d) the role of religions in a post-secular society, see David Rasmussen, “Critical Theory Then and Now”, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 26(2), 2012: 291–8. 5 Adorno even attacks all forms of trascendent or external critique as authoritarian: “Transcendent critique avoids from the outset the experience of what is other than its own conscious­ness … Transcendent critique­ sympathizes with authority in its very form, even before expressing any content” Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 146. 148 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis immanent criticism as being nearly synonymous – is somewhat more demanding. It builds on internal criticism, in the sense that internal criticism clears the ground from contradictions and tensions that might oppose one aspect of a doctrine, tradition, or life-world to another, but immanent critique also goes beyond the idea of spotting inconsistencies and clearing tensions away. Immanent critique aims at the optimal unfolding or expansive flourishing of the object of our criticism, at bringing to the surface potentials that were – to use this somewhat misleading topographical metaphor – “buried deep down” and unable to become manifest because of the impediment or obstruction caused by internally inconsistent frames of meaning. In so doing, immanent critique in a way operates a “transcendence from within”6 on which much has been written: it brings the object “beyond itself”, that is, beyond its present state or predicament, turning it into something that projects a significance that can be appraised by others who were not in the original circle of habitus and critique. Immanent criticism offers its object a chance to become an embodiment of justice, of freedom, of human dignity, or of some similar value.

Two Kinds of Immanent Critique

The problem is that also this kind of immanent critique is not a univocal type of criticism, but comes in two distinct versions. Some fellow critical theorists have put this point in very eloquent terms. For example, Maeve Cooke in Chapter 1 of her Re-Presenting the Good Society reconstructs four ideal-types of critical social theory. If we exclude the two least interesting for our purposes – namely conventionalist and authoritarian or externalist positions – the two remaining ones exemplify in my opinion these rival versions of immanent criticism. The first version – calledradical contextualist critique – “asserts a difference between the normative ideas that orient the everyday lives of the inhabitants of a particular sociocultural context and the ideas that that would orient their lives, if only they were able to become more like themselves at their best”.7 For radical contextualists, “there is no vantage point external to a particular sociocultural context that would provide a basis for assessing the validity of the ideas held by its inhabitants”.8 The second version – called context-transcending critique – instead “appeals to normative ideas that are at once immanent to the sociocultural context in question and transcend it ”.9

6 See Habermas “Transcendence from within, transcendence in this world”, in Eduardo Mendieta (ed.), The Frankfurt School on Religion (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 303–25. 7 Maeve Cooke, Re-Presenting the Good Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 14. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 15. Rethinking Critical Theory Once Again 149

So far, so good. However, also this dual understanding of immanent critique did not originate from, nor is it confined to, Frankfurt. In fact, the champion of radical contextualism is Richard Rorty (one could add Michael Walzer’s notion of the “connected social critic”)10 and the champions of “context-transcending yet immanent criticism” are Habermas and Honneth. So, one could imagine drawing the line between generically critical theories and “critical theory proper” right there, with Habermas and Honneth on one side and the radical contextualists on the other. Habermas and Honneth, however, are neither the inventors nor the exclusive practitioners of “context-transcending yet immanent criticism”. Indeed, the context-transcending capacity of this kind of immanent criticism rests on the fact that certain normative ideas – e.g., formal pragmatics or the idealized conditions of discursive consensus for Habermas, and the moral grammar found in three social spheres of recognition for Honneth – though embedded in the local culture, “are not merely expressions of our deepest hopes and aspirations” but “represent hopes and aspirations that everyone should have if they are to be able to fulfill their potentials as human beings”.11 But then again, if we understand “context-transcending yet immanent criticism” this way, it is hard to see why Kant’s moral philosophy is not “critical”, insofar as the moral law constitutes the essence of a moral point of view inescapably inherent in every human being (only devilish creatures are immune to its call, whereas we humans are free to disattend to it but are not immune to its call) and capable of making us transcend the particular inclinations and desires rooted in our phenomenal nature. Similarly, it is hard to see why we cannot qualify as “critical” Korsgaard’s contention that underlying the varieties of “practical identities” that people can reflectively endorse, a “moral identity” is operative – namely our identity as people who simply “value themselves as human beings”12 – and that the possession of such moral identity is what allows moral actors to transcend the possibly dubious aspects of their chosen identity. So then we are back to the basic question once again: If critical theory is best understood as a kind of context-transcending immanent critique, what is distinctive about its own way of transcending the context while remaining immanent?

Rethinking the Specificity of Critical Theory’s Way of Transcending Contexts

Having said all that preceded, I would characterize the specificity of critical theory on the basis of two connected characteristics and would plead for exploring a new way of grounding critical theory’s own normative standpoint. The first of these

10 See Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 35–66. 11 Cooke, Re-Presenting the Good Society, 15. 12 Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 121. 150 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis characteristics is radical methodological reflexivity. Distinctive of critical theory is not only a) the immanent “denunciation” of man-made, though not necessarily intentional, impediments to the optimal unfolding and realization of the potentials inherent in one lifeform, but also b) the simultaneous self-interrogation on the grounds of validity of such critique, and c) the incorporation of the results of such interrogation into the analysis of the object. In other words, even well-grounded critique is not enough, but what critical theory requires is radically self-conscious or self-reflexive criticism or, to use somewhat ironically a Rawlsian expression, it requires critical theory to apply critique to itself. Critical theory holds together in one and the same breath what other critical traditions keep separate: a) the immanent critical approach aimed at the flourishing of the object and b) the reflection on the grounds of validity. In fact, no critical tradition agonizes like critical theory over the grounds of the validity of its own criticism. This is a distinctive trait above dispute, initiated by Horkheimer with his essay on “Traditional and Critical Theory” and skyrocketed to a zenith by Habermas.13 It is captured by Eduardo Mendieta when he writes that “As a meta- philosophy, critical theory aims to think with the concept against the concept. For concepts themselves become an impediment, and an obstacle in the way to that which they seek to grasp: human social existence.” As Adorno put it in Negative Dialectics, philosophy “must strive, by way of the concept, to transcend the concept”.14 However, this was to some extent true of Hegel’s dialectics as well. The second characteristic concerns the quality of the context-transcending element connected with “immanent critique”. This is where I think innovation is required. For it is quite inadequate to conceive of such an element as a universal feature inherent in every human being. This strategy could lead us at best to ground some universal normativity – and indeed this has been the case from Plato to Habermas’s idealized conditions of discourse qua kernel of all communicative action – but grounding normativity is one thing, grounding immanent critique quite another. In the existing versions of critical theory, the context-transcending is certainly there, but at the expense of immanence. The immanent moment in the existing versions of “transcendence from within” is very tenuous, for the very universality or non-specificity of the context-transcending moment (whether our competence as communicative actor, our moral identity in Korsgaard or our noumenal nature that makes us receptive to the moral law) leaves very little of my own uniqueness, difference or non-identity in my act of transcending particularity. Context-transcending critique so conceived transforms me into a

13 See, Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory”, in M. Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Continuum, 1972), 188–243. According to Habermas, this essay provides evidence of the fact that “from the beginning, critical theory laboured over the problem of giving an account of its own normative foundations (normativen Grundlagen)”, Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, Vol I (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), 374. 14 Mendieta (ed.), The Frankfurt School on Religion, 6–7. Rethinking Critical Theory Once Again 151 moral actor who is somewhat underindividuated – and this has been one of the fundamental elements of friction between second generation critical theorists (basically Habermas) and third generation critical theorists. Examples of this early tension are found in Seyla Benhabib’s criticism of Habermas in Critique, Norm and Utopia and her emphasis on the “concrete other”, or Honneth’s attempt to reconnect the context-transcending moment to the situatedness of concrete social groups struggling for recognition.15 One further problematic aspect of this second-generation-way of pursuing critical theory is that it makes critique very thinly distinguishable from normative theory. Consequently today we experience a deficit of demarcation of critical theory from other similar endeavors precisely because this philosophical turn has been taken. This aspect is compounded by an apparent tension between the factual uniqueness, difference or non-identity of the actor on one hand and, on the other, her criticizing her life-circumstances in the name of the universal standard of criticism: somewhat paradoxically, we are more unique in our shortcomings and deviations from the normative ground than when we abide by it. My point is that a “within”-moment or a moment of immanence without uniqueness is only a “bogus within” or immanence, for the normative principle to which we respond is not “our own” but something larger of which we individually partake – just like in all traditional normative schemes, from physis to the will of God, to the autonomy of reason, to reason in history, where we are merely part of a larger normative reality. The same holds for the ideal conditions of communication, as reconstructed in Habermas’s formal pragmatics:16 they are present in any speech act and every conversation aimed at reaching understanding, but exactly for this reason can hardly count as typical of or truly internal to any specific life-form.

Immanent Critique Requires Truly Immanent Normativity

I think that this unfortunate outcome of the Habermasian version of “transcendence from within” is due to an “uncriticized” conception of what context-transcending means – a conception shared both by radical contextualist critics and by context- transcending ones. Context-transcending is understood in a way that embeds two differently biased interpretations of the Linguistic Turn. Habermas interprets the Linguistic Turn as allowing one procedural exception, the one procedural language game (i.e., discourse) that allows for the plurality of language games to

15 See Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) and Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflict(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). 16 See Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society (1981), translated by T. McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984), 273–337. 152 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis be discursively bridged.17 Rorty interprets the consequences of the Linguistic Turn as implying the erasing of the question of validity altogether, and consequently we become hostages to our contexts.18 For different reasons, neither Habermas nor Rorty have succeeded in connecting immanent critique to a truly immanent source of normativity. In Rorty’s case, taken here as representative of the contextualists, we have immanent critique with no normativity at all, and in Habermas’s case we have immanent critique based on a not-entirely immanent, or bogusly immanent normativity. We need to overcome this impasse and have a critical theory based on a truly immanent kind of normativity. In order to do so, we need a version of immanent critique which both bridges the gap between radical contextualism and context transcending and avoids reducing the “beneficiary of critique” – i.e., the subject whose flourishing critique aims at restoring – to a mere receptacle of a transcending normative principle (be it the categorical imperative or the presuppositions of communication) with no individuation of normative significance. In Adorno’s vocabulary, we do not want to purchase context-transcendingness at the cost of flattening the non-identical once again to the identical – even if the identical is equated with well-grounded normativity. Immanent critique needs a truly immanent source of normativity as its ground. What could this truly immanent source of normativity be? The conundrum can be solved by switching, within critical theory, to a different model of context-transcending – no longer relying on the critical leverage of a normative principle or set of universal idealized conditions, but relying instead on the critical leverage of exemplarity and of judgment about exemplarity. Radical contextualism ends up entrapping us within the symbolic boundaries of a context only because its proponents fail to address the question of validity and overlook the fact that exceptional self-congruence between the ultimate normative commitments of a lifeform and its institutional practices projects a normative force of its own, albeit not the kind of normative force that principles and norms project. It is the force of exemplarity, the same as is at work in the work of art which draws on the symbolic resources of a style, but is capable of arousing an aesthetic effect across publics used to different styles by virtue of its being as it

17 See Jürgen Habermas, “Hermeneutic and Analytic philosophy. Two Complementary Versions of the Linguistic Turn?”, in Anthony O’Hear (ed.), German Philosophy since Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999), 413 ff. 18 See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 8–9. In Walzer’s case, the “subversiveness of immanence” (see Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 47) cannot by itself remedy the obvious difficulty of all criticism that simply points to the misalignment of ideal and reality: namely, the difficulty that sometimes reality should be rectified, sometimes the ideals are utopian and unattainable or otherwise ill-conceived, and a mere diagnosis of misalignment, unless backed up by some notion of normativity, is unable to sort out these two predicaments. Rethinking Critical Theory Once Again 153 should be. Similarly, groundbreaking political innovations often with one and the same gesture disclose new dimensions of normativity and manifest themselves as embodiments thereof. However, nothing in principle would prevent context-transcending critics like Habermas from weaving this model of the normative ground of critique into their framework, and occasionally they do. For example, Habermas implicitly gestures towards a model of this kind whenever he, instead of invoking the normativity of idealized conditions of communication, speaks of the normative content of modernity (i.e., we cannot choose to be un-modern), of the irreversibility of learning processes (i.e., what we learn often irreversibly changes who we are), or of the authority of the constitution as resting on our sense of being “in the same boat” with our forbears who did have the privilege of actually granting each other those rights which we now are bound to honor.19 Considerations of space prevent me from spelling out what the normativity, and the critical edge, of exemplarity – in Adorno’s vocabulary, “being identical to oneself and yet non-identical” at the same time – consists of.20 It simply comes down to the idea that normativity can be disjoined from generality and connected with uniqueness: the inner normativity of the work of art, of the psychic configuration or of the life-course. Think of Luther’s saying “Here I stand. I can do no other”, where the source of normativity that prevents Luther from acting differently is entirely internal and unique. Think of Kant’s idea of the beauty of the work of art as connected with a never ending interplay of the faculties, with a normativity that never comes to rest in identity and yet provides a point of view from which we can make sense of the unique coherence of the whole. Think of Simmel’s notion of an “individual law”, no less binding on me for the fact of being applicable to one and only one case,21 a notion that at the turn of the last century resurfaces in Korsgaard’s idea that “self-conceptions are essential to the normativity of reasons”.22 In all these cases, we find the idea of a normativity rooted in, and emanating from, something unique, be it a human identity or a work of art. Rousseau is the author who comes closest, in his novel Julie, or the New Heloise, to offering an account of the inner and unique normativity of an identity and how failing to respond to that unique normativity is bound to undermine the

19 Jürgen Habermas, “Constitutional Democracy – A Paradoxical Union of Contradictory Principles?”, Political Theory, 29(6), 2001: 766–81. For a critical discussion, see Alessandro Ferrara, “Of Boats and Principles. Reflections on Habermas’s ‘Constitutional Democracy’”, in Political Theory, 29(6), 2001: 782–91. 20 The argument is presented in a more detailed form in Alessandro Ferrara, Reflective Authenticity. Rethinking the Project of Modernity (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 50–69, and The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 16–23. 21 Georg Simmel, “Das individuelle Gesetz” (1913), in G.Simmel, Das individuelle Gesetz. Philosophische Exkurse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987), 217. 22 Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 247. 154 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis subjectivity of the person. In other works of his this theme can also be found. In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality we are offered a critical social philosophy that indicts modern civil society for “systematically distorting” the person’s relation to that inner normativity,23 and in the Social Contract the normative principles that the legislator submits for the sovereign people’s approval are not principles equally valid for all peoples.24 Rather, they amount to a moral vision that the people in question ought to adopt as their own but that, again, emerges as an “ought” or a normative directive from the people’s own self-representation. The legislator does not purport to indicate what is good in general, independently of the people to whom this good is destined or on the basis of some model of justice valid for all seasons and in all possible worlds, but indicates those principles of justice with which a people can “wholeheartedly identify”. The legislator in the public realm shows the sovereign people, just as in Rousseau’s novel Lord Bomston shows Julie in the private realm, proper lines of conduct that respond to a singular normativity. Instructive from this point of view is the error imputed by Rousseau to Peter the Great. Although Peter the Great was not exactly the legislator of a democratic people, it could be said of him, according to Rousseau, that he had an “imitative genius”, “not the true genius”, for he wished to turn his Russian subjects into “Germans or Englishmen, when he should have begun by making Russians” and thus “he prevented his subjects from ever becoming what they might have been, by persuading them that they were

23 Rousseau’s critique of the social pathologies generated by the modern form of life inaugurates a tradition of critical social philosophy that Axel Honneth has tried to reconstruct in “Pathologien des Sozialen. Tradition und Aktualität der Sozialphilosophie”, in Das Andere der Gerechitgkeit. Aufsätze zur praktischen Philosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000), 11–69. The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality can be seen as one of the fundamental sources for a theory of reification and for questioning the widespread idea that modern society has brought about an increase in the individuation of the individual. Rousseau suggests instead that modern competitive social life has resulted in phenomena of de-individuation. Under the heading of “soft despotism” this insight would be further developed in the nineteenth century along less pessimistic lines by Tocqueville, and in the twentieth century by Horkheimer and Adorno, by Ortega y Gasset and by a number of critics of the negative transformation of personality in the direction of the other-directed personality, the narcissistic personality or the therapeutic personality. In the twenty-first century, the Rousseauian insight into the effects of competitiveness on personality is reflected in the work of Sennett, of Elliott and Lemert and of Bauman. 24 For Rousseau the common good, no less than Julie’s individual good in the novel, always gives away something of the subject whose good it is. To know it does not mean to acquire knowledge of something “independent of who we are”. In Rousseau’s words, “As an architect, before erecting a large edifice, examines and tests the soil in order to see whether it can support the weight, so a wise lawgiver does not begin by drawing up laws that are good in themselves, but considers first whether the people for whom he designs them are fit to endure them”,The Social Contract, edited and with an introduction by Lester G. Crocker (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967), 46. Rethinking Critical Theory Once Again 155 what they were not”.25 In sum, Rousseau’s legislator points to what the people’s will must take as its object in order to be “general”, but the legislator’s finger does not point outwards, towards a mythical rising sun far at the horizon. Rather, that finger is pointed inwards: it indicates to the people that we (for the legislator is a member of the people, not an external advisor or an authority standing above the people), we as we like to think of ourselves, can do no other than adopt this kind of political regime, basic structure or set of constitutional essentials. The normativity to which the legislator appeals, in urging this singular good on us, is ultimately the normativity of collective identity. Two centuries thereafter, in 1980, this view of an aggregate “singular normativity” emanating from a people’s self-representation, powerfully re- emerges in Rawls’s interpretation of the validity of “justice as fairness”, qua interpretation of the terms of the just political life of a modern democratic people, as resting not on its “being true to an order antecedent to and given to us, but [on] its congruence with our deeper understanding of ourselves and our aspirations, and our realization that, given our history and the traditions embedded in our public life, it is the most reasonable doctrine for us”.26 The point is that such normativity of the exemplary, of that which is “a law unto itself ”, and is a “law unto itself” by virtue of a self-congruence (being as it should uniquely be) not reducible to mere consistency, is the only kind of immanent normativity which 1) allows a defensible model of “transcendence from within” to be truly immanent and truly transcendent (only in the case of an exceptional, albeit never perfect, coincidence of the “real” with the innerly generated ideal does context-transcending through “cross-contextual inspiringness” take place),27 and at the same time 2) constitutes the “normative ground” of a truly immanent critique unaffected by residues of the older bogus immanent critique, where the immanence of immanent critique is purchased at the unacceptable cost of flattening the singularity (or non-identity) of what is criticized to a repository or a copy of a normativity by no means coextensive with it.

Critical Theory once again Revisited

Having said this, we must come to the sober realization that even this new twist in the interrogation on the normative ground of critique and its nature neither originated in Frankfurt nor is even a habitual line of thinking in Frankfurt. However, if critical theory adopted it as a possible form of self-understanding, its

25 Ibid., 48. 26 John Rawls, “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory”, The Journal of Philosophy, 88, 1980: 519. 27 For a more detailed argument about the nature of exemplary normativity and its relation to judgment and sensus communis, see Ferrara, Force of the Example, 17–34. 156 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis uniqueness among other critical endeavors could be rescued along the lines of a total, unique and radical self-reflexiveness. In fact, if critical theory, differently from Kant, Rousseau, Simmel, and contemporary theorists of self-constitution, self-consciously adopted exemplarity and exemplary normativity as the ground of its own criticism, it would become the only philosophical view that engages and brings to the fore the critical potential of the normativity of exemplarity instead of simply presupposing it, like the above-mentioned authors. To perceive exemplarity in the emphatic sense of being a law unto oneself (as opposed to merely being an example of something already known), in fact, requires that we constantly criticize false exemplars, which abound in the public sphere of contemporary society and are indeed simple replicas of unconsciously internalized models. Finally, critical theory would then be characterized by a kind of radical methodological reflexivity: according to the exemplarist turn, the justification for adopting this way of understanding the ground of critique is, in a reflexive way, its being exemplarily consonant with who we have come to be as critical theorists, in the third and fourth generations, and especially after having seen through the limits of the Habermasian version of context-transcending immanent critique. In fact, we would incur a performative contradiction if we tried to justify our model of truly immanent but context-transcending critique through an appeal to some general principle or sets of principles. One way to avoid such outcome is to justify exemplary normativity as the ground of criticism on the basis of a concrete narrative about our situated identity as critical theorists of the twenty-first century who, after experiencing the unfolding of the communicative paradigm in critical theory, come to the conclusion that we “can do no other” than seek to ground immanent critique in a truly immanent source of normativity. The reasons supporting our “here we stand”-pronouncement are similar – with respect to their methodological status – to the undemonstrable, yet intuitively compelling, reasons that art and literary critics offer to justify their judgments to the effect that a particular set of printed characters on a clothbound stack of pages or a particular set of brush strokes on a canvass constitute works of art. They are also similar to the reasons offered by artists in support of their choosing one alternative completion of their unfinished artwork over another, or to the reasons that justices provide in order to convince each other that a certain reading of the Constitution is better than another. They are concrete, singular, context-bound reasons that cannot force anyone to agree as logical propositions do – not even through the uncoercive coercion of the best argument – but nonetheless articulate a sense of validity that ultimately rests on intuitions about what Kant would call, in a language that Dewey could underwrite as well, the “enhancement of life”.28 Like the reasons that accompany, illustrate and make intellegible to others our judgments about the well-formedness of artworks and the realization of individual

28 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 23, 128. Rethinking Critical Theory Once Again 157 identities, these formulations begin as concrete and contextual but strike on something which is not just local, namely the ability we have – and suppose, but only suppose, that fellow human beings who articulate their visions within other language games, traditions or conceptions of the good possess as well – of judging when our life is “furthered” and when it is not. This kind of exemplary normativity cannot impose itself on us as a conqueror but attracts us as a seducer. Whereas a conqueror can crush us regardless of who we are, a seducer cannot seduce us regardless of who we are: his or her influence exerts itself on us but not independently of who we are. Likewise, a critical theorist dedicated to the project of a truly immanent critique cannot prevail over the apologetic defenders of the status quo by forcing them to be critical – even by the uncoercive coercion of argumentation – but can only appeal to the superior alignment that adopting the critical line affords with the self-conception that the addressee of critique wishes to live by. This page has been left blank intentionally Chapter 12 How Practical Can Critical Theory Be? Marcos Nobre

Critical Theory was, so to speak, born practical. Its birth with Marx declared that a good theory is one that is directed at and by emancipatory practice. It is this that distinguishes Critical Theory from non-critical approaches, and it is this that is the basis for what I call Critical Theory’s “non-concurrence claim.” Based on this claim I would like to address the issue of the theory/practice relationship in Critical Theory, both past and present. Rather than positing an alternative or, improved economic or social theory to replace Adam Smith’s and David Ricardo’s theories, Marx wrote a “critique of political economy.” This “critique of political economy” was only made possible because it did not put itself on the same ground as bourgeois knowledge, since, as Lukács wrote in his work History and Class Consciousness, “a radical transformation of this standpoint is impossible on the soil of bourgeois society.”1 The light that guides the practice of a “Critique of Political Economy” is the one that the emancipated state can shed on it. This is another reason why it does not enter into competition with bourgeois lines of research, a decisive feature here summarized as Critical Theory’s “non-concurrence claim.” In fact, the original formulation of the non-concurrence claim put forward by Marx asserted that the “critique of political economy” should not compete with political economy, but was rather, “the system of bourgeois economy critically presented (…) through its critical presentation.”2 In contrast to other intellectual traditions such as utopian socialism, Critical Theory does not embrace emancipation as an ideal; rather, it embraces it as a real possibility that is inscribed in the actual logic of capitalism. In Marx’s words, the working class “has only to set the elements of the new society free, elements that have already developed themselves in the womb of the ruining bourgeois society.”3 Such a non-concurrence claim also requires trends in historical development to be set and this helps to delineate and emancipate potentialities and blockages which can then serve to guide transformative action. This does not imply an

1 Georg Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein: Studien über marxistische Dialektik, in: Werke, vol. 2 (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1977), 286. 2 Karl Marx, Briefe Januar 1856 zu Dezember 1859, Marx-Engels Werke, vol. 29 (Berlin: Dietz, 1984), 573. 3 Karl Marx, Der Bürgerkrieg in Frankreich, Marx-Engels Werke, vol. 17 (Berlin: Dietz, 1973), 343. 160 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis opposition to bourgeois knowledge, though. Lukács distinguished between the two positions of “bourgeois thinking” and “revolutionary science,” and then theoretically determined their relationship in a sharp formulation of his preface to History and Class Consciousness: “the ‘false’ is both (zugleich) ‘false’ and ‘not false’—a moment of what is ‘true.’”4 In his essay, Horkheimer made the distinction between “Traditional” and “Critical Theory”5 and this has been used by several critical theorists in a variety of formulations. However, the assumption of a union of theory and practice has become ever more problematic since this essay. Despite the fact that Horkheimer’s first distinction between traditional and Critical Theory was based on Marx’s “critique of political economy,” his essay also states that there is no identity of the subject of either moment, nor between the moments themselves. According to Wolfgang Bonss: “First, in view of the absence of a revolutionary labor movement, the proletariat is redefined not as the subject but as the addressee of theory, and the theory-praxis dilemma is transformed into the problem of a theory of society that encompasses factual and theoretical knowledge. The reformulation of the concept of materialism thus is uncoupled from the dimension of praxis that mediates between fact-oriented science and reflection-oriented ‘philosophy.’ Therefore on this basis the crisis of Marxism is altered. As a problem that is inadequately explained, according to Horkheimer it is interpreted as both the result of deficient theoretical and empirical distinctions, and as a translation of scientific organization, as these theoretical gaps can only be closed through an interdisciplinary extension (or differentiation) of the materialist paradigm.”6 This new formulation of the relationship between theory and practice cannot solely be understood in reference to the repressive context of Nazism and fascism, which dismantled most emancipatory movements. This formulation has much deeper roots, which can be found in the numerous diagnoses of time that were the result of the contributions of different researchers affiliated to the Institute for Social Research. If one were to summarize a number of the common points in these diagnoses, it would include elements such as the relative stabilization of the self-destructive features of capitalism in its monopolistic phase; the new social differentiation within the proletariat; and new integration mechanisms of the masses into the system. By 1937, these kinds of structural changes required a profound revision of the Marxian diagnosis and of its main theoretical assumptions. Nevertheless, such a revision was not carried out.

4 Georg Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein: Studien über marxistische Dialektik, in: Werke, vol. 2, (Darmstadt, Luchterhand, 1977), 169. 5 On this, see Andrew Feenberg, The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Lukács and the Frankfurt School (London: Verso, 2014), and Marcos Nobre, Lukács e os limites da reificação. Um estudo sobre História e consciência de classe, (São Paulo: Editora 34, 2001). 6 Wolfgang Bonss, “The Program of Interdisciplinary Research and the Beginnings of Critical Theory,” in W. Bonss, S. Benhabib and J. McCole, J. (eds), On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 111. How Practical Can Critical Theory Be? 161

Even if one were able to suggest that the Dialectic of Enlightenment was to later represent a revision such as this, it would still be difficult to argue that it presented a reformulation of the relationship between theory/practice as established in Horkheimer’s writings of the 1930s, or of the non-concurrence claim itself. However, even if one admits there was a barrier to transformative practice in late capitalism, this does not mean it was entirely abandoned. Critical theoretical developments have in general taken on and embraced the new formulations of the 1937 essay, albeit in a variety of different ways. For instance, in accordance with the diagnosis of a decline in the explicative force of the labor paradigm and new forms of regulated capitalism, the very idea of a “union” between theory and practice has lost its plausibility, and this has made it problematic to continue making use of ideas such as the “organic intellectual” or the proletariat as being the only subject of transformation, and even of making distinctions such as that made in History and Class Consciousness between “empirical” and “attributed” class consciousness.7 However, despite the sublimation of the relation to practice that has, in all its diversity, largely characterized Critical Theory since Horkheimer in the 1930s, the non-concurrence claim has remained a distinguishing feature of critical, rather than traditional, theories. This is an example from Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action, some fifty years later: “Critical social theory does not relate to established lines of research as a competitor; starting from its concept of the rise of modern societies, it attempts to explain the specific limitations and the relative rights of those approaches.”8 In other words, since “Traditional and Critical Theory,” the only basis of the non-concurrence claim has been orientation towards emancipation, which has to be separated from direct action. This seems to me to be a necessary formulation of the non-concurrence claim under the transformed conditions as conceptualized by Horkheimer from the 1930s on. Critical theoretical contributions can only be seen as such on the basis of other critical theoretical contributions in the wider field of CriticalTheory.

7 In an important passage from “Traditional and Critical Theory,” Horkheimer states that “the situation of the proletariat in this society constitutes no guarantee of correct knowledge. As much as it experiences in itself senselessness as the continuation and strengthening of misery and injustice, the differentiation of its social structure—which is stimulated from the top down, and which opposes personal and class interests that are only rarely overcome—impedes this awareness from acquiring instant validity” (Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4 (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Verlag, 1988), 187–8. He then adds: “Even the systematization of the consciousness of the proletariat would give no true picture of its existence or interests. It would be a traditional theory with an unusual manner of putting the problem, and would not be the intellectual side of the historical process of emancipation. This is valid even should one want to limit oneself to absorb and spread the representations of the proletariat not in a generalized sense but in its advanced parts, which are part of a party or of its direction,” 189. 8 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2 (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1989), 375. 162 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

Such a reformulation is however, far from solving the main difficulty—which on one hand comes from the result of maintaining the non-concurrence claim, and on the other, comes from giving up the notion of a union between theory and practice. In fact, it merely stresses the challenge that new historical conditions have presented to establishing a new enduring tension which avoids a pure and simple blow of the distinction between critical and traditional contributions. This lack of theoretical foundation still needs to be addressed if the major inaugural divide of Critical Theory is to be maintained. In order to present this state of affairs in a more concrete fashion, I will take works by Habermas, Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser from the 1990s and the 2000s as examples. From the results of this brief investigation, I will then try to problematize the relationship between theory and practice for Critical Theory today, and try to highlight the available choices and options from the perspective of the non-concurrence claim.

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I will start with a brief reconstruction of some of the main characteristics of the “procedural paradigm” of law and politics as advanced by Habermas in Between Facts and Norms. Habermas considers that in contemporary society established paradigms of law project certain societal ideals and thus use certain social theories to make them explicit. As of chapter V of his book, Habermas sets out his alternative proposal for a procedural paradigm, and states that “the two most successful paradigms in the history of modern law, which are still competing today, are those of bourgeois formal law and welfare-state materialized law. In taking the perspective of discourse theory, I intend to sharpen the contours of a third legal paradigm, which provides a specific interpretation of the other two and goes beyond them (das die beiden anderen in sich aufhebt).”9 It is interesting to note that, with only forty pages until the end of the book, this procedural paradigm has still not been convincingly honed: “So far, the contours of the proceduralist legal paradigm that is supposed to lead us out of the cul-de-sac of the social-welfare model have remained vague.”10 However, my actual point is to examine how this procedural paradigm could compete with the already established ones. In the case of Between Facts and Norms, the non-concurrence claim is based on Habermas’s assumption that his third procedural paradigm is superior to the other two. It is superior firstly because the two other are structurally flawed, as they do not respond to present needs of systemic or social integration, and secondly, because the structural weakness of both paradigms coincides with the strengthening of democracy—here understood not in the restricted sense of a political regime, but

9 Jürgen Habermas, Faktizität und Geltung. Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaates (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 238–9; Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 195. 10 Ibid., 493; translation,.409. How Practical Can Critical Theory Be? 163 as a social practice that generates a multiplicity of forms of living. As mentioned previously, Habermas sees the inadequacy of the ruling paradigms of law in their projection of determined ideals of society that correspond to determined patterns of political options and ways to shape one’s life. Thus, the superiority of the procedural paradigm lies in its “formality”—in the sense that this term embraces the idea of procedure: not in opposition to the content to which it would be an “abstraction” or in relation to which it would be “void”; but in the sense that it allows the emergence of content according to the need to promote the largest possible number of voices, alternatives of action and life forms, and to simultaneously guarantee their right to expression and participation. As Habermas writes towards the end of his book, the procedural paradigm is formal “in the sense that it merely states the necessary conditions under which legal subjects in their role of enfranchised citizens can reach an understanding with one another about what their problems are and how they are to be solved. The procedural paradigm is certainly connected with the self-referential expectation of shaping not only the self-understanding of elites who deal with law as experts but that of all participants”.11 There is a new element here when considering the development of Critical Theory. Although the expectation is directed to “all participants,” it also reserves a special place for law experts. In my view, this also shows a specific project of institutionalization for the new procedural paradigm which requires law experts’ adhesion to and adoption of corresponding interpretative patterns for jurisprudence. Furthermore, it projects a determined configuration of the separation of powers and of their own internal structures, which no critical theoretical position should be supposed to fix once and for all. It is in view of these parameters that I think Habermas discusses and confronts current interpretative trends in constitutional courts, shows their difficulties and insufficiencies, and points to better solutions that could be reached through the procedural paradigm. An example is when for instance he confronts a Republican understanding of politics and describes the superiority of a constitutional court that is swayed by a procedural comprehension of the constitution: “Discourse theory breaks with an ethical concept of civic autonomy, and thus it does not have to reserve the mode of deliberative politics to exceptional conditions. Moreover, a constitutional court guided by a proceduralist understanding of the constitution does not have to overdraw on its legitimation credit. I can stay within its authority to apply the law—an authority clearly defined in terms of the logic of argumentation—provided that the democratic process over which it is supposed to keep watch is not described as a state of exception.”12 The alleged superiority of the procedural paradigm needs also to prove its ability to obtain the adhesion of both law experts and general participants, provided that they are convinced that the new interpretative framework it advances is more adequate to self-understanding and the discussion and solution of controversies

11 Ibid., 536; translation, 445. 12 Ibid., 339; translation, 279. 164 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis in current political-juridical disputes. This competition between paradigms is qualified by Habermas as being an explicitly political one; it is one in which law experts currently hold a privileged role: “The dispute over the correct paradigmatic understanding of the legal system, a subsystem reflected in the whole of society as one of its parts, is essentially a political dispute. In a constitutional democracy, this dispute concerns all participants, and it must not be conducted only as an esoteric discourse among experts apart from the political arena. In virtue of their prerogatives and, more generally, their professional experience and knowledge, members of the judiciary, and legal experts participate in this contest of interpretations in a privileged way; but they cannot use their professional authority to impose any single view of the constitution on the rest of us. The general public must itself find such a view convincing.”13 At this point, it seems unclear how the non-concurrence claim can still be maintained. If, in the framework of the Theory of Communicative Action, the idea of a non-exhaustible and blocked potential for social learning still underpinned the non-concurrence claim, the specification of determined actors and action margins for a political-institutional dispute over the implementation of a new paradigm in law and politics would undermine any non-concurrence claim vis-à-vis established paradigms. It is also unclear how any new paradigm could be presented as a concrete developmental tendency inscribed in present society—and this is a distinctive feature of Critical Theory vis-à-vis utopian/normativistic approaches. At most I think it can only be said to be an adequate normative option in the light of Habermas’s diagnosis of time or as a response to the particular theoretical trap represented by the traditional theoretical contributions of John Rawls and their peculiar power of attraction. Regarding the history of Critical Theory, there are at least two new developments that emerge here. Firstly, critical contributions are set as alternatives to others and can no longer claim to not be in competition with non-critical contributions. Secondly, their normative character itself is altered in that they no longer criticize the existent solely in the light of non-realized potentials, but also in the light of institutionalization proposals as yet unrealized, even if these are under the label of “procedural.” I also think that this state of affairs is not only characteristic of Habermas’s recent developments. Although it may take different directions and have different intentions, a similar state of affairs can be found in the writings of other important critical theorists, in the sense that a sort of tendency to suppress the non-concurrence claim seems to have established itself in an enduring way. In what follows, I would like to give some brief examples of this new configuration of Critical Theory taken from writing by Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser from the 2000s. I would also like to point out to what may be a different position in this configuration of the field of Critical Theory, and in particular, to that taken by Axel Honneth in his writing from the early 2000s up to his work Freedom’s Right in 2011.

13 Ibid., 477; translation, 395. How Practical Can Critical Theory Be? 165

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In her many debates with Nancy Fraser and Iris Young, Seyla Benhabib always stresses their salient shared points of agreement. These refer to their common reference to Critical Theory; as for example, in the following passage from Claims of Culture, in which Seyla Benhabib criticizes Brian Barry’s approach as set out in his book Culture and Equality: “Of particular relevance here is the difference between his [Brian Barry’s, MN] approach and those like Young’s, Fraser’s and mine, which look at broader sociological and cultural processes and movements in evaluating multiculturalism.”14 But these points of agreement are not just negative or seen only from the position of the critique of “traditional theorists.” Despite disagreeing with Benhabib on a number of crucial points, such as her defense of a “social critique without philosophy,”15 I think that Fraser would agree with the generally positive formulation of the critical posture seen in this excerpt from Claims of Culture:

The answer to this ancient conflict between norm and reality is simply to say that if all were as it ought to be in the world, there would be no need to build normative models, either; the fact that a normative model does not correspond to reality is no reason to dismiss it, for the need for normativity arises precisely because humans measure the reality they inhabit in the light of principles and promises that transcend this reality.16] The relevant question therefore is: Does a given normative model enable us to analyze and distill the rational principles of existing practices and institutions in such a fashion that we can then use these rational reconstructions as critical guidelines for measuring really existing democracies?17

In this quotation one finds the distinguishing features of Critical Theory: both orientation to emancipation as critical behavior – a new determination of the theory/practice relation in which the terms are intertwined but do not coincide – and the need for making the normativity of reason explicit in order to justify the critical position. But it also evokes a relation to “existing practices and institutions” that, in my view, needs further theoretical development. In fact, in her discussion of Claims of Culture in Constellations, Benhabib remarks that her critics chose not

14 Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era, (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 119. 15 Fraser, Nancy, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Post-Socialist’ Condition (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 209–12. 16 On this, see Benhabib, Seyla, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). [This note is in the original.] 17 Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 134. 166 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis to comment on “institutional options” and states that this aspect of her argument “will also be central to the project of reclaiming universalism in critical theory in the future.” In her view, this new field of work for critical theorists is one of “macro-questions of institutional design.”18 This new task is in turn closely linked to her diagnosis that critical theorists have not paid enough attention either to the urgency and centrality of the problem(atic) or to the theoretical developments it requires. For Benhabib, the major factor of her skepticism against strong universalism is

precisely the lack of significant engagement in Habermas’s work with the claims of identity/difference movements. Although in recent years with the publication of The Inclusion of the Other, Habermas has begun to address these questions, a reworking either of the discourse theory of democracy or of the program of communicative ethics in view of these developments has been lacking. The aim of The Claims of Culture was to address precisely this lacuna in the program of contemporary critical theory.19

She also mentions the work of Nancy Fraser, Axel Honneth, Rainer Forst and James Bohman as examples of those who confront these questions in the critical field. In my view, some of the difficulties of the non-concurrence claim regarding the role of critical contributions that can be found in Habermas’s work after Between Facts and Norms can also be found in Seyla Benhabib’s writings, albeit in even more problematic forms. This raises a question: if she can no longer limit her efforts to critically reconstructing the rationality of existing practices and institutions, and insists on engaging in the modeling of institutions, what is it that distinguishes her contributions other than different theoretical assumptions?20 And if critical contributions lie on the same ground as traditional ones, what does critique now mean? In other words, how can the critical standpoint still be affirmed when the borders that separate it from the traditional one are blurred, nebulous, or insufficiently justified? I think that the new stance Benhabib expects for critical theorists is also one shared by Nancy Fraser. Despite her distinct position in the critical field, in that she tries not only to mediate between positions like Iris Young’s and Seyla Benhabib’s, but also to integrate contributions like Judith Butler’s; Nancy Fraser seems to me to share Benhabib’s urge for a qualitative new form of intervention by critical theorists. In fact, in her “rejoinder” to the “political-philosophical exchange” with

18 Seyla Benhabib, “On Culture, Public Reason, and Deliberation: Response to Pensky and Peritz,” in: Constellations, 11(2), 2004: 299. 19 Ibid., 298. 20 Or, to use a quote from Horkheimer’s 1937 essay: it could be “a traditional theory with a peculiar way of putting the problem and not the intellectual side of the historical process of emancipation”, Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Verlag, 1988), 189. How Practical Can Critical Theory Be? 167

Axel Honneth, she begins by summarizing the new tasks of critical theorists in contrast to those formerly put forward by “earlier Frankfurt School thinkers,” in which, among other important elements, socialism is no longer the focus of emancipatory hopes; social movements have proliferated in decentered way; and value horizons have been pluralized.21 The final contrast is enunciated by Fraser in the following terms:

Unlike their predecessors, finally, today’s critical theorists cannot assume that all normatively justified claims will converge on a single program for institutional change. Rather, they must take on the hard cases—those, for example, in which claims for minority cultural recognition conflict with claims for gender equality—and tell us how to resolve them.22

I think that this formulation goes even further than that of Seyla Benhabib, and I am not sure if she would share it. However, while the fact remains that critical theorists are now required to “resolve” hard cases, it is unclear to me how this can be done without totally blurring the lines between theory and practice, in a context in which Fraser herself admits that the former conditions for the union of theory and practice are lacking. Additionally, this new requirement is not a mere corollary of critical behavior; it is now understood as a “condition” of Critical Theory in general:

Critical Theory must incorporate a theory of justice that meets two conditions simultaneously. On the one hand, it must be sufficiently general to avoid sectarianism. On the other hand, it must be sufficientlydeterminate to adjudicate conflicts. Only a theory of justice that is simultaneously general and determinate can meet the challenges of globalization.”23

This is also one of the important points in her attack of Honneth’s position; namely that “Once its recognition principles are emptied of content, Honneth’s theory of justice lacks sufficient determinacy to adjudicate conflicting claims.”24 If I understand Honneth’s response correctly, the requirement of an “adjudication of conflicting claims” is excessive when confronted with the original demarcation of the limits of Critical Theory. Moreover, in the case of Fraser, this position also conflicts with a procedural understanding of justice itself. In Honneth’s words: “Fraser again and again seems to anticipate the results of these procedurally conceived debates by herself explaining the material content of social justice. Such anticipations, however, are incompatible with proceduralism

21 Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political- Philosophical Exchange, (London and New York: Verso, 2003), 198. 22 Ibid., 198–9. 23 Ibid., 223–4. 24 Ibid., 225. 168 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis in the strict sense, since determining content is precisely what should be left to the carrying out of the procedure.”25 This position requires a new conception of the relationship between theory and practice “under transformed conditions” 26 and the problem stated at the beginning of this chapter remains: how can this new conception of the relationship between theory and practice be read today? How can this new conception put itself forwards for a distinguishing position in Critical Theory and towards a new formulation of the non-concurrence claim? Without the “union between theory and practice,” and without a distinguishable unitary revolutionary subject, the answer to the above questions might be that what distinguishes a critical theoretical contribution is purely and simply its attachment to the history and principles of the intellectual field itself. However, as we have already seen, this simple answer obscures the fact that such an attachment to the critical theoretical point of view may take shape in critical contributions that position themselves so closely to traditional ones that the border between the two seems nebulous. This is why such a new state of affairs requires a reformulation of the problem that embraces both its theoretical as well as its practical dimensions. The former requires one to reflect upon ties to the critical theoretical tradition. This entails making a distinction between two levels of critical theoretical work. The The former requires one to reflect upon ties to the critical theoretical tradition. This entails making a distinction between two levels of critical theoretical work. The first level embraces the reconstruction of the whole intellectual tradition of Critical Theory in order to actualize a specific critical model or different elements of several critical models. The second level involves the relation to traditional contributions and the possibility of appropriating their results in a critical manner. The latter dimension relates to practice, and must deal primarily with the fact that emancipatory activism has lost both its revolutionary and its reformist models of transformation. This new relation to transformative action also needs to be developed by again distinguishing between two levels of engagement: one directed at single actions, and the other at a greater commitment to an emancipated society. It is this that I intend to do in the following and final part of this chapter. In both dimensions and at both levels of each dimension, it is clear that the different diagnoses of time should take precedence over the more abstract theoretical formulations, and also that the arena for open debate on different diagnoses of time should be neither overshadowed nor blocked by more abstract formulations. The reason the new configuration of the relation between theory and practice regarding the diagnosis of time has been given precedence, is due mainly to a situation in which practice as well as theory depend inherently on activism in the public sphere and, to a broader extent, in democratic disputes. The primary task of Critical Theory now is to try to shed emancipatory light on current debates, so

25 Ibid., 261. 26 Ibid., 265. How Practical Can Critical Theory Be? 169 that practice may be critically informed. Critical diagnoses of time do not compete with traditional ones; they only compete with other critical diagnoses of time. Despite this, the critical theoretical field does not seem characterized by open discussion of different diagnoses of time; rather, it prefers a number of abstract theoretical elements from a variety of past and present models of Critical Theory.

* * *

With his idea of “actualization,”27 Honneth helped to make explicit the fact that critical theoretical efforts always presuppose a reconstruction of Critical Theory’s intellectual reservoir (at a primary level), which then allows the appropriation (at a secondary, “actualizing” level) of both traditional and critical contributions. To make a distinction between these two levels does not imply any chronological priority of one over the other, as they are frequently intertwined; rather, it is aimed at an already functioning substitute reformulation of the non-concurrence claim, in which the diagnosis of present time takes precedence. It is this centrality of emancipation oriented diagnoses of time that distinguishes critical theoretical contributions today. This also means that they must face non-critical, traditional diagnoses of time and actualization, and that this very centrality of the different diagnoses of time establishes a new relationship between theory and practice in the critical theoretical field. In the absence of a collective historical horizon of emancipation—as socialism was throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—it is first level reconstructions of the history and development of Critical Theory that today distinguish critical theoretical contributions. This situation seems to imply an implicitly shared diagnosis, according to which a “realistic concept of the ‘emancipatory interest’”28 prevails. When social movements expanded the horizon of emancipation to target not only emancipation from capital, but also from any previously fixed model of society, the very logic of radical social transformation was altered. The previously dominant revolutionary model, the heir of the French and the Russian Revolutions, gave way to a new model, which no longer advocated the creation of “the new man,” nor of a new society to be built from the conquest of state power. In contrast, the new model that made its initial appearance around the 1970s assumed that the conquest of state power was a major obstacle to the revolutionary model of transformation in achieving its goal, that being the creation of a new society

27 It is no simple task to determine a constant and uniform meaning for expressions like “actualization” “presentification,” “reactualization” in Honneth’s intellectual trajectory, and to fulfill such a task is certainly not the goal of this text. What matters here is not the notions per se, but simply to point out that such expressions help to make explicit an element that most of the time is in the shadows or in the background of current critical theoretical practices. 28 Axel Honneth, Pathologien der Vernunft. Geschichte und Gegenwart der Kritischen Theorie (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), 55. 170 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis from below. This has been a major result of global social movements, which while they may be highly diverse in composition and objectives, share their rejection of being trapped in the exiguous space between state repression and existing unions and political parties. To take Rudi Dutschke’s well-known formula: it was about “revolutionizing the revolutionaries.” Over time, this new image of radical social transformation established that only the vivid transformation of a large social base could be the point of departure for genuine radical change. This also entailed expanding the horizons of politics to reach all dimensions of daily life in a way that the previous revolutionary model was not able to do because it was always haunted by the priority of conquering state power, and because of its logic of the subordination of all social conflicts in relation to a “higher end.” From this point on, all dimensions of political struggle against domination were legitimate in themselves and were as important as any other battlefield. It stressed the necessity of fighting a power which was no longer primarily state power, but which were forms of subordination that were generated in all areas of society. The point here is not to edulcorate what happened in the 1960s and 1970s. There has been considerable intolerance, and there have been many authoritarian versions of social transformation. A typical transitional moment from one model to another, may correctly be generally described as an amalgam of the new and the old. Only with time did a new model decant and separate itself from the old revolutionary model. Only with time did a new imaginary establish itself with the idea that real transformations cannot happen at the expense of individuality; that no political and social organization of any sort can demand sacrifice in the name of an abstract and distant better future; and that no social movement should entail the submission of an individual to a party or to a group of enlightened political actors. Self-organization does not go along with vertical and hierarchical structures. While it has become impossible to grasp the complexity of social and political life having as its only focal point the valorization and accumulation of capital, there is still the wider question of how previously fixed models of society are imposed over the heads of individuals and social groups that are systematically excluded from its fundamental decisions. It is this, for example, that makes abstract models of modernization set as normative patterns to be followed highly suspect. In fact, the revolutionary model of social transformation also largely assumed that a single unique model of modernization should be at the basis of all theoretical and practical actions. One of the striking differences that separates today’s emancipatory from non-emancipatory contributions is precisely the fact that the struggle for emancipation largely questions such a modernization paradigm, while the other field still clings to a prescriptive version of a previously fixed model of modernization. The complexification of emancipation, which has made it multidimensional, also implies that it became impossible to take for granted that advances in promoting equality would automatically result in advances in promoting freedom. Struggles for equality became in so many ways and forms intertwined with How Practical Can Critical Theory Be? 171 struggles for freedom that they can no longer be separated from each other. While the revolutionary model of transformation conferred a primacy upon struggles for equality over struggles for freedom, it is no longer the case that a reduction of the logic of the one to that of the other, or that a primacy of the principle of equality over freedom is tenable in the new model of radical social transformation.29 The two fronts of political battle should be pursued simultaneously. Only in this way does it become possible to question the model of modernization imposed as unique and unavoidable: it is unequal, without a shadow of doubt, but it also silences, segregates and blocks the emergence of new voices that point to the emergence of new forms of life. However, this does not mean that this description fits the self-understanding of the whole critical theoretical field today. There are many positions that still advocate reducing issues of freedom to an inflated notion of equality, including a notion of “equality of opportunities,” which is hard to detach from a non-critical way of thinking. The proposal here is that there is much to gain, both theoretically and practically, from leaving behind such inflated notions of equality, and by operating in the double register of demands for freedom and for equality simultaneously, without giving precedence to one over the other. Given concrete situations of action, the priority of one over the other should always depend on the actors themselves, and the main criterion for such a priority should be nothing less than increasing the autonomy of citizenship, as individuals as well as groups, organized from the perspective of a concrete social struggle. Notions such as “equality of opportunities” not only inflate equality in a way that weakens its critical potential, but also involve establishing a catalogue of freedom rights that are understood as fixed, and are posited as a condition of other rights. In such a formulation, the dependence of equality relative to freedom limits political action right from the start, and blocks deliberation over equality issues that cannot emerge unless today’s configuration of freedom rights can be questioned and challenged. The fall of “real existing socialism” and the decline of state regulated capitalism came about simultaneously and gave birth to a new form of state. At first this new state form aimed at maintaining its planning logic while also accepting the new social movements as legitimate discussion partners, trying to negotiate alternatives without giving up its technocratic position. However, during the 1990s what emerged was a new relation between state and society, in which many emancipatory social movements acquired a co-management position, participating directly and indirectly in elaborating, implementing and co-determining multiple state policies.

29 However, this is not to say that Critical Theory should then conceptualize all social struggles according to the sole logic of freedom, including equality issues, as Honneth claims (cf. his Das Recht der Freiheit. Grundriss einer demokratischen Sittlichkeit (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011)). Freedom and equality have quite different political, economic and social logics that should not be reduced to one another, and this is a core element of the new model of radical social transformation. 172 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

This new porosity of the state regarding social movements for freedom and equality does not mean pure and simple co-optation, although it is clear that it involves the permanent risk that the horizons of the demands may be confined to the logic of the “possible,” which is in turn established by the administrative state logic. This “reality trap” and potential paralysis of the imagination has been challenged by the numerous democratic protests and revolts of the 2010s; from the “Occupy” movements to the Brazilian June protests in 2013, the Arab Spring and the Spanish 15-M, amongst many others. All these movements rejected the false alternatives between topic elaboration and implementation of policies, and harsh criticism of these same participatory processes, and they point to a gamut of inadequacies and deficits from an emancipatory point of view. Although such movements have not yet reached the mechanisms of direct economic regulation, this does not mean that they cannot do so in the future. Political battles are fought under concrete conditions and emancipatory potentials should be pursued wherever they appear. Bearing this in mind, perhaps the question in the title of this chapter should now read: “Up to what point can emancipatory interest be realistic without losing its critical theoretical impulses?” And if there is no answer to this question other than a practical one, its theoretical counterpart requires from the outset that the problem of the non-concurrence claim be explicitly placed as a watershed between critical and non-critical contributions. As to the debates within the critical theoretical field, the main point is to not hide behind abstract theoretical formulations that emanate from the range of critical models, but rather, to accept the open disagreements within the arena of the diagnosis of time as a common ground and intellectual reservoir. Chapter 13 Habermas on Solidarity and Praxis: Between Institutional Reform and Redemptive Revolution in Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis David Ingram

Since its inception critical theory has been ambivalent about what kind of political practice it should promote and in the name of what kind of solidarity. Oversimplifying somewhat, the choices fall somewhere between two extremes: Should it promote institutional reform in the name of achieving democratic solidarity? Or should it promote anarchic revolution in the name of achieving solidarity with suppressed nature, redeeming integral life in its totality from narrow self-interest and instrumental reason? The former practice recalls earlier struggles for social justice, civil rights, and the franchise that find their contemporary evocation in human rights movements that aim to hold states and international institutions of governance accountable to the people and not just a privileged few. Ending domination of one group by another here requires the kind of critical theoretical praxis associated with the critique of ideology, exposing partisan norms and undemocratic institutions that masquerade as universally valid for all. Its modus operandi is undistorted self-understanding achieved through concerted efforts at rational reflection, or critical dialogue. The latter recalls Sorel’s myth of the general strike, which later inspired Walter Benjamin’s youthful fantasy of a divine violence, an apocalyptic annihilation of the all-too rational violence of an institutional order that alienates humanity from itself and its natural environment.1 Today this yearning for solidarity with those who have suffered the catastrophe of modern progress, solidarity with a world both human and natural, inspires a range of activists, from anti-globalization anarchists to deep ecologists, who extend the besieged community of fate to include the entire planet. Critical theory is here called upon to redeem a utopian hope for

1 W. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence” (1921) in Selected Writings, Vol. 1, ed. M. Bullock and M Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2000), 236–52. The contrast between two types of critical theory practice I am suggesting here is discussed by Habermas in “Walter Benjamin: Consciousness Raising or Rescuing Critique?” (1972) in Philosophical-Political Profiles, trans. F. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983). 174 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis integral fulfillment by recalling suppressed needs and by reimagining alternative ways of living and (re)producing our lifeworld. Common opinion has it that the first generation of Frankfurt School critical theorists, when confronted with the incapacity of liberal democratic institutions to stanch the rise of totalitarianism, embraced an anti-institutional practice that mourned the loss of humanity’s instinctual solidarity with nature. Second- and third-generation critical theorists, by contrast, are presumed to have abandoned such religious-metaphysical yearnings in favor of a more sober and pragmatic political practice of piecemeal amelioration of injustice and insult requiring what Antonio Gramsci described as a protracted tactical war of position involving a struggle for cultural hegemony, a “long march through institutions,” as Rudi Dutschke famously put it during the German student revolt of the 1960s. As generalizations go this simple correlation of critical theory generations and their preferred modes of enlightened resistance rings true. However, we need look no farther than Marx himself, whose theoretical promotion of class struggle expressly combined both types of practice, to see that critical theory in whatever applied form it assumes—class struggle, democratic reform, defense of human rights, or planetary salvation has—and I would argue, must—invoke both civic and planetary ideals of solidarity, ideology-critique and redemptive critique, political and aesthetic-artistic practice. In short, critical theory combines institutional reform and existential revolution in advancing the transformation of human needs in solidarity with others.2 I hope to illustrate this point by tracing the evolution of Habermas’s critical project from its inception in aesthetic criticism of capitalism to its current political form. As Habermas noted back in 1996 in speaking of his focus on legal institutions, “Even if readers do not always see the ‘end of critical theory’ in this project, they frequently think it diffuses the critique of capitalism and just gives in to political liberalism.”3 However, it was this same philosopher who responded to his left-leaning critics by saying, “I mostly feel that I am the last Marxist.”4

2 Lawrence Wilde distinguishes three kinds of leftist appeals to solidarity: the ethico- inclusive ideal, which has its roots in Pierre Leroux’s peaceful, humanitarian call to bring about a democratic socialism based on worker cooperatives; a redemptive ideal, which resonates with Bakunin’s call for a violent, apocalyptic annihilation of all legal institutions, and the class struggle ideal advocated by Marx, which urges the creation of internationalist working class movements and working class political parties to affect revolutionary changes in basic legal and economic structures with the aim of eventually achieving a non-oppressive world society. Competing with these concepts of solidarity are liberal ideals based on liberal, social democratic models of integration of the sort that was classically defended by Émile Durkheim; and nationalist ideals, based on national-cultural identity. L. Wilde, Global Solidarity (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), ch. 2. Habermas’s appeal to solidarity straddles the ethico-inclusive and liberal ideals. 3 Habermas, “Reply to Symposium Participants,” in Cardozo Law Review 17/4–5 (1996): 1545. 4 Habemas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” inHabermas and the Public Sphere, ed. C. Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 469. Habermas on Solidarity and Praxis 175

After Habermas’s deliberate abandonment of the Marxian concept of revolutionary praxis, this self-assessment may seem misleading if not disingenuous. But Habermas himself saw his departure from this strand of revolutionary Marxism as continuous with Western Marxism’s own critique of bureaucratic socialism, a critique that sought to recover the revolutionary potential of social democratic reform while “developing a self-critique of the capitalist, mass democratic, constitutional welfare state, with its strengths and weaknesses.”5 The welfare state, he insisted, still drew its power from the liberating spirit of a utopian society of workers (arbeitsgesellschaftliche Utopie) but the idea of unalienated life—with its core values of freedom, liberty, and solidarity—could no longer be thought in terms of a concrete model of the good society, based on a radical reorganization of the labor process. Rather, utopia would have to be reconceived as a form of “undistorted intersubjectivity” grounded in an open and egalitarian democratic public sphere.6 When linked to a procedure of critical debate oriented to unconstrained consensus, the political sphere, the constitution and the entire legal system could be understood, in Ulrich Preuss’s sense, as a fallible learning project, a never-ending revolutionary redefinition of the rights and freedoms that constitute emancipated life.7 Most commentators date Habermas’s legal turn back to the 1970s, when he started developing his discourse theoretic account of democratic legitimation. For Martin Matustik and many others, the pivotal year in which Habermas turned away from his aesthetic-anthropological critique of technocracy—1968—was also the year that he changed from being a progressive leftist to being a “reform-minded legal scholar.”8 But as Matthew Specter observes in his intellectual biography of Habermas, the legal turn had probably already been set in motion by the late 1950s, before Habermas had written Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.9 His introduction to the Institute’s empirical study of the political awareness of Frankfurt students, Students and Politics,10 shows that by 1957 Habermas was deeply concerned about the legal ramifications of the Federal Constitutional Court’s banning of the Communist Party in 1956, the Christian Democratic Union-led government’s decision to allow

5 Was heisst Sozialismus heute?” in Die nachholende Revolution: Kleine Politische Schriften VII (Frankfurt a.M., 1990), 203. 6 Habermas, “Krise des Wohlfahrtstaates und die Erschöpfung utopischer Energien,” Die Neue Unübersichtlichkeit. Kleine Politische Schriften VII (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1985), 161, 195. 7 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. W. Rehg (Cambridge: MA. MIT Press, 1996), 384, 444. 8 M. Matŭstìk, Jürgen Habermas: A Philosophical-Political Profile (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 93. 9 M. Specter, Habermas: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 10 Habermas, “Reflexionen über den Begriff der Politischen Beteiligung,” in Student und Politik: eine soziologische Untersuchung zum politischen Bewusstsein Frankfurter Studenten, ed. L. von Friedeburg et al. (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1961), 11–55. 176 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

NATO to install missiles on German soil, and the Social Democratic Party’s gradual abandonment of its identity as a “worker’s party” oriented toward the necessary democratic establishment of socialism in favor of reconstituting itself as “people’s party” (Volkspartei) that presented socialism as an ethical choice alongside other capitalist-friendly Keynesian alternatives. Of this time in his career Habermas says, “I was very much influenced in the late ’50s by the Weimar Staatsrechtslehrerdiskussion and its aftermath (C. Schmitt, Forstoff, Weber vs Abendroth) … Until I discovered Rawls in the late ’70s I was nourished in political theory almost only by the German Staatsrechtslehre.”11 The German legal debates to which Habermas referred gravitated around the relationship between state and civil society, legality and legitimacy, and liberal constitutionalism and democracy. Was the state’s executive branch and civil service a neutral force above civil society that could rightfully suppress radical political parties in the name of protecting Germany’s fragile democracy, as Schmitt and his students argued? Could the CDU’s lawful decision to allow NATO missiles be resisted as undemocratic and illegitimate, perhaps by the more legitimate means of popular plebiscite? Did Article 20, Section 1 of the Basic Law that refers to “a democratic and social federal state” and Article 79 asserting that Article 20 was immune to future constitutional change be understood as constitutionally entrenching the welfare state? Did it imply that the constitution was grounded on an unstated principle of social justice, or natural law, as the Federal Constitutional Court asserted? If so, did this natural law interpretation of the constitution not have the consequence of elevating Platonic judges over democratically elected legislatures as the guardians of basic rights? Specter’s attempt to read the entire trajectory of Habermas’s critical theory as a response to German legal and political debates is illuminating because it shows that he broke from his mentors in Frankfurt very early on in developing an institutional form of immanent critique that, unbeknownst to him at the time, had already been pioneered by Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer in their critical legal theories. But Specter is so insistent on opposing Habermas’s Weberian analysis of the unavoidable systemic constraints of modern legal and economic institutions to the more holistic, aesthetic-expressive praxis approach defended by first-generation critical theorists like Marcuse, that he forgets Habermas’s continuing fascination with this other form of critique.12 The following essay therefore situates Habermas’s institutional critical theory against the backdrop of his more speculative critique of technological alienation.

11 Correspondence with Specter, cited in Specter, 59–60. 12 Habermas disputes Specter’s reductive interpretation of him as a “political scientist,” noting the latter’s relative neglect of his “theory of communicative action.”The latter reconstructs the Marxian critique of capitalism understood as a social-pathological life-form, the structural imperatives of which undermine capitalism’s own personal, cultural, social, legal, ecological, and political presuppositions. [Personal communication with the author on May 4, 2014 at the Critical Theory in Critical Times Conference held at Northwestern University]. Habermas on Solidarity and Praxis 177

Habermas was already a critical theorist well before he became Adorno’s assistant in Frankfurt and had immersed himself in the writings of the first generation. His youthful interest in Heideggerian phenomenology and Jewish philosophy, which culminated in his Young Hegelian appropriation of Schelling’s idealism, displayed a theological yearning for a redemptive, solidaristic practice aimed at overcoming technological reification. At the same time, he cultivated an abiding interest in institutional debates surrounding the new social democracy that was taking shape throughout post-war Europe and especially in West Germany’s fledgling democracy during the height of the Cold War. Although his first treatise on modern democracy and the transformation of the public sphere bore the indelible trace of Carl Schmitt’s political-theological critique of liberal parliamentarism as the very antithesis of popular sovereignty, and was accordingly read by many as a total rejection of institutional mass partisan politics—a revolutionary invocation that apparently worried his more conservative mentors in Frankfurt—Habermas’s own mercurial rise in the German student movement eventually led him to oppose over-politicizing the university, whose value as an inclusive institution of impartial debate accorded with his increasing embrace of rational discourse as a privileged form of solidaristic practice. This tension between reform-minded and revolutionary forms of praxis in the name of conflicting ideals of solidarity would accompany him throughout his career, and would culminate in his current project of extending democratic practice and solidarity globally. The limitations associated with this project, I argue, are partially offset by Habermas’s turn to utopian religious consciousness and his defense of a solidaristic idea of human nature in confronting neoliberalism’s atomistic reduction of the individual to a rational, self-interested calculator. This view is continuous with his earliest pre-Frankfurt writings on technological alienation, to which I now turn.

Early and Late Habermas on Aesthetic Fulfillment in the Age of Industrial Technology

Habermas’s earliest interest in technological alienation was inspired by Heidegger, whose unapologetic Nazi sympathies he denounced in 1953, and by Marx, whose writings he read possibly as early as 1946, when he was still a student in the Gymnasium and a patron of a local Communist bookstore.13 It was Marx and other Young Hegelian influences that shaped his dissertation on Schelling as well as his earliest newspaper contributions as a reviewer of exhibitions and technical books. The writings spanning 1953–56 reflect Jewish and other theological motifs in addition to Heideggerian themes in a way that has led one commentator to describe Habermas’s pre-Frankfurt brand of critical theory as a kind of

13 Habermas’s very early exposure to Marx’s writings, mentioned by Matustik, was confirmed in a personal communication with the author on May 4, 2014. 178 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

“redemptive republicanism.”14 Some of these more philosophical pieces, such as an essay written during the centennial of Schelling’s death in 1954 (the same year as Habermas’s dissertation on Schelling), hint at a sweeping critique of modern science and technology reminiscent of similar totalizing critiques advanced by Heidegger, Adorno, and Horkheimer. Praising the untimely meditation on evil developed in Schelling’s later philosophy, Habermas observes that “error and sin always arise whenever [rational] understanding (Verstand) refuses to bid farewell to its own autonomy” and thereby recognize its natural emergence out of unconscious sensibility (Gemüt) and its higher aspiration toward soulful wholeness in unity with divine creation. Evil (das Böse), on this reading, is therefore “pure spirit” (das reinste Geistige), humanity seeking to become God-like in imposing its own nihilistic, ego-centric (eigenwillige) will on everything that resists its all-consuming desire. The target of this critique appears to be a freedom-denying, authoritarian economic and legal system:

[U]nless we contain the objectification of ourselves in the face of limits revealed in öur essence (Wesen), we will surrender our freedom, and the gain in our ability to manipulate (die Verfügungsgewinn) our life circumstances will be our demise . . . as a first step toward a philosophically free spiritual act [Schelling] teaches us not to know but to refuse to know, to refuse the self-willing of the administrating (verwaltenden) and controlling (verfügenden) spirit.15

Although Habermas takes note of Schelling’s hope that the rational spirit can be subordinated to the intuition of the absolute but now forgotten unity of being in the aesthetic experience of a work of art, he does not here explore the possibility of developing an aesthetic theory of modern technology, consumption, and production. Many of his other earlier pieces do, however. To begin with, these early pieces address the meaninglessness of consumption in the age of planned obsolescence, when traditional styles (barock, Biedermier, etc.) are shamelessly exploited to provide the comfortable and meaningful ease of the familiar against the backdrop of a mindless pursuit of novelty for novelty’s sake. The fake “sovereignty” of the consumer in the face of manipulative marketing geared toward unconsciously stimulating an endless cycle of consumption is juxtaposed to the more traditional act of using durable goods that express the intimacy and constancy (Selbständigkeit) of social relations expressive of a meaningful existence (Dasein).16 Where music once expressed the natural rhythms of physical labor jointly synchronized, it now surreptitiously invades the modern workplace

14 Dirk Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), ch. 5. 15 Habermas, “Schelling und die ‘Submission’ unter das Höhere,” Zum 100 Todestag des Philosophen—nicht nur in memoriam.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (August 21, 1954). 16 Habermas, “‘Stil’auch für den Alltag,” Handelsblatt” (Sept. 23, 1955), 4. Habermas on Solidarity and Praxis 179 as a subliminal technique for elevating the mood and productivity of isolated office workers;17 where holidays and festivals once marked the natural cycles of life and public religious events that punctuated the routines of daily existence, they now serve to celebrate either the individual’s withdrawal into the intimate space of familial privacy or the commercial exploitation of public carnivals uprooted from their once playful and sacrilegious mockery of the upper classes.18 When speaking of production, these early essays also hint at two countervailing tendencies. The modern tendency toward automized production, Habermas ruefully notes, promises something it can’t deliver. Instead of freeing everyone from the need to toil so that all can develop their human potentials, it consigns a mass of unskilled workers to unemployment while creating a class of educated, over-specialized engineers whose intellectual responsibility—fixated on the repair and oversight of technical processes—permits little or no initiative,19 despite the replacement of old managerial hierarchies and horizontally situated control rooms.20 Countering this diagnosis, Habermas elsewhere hints at the possibility of implementing liberating technical designs that would integrate art and technology, nature-as-life process and humanity-as-natural (sensuous) being. As he stated in 1953,21 the problem of modern technology has nothing to do with “the multiplication and increase in aesthetic effects, but rather with the relationship between people and technically produced objects with(in) which they live (umgeht), [and] with the relationship to the world in general, into which twentieth century mankind is born.” More precisely, Habermas observes that today “contemporary humanity creates its technical products not for the sake of its own purposes but rather creates its purposes for the sake of the means (which provide humanity with a permanently perfectible process of production), so that these ‘purposes’ are no longer [humanity’s] own.” Accompanying the detachment of technical things from the people who produce and use them is a “myth” of functional “neutrality and anonymity,” the myth that technology itself is “removed from [persons’] immediate interests.” Instead of the “domination of means,” characteristic of capitalist forms of productive efficiency, Habermas allows that “there could again be genuine things (Dinge) that are tailored to people (and not the other way around), that are

17 Habermas, “Wie an einem Samstagnachmittag. Musik als indirektes Produktionsmittel—Ihr Einfluss auf die Arbeitsstimmung,”Handelsblatt (Dec. 14, 1954), 4. 18 Habermas, “Man möchte sich mitreissen lassen: feste und Feieren in dieser Zeit,” Handelsblatt (Feb. 17, 1956). 19 Habermas, “Die Hilfsarbeiter wird angelernter Ingenier: Die Entwicklung vom Fließband zum Prüfstand—Berufsumschichtung durch die Technik, Handelsblatt (May 14, 1954), 4. 20 Habermas, “Für und Wider: Der Mensch zwischen der Apparaten,” Süddeutsche Zeitung (Sept. 6, 1958. 21 Habermas, “Der Moloch und die Künste: Gedanken zur Entlarvung der Legende von der technischen Zweckmäßigkeit,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (May 30, 1953), 20. 180 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis something in themselves by which people and their world are revealed, their life space disclosed (erschliesst) just as a dwelling (Wohnung) is, and ought to be, shelter and not merely a barracks for sleeping and a guard against the elements … Stylization, shaping, and giving form would thus mean bringing the thing character of technical products to appearance (Vorschein), allowing them to emerge from their anonymity and win their own durability (Bestand), in part even allowing them to become their own world, making them in such a way that they can bring forth (hervorkehren) what they are.” Habermas concludes this Heideggerian meditation by noting that “stylization in this sense of world disclosure is however a problem of art.” What it would mean to restore technology to its former aesthetic dimension, in craftwork, say, is not pursued further by Habermas except to note that modern art has also witnessed a tendency toward arrangements involving the bundling together of forms that at once “bind and liberate” technique. As examples of such a bundling—in which the blending of art and technique open up human living space—Habermas mentions tapestry prototypes based on Klee drawings, stained glass windows, and the neo- classical architectural style of Stazione Termini in Rome. Elsewhere, in reviewing an exhibit on Italian design, he approvingly cites the playful, ironic prototypes of furniture, silverware, vases, lamps, and other implements that manage to cross the divide between older, individually expressive craft artisanship and modern, mass- produced industrial artifact. The ability of a simple basket to recapture the natural cycle of harvesting and to recall the countryside, or the capacity to draw forth from glass and clay an imaginative and evocative experience of a more rooted, intimate, and meaningful life suggest to him the possibility of a new international style that retains regional and local accents.22 Habermas expounds further upon the synthesis of artisanal wisdom and modern industry in a 1955 review article on John Diebold’s discussion of automated factories and cybernetic control systems.23 This article critically examines the development toward technical efficiency by which machines automatically reconfigure themselves to adapt to changing materials, supplies, storage facilities and work components: “He [Diebold] wants machines that design (entwerfen) not only in reference to what concerns the produced article but also in reference to what concerns the basis of their special modes of working. Otherwise machines become obsolete (ausgedient) as soon as their products are no longer marketable (nicht mehr abgesetzt werden kann). Engineers like Lewer and Brown therefore suggest a division of minutely designed machines on the basis of their fundamental work processes, which can then be elastically recombined. This idea of ‘bundled work processes’ makes possible machines serving multiple purposes.”

22 Habermas, “ Im Suden nichtes Neues? Italienischer Stil vom Kunsthandwerk zur Industrie—Die Austellung ‘Forme Nuove in Italia,” Handelsblatt (December, 1954), 3. 23 Habermas, “Die Letzte Phase der Mechanisierung,” Frankfurter Allgemiene Zeitung (Jan. 8, 1955), 29. Habermas on Solidarity and Praxis 181

According to Specter, the aesthetic transformation of labor and technology cited by the young Habermas as essential to human emancipation was later rejected by the mature Habermas. This break, he argues, was officially documented in Habermas’s 1968 essay, Technology and Science as Ideology.24 Accepting Marcuse’s thesis that modern science and technology had functioned ideologically in late capitalism by promoting the substitution of administration for political action, Habermas criticized Marcuse’s proposed political goal of aesthetically transforming technology into a non-objectifying communicative praxis. However, despite his rejection of Marcuse’s praxis philosophy, Habermas—contrary to Specter’s claims—did not abandon aesthetic critique.25 Although Habermas shifted the problem of technological alienation to the problem of political domination, he continued to see these problems as intertwined with a more basic problem: capitalism. Written at the same time as his critique of Marcuse, Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) anticipates this intertwinement in its linkage of technological alienation (scientism) with class domination, and its utopian advocacy of a community of solidarity. A classless society based on undistorted, domination-free communication here appears as a necessary condition for freedom, justice, happiness, and enlightenment. Formulated in the language of psychoanalytic reflection, the shattering of ideological compulsions and the recovery of suppressed nature wrought by rational communication culminates in a transformative reconciliation between the self, other, and nature.26 By 1973 Habermas had relinquished the idea that rational communication anticipates such a reconciled form of the good life. Nonetheless his abandonment of this idea, along with social psychoanalysis, did not signal an abandonment of ideology critique or aesthetic critique. The critical political theorist guided by a procedural ideal of democratic legitimation still retains a critical awareness of the stark contradiction between capitalism and democracy. The ideology of administering welfare (consumption) under the aegis of technological elites conflicts with moral imperatives demanding greater accountability and political participation. It also conflicts, as Marcuse earlier noted, with counter-cultural aesthetic sensibilities that forswear institutional rewards of monetary and career success.27

24 Habermas, “Technology and Science as Ideology,” Toward a Rational Society, trans. and ed. J. Shapiro (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1970). 25 For a more detailed discussion of aesthetic rationality and technological design as it bears on the disagreement between Marcuse and Habermas, see my essay “Living Well in the Modern Age: Feenberg on Habermas, Technology and the Dialectic of Reason,” published in the Book Symposium on Andrew Feenberg’s Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity, Philosophy and Technology, 24/2 (2011): 206–11. 26 Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. J. Shapiro (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), 314. 27 Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1975). 182 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

By 1980 Habermas expanded his focus on the legitimation crisis of the welfare state to include the social disintegration of family and society caused by the “colonization of the lifeworld.” Here the crisis shifts from political domination to the instrumental (economic and administrative) domination of life in the broadest environmental and ecological sense of the term.28 Classical struggles for civil rights and democratic inclusion (civic solidarity) now share space with new “green” movements (planetary solidarity). Habermas also reaffirmed his earlier commitment to workplace democracy and market socialism.29 Rejecting “simple recipes of workers’ self-management” aimed at eliminating market systems, he nonetheless supported the abolition of “capitalist labor markets.”30 If social pathologies reflect a capitalist course of rationalization in which market demand determines technological development and abstract processes of learning (rationalization complexes) and split-off technical elites confront each other as alien and opposed, then we must turn to conceptions of aesthetic rationality in order to retrieve the notion of a life lived in integrity.31 Aesthetic experience, Habermas tells us, “harbors a utopia that becomes a reality to the degree that the mimetic powers sublimated in the work of art find resonance in the mimetic relations of a balanced and undistorted intersubjectivity of everyday life.”32 But “an aestheticization of the lifeworld is legitimate only in the sense that art operates as a catalyst, as a form of communication, as a medium within which separated moments are rejoined into an uncoerced totality [in such a way] that art ‘leads’ everything which has been dissociated in modernity—the system of unleashed needs, the bureaucratic state, the abstractions of rational morality and science for experts—‘out under the open sky of common sense.’”33

28 Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action. Volume Two. Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1987). 29 Habermas, A Berlin Republic: Writings on Germany, trans. S. Rendell (Lincoln, IN: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 141–2. 30 Habermas, Habermas: Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas, trans. and ed. P. Dews (London: Verso, 1986), 187. 31 A more detailed discussion of Habermas’s views on aesthetic rationality and art in relationship to competing theories advanced by Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse, can be found in my essay, “Habermas on Aesthetics and Rationality: Completing the Project of Enlightenment,” New German Critique 53 (Spring/Summer 1991): 67–103. For the importance of aesthetic rationality in grounding critical theory and practice, see my Habermas: Introduction and Analysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 316–28; and Critical Theory and Philosophy (New York: Paragon House, 1990), ch. 8. 32 Habermas, “Questions and Counter-Questions,” Praxis International 4/3 (1984): 237. 33 Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 50. Habermas on Solidarity and Praxis 183

Habermas and the Project of Constitutional Reform

I have argued that aesthetic concerns regarding a form of life beyond alienation played an important role in Habermas’s revolutionary critique of capitalism throughout the eighties and into the nineties. Do they continue to do so in the aftermath of his discourse theory of law and democracy? Habermas has used this theory to advocate on behalf of social movements that he believes promote potentials for civic and planetary solidarity that already find institutional support in liberal democracy. However, Habermas’s call for a constitutionalization of international relations in response to human rights violations, global poverty, and global climate injustice, by no means follows as seamlessly from discourse theory as he thinks it does. Two challenges immediately come to mind. First, although discourse theory grounds a cognitive commitment to resolve normative disagreements through argumentation, it says nothing about the personal commitment to cooperate in the first place, especially when it involves risks and sacrifices. The commitment to improve the lives of strangers, while potentially worsening our own lives, would seem to come from ethical ties that lie outside discourse proper. Second, ethical caring for others withers beyond our national borders. Outrage in the face of human rights abuses does not compel the sorts of sacrifices that must be made in redistributing the costs and benefits of a global market economy. Whatever solidarity we feel for the starving masses living outside our borders seldom motivates any practice beyond modest levels of charitable giving. This last comment leads to a third challenge. By its very nature, discourse theory turns to institutionalized forms of democratic discourse, parliamentary and public, in raising and resolving social justice concerns. But deliberative democracy only works when citizens overcome their deep social differences. Democracy and constitutional reform can exist as a revolutionary project for expanding inclusion and social equality only when the citizens begin to speak in one voice. This happens only during those rare moments of economic and political crisis, as in the United States during the Great Depression, when the people’s mandate for a New Deal set in motion a massive revolution in constitutional jurisprudence that led to the elevation of new civil, political, and social rights over entrenched economic, racial, and gender domination. But crises can also trigger reactionary responses. Since the passing of the Fordist model of organized capitalism and its Keynesian economic justification along with the advent of unregulated neo-liberal capitalism based on trickle-down economics, welfarist solidarity has declined in proportion to the weakening of unions and the cutting back of public services. Heightened inequalities have created divisions among the large mass of people whose incomes have stagnated or declined and are now fighting each other for a dwindling portion of the pie, and these divisions have been exacerbated by partisan politics that have increasingly reduced democracy to a non-deliberative, winner-take-all contest, driven by propaganda and narrow self-interest. 184 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

Habermas’s response to the economic crisis of 2008,34 which reiterates his earlier analysis of the legitimation crisis besetting the welfare state, and his situating that crisis within a broader analysis of the democratic legitimation crisis crippling the EU and of institutions of global governance, expressly targets neo- liberal economic policies as a major obstacle to progressive democratic politics, if not democracy as such. If we take him at his word, critical theory must continue to enlighten the broader public about the stark tension between capitalism and democracy. It must continue to lay bare the potential for pseudo-compromise as well as ideologically induced consensus on partial interests. In the former instance it must show how a compromise between, say, the growth imperative of capitalism and a healthy ecology of the planet is not a sustainable compromise between two equally legitimate and worthy values. In the latter instance it must show how unregulated flows of capital, labor, and goods coupled with the selective devaluation of currencies, restructuration of economies, and privatization of services—the so-called Washington Consensus—is not, contrary to the claims of free market ideologues, theoretically or empirically justified, and does not lead, even in the long run, to everyone’s lives being improved. In the face of these facts, Habermas’s practical response to today’s crisis is remarkable for urging a gradual reform of global institutions of governance that works within the given limits of a largely state-centered system of international law while recommending the strengthening of a cosmopolitan human rights regime centered on the UN. The key to this project revolves around the capacity for states, no less than individuals, to acknowledge the importance of cooperating solidaristically in confronting their collective planetary fate. Empathy leads to demands for humanitarian intervention in remedying only the worst human rights violations, but intervention generally takes the form of military actions or economic sanctions, which appear costless to most citizens inhabiting the enforcer nations (who remain largely ignorant of their collateral effects on citizens inhabiting the sites of intervention). Indeed, according to Habermas’s most recent observations on this subject, we cannot say that our moral outrage in the face of gross human rights violations normally requires feeling solidarity with the victim. Expressly contradicting an eponymous article he wrote over twenty years ago on this subject,35 he now denies that solidarity and justice are complementarity moral categories. Justice refers to moral respect for the rights of the individual qua individual; it commands unconditional duties in our treatment of all persons, even strangers with whom we are not connected. By contrast, solidarity refers to ethical trust and reciprocity based on an acknowledgement of one’s jointly shared long- term interests (what Habermas here designates by Hegel’s conception of Sittlichkeit,

34 Habermas, Europe: The Faltering Project, trans. C. Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 187. 35 Habermas once observed that “[j]ustice conceived deontologically requires solidarity as its reverse side.” J. Habermas, “Justice and Solidarity: On the Discussion Concerning Stage 6,” The Philosophical Forum, XXI/1–2 (1989/90): 47. Habermas on Solidarity and Praxis 185 or ethical life). The special duties it enjoins are not, however, equivalent to the special duties parents owe children, despite the fact that solidarity may also call forth supererogatory acts of sacrifice. Unlike pre-political forms of ethical life that extend familial sensibilities in the direction of national ties, modern civic solidarity arises as a political response to economic and social crises of a systemic nature that dissolve communal bonds and traditional identifications.36 As Axel Honneth notes, this kind of postmodern, multicultural matrix of overlapping solidarities presupposes mutual recognition and concern among equally esteemed consociates whose particular communities need not be bound by broader notions of communal identity based on shared goals.37 Yet Habermas’s observation that such abstract civic solidarity has a potentially unifying offensive orientation seems correct, namely, to combat the technical colonization of the lifeworld and reclaim popular democratic control over economic and political processes whose unintended side- effects (poverty, global climate change, financial and other economic crises) are patently unjust (in the socio-political sense of the term) and damaging in their impact on selected populations and ultimately the entire planet. We don’t have to accept Habermas’s recent relegation of solidarity to the politico-ethical sphere in order to appreciate his point that commitments to engage in risky and costly political activity go beyond the minimum requirements of moral duty. These commitments are to be found in their purest form at the level of the state. According to Habermas’s genealogy, the emergence of the nation state signals a progressive stage in the evolution of ethical life insofar as it subsumes divisive religious and sectarian bonds of solidarity under a broader cooperative scheme. Outwardly, however, national solidarity, like any insular and exclusive notion of solidarity, can induce sacrifices for regressive aims of imperial expansion. The democratic reform of the nation state tempers this nationalism by introducing a new form of civic solidarity. This solidarity reflects the Janus-faced nature of the liberal-democratic constitution, whose rights of national citizenship implicitly apply to all individuals in a universal cosmopolitan sense. The kind of solidarity appropriate to modern constitutional democracy signals a readiness to make sacrifices for the sake of protecting and augmenting the rights of one’s consociates, rather than a readiness to sacrifice one’s life for the state or the nation. But as Hauke Brunkhorst notes, the emergence of what Durkheim calls “organic solidarity”—the solidarity of mutually interdependent individuals living in highly stratified societies structured by market systems of exchange and contractualist relations—produces social inequalities and class tensions that threaten civic solidarity.38 Democracy functions to legitimate the legal order only

36 Habermas, “Plea for a Constitutionalization of International Law,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 40/5 (2014): 10–11. 37 A. Honneth, Disrespect: The Normative Foundations for Critical Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 123–4, 254–62. 38 Brunkhorst contrasts modern civic solidarity, which has its birth in the French Revolution, with its premodern sources: the ethical-political solidarity found in ancient 186 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis insofar as it regulates these inequalities to the perceived benefit of all; and that means securing equal opportunities to exercise rights for all citizens. The equal inclusion of all persons as active participants in democratic deliberation depends on a fragile class compromise that is now threatened by the forces of neo-liberal globalization. Civic solidarity thus emerges to the degree that citizens collectively reclaim their right to self-determination and communal-ecological integrity against the disempowering and disintegrative effects of an economic-administrative system managed in top-down fashion by technical elites. The question arises whether the kind of civic solidarity that barely exists at the domestic level of the welfare state be extended globally.39 Habermas’s long-standing worry about the democratic deficit plaguing the economic unification of the EU illustrates his own ambivalence on this score. As of 2014, the EU has managed to increase overall systemic efficiency by increasing economic and monetary integration without making the bureaucracy in Brussels accountable to the people. Instead, it has managed the current financial crisis in a way that has pitted bureaucrats allied with Germany’s neo-liberal policies against the interests of Greeks, Spaniards, and other EU citizens who happen to reside in crisis-ridden states of the Euro Zone.40 The Lisbon Treaty, with its marginal closure of the democracy gap, has not made the Brussels bureaucracy more accountable, but has allowed this bureaucracy to shatter whatever solidarity once existed between northern and southern member states. At the transnational level, things look equally bleak. The prospects for mounting a global extension of domestic welfare policies involving concerted sacrifices on the part of developed nations to remedy global inequalities and ecological imbalances seem discouraging. Even Habermas’s recommendation that the General Assembly of the UN be transformed into a quasi-legislative body that would lay down general principles of distributive justice to check the self-serving behavior of powerful states and global economic multilateral organizations in their trade negotiations is qualified by a stark institutional realism. Abandoning his earlier defense of a post-national cosmopolitan constellation, Habermas today cautions that the world’s inhabitants should not be expected to relinquish their civic solidarity with fellow nationals for an intangible solidarity

Greece (civic friendship) and the religion-based form of solidarity found in the Judeo- Christian tradition in Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to Global Legal Community, trans. J. Flynn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). 39 Honneth (2007, 124) designates “abstractly utopian” notions of humanitarian solidarity that are based on a common goal exceeding common recognition of “equal cultural differences.” Following Habermas, I defend a notion of humanitarian solidarity based on a common ethical-aesthetic need for an unalienated, sustainable form of life. 40 “Under the leadership of the German government, the European Council is adhering to a crisis agenda that insists on the priority of each individual state’s balancing its national budget on its own [thereby] adversely affecting the social security systems, public services and collective goods, which means that it is being implemented at the expense of the strata of the population that are disadvantaged” (“Plea,” 9). Habermas on Solidarity and Praxis 187 with humanity. Neither the EU nor the UN should aspire to a federal union like the United States, but a looser federation constituted by sovereign member states and their elected representatives, on one side, and supranational citizens and their elected representatives, on the other. Extended globally, the principle of dual constituent powers involves reconstituting the UN General Assembly as a bicameral body representing both member states and cosmopolitan citizens.41 Let me here suggest that Habermas’s attempt to lay out a constitutional pathway for democratic reform of the global political and economic order correctly designates political practice as the only praxis capable of making long-term revolutionary changes in capitalism. This practice must somehow reconcile the dual ties of solidarity claimed by persons who identify as citizens of states and as citizens of the world. But will citizens of wealthy states be motivated to distribute their wealth and make greater sacrifices in cutting back their production of greenhouse emissions in their capacity as world citizens? Would they be willing to reform economic and legal institutions in the name global justice, especially if this required redeeming the planetary community of living things through a revolution in their aesthetic sensibilities? Beholden to global forces beyond their control, citizens must increasingly look beyond their local governments to new forms of global cooperation. They must reimagine themselves as future cosmopolitan citizens whose civic solidarity is forged alongside a growing planetary solidarity. Living harmoniously with our global environment in a sustainable way requires all of us to re-imagine a world beyond capitalism as we know it, a world that somehow balances the efficiencies of the market and the legal system with aesthetic needs for happiness, ethical needs for community, and moral needs for justice. Arguably the single most important moral idea undergirding the struggle for justice—respect for the dignity of the individual as a bearer of human rights—intersects the ethical-aesthetic idea of solidarity. As Habermas himself recently observed, human rights have a pedigree extending back to the Judeo-Christian tradition, perhaps even as far back as the Axial break.42 Their content embraces a long history of insult and injury, indeed, all forms of dehumanization that deny some persons opportunities to develop themselves ecologically as well

41 Habermas, “The Constitutionalization of International Law and the Legitimation Problems of a Constitution for World Society,” Constellations 15/4 (2008): 444–54. More recently, Habermas has argued that the constitutionalization of international law would continue the civilizing mission of the rule of law under conditions of democratic legitimacy under a radically new constellation in which states (whose administrative powers are directly democratically legitimated) would retain a monopoly of sanctioning power subordinate to powerless supranational legal structures. Key to this proposal (and the idea of global democratic legitimation) is the dual constituent role of persons as citizens of both states and supranational polities. J. Habermas, “The Crisis of the European Union in the Light of the Constitutionalization of International Law,” EJIL 23/2 (2012): 335–48. 42 Habermas, The Concept of Human Dignity and the Realistic Utopia of Human Rights,” Metaphilosophy 41/4 (2010): 464–79. 188 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis as socially, politically, and economically. In this way, the conditions for leading a worthwhile life as a human agent—conditions that human rights are uniquely geared toward protecting—intersect with the conditions for leading an ethical life in solidarity with others and the entire matrix of planetary life. Reimagining these conditions in literature, art, and innovative technology is the task set forth by redemptive critique; reflectively evaluating them in a manner both just and legitimate is the task set forth by discourse theory and ideology critique; and realizing them is the task set forth by democratic politics. Achieving cosmopolitan and planetary solidarity will require shifting our loyalties away from the local and regional to the global. Only if we combine civic solidarity with planetary solidarity—guided by a comprehensive understanding of human emancipation and human dignity—can we conceive the possibility of a democratic, revolutionary praxis. Such praxis depends on expanding our sense of civic solidarity beyond borders to acknowledge our reciprocal connectedness to others and our mutual dependence on a sustainable community of life. But only remembrance of the catastrophe of history and of all those who have suffered under its reign of “progress” can ignite hope for a redeemed humanity, without which our best efforts at institutional reform will continue to perpetuate a mythic cycle of violence. Chapter 14 The Color of Adorno’s Thought: On Hito Steyerl’s Adorno’s Grey1 Samir Gandesha

“…the greyness of theory is for its part a function of the life that has been stripped bare of qualities.”2

In an essay written in 1914–15 though unpublished during his lifetime, Walter Benjamin writes that “Where color provides the contour, objects are not reduced to things but are constituted by an order consisting of an infinite range of nuances.”3 Reflecting on this short essay, Howard Caygill contends that Benjamin’s thought as a whole can be said to be unified by this early understanding of color.4 Color, so conceived, undermines the static opposition between subject and object, passive sensibility and active understanding lying at the heart of Kant’s Critical Idealism. Indeed as Martin Jay has argued in a paper devoted, in part, to Benjamin’s reception of Kandinsky, “color is on the side of anti-authoritarian disruption and discontinuity, the radical leap of temporality that undermines smooth evolutionary progress.”5 The deconstruction of the opposition between subject and object brings

1 This chapter was initially written for a lecture series devoted to Hito Steyerl’s exhibition Adorno’s Grey curated by Melanie O’Brien and Amy Kazymerchych at the Audain Gallery at SFU. I would like to thank Melanie and Amy for inviting me to give the original talk upon which this one is based. It was also presented at the Frankfurt School and the Critique of Capitalist Culture Conference at SFU-Vancouver in July, 2014. I would also like to thank Martin Jay, John Abromeit, Johan Hartle and Henry Pickford for their helpful comments on previous drafts. 2 Theodor W. Adorno, “Dialectical Epilegomena: Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry Pickford, (NY: Columbia University Press, 2005): 260. 3 Walter Benjamin, “A Child’s View of Color,” Selected Writings Volume I 1913–26, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 50. 4 Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (London: Routledge, 1998). 5 Martin Jay, “Chromophilia: Der Blaue Reiter, Walter Benjamin and the Emancipation of Color,” paper presented at the 2011 Yale University Forum on Art, War and Science in the 20th century, May 19–23, 2011, Hornby, British Columbia. 190 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis to the fore what Benjamin calls the “language of things.”6 Such a language makes things legible as the site at which nature and history converge. In his book on German Trauerspiel, or play of lamentation, random natural occurrences such as the setting of the sun, for example are to be read, allegorically, as historical events such as the death of the tyrant. This idea of the language of things, based on an “infinite range of nuances,” with an ability to, in a sense, rupture the continuum of history, or at least to brush it against the grain, provides us with a particularly productive point of departure for approaching Hito Steyerl’s video installation Adorno’s Grey. The placement of things in a specific constellation or relation within one another makes them legible. It both lets them speak and prompts us to listen. Commenting on the implications of the “language of things” for the documentary form, Steyerl claims in a 2006 essay:

to engage in the language of things in the realm of the documentary form is not equivalent to using realist forms in representing them. It is not about representation at all, but about actualising whatever the things have to say in the present. And to do so is not a matter of realism, but rather of relationalism—it is a matter of presencing and thus transforming the social, historical and also material relations, which determine things.7

If the infinite nuances of color bring into play the language of things, then the language of things can, also, draw out the color of thought. This is particularly well exemplified in Steryl’s 2012 video installation which begins by taking up the legend that Adorno had had the lecture hall in which he taught painted grey to enhance his students’ concentration and follows a pair of conservators—one of whom who had worked with Yves Klein—as they methodically seek to uncover, under layers of white paint, “Adorno’s grey.” It is in the very materiality of the lecture theatre that two powerful narrative threads—articulated in the form of voice-overs—converge: the infamous “Busenattentat” or breast attack, which itself crystallizes political and artistic vanguardism in a pure Aktionismus as well the strange political contemporaneity of Negative Dialectics in a Book Bloc street demonstration. Accordingly, the things Adorno’s Grey places in a specific relation with one another draws out the other predominant colors of Adorno’s thought: Adorno’s grey is framed by Adorno’s red, or his relation with radical politics, on the one side, and Adorno’s black, or his aesthetics, on the other. Adorno claims that art which he describes in turn as “speechless,” “enigmatic,” “monadic” requires philosophy to draw out its “truth content” while art provides philosophy with the sensuous particularity that philosophy purports but always, at the end of the day, fails to grasp. Steryl’s Adorno’s Grey seems to suggest an inversion of this logic:

6 Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and the Language of Man,” Selected Writings Volume I: 1916–26, 63. 7 Hito Steyerl, “The Language of Things,” http://eipcp.net/transversal/0606/steyerl/en The Color of Adorno’s Thought 191 that the art work can actually lend a voice to philosophical concepts, enabling them to articulate their truth-claims (and politics) more eloquently.

“Grey: A Shape of Life Grown Old”

Only one word more about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it. As the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality is already there cut and dried after its process of formation has been completed. The teaching of the concept, which is also history’s inescapable lesson, is that it is only when actuality is mature that the ideal first appears over and against the real and that the ideal apprehends this same real world in its substance and builds it up for itself into the shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy’s grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.8

In Adorno’s Grey Peter Osborne refers to this passage which is drawn from the Preface to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right as representing the color of philosophy or theory as opposed to the polychromatism of life as such. In it Hegel suggests that philosophy cannot change the world, but can only interpret it by removing itself from a life as it has unfolded historically. As Hegel says slightly earlier in this text, “What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational.”9 And it was over the meaning of precisely this passage, the famous Zweisatz, that right- and left-wing followers of Hegel battled it out. The Hegelian right contended that philosophy’s role was simply to discern the historical ruse of reason that was, always already, embedded in the institutions of the modern world, while left Hegelians, including Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner and, of course, Karl Marx, argued that reason had to be actualized; philosophy had to be simultaneously cancelled as a separate and alienated activity and preserved or realized in so far as freedom as Idea would, finally, become actual, that is, practiced and not just thought. For the right, then, reason was a historical fait accompli, for left, a rallying cry, a demand that the actual world be made rational, which is to say, philosophical. Roughly 100 years later, through a reading of Feuerbach, Marx, Georg Lukács and Karl Korsh, Guy Debord took up the problem with which the Hegelian left had grappled, though this time, significantly, displacing reason by the two most influential wings of the twentieth-century avant-garde in a way that nevertheless laid bare their ultimate failure. According to Debord in the Society of the Spectacle,

8 G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon press, 1967), 12–13. 9 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 10; emphasis in the original. 192 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

“Dadaism wanted to cancel art without realizing it; Surrealism wanted to realize art without cancelling it.”10 In contrast, the project to simultaneously negate and realize art was the program the Situationist International helped to instigate in May, 1968. In the aftermath of the experiences of the twentieth century, Adorno challenges both the Hegelian Left, including Marx, and the avant-garde in the famous opening to Negative Dialectics that “Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed.”11 Philosophy could only properly continue to live on if it were supplemented by a steadfastly autonomous form of art that actively resisted the impulse it to return it to a form of what Adorno calls “damaged life.”12 Hegel’s philosophy was a “timely” philosophy par excellence: it painted its “grey in grey” precisely because it was its “own time grasped in concepts.” And, for Hegel, his time was the time during which the Idea of Freedom had taken rational shape in the institutions of the modern world. The color of Adorno’s philosophy, in contrast, is grey not because of its timeliness per se, but rather because it was untimely. Hegel’s timeliness had outlived itself and became belated. Adorno didn’t so much juxtapose the greyness of philosophy and the color of life, but rather, through philosophical claims, grasped life as itself grey, which is to say lifeless. The greyness of life is well-captured in a section of Minima Moralia entitled “Le bourgeois revenant” (or “The bourgeois ghost”) that seems, as with much of this text, to read as both an implicit and explicit response to Hegel whose fundamental categories were Geist or Spirit and Bürgerliche Gesellschaft (translated as civil society):

Whatever was once good and decent [civil] in bourgeois values [Adorno suggests] … has been corrupted utterly … Privacy has given way to the privation it always was … The caring hand that even now tends the little garden as if it had not long since become a ‘lot,’ but fearfully wards off the unknown intruder, is already that which denies the political refugee asylum. Now objectively threatened, the subjectivity of the rulers and their hangers-on becomes totally inhuman. So the class realizes itself, taking upon itself the destructive course of the world.

What Adorno is suggesting, then, is that the forms of Spirit (Geist) such as bourgeois values and decency had themselves in their condition of belatedness become drained of Spirit (literally breath, or in Latin, Spiritus) and therefore turned

10 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), 191; translation altered. 11 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum Press, 2007), 3. 12 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2006). The Color of Adorno’s Thought 193 ghostly. The grey of a Spirit or Geist capable, now, of understanding the world pace Hegel becomes the grey of a form of life that no longer lives. As Adorno goes on to suggest: “The bourgeois live on like spectres threatening doom.”13 Grey becomes the color, then, of a philosophy whose simultaneous cancelation and realization (or Aufhebung) had misfired. Hegel sought to lay bare the self- formative process whereby Spirit or Geist externalized itself in the world, confronted the products of its own conceptual labor as alien and then re-internalized these products in the fullness of its own life. Negative Dialectics is a philosophy written simultaneously with and against Hegel appropriate to a world in which life, itself, had drained away. “Life,” as Adorno puts it in the epigraph to Minima Moralia, “does not live.” “Underlying the prevalent health,” Adorno writes, “is death. All the movements of health resemble the reflex-movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating.”14 But Adorno’s reflections were, in a sense, already anticipated in Karl Marx’s 1852 polemic the Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte which depicts the unfolding of what he calls a “history without events” (Geschichte ohne Ereignisse), history as repetition, claiming of the Revolution of 1848 “If any section of history has been painted grey on grey it is this.”15 As Adorno shows in his reading of Beckett’s Endgame and elsewhere16: Nature reverses into history insofar as it has no right to exist outside of its ability to serve human purposes and needs, while history, at the same time, becomes naturalized, a second nature, and therefore ever more locked into the blind reproduction of the ever-same. “Panic breaks once again,” Adorno argues, “after millennia of enlightenment, over a humanity whose control of nature as control of men far exceeds in horror anything men ever had to fear from nature.”17 And this involves a double bind: as nature’s temporality is marked by the spiraling of increasingly momentous “events” such as the splitting of the atom, and, more recently, we could say, the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, the events of history become through the reproduction of a dominating form of subjectivity ever more reduced to a mere “second nature,” effectively bringing the dialectic to a standstill. While for Hegel, history ends or culminates in a vibrant, living and rational freedom, in a “Whole [that] is True,” for Adorno, in contrast, in late capitalist society, it culminates in a “life” that had become the “ideology of its absence.” That “the destructive tendencies of the masses that explode in both

13 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 34; emphasis added. 14 Ibid., 59. 15 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works Volume 11 (New York: International Publishers, 1979), 125. 16 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame,” in Notes to Literature Volume I, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 216–40; and, Theodor W. Adorno, “The Idea of Natural-History,” trans. Robert Hullot- Kentor in Robert Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 252–69. 17 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 239. 194 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis varieties of the totalitarian state are not so much death-wishes as manifestations of what they have already become. They murder so that whatever to them seems living, shall resemble themselves.”18

Red Revolutionary Ambivalence19

As I have already suggested, then, Adorno positioned himself critically both towards the Marxist tradition, particularly in its understanding of the “negativity” of capitalist society, on the one hand, and the artistic Avant-garde, on the other. More specifically, in relation to the former, while Adorno, with his Frankfurt associates, challenges the idea that revolution would result necessarily from the contradictions of capitalism as laid out in the Communist Manifesto, his critique of the dominating role of the concept remained deeply indebted to Marx’s critique of exchange value. Assuming such a position of negativity, albeit of a determinate rather than abstract sort, towards both of these traditions was bound to appear as a deliberate provocation to the radical students for whom political vanguardism and aesthetic avant-gardism became, particularly as its militancy deepened, ever more closely fused together in direct action. The Busenattentat crystallizes elements of both and of course anticipates and probably inspires contemporary forms of radical feminist protest such as those of Pussy Riot. In retrospect, it appears as a bizarre, absurd and ultimately unseemly coda to Adorno’s academic and intellectual life. Even those with next to no familiarity with of Adorno’s actual writings, know something about the Busenattentat. For example, A.J. Ayer, a key figure in analytical philosophy, writes in his memoirs that “it is perhaps not entirely to our credit that we took next to know interest in aesthetics or Marxist philosophy … he eventually fell victim to student unrest, suffering a heart attack when some of his female students uncovered their breasts and danced around in mockery of him.”20 The implication almost seems to be something like a retrospective judgment that he and the other Oxford dons were, at the end of the day, perhaps justified in not paying attention to a figure who would find himself in the middle of such a tragi- comedy. Yet, this action was symptomatic of something far more sinister in the air in Germany at this time—the strange afterlife of a fascism that was no longer fully alive but also not quite yet dead. Behind its inherent absurdity was a menacing aspect of the Busenattentat that remains absent from Adorno’s Grey although it is hinted at. In this lecture course entitled “Introduction to Dialectical thinking” which had attracted growing numbers of students to it (close to 1000), Adorno nonetheless sought to create

18 Ibid., 231. 19 This section draws extensively upon Stefan Aust’s book, Baader-Meinhoff: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. trans. Anthea Bell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 20 A.J. Ayer, Part of My Life (Oxford: Oxford paperbacks, 1978). I thank Daniel Harris for drawing my attention to this passage. The Color of Adorno’s Thought 195 conditions for genuine dialogue (which is fitting as he, like Guy Debord, drew attention to the origins of dialectic in the dialogue form) by allowing students to put questions to him at any time during the course of the lectures—still quite unheard of even today in the relatively hierarchical German University system. Far from creating the context for the meaningful exercise of the public use of reason or Mündigkeit (the ability to speak for oneself), however, this openness was hijacked by the students. On April 22, at the inaugural lecture, members of the so-called “Leather Jacket Fraktion” of the SDS demanded that Adorno engage in self-criticism for having called in the police to clear the Institute of the student occupiers several months earlier. One of them wrote on the blackboard, “If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease.” Shortly afterwards, he was set upon by the three young women and immediately fled the lecture theatre using his briefcase as a kind of shield. In her off-camera commentary in Adorno’s Grey, Nina Power poses the question as to whether this actually caused Adorno’s death as the legend held. Whether or not this caused his biological death is, indeed, an open question although its very openness seems to suggest a kind of prudishness that never characterized this public advocate for among other things, the repeal of the Federal Republic’s anti-sodomy laws.21 But one thing is clear: shortly after the Busenattentat a pamphlet circulated amongst the students with the slogan that “As an Institution, Adorno is dead.” At this stage, this event, and in particular, the statement on the blackboard (That “If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease”) may have appeared simply as an idle threat, a mere suggestion of the Oedipal wishes of some of the more hardline students, yet with their progressive radicalization and increasing propensity to use violence, the statement and the event takes on, retrospectively, somewhat more sinister meaning. Upon their return from exile in 1949, Adorno and Horkheimer were an inspiration for the budding opposition. Pirated copies of Dialectic of Enlightenment circulated in the late 1960s at the Institute for Social Research against the wishes of Horkheimer, in particular, who was in the process of re-establishing the Institute in the Federal Republic and who felt that the resurfacing of the text might compromise the Institute’s reputation. Nevertheless, for the students, Adorno’s (and Horkheimer’s) theses, which were disseminated throughout the 1950s and 1960s via public and radio addresses on amongst other themes as “On the Question: What Is German?” “Education for Enlightenment (Mündigkeit)” “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” etc. as well as through philosophical and sociological seminars, were a profound influence and inspiration. As was Adorno’s tireless work of university reform, as amply documented in the work of Alex Demirovic, in particular the establishment of sociology as a critical and

21 See Adorno’s 1969 Interview with Der Spiegel translated by Gerhard Richter “Who’s Afraid of the Ivory Tower,” in Gerhard Richter (ed.), Language without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity (New York: Fordham University press, 2010), 227–38. 196 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis reflective, rather than simply administrative, discipline in the Federal Republic.22 Adorno’s intellectual contributions, of course, concerned the damaging impact of positivism on the humanities, the intertwinement of enlightenment and myth, the stubborn persistence of authoritarian personality structures within late capitalism and the way in which leisure time was merely an extension of the crippling drudgery of work seemed to directly hit the mark in a society in the throes of its so-called economic miracle (Wirtschaftwunder) that seemed to crystallize what Joseph Schumpeter called capitalism’s logic of “creative destruction.” The fact that its industrial base had been laid to waste during the war made it possible for West Germany to create, with Japan, one of the most technologically advanced and competitive economies of the emerging global order. What seemed to have been destroyed, as the students were beginning to realize existentially, was not just the obsolete fixed capital accumulated during the first wave of German industrialization in the final decades of the nineteenth century, but also, as was pointed out by a number of writers,23 the capacity for West German society to mourn the victims of the catastrophe, to genuinely “work though the past.” Moreover, it seemed that in 1967, especially, that Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s thesis of the “totally administered society” seemed to have exactly hit the mark with the formation of the so-called Grosse Koalition (Grand Coalition) between the SDP and the CDU. One of the key pieces of legislation passed by this government was the Notstandgesetzt, the emergency law in 1968 that severely curtailed civil liberties as a way of clamping down on the growing disaffection among, and militancy of, the students. It was painfully reminiscent of article 48 of the Weimar Constitution that made it possible for the President to take emergency measures and it ultimately allowed the Nazis to come to power via democratic or constitutional means.24 It was against this set of developments that the APO [Ausserparliamentarische Opposition or extra-parliamentary opposition] was brought into being via the SDS (German Socialist Students Union). Yet, at the very moment that the students drew upon Critical Theory to inform their political activities they also came to call into question Adorno’s own avowed distance from political praxis which was, in a sense, the condition of Critical Theory in the first place. The students’ impatience was compounded by two events in particular: the first was the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg at a peaceful protest

22 Alex Demirovic, Der nonkonformisctischeIntellekutelle: Die Entwicklung der KritischenTheoriezur Frankfurter Schule (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999). 23 Here I am thinking about Alexander Mitcherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behaviour (New York: Grove, 1975) and W.G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2004). 24 John Abromeit, “Limits of Praxis: The Social-Psychological Foundations of Theodor Adorno’s and Herbert Marcuse’s Interpretations of the 1960s Protest Movements,” in Belinda David et al (eds), Changing the World, Changing Oneself: Political Protest and Collective Identities in West Germany and the U.S. in the 1960’s and 1970’s (New York: Berghan Books, 2010). The Color of Adorno’s Thought 197 against the Shah of Iran on June 2, 1967, at which the students were set upon by the police culminating in the shooting death of the young student attending his very first political rally. The second followed just a few months later: the attempted assignation of the SDS/APO leader Rudi Dutschke on April 11, 1968, by a right-wing extremist. The students, with real justification, held the Cultural Industry, notably the right-wing media (Springer Press), responsible for stirring up anti-student sentiment which Adorno, himself, compared to the pogroms directed against the Jews in the 1920s and 30s. These events, therefore, seemed to demonstrate to the students the authoritarian if not down-right fascistic character of the state that had not yet even posed the question of what is entailed in “working through the past.” Indeed, this was not surprising given the fact that many prominent former-Nazis had achieved positions of power and influence in the Federal Republic. And the frustration with Adorno came to a head when the students occupied Frankfurt University and the offices of the Institute for Social Research in December, 1968. Their aimwas supposedly to break with what they considered to be an education oriented to produce “integrated alibis of the authoritarian state.”25 Despite the demands of the students to “smash the academic machine,26 Adorno and his colleagues such as Jürgen Habermas sought to keep dialogue open with the students, but to no avail. Subsequently, Adorno even sought to invite Marcuse to the University in the hope that Marcuse’s much more positive reputation amongst the radicals would be able to mediate between both parties.27 Despite these efforts to engage in on-going discussion with the students, the most radical factions among them continued to agitate, now for the expropriation of Institution for Social Research’s “means of production”—its furnishings and equipment. The students, under the leadership of Adorno’s own doctoral student, Hans-Jürgen Krahl, sought to carry out this action on January 31. The Directors of the Institute, with Adorno at its head, met this threat directly and called in the police to protect the autonomy of the Institution. In the justification of their actions, the Institute’s directors argued:

It is vital that precisely those who believe that university reform is overdue and who wish to bring about a democratic and social institution in harmony with the Basic law, it is vital precisely for those who identify wholeheartedly with this aim of the extra-parliamentary opposition, that they should feel obligated to resist their own criminalization: they should resist all authoritarian tendencies

25 Müller-Doom, Adorno: A Biography, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2005): 464. 26 Adorno: A Biography, 464. 27 Although, according to Martin Jay (personal communication) this is contested, with certain of Adorno’s letters betraying tremendous suspicion of the negative effects of a visit by Marcuse. 198 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

and equally all pseudo-anarchistic acts of violence on the part of ostensibly left- wing activists as well as crypto-fascist actions from groups on the extreme right.28

It is here that Adorno’s difficult relation to the history of the Left crystallizes. Since the middle of the nineteenth century if not earlier, the Left had adopted the color red as its own. It had come to signify praxis itself, in “the passionate, suffering” bodies of the men and women who were the real subjects of the historical process, as Marx states in the German Ideology. Red referred, moreover, to the blood of the workers spilled by the reactionary forces in cities throughout Europe, not least cities such as Frankfurt am Main, itself, in which a significant historical battle had raged to establish a genuinely representative constituent assembly during the Revolutions of 1848. It was in this very city that, as alluded to above, the Hegelian Left sought to make the “world philosophical” by both realizing and negating philosophy in republican politics. Some fifty years later, in Russia, revolutionary opposition to the Tsar was divided between the Whites or the Mensheviks who tended to be “gradualists” who believed that what was required was the development of the productive forces to the point where revolution would be possible, and the Reds or the Bolsheviks who, with the example of the Paris Commune clearly in mind, believed that the historical development in Russia could be “telescoped” and, hence, power could be decisively taken in the present rather than deferred to an open future.29 If Adorno distanced himself from what appeared to be an ossified Marxist praxis, theoretically, Adorno, as suggested, remained very much in the theoretical tradition of Marxism. His characterization of Marx’s Capital as the “phenomenology of the anti-Spirit,” as what he called the “ontology of the wrong state of things,” could be said to have characterized the totality of his own writing. Adorno roots his understanding of the violence done by identity-thinking to the “non-identical” in the penetration of the exchange logic into virtually every nook and cranny of the life world.30 Adorno argues that the violence done by the unreflexive concept or identity thinking was ultimately to be rooted in the domination of use by exchange value just as Nietzsche had located the very structure of ascetic subjectivity itself

28 Adorno: A Biography, 465. 29 Contrary to figures such as Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács, Adorno along with Horkheimer and Marcuse, refused to be brought into the Communist fold. It is for this among other reasons that Lukács accuses Adorno of taking up residence in “Grand Hotel Abyss” in the 1962 preface to Theory of the Novel (quote)—a text that had proven such an inspiration for Adorno’s own thinking. Adorno, of course, returned the favor and attacked Lukács’ conception of critical realism claiming in a way that bears directly on our own TRC that it registered an “extorted” (erpresst) Reconciliation. Adorno claimed that Lukács’ ambitious 700-page genealogy of the intellectual roots of National Socialism entitled the destruction of Reason proved nothing so much as the destruction of Lukács’ own reason. 30 See the vitally important work of Sohn-Rhetel. The Color of Adorno’s Thought 199 in the capacity to remember debts.31 Indeed, he draws upon Marx himself to defend a certain division of labor between theory and praxis under conditions of class society.32 Social domination, for Adorno, was inextricable from the domination of nature. Philosophy manifested in abstract form the natural-historical logic of devouring and being devoured; it was belly turned mind. So the ambivalence of the students towards Adorno was reflected by his own ambivalence toward the demand that theory and practice be unified in revolutionary political action. Hans-Jürgen Krahl captures this tension perfectly when he states:

when we were besieging the council of Frankfurt University, the only professor who came to the students sit-ins was Professor Adorno. He was overwhelmed with ovations. He made straight for the microphone, and just as he reached it, he ducked past and shot into the philosophy seminar. In short, once again, on the threshold of practice, he retreated into theory.33

In Adorno’s view, this demand that theory be unified with praxis was in league with the now ubiquitous claim that what does not in some way serve measurable social utility, has lost its existential right to exist. He states that “I still believe that one should hold on to theory, precisely under the generalized coercion towards praxis in a functional and pragmatized world.”34 Yet, with the increasing violence that the students saw directed against them marked by the shootings of Ohnesorg and Dutschke, a faction of the movement became convinced that non- violent opposition had reached its very limits—that the very generation that had orchestrated Auschwitz was never going to be swayed by non-violent tactics. In a moment of decision of what they, themselves, also described as a moment of “madness” (to use Gudrun Enslinn’s words) they proceeded to play out what Freud had called Nachträglichkeit or deferred action--the armed resistance of the militant wing of the students could be said to have manifested the repressed resistance of their parents. Paradoxically, it was by actualizing this deferred resistance that the earlier generation had refused, that the students established distance from their parents whom they viewed as compromised as a generation. Nachträglichkeit marked in this case, therefore, a generational caesura. Yet, while it undoubtedly contained fascist elements within it, the BRD could no more be characterized as a fascist state than could Italy or Japan. And in this revolutionary pantomime, the RAF mirrored the actions of their comrades in the two other former Axis powers: the Japanese Red Army and Brigate Rosse in Italy.

31 F. Nietzsche, Geneaology of Morals and see also, Martin Jay’s Adorno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984) for an examination of the twin sources of Adorno’s conception of reification. 32 Adorno, “Who’s Afraid of the Ivory Tower”: 237. 33 Müller-Doom, 461. 34 Adorno, “Who’s Afraid of the Ivory Tower,” 237. 200 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

The Baader-Meinhof group began its campaign of seeking to, as they said, “explode a bomb in the consciousness of the people” by launching a frontal attack on consumer culture by firebombing two Frankfurt department stores in April of 1968 and this chain of events would include the bombing of US bases in Heidelberg, the high-jacking of a Lufthansa flight in Somalia and culminated in the kidnapping and assassination of the German Business Association President and former high-ranking Nazi responsible for forced labor, Hanns-Martin Schleyer in October, 1977. If Hegel had argued that philosophy could only understand post- festum (after the feast or after the event) reality’s formative process, with the RAF, philosophy is almost completely displaced by action or praxis. “Hell, yes, it’s all about Praxis” wrote an enthusiastic Andreas Baader in a letter to his lover and comrade Enslinn. It is perhaps the ultimate List der Vernunft or “cunning of reason,” as Hegel calls it, that Enslinn, herself, was the great granddaughter of none other than the great Idealist philosopher, himself. In fact, Enslinn would die (some contend she was extra-judicially murdered)in the notorious, maximum high-security Stammheim Prison located a just few kilometers from Hegel’s birthplace in Stuttgart. In this, a certain chapter in German intellectual and political history comes full circle: from Hegel’s emphatic insistence, as we have already seen, on the essentially interpretive vocation of philosophy to his mid-twentieth century heir’s almost unthinking, unreflective turn to unmediateddirect action. Indeed, Hegel devoted an important chapter of the Phenomenology to the “Absolute Freedom and the Terror of the French Revolution,” arguing that it was the precisely in the Jacobins’ lack of understanding of the need for mediation or differentiation in their understanding of politics that led the Revolution, Chronos-like, to devour its own children. Of course, with the German students, the situation was the exact inverse: here the children sought to devour their own parents. But there is a certain logic to this, if Marx drew attention to the contradiction between the most advanced theory, on the one hand, and socio-economic backwardness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—that unlike France, German had had revolutions only in the mind—now we see a kind of reversal: a society that was quickly becoming one of the most socio-economically advanced nations in the world, seemed now to be able to dispense with theory altogether. In their willingness to sacrifice all of the cause, to put their bodies and, indeed, lives on the line for anti-capitalist resistance, the members of the RAF undertook what can only be seen as an essentially religious struggle, one with clear parallels in our own present. The invocation of the idea of decision as dependent upon a moment of “madness” can be understood as a quintessentially Kierkegaardian gesture that constituted what the latter called in direct opposition to Hegel in Fear and Trembling the “teleological suspension of the ethical.”35 It therefore clearly challenged both the Right Hegelian declarative equation of the rational and the

35 S. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alistair Hannay (London: Penguin Classics, 1986). The Color of Adorno’s Thought 201 actual as well as the Left Hegelian programmatic imperative to make the actual rational. When asked about the meaning of his daughter’s participation in the bombing campaign, Enslinn’s father, who was a pastor, said that he believed that it constituted a kind of “holy self-realization.” Not only did this this simultaneous self-assertion and self-subordination not challenge authoritarianism it seemed at a deep psychological level, on the contrary, to reproduce its very conditions. And the authoritarianism of both was constituted, at least in part, by a refusal and possibly a lack of capacity to engage in the public use of reason.36 Adorno’s critique of the violent tendencies of the students was consistent with his understanding of the self-destruction of the enlightenment: that in seeking to master a terrifying nature outside of itself, the subject mirrors and internalizes that very terror which it, then, practices against itself. In a similar way, in its attempt to confront fascism by using its own tools against it, the radical arm of the students reproduced rather than worked towards genuinely confronting and transcending it. So, what I’ve tried to suggest so far is that Adorno’s thought retains the color grey, with the historical failure of the “reds,” that is, the Bolsheviks and the Sparticists, to “make the world philosophical” by simultaneously negating and realizing (“sublating”) philosophy. For Adorno, with the moment of this failure, praxis is not itself abolished but rather displaced to the philosophical concept in league with autonomous art work whose color had turned black.

Black: The Resistance of the Eye

The historical failure of the moment to realize philosophy, to make the actual rational, lends Adorno’s thought a tone of lamentation or Trauer. In his dedication of Minima Moralia, his reflection on the damaged life of the intellectual émigré, to his close collaborator and friend, Max Horkheimer, Adorno characterizes his thought as a “melancholy science” (traürigeWissenschaft) and the etymological roots of melancholy lie in the Greek words for black (Melanos) and bile (Khole). Melancholy signified, therefore, within the medieval doctrine of bodily humors, back bile. “Melancholy science” aspires to raise the world’s lamentation, the expression of its suffering, to a conceptual level in such a way that would explode an introverted and progressive conceptual thinking.

36 One finds this kind of analysis in the films of Alexander Kluge, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Margarethe von Trotta in the films that address this BleierneZeit or “heavy time” as well as in the 2008 film The Baader-Meinhof Complex (based on the book by Stefan Aust, Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the RAF) This was also the analysis of Ulrike Menihof while in prison shortly before her suicide. Gudrun Enslinn’s sister’s husband who started out as a radical poet, moved to the far right (Masche). Most tellingly, perhaps, Horst Mahler, the lawyer who founded the RAF in 1970 went on in the 1980s to deny the historical truth of the Holocaust and to this day remains in a leadership position in the far-right neo-Nazi National Democratic Party 202 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

If Adorno begins Negative Dialectics with the claim that the moment to realize philosophy was missed and therefore the way to realize philosophy was via an unremitting negativity, then such negativity could only be manifested via artworks that refuse to be made a functional part of the existing order. Following Kant, Adorno argued that genuine art works manifested an internal purposefulness relating the parts within the whole yet they were ultimately purposeless in themselves, insofar as they “stepped out of the means-ends relations of empirical society.”37 If art could be said to embody a purpose it lay precisely in its active disavowal of social purposes. The function of art was to be dysfunctional and as such constituted the “splinter in the eye” that served as “the best magnifying glass.”38 Yet art in its very expressiveness remained mute, unable to articulate its own truth content and therefore stood in need of philosophical or conceptual explication. Philosophy, in contrast, could through concepts communicate contents, yet without art’s expressiveness, would only subsume such sensuous content through the logic of identity or the exchange logic of the very society it wished to confront critically. Philosophy, on the one side, and the artwork, on the other, crystallize experience not in terms of overarching totalizing concepts, but in its micrological details. If the color red came to signify in the post-war period either a Communism that had degenerated into Stalinism, on the one hand, or Aktionismin the various armed insurrectionary groups on the other such as the RoteArmeeFraktion, the Japanese Red Army or the Brigate Rosse, then what comes to supplant red, as the genuine site of negativity, is a form of art whose color was black. As Ad Reinhardt stated in 1962, “black is interesting not as a color but as a non-color and as the absence of color.” In other words, black manifested an indefatigable negativity. On the face of it, it appears that Adorno, in turning from red to black, could not have been farther from the students. After all, in a late essay dating from the time of his composition of Aesthetic Theory entitled “On Subject and Object,” he allows himself the rare opportunity to speak of what a reconciled condition would look like: a condition of non-violence or peace between subject and object based on genuinely communicative relations between them.39 Such a relation would be based, though, on the paradoxical strengthening of an ego that, in that very strength, stood capable relinquishing itself and to genuinely open itself to the other. Peace in a sense could only be brought about dialectically, that is, by way of, as Adorno put it, the very coldness without which Auschwitz would not have been possible. Peace, in other words, required the very identity-thinking it, ultimately, sought to overcome. Thinking, properly understood, was a thinking against itself. But perhaps Adorno’s wasn’t quite as far from the most radical faction of the students as at first might appear to be the case. While Adorno supported the SDS

37 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnestoa Press, 1998): 139. 38 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 50. 39 Theodor W. Adorno, “On Subject and Object,” Critical Models: Interventions and Catch Words, trans. Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 247. The Color of Adorno’s Thought 203 against the SPD’s adoption of the Emergency Law, he certainly never approved of the violence as a means of political action. For example, he states that “The only meaningfully transformative praxis that I could imagine would be a non-violent one.”40 Nonetheless perhaps we can think the relation between Adorno and the radical wing of the students in the following terms: What these students wanted to carry out directly was, as already suggested, exploding reified consciousness by way of brazen acts of political violence, Adorno saw as possible only in a highly sublimated form via the autonomous work of art and its criticism. As John Abromeit has shown in a recent piece on the student movement, Adorno can also be distinguished from Marcuse’s emphasis in his Essay on Liberation of the direct coming into being of a “new sensibility” that would open up new possibilities for political transformation. For Adorno, the logic of the aesthetic entails mediation above all.41 In this sense, the black, melancholy art work reflects back the color, or, better, the non-color, the negativity, of a world whose heart had stopped beating. “In expression, Adorno argued, [works of art] reveal themselves as the wounds of society42 Art was, therefore, as an “uncommitted crime,” one that “becomes as enigmatic as the terror born of the primordial world, which, though it metamorphoses, does not disappear; all art remains a seismogram of that terror.”43 “[Art objects] kill what they objectify by tearing it away from the immediacy of its life.” “Without this admixture of poison,” Adorno argues, “the opposition of art to civilizatory repression would amount to nothing more than impotent comfort.”44 What can be heard in even the “greatest works of aesthetic unity” is the “echo of social violence.”45 So, Adorno’s notion of authentic works preserving, in mediated form, the experience of what he calls “primordial shudder,” the terror of confronting a nature that had not yet been brought under almost total human control, was, in some ways, not that far removed from the RAF’s idea of “exploding bombs in the consciousness of the people.” However, while the students took this literally, Adorno showed throughout his Aesthetic Theory the way in which this explosive, Dionysian impulse had to enter into the very formal constitution of the art work which, itself, stood in need of philosophical explication or, again, a “public use of reason” aiming to “express the inexpressible.” As Adorno states:

40 Adorno, “Who’s Afraid of the Ivory Tower?,” 236. 41 John Abromeit, “Limits of Praxis: The Social-Psychological Foundations of Theodor Adorno’s and Herbert Marcuse’s Interpretations of the 1960’s Protest Movements,” in Belinda David et al. (eds), Changing the World, Changing Oneself: Political Protest and Collective Identities in West Germany and the U.S. in the 1960’s and 1970’s (New York: Berghan Books, 2010). 42 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 237. 43 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 127, emphasis added. 44 Ibid., 133. 45 Ibid., 134. 204 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

The critique exercised a priori by art is that of action as a cryptogram of domination. According to its sheer form, praxis tends towards that which, in terms of its own logic, it should abolish; violence is maintained in its sublimations, whereas artworks, even the most aggressive, stand for non-violence.46

In a sense the sublimated force of the art-work that has resisted all social functions, that has become in a sense dysfunctional, is brought to a head in the closing moments of Adorno’s Grey in the image of the Book Bloc activist who used Negative Dialectics—a philosophy whose necessary supplement, as I just suggested, was the art work—to break out of the police line. Perhaps this can be read as allegorizing Adorno’s fundamental philosophical intention in Negative Dialectics: to use the very strength of rational subjectivity to break out (Adorno calls this an Aus-bruch) of a form of sacrificial subjectivity that subordinates external nature and its own sensuous impulses, as well as other human beings, to the reproduction of the false logic of the social whole. It would seem that the story that Adorno had his lecture theatre painted grey is an urban legend, however, what is clear is that Hito Steyerl takes up Adorno’s own apocryphal stance and by, as it were, painting her white on grey, lays bare the intertwinement of art and philosophy. In so doing, she approximates the very blackness of an art that aims at keeping alive, as Adorno states in Negative Dialectics, a “resistance of the eye which doesn’t want the colours of the world to fade.”47

46 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 241. 47 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 405. Chapter 15 An Astonished Facticity: Toward a Meta-fetishist Ethnography Massimo Canevacci

Introduction

This chapter explores the extreme epistolary exchange between Adorno and Benjamin, regarding the empirical emergence of fetishisms. Here starts my proposal on astonished methodology, through which meta-fetishism is affirmed. Suchmeta- fetishist ethnography has the explicit purpose of dissolving contemporary digital reifications. A disjunctive ethnography interweaves the proliferation of visual fetishes and digital cultures, through attractors disseminated on advertising, art, film, performance, architecture, design, fashion and even music. The exchange of letters between Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin is an inexhaustible source of ideas that often anticipate current debates. In November 1938, a few months before the invasion of Poland and Benjamin’s suicide on the French-Spanish border, Adorno wrote from New York to his older friend in Paris: calling him Sir with a capital letter, he penned a long essay letter with harsh criticism. About a month later, Benjamin wrote back with a memorable response. Through the analysis of these two letters, I will try to apply the concepts of astonishment and facticity to the increasing dissemination of material/immaterial goods, immersed in the flows of digital communication. I will follow, in particular, the concept of astonished facticity expounded by Adorno and then reclaimed by Benjamin. Astonished facticity contains critical elements that can be used here and now. In those times characterized by a terrible political situation, amidst a saving exile (in the United States) and another deadly one (in Port Bou), these two friends tapped into a crucial issue that set in motion the forced immobility of Marxism. Adorno’s critique launches a reply from Benjamin, leaving everyone else truly breathless. Rather than dialectic, this dialogic relationship, although stiffened by its epistolary form, stirs this passion up between the two friends, so close and yet distant. Adorno’s invention of disturbing conceptual approaches, prompts Benjamin to new visionary positions. Dialogic is a conceptual polyphony and does not circle back on itself towards improbable origins, comforting utopias or accommodating synthesis. Dialogic exceeds their present, pushes words beyond and above, mutes the meanings of words with their surprising editing, and anticipates something new and “incomprehensible”. The enormity of an unprecedented conflict, pushed 206 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis these two intellectuals to another spatial and temporal dimension and towards an accelerated conceptualization, far beyond what was “normally” conceivable. So, in the privacy of a classic exchange of letters, these breathless words are retained, stiffened in printing to produce extensive illuminations between the historicity of their space-time and the disjunctive changes of the present. This chapter aims to demonstrate how another one of Benjamin’s famous concepts, the sex appeal of the inorganic, is a sort of premise emerged from the most beautiful research ever conducted on metropolitan communication. This chapter will try to find an appropriate application crossing and mixing the sex appeal of the inorganic to astonished facticity. My hypothesis is the following: the first concept (the sex appeal of the inorganic) has absorbed the classic form of fetishism but, only by entering the second concept (astonished facticity), is the transition towards a dissolutive meta-fetishism promoted. Such transition does occur thanks to Adorno’s provocation, pushing his friend, Benjamin, to claim and to specify his procedure that increases the most radical critique that has ever been made. Adorno displaces the words of the friend through a dialectic excess. This is the paradox: Adorno enters this vortex of “magic and positivism”, sees it, feels it, perhaps even admires it, but in turn remains astonished and terrified by the excess of conceptual audacity. And then, he “dialectically” denies it. I imagine the silence around both men, when they dropped their pens the kind of silence that falls when one makes a decision that forces logic.

Teddie: 10 November 1938

Adorno begins his letter, expressing disappointment at Benjamin’s essay on Baudelaire. This piece would be published in the journal of the Institute of Frankfurt (the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung). For Adorno, the essay is methodologically restrained and does not correctly develop the reasons that would have it connected to Passagen (“Passages”);1 hence, the observation of practicing with this type of writing, an “ascetic discipline”, in which “pragmatic content” conspires against the possibility of grasping the whole work. The plotline between asceticism and pragmatism configures in Benjamin the excess between a mystic ascending towards the immaterial and a positivistic descent into materialism. The interweaving of metaphysical and materialistic patterns represents to Adorno a perverse alliance that excludes the concept of dialectical mediation. At the core of his criticism, the absent mediation obstructs the dialectical process along its isolated or fragmented elements. Consequently, Benjamin’s genealogy of passages does not reach the global social production and is blocked in a mere list of empirical narrative (dirty sidewalks or gas lighting …). So, the decisive theme of phantasmagoria should have been the object of dialectical analysis, but became the writing itself, which overturn into phantasmagoria. With a relationship

1 W. Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983). An Astonished Facticity 207 between the parts and the whole so lacking, fragments are reversed into the same phantasmagoria that Benjamin sought to criticize. In this way, the domain, rather than being dissolved, reproduces itself. This is a lethal accusation made by an intellectual like Adorno and his Hegelian- Marxist temporary orthodoxy. In Adorno’s view, this narrative essay transforms all the reified fragments, deprived of social mediation, into phantasmagorical reproductions of reification itself. In Adorno’s mind, Benjamin has a Medusa’s gaze that petrifies every empirical element: aMedusa , who absorbs the perspective of the goods and transforms mythical petrification into historical reification. This reification is insidious, as it diffuses a phantasmagorical apology under the guise of criticism. Benjamin is a prisoner of the myth: a myth that has subsumed his gaze and turned it upside down in a blocked apology for the existing. The distinction between petrification and reification is significant. According to Adorno, objectification is split between the historical reification that transforms objects and subject into commodities, and the more archaic petrification that emerges from the mythical process of civilization. A brand is then intertwined between reification and petrification, contemporary history and archaic myth, desire and repression or regression. From the emergent capitalism to post- industrial society, the transmutation of the myth into a brand is a kind of cosmetic make up that unpredictably improves the beauty of the commodity’s body. With the notion of the brand as a mimesis of myth, the brand assumes mimetic forms of goods in order to penetrate more easily the defences of the subject and turn it into a homologated mass. This is the power of petrification. The dark forces of a myth are behind and within the merchandise: this marks every single modification applied to the surface of the skin, to the asphalt, to reveal an uncontrollable and unmanageable nature. To be allied with the myth means to become an irrational brand, penetrating the rationality that manufactures these goods. Petrification takes over these goods, almost possessing them and nullifying, thereby, the sense of history and therefore any possibility of mutation or radical transformation. Petrification drags history into the power of the myth: the gaze of the Medusa hides every historicity of the merchandise and develops the myth as a phantasmagorical essence of the goods themselves, whilst petrifying it. This narrative is, indeed, transfigured into brands, as it produces astonishment, similarly with any entertainment. And, even before the narrative, there were ground fairs, circuses, carnivals, chthonic cults, so forth and so on towards the origin. The myth of the origin is as the myth par excellence. It is the myth of the myth. Even deeply influenced by his friend, Adorno warns him about the dangers of this perverse alliance between myth and history, the danger of the overthrowing of goods (and the subject) in stone. Adorno warns his friend about the urban masses being sucked into cultural-industrial tribalizations, as well as, the naturalization of culture thanks to the “Eternal Return” used as advertisement in tourism brochures. Finally, the distinction between petrification tied to myth and reification linked to history will be unified by the authoritarian society, through the most dangerous synthesis. This processual unification appears to be an einbahnstrasse, the 208 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis one-way-road that he, Benjamin, has so well identified and now is walking down without noticing. Something bigger than friendship is at stake here: the totalitarian historical context that could eliminate any remaining from humanism. “Dialectic is insufficient. It lacks mediation. There is always a tendency to immediately refer Baudelaire’s pragmatic contents to the traits of the social history of their time”,2 Adorno points out. Translated into dialectical terms, this means that “pragmatic contents” lack characters that are sociologically material. The empirical single trait becomes concrete only in its relation to the overall process of production. Without such an empirical trait, pragmatic contents float like petrified goods into the Maëlstrom of capitalist whirlpool and will be swallowed up along with unaware ascetics. In this way, Benjamin would apply an immediate materialism that Adorno relates to anthropological materialism (or romantic according to the current philosophical terminology). And here is the highest point of the whole criticism: asceticism, or renunciation, for the theory acts on empiricism transforming it into “an astonishing representation of pure facticity”.3

An Astonished Facticity

A bewitched crossing, made from a perverse alliance between magic and positivism, emerges from this whirlpool. This alliance will form the core of the next Dialectic of Enlightenment (written in collaboration with Max Horkheimer)4 in which progress is reversed into barbarism. Put radically, the crossing that combines magic and positivism has the same nature as the intersection between myth and ratio, superstition and Enlightenment, self-affirmation and self-repression. Benjamin had already fallen into the same trap as Sade and Kant: he had become a prisoner of the spell that he helped to cast himself, starting with Baudelaire, represented by an isolated factual astonishment. A few years back, Benjamin committed a more serious crime that announced the beginning of the end. He had proclaimed at Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, a possible revolutionary event on the part of the working masses, thanks to the reproducibility of the technique that causes the collapse of the bourgeois-aristocratic aura. This was Benjamin’s famous essay, the one that Adorno had replied to, in a not so indirect way, with an opposite view on the reification of contemporary music. Benjamin sees glimpses of a possible liberation from the applied technology in favour of a new culture of the masses, from which a revolutionary cinema emerges as a possible act of an agglutinated process on the part of liberationist fragments. In Adorno’s reply, based on his own field, music, emerges an inevitable regression of the act of listening, based on mass culture.

2 T.W. Adorno, in W. Benjamin (1966), Briefe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag), trans. Lettere 1913–1940, (Torino, Einaudi, 1978), 363. 3 Ibid., 365. 4 T.W. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, Dialektik de Aufklarung (Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1966). An Astonished Facticity 209

This develops sonorous fetishism and marginalizes any form of acoustic or social dissonance. The Sacre du Printemps tribalizes like jazz or jingles; in the same way as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and even Citizen Kane. Technical reproducibility divides the two friends radically, as a source of reification for one, and a source of liberation for the other. No mediation is possible between them. Thanks to these lacerating premises, disciplinary distinctions are skipped. Philosophy gets into sociology, inventing empirical research on radio broadcasting, on stars down-to-earth, on authoritarian personalities and irrationalism. Politics is not summarized in the critique of political economy or in the hetero-directed party, but insinuates itself in advertising, radio stations, standardized consumption: everything, or something, is foreseen for every single one. Thus, practice, as a collective action of transformation, should be suspended. And, the individual should be defended as a dissonant one.

Walter: 9 December 1938

Benjamin’s response to Adorno is one of the highest points of the twentieth century critical theory and anticipates methods for a dissolutive ethnography of reification, without stiffening in negation or comforting in mediation. Benjamin claims in his essay a moment in which theory “bursts like a ray of light isolated by an artificially darkened room”.5 This beam penetrates the subject through one’s empathy (Einfühlung) with commodity. Adorno does not understand that these passages (galleries, housing, department stores and modernity based on consumption) are an empirical indicator that makes social mediation’s logic obsolete. Passages contain neither dialectic nor dualistic oppositions. Passages are neither places of production nor sites of structured social classes. They are an emerging area of change that anticipates the most significant features of modernity characterized more by consumption and communication than work. Within passages one does not live in the city anymore, but is about to enter the metropolis. This is a process that goes beyond the traditional perception of production as a centre of capitalist valorization and dialectical contradiction as the core of social change. Passages became a polycentric dissemination of a new metropolis that anticipates trends other than the expansion of goods, drawing therefore communicational spaces of consumption. Passages incorporate a phantasmagoria other than commodities, unforeseen by the critics, more powerful and, so to speak, more subtle and intangible. The commodity that has an exchange- value in the factory acquires a communicational-value when the same commodity is exposed as nouveauté in a grand magazine. These values are an intrigue of communicational fetishes.

5 T.W. Adorno, in W. Benjamin (1966), Briefe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag), trans. Lettere 1913–1940, (Torino: Einaudi, 1978), 370 (Italian translation). 210 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

Such added value is the commodities’ power, not Medusa’s returning as a petrified myth, but in a rather pulsing fetish that pushes stratification, mixing the sacred, the commodities and the Eros inside the bodies of things. This is a fetish that sums up the sacredness of the god-object, the alienation of the commodity-value, the perversion of the eroticized body. Sacredness, alienation, perversion transfigure the dead things into pulsing subjects and add empathy to subject and object. Benjamin understands that in the eighteenth century, passages, along with the Universal Exhibitions, replaced the social centrality of the factory due to the diffusion of a sexed consumption and an unproductive labour. Passages abolish dialectics and spread empathy, not alienation. Apart from this change, Benjamin has perceived that the construction of the text itself contains the method. Thus, there is a close correlation between the composition of the text and the explanation of the fieldwork. The writing as a montage adapts his style to the glistening passage, certainly not to surrender or to sing an apology, but to penetrate costumers (and critics!) defences. And in this, Benjamin’s writing tries to decipher and to take possession of the rebus, those puzzles in the form of things and letters embodied by living goods in order to dissolve the reified power of the brand. The compositive vision of the text drove Benjamin “to ensure that the second part of the book was made up essentially of philological material”.6 What Adorno mistakes as ascetic is in fact Benjamin’s own methodological choice that does not give up “things” nor magically transcends goods, but penetrates their inorganic monadology, without stopping inside, but by crossing them fetishistically. It is paradoxical, though, that Adorno’s accusation will favour a reply with a methodological explanation: “When ‘astonished representation of facticity’ is said, You, Sir, characterize a genuinely philological attitude”. Just to settle the alliance between magic and positivism, Benjamin has developed “the philology [as] the inspection of a text which proceeds according to its details, and magically embeds the reader in the text itself”,7 but does not stop at that moment, as Adorno’s Hegelianism misunderstands: “The appearance of a compact facticity that marks the philological investigation and enchants the scholar vanishes when the object is constructed in a historical perspective”.8 The pragmatic philology elaborated through Benjamin’s writing moves the interpretations: such a sensorial shaking has the aim of melting any reification represented in his narrative work. The feeling that “phantasmagoria was described rather than dissolved in the construction”9 comes from the fact that the bright light of critical theory is located inside the flow of the text, inside the body of thething : something pulsing as a fetish, but not petrifying as a myth. For Adorno, this light

6 T.W. Adorno, in W. Benjamin (1966), Briefe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag), trans. Lettere 1913–1940, (Torino: Einaudi, 1978), 371 (Italian translation). 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 374. An Astonished Facticity 211 is at the same time too strong and too weak, hence the use of social mediation imprints a shortcut and, at the same time, an infinite elongation. Instead, Benjamin captures the harshness of the accusatory sentence, and in its extraordinary formal beauty, the truth in which he has placed himself. Instead of being petrified, Benjamin’s look burns, wrapping the facticity up and representing it through a philological astonishment. It is not so much the “historical perspective” that dispels the power of facticity, as the immanent philology to interpretation that dissolves the layers of the domain. The reified dissolution of facticity blooms from its inside: interpretation is destruction, not a hermeneutic circle. That is why Adorno is sensitive to the negative criticism of the act of listening, as Benjamin is susceptible to the visual challenge of the optical unconscious. Music and Cinema conflict because they develop from rather different methodologies. Both friends split not due to these diverse sensorial fieldworks, but because of the angle through which criticism is placed with respect to possible changes: “I have tried to articulate in my work these positive moments with the same clarity that You, Sir; have devoted to the negative”.10 This is the boiling core of the dispute between the two friends. The image that comes to mind is a stall: a stall not as in a draw or immobility, but rather as in an impossibility of drawing a conclusion; as in an unsolved “game” in which players will always move the checkers not to take advantage of the error of the opponent, but to stubbornly seek solutions to a dilemma. Adorno and Benjamin are not positioned against each other, even if much of the subsequent “criticism” attempted to affirm as much. One is simply within the other in a never-ending dialogue. The epistolary dialogue between the two friends continuously develops asymmetric paradoxes. Despite being free, Adorno sees every aspect of culture as being invaded by a barbaric obscurantism, which opposes a sharp and solitary criticism. Benjamin, on the other hand, imprisoned by the magic circle of the Bibliothèque Nationale, continues to view possible liberations. He foresees “empathy with merchandise presenting itself as empathy with the inorganic materiality”.11 The consumption of the exchange-value produces the identification of an empathic subject composed of body and corpse: attraction to what was a classic difference (of the inert object). This attraction, instead, gets closer and closer to the self until it dissolves like something beyond the inorganic. The organic-inorganic dualism is absorbed by new visual fetishes, not to surrender monistically, but rather to pass them through an identitarian multiplication and elusive self.

Staunende

The original text of Adorno says: “The theological motive to call the thing by its name, tendentially suggests the astonished representation of pure facticity” (“die

10 Ibid., 375. 11 Ibid. 212 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis staunende Darstellung der blossen Factizität”).12 Staunende (“astonished”) is an active participle form. Hence, in Italian, the translation “stupita” (astonished) is not correct (it is a passive participle). The alternative “stupefacente” (astonishing) has other meanings in Italian; while blossen is more than pure, it is the only one. So, the theological reason to name things contains in the same exposure a stupor attivo di una fatticità unica (“an active astonishment of unique facticity”). Adorno is credited with the linguistic sagacity that facticity is unique, meaning that each fragment, philologically collected by Benjamin has its individuality, like any other subject. The variation “stupita fatticità” (“astonished facticity”) is a personal choice that highlights the astonishing act as inherent to the exposure, determined by its uniqueness. This uniqueness is what affects Adorno, for a dialectical mediation’s absence with a social production. For Adorno, an isolated facticity is just nothing. A fragment devoid of society is the dead-being that the highly Hegelian Adorno criticizes in his friend. Benjamin, instead of favouring purity, exposes “things” in their irreducible uniqueness to blow the fetish up without dialectic’s mediation, but through immanent literary exposure. Such exposure stirs facticity. I would almost say that Benjamin provokes facticity to be pushed beyond its exhausted astonishment. On the basis of these mutations, astonishment penetrates facticity, identifies its phantasmagorical traits, filters its thinghood and does not stop in the face of a risky identification. Astonishment is the pupil of the observer, neither neutral nor detached: an observer who does not scrutinize from the outside intrigues of emotional glow, emanated from visual facticity. Astonishment looks at any distracted observer from “its” inside; it looks dilated in the flesh facticity. Astonishment, then, fulfils its concept in the sexed internality of the “thing”: that is, it “astonishes”. If astonishment stays outside, the glance stiffens in a mere classification, in various moralism or, at best, in a fixed negation. Astonishment moves, expands, grows as an astonished act, as an astonished look whilst entering the somatized brands of facticity. What is unique is whilst developing this combination of astonishment and facticity, Adorno grasped the empathic-dissolutive dynamics of his friend and, soon after, censured it as apologetic due to its lack of dialectic. Benjamin, in return, claims as his the method of entering facticity whilst reproducing itself in astonishment. Meanwhile Benjamin’s interpretation dissolves the deposits of reifications. The orthodox social mediation encloses, instead, the researcher within the frames of an inadequate method or philosophy (dialectics). Strangely, Benjamin reminds his friend that Adorno himself used the concept of astonishment in Kierkegaard. According to Adorno, Benjamin writes, astonishment expresses “the deepest understanding of the relationship between dialectic, myth and image”.13

12 T.W. Adorno, in W. Benjamin (1966), Briefe (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag), trans. Lettere 1913–1940, (Torino, Einaudi, 1978), 365 (Italian translation). 13 Ibid., 371 (Italian translation). An Astonished Facticity 213

So, astonishment is an emotional/rational position of the subject, through which traditional dualistic distinctions are dissolved. Astonishment nests itself in the myth rather than in the myth-o-logy, managing to reach dark areas of the subject, where images are tied up to dialectic. The most archaic past is intertwined with an imaginable future in these dialectical images. The images of myth dilate in astonishment. There is no myth without astonishment. A myth that is not astonishing is not a myth. An astonishing statement is the only one acceptable to challenge any myth, penetrating and dissolving its recurrent and seductive power, as well. Semiotics governs in order to organize the “science of mythology”, a very aporetic (and mythical) paradigm with the obsession of classifying what is already planned by the semiotic method. In this process, the dialectic that “understands” the myth perishes or turns into its own opposite: the mythological stagnation. The comprehensible myth, that is, the myth surrounded by a concept’s logical power; then captured, is reset and at the same time re-emerges as irrational rationality. Adorno will develop himself these reversals of the Enlightenment after the death of his friend. Unable to grasp it, Adorno, will not be able to go beyond his rigidity of negative dialectics, either. An offended dialectics is just like any life or poetry. For Benjamin, instead, “astonishment is an excellent object of such understanding”. This statement has a brilliant and final composition: the Astonishment-Object. The thing in front of the subject should be approached, entered and crossed over. For this reason, astonishment presents itself as a factual incarnation (objectual facticity) and not as a gnoseological expression. Consequently, for one of the friends, astonishment remains bounded to the cognitive dialectic process; for the other, astonishment coagulates as facticity which may vanish due to the immanent philological perspective and the meta- fetishistic glance. Facticity enchants the scholar. This crossing is bewitched. Rather than reaffirming the global mediation of dialectics, Adorno, however, does not understand that penetrating and being penetrated by the petrified enchantment is a prerequisite for the dissolution of each reified facticity. This bewitched crossroads cannot be challenged or cancelled from the outside: this is the pulsing feeling for the sex appeal of fetishism. Such is the reason that keeps Benjamin obsessed by the enchanted space of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, collecting until his last breath quotes full of astonishment from which to rip the spell up. Meanwhile, Adorno withdraws from any enchanted involvement, as he has heard the silence of poetry after Auschwitz. My hypothesis is: the astonished facticity is the sex appeal of the inorganic presented as a method. The inorganic appeal transforms cloth into skin, shoe into sex, and commodity into a sentient subject. The facticity recall produces identification, philology and montage between the individual and the thing. It is the feeling of the “thing” peeled off of as facticity, shaken with an interpretative empathy that can dissolve its spell only after passion’s embodiment of the astonishing. 214 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

The concept of Factizität (“facticity”) is the result of a philosophical reflection that starts with the brutal empiricism of the “fact” and turns it into something more general and abstract. If the term Factizität includes a reified dimension, it is definitely not limited to it. This means that facticity is partly linked toa historical dimension (and in this sense, linked to the dimension of the goods). At the same time, though, facticity is linked to a more general condition intrinsic to Homo Sapiens. Whilst it produces facts and things, objectification will be a historically changeable and an impossible process to eliminate, unless through idealistic schemes. This is to say that facticity, the objectification of the fact, does not coincide with the reification of the commodity or with the all-encompassing nature of the thing.

Facticity includes Commodities, Surpassing Them

Thus, we arrive at the nexus facticity-utilities. It was known that Benjamin was working with a particular vision: the quest to liberate all forms of objectification, by eliminating the utility humans attach to themselves, to living things or to being-goods. “There must be a human moment in things that does not come from labour”14 (1978:400). The dissolution of the domain of utility clears all or none. In this sense, the use of the term facticity expressed by Adorno is extremely bright, as much so as his friend’s use of it in its altered (non-identical) form. The collector is a flâneur in the world of things. Goods, therefore, are alive, and ready for their fate (empathetic consumption) with all the vitality of their biography and even their biology. Goods are singular, having acquired their own subjectivity that personalizes them and are full of psychologies, fetishism and narcissism. The narcissism of things consists in their being historical, having a specific character and physiognomy related to their own behaviours, desires, sensibilities. . Goods are aesthetic and refer to something that concerns not only the feelings that surround art in a gnoseological way, but also the reflexive attitude towards each object. Astonishment combines amazing emotional traits when facing such abstract facticity. It locates the attitudes of wonder that one feels in the face of the overwhelming power of a prodigy. It is a mythical factor that surprises the senses of the subject, turning them into a kind of paralysis-in-waiting. Astonishment is that moment of uncertainty when one has no idea of what might ever happen, when every organ is opened (eyes, mouth, nose, ears, skin, sex) to accommodate the unknown that is yet to come. It is the desire of the unknown anticipating the astonishment. The body gets ready and opens any possible sensoriality to be trespassed, possessed, devoured from astonishment and whatever it might become. Astonishment has the task of living in the moment before. Astonishment is the moment before. Astonishment makes uncertain the meaning of the “thing” that

14 Ibid., 400 (Italian translation). An Astonished Facticity 215 stands before us, full of riddles impossible to resolve, and differs from wonder because it potentially includes fear or danger. Astonishment is the edge of threat, risk and pleasure. It is a petrified and reified variation of the Unheimlich: an uncanny sonata.

Facticius

Retracing the history of the concept of fetishism is essential, as a part of anthropology. As an instance of the conceptual control of the West in its colonial excursions, the Portuguese defined feitiço (fetish) as all that belongs to the incomprehensible multi-verse of “primitive” (superstitious, pre-logical, wild) cultures and all that does not fall within the framework of the Christian religion. The local cultural references about what Portuguese, and later on Europeans, called fetishisms were the sacred, not religion. The impalpable, uncontrollable, indefinable sacred of any monotheistic religion was always necessary to redeem through places (church, mosque, synagogue), books (Bible, Koran, Torah), priests, rituals, or dogmas. Any religion aimed to control the sacred and to “civilize” it in its respective doctrine. Unfortunately, the polytheistic materialism also absorbed the same purpose. Portuguese colonial heritage continued to control, to redeem and to cure any feitiços, not only from a linguistic but also from an unchangeable political tradition. Fetish is as an object transforming itself into the subject through never-ending rituals. Fetishism is a moving being that does not accept the dialectic of subject- object and that gives life to things, even commodities (Marx) and bodies (Freud). Finally, the contemporary visual fetishism is no longer the sacred of the “spirit”, the arcane of commodities or the perversion of bodies. Contemporary visual fetishism emerges from the body-corpse, a transition between the body, as a living body, and the corpse, as a dead body, in which the dash between body-corpse expresses the continuous flow that gives life to the dead and mortifies the living.15 In this process, to do ethnography signifies to de-colonize the concept: to penetrate into the mutations of fetish, that transfigures each one of the objectivities into a subject, changing inert things into human goods, and goods into a mutoid fetishism which absorbs astonishment through the eyes: the sublime and the uncanny re-enacted. In this panorama, one cannot use any traditional theoretical framework of whom (or what) is familiar or foreign, since the same subject or object are mixed and “subjectivized” together with the sensitivity of the researcher. The increasing rate of visual fetishes is incorporated by attractors. These are optical splinters that pierce perceptual modules of a contemporary personal look trained to decode how eager one is to select and distinguish them. These attractors are irregular codes (“brands”) filled with highly neo-fetishist contents. The

15 M. Canevacci, Una stupita fatticità. Feticismi visuali tra corpi e metropoli (Milano: Costa & Nolan, 2007). 216 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis ethnographic gaze becomes dangerously fetishist with the empathic need to see these codes. The narrative composition penetrates and pierces the visual fetishes and the ethnographer’s pupil, which transforms itself through processes onto the research. This composition metamorphoses disciplines, iconic exhibitions, ideographic expressions, oral explanations and sonic pulses. The experimental method accepts the risk of gazing excitedly and proliferating attractors through digital communication. A polyphonic and dissonant methodology emerges from such a context, searching for multiple scriptural styles, iconic expositive assembling and a non-dualist paradigmatic logic. The attractor’s key concept transforms the original meaning of physics: if a ball rolls on a floor, its movement will slowly converge towards a situation in which the speed of the ball will be nil, due to friction. The point that the ball reaches movement zero is the attractor. If we changed the ball into an eye’s pupil casually gazing at a panorama, movement zero would mean the eye is physically attracted to a specific point that is responsible for blocking its movement. Here, the eye becomes locked into it, thanks to the attractor. The attractor’s bonding power is determined by the visual fetishism diffused through digital communication and metropolitan culture. It resets the movement of the eye due to an interpretive puzzle that disturbs the viewer and determines the trends of digital fetishes. These fetishes break with the classic ones, as they incorporate not only traditional goods, but also the facticity that transmutes body and corps, pixel and skull, skin and screen, bodyscape and location. And, the eye is then penetrated with polymorphic perspectives. Now, I would like to get back to the already discussed concept of facticity, from a philological point of view, “made” of palpitating goods-things-objects and bodies-buildings-metropolises. On the one hand, fetish links through the Latin matrix facticius the body-thing facticity (“res”) to the sacred. On the other hand, fetish expands the fiction to the narratives, through another Latin matrix, fictio. As a result, a visual fetish connects facticity and fiction, expresses material and immaterial narratives, and communicates myths and things. Any fiction is facticity. The result is an unstable movement towards a multiple facticity that reifies and creates, disseminating digital fetishes and narrative inventions. A visual facticity represses and releases; freezes and metamorphoses. And if the brand of repression is constant, the brand of liberation is pursued through penetration into the production-diffusion of the body-corpse. Since observing the process of fetishization from the outside is not possible; the method becomes assimilated to a “dress”. It must be worn every day, risking the loss of one’s self and trying to emerge with increased individual autonomy. A “trivial” Swatch advertising campaign from a few years ago convinced me to switch from a random admiration for its communicative ability to a selective research to be developed with a wider hypothesis. I started then to collect fetish images from many different magazines and websites that in their visual sensitivity, syncretized the organic and the inorganic, things and bodies, material and immaterial, nature and culture, male and female, design and urbanism – something perverse and normal: two concepts that became inadequate for explaining visual An Astonished Facticity 217 contemporaneity with a highly perversely normal fetishist content. In short, the fetishism and the visual became the blades of a pair of scissors that converged towards the final cut, instead of opening themselves wide. A pair of scissors when closed unifies the cutting excess of fetishist facticity. The blades are facticius and fiction. To watch something means also to be observed. The methodology makes itself reflexive and astonished like a perturbative dress-code. The narrative binds, in an immanent manner, the continuous metamorphosis of the object-fetish into subject-fiction, or rather; the silent object is always in some way a narrative-subject. The method thus transgresses traditional dualistic distinctions and transits through methodological fetishism. My aim is to de-colonize the concept of fetishism beyond any “anthropocentric anthropology” and towards a meta-fetishist physiognomy of facticities. In order to de-center the human being, multiplying the sensorialities of commodities should be possible; deprived of their reified character, through digital connection and meta-morphic perspectives. Re-enacting the ecology of mind between body and thing, subject and object, skin and screen is possible: a living physiognomy of digital “beings”. At this crossroads, Adorno and Benjamin meet Gregory Bateson.16 Meta-fetishism is an ecological fetishism deprived of modern stigma, beyond colonialism, reification or perversion. Meta-fetishism is a humanism that includes facticities. Astonished facticity refers to the method that penetrates the processes of reification, trying to dissolve them. Dissolution, thus, emerges not so muchas a “theory”, but as the same expositive force embodying astonishment itself As a sort of methodological astonishment that wishes to penetrate into fetishisms, twisting and metamorphosing into various visual facticities, piercing their logical orders and dissolving them through fiction. The astonished narrative encourages risky illegal logics fixating such proliferating fetishes with a positioned astonished ethnographer. The aim is to pierce the optical attraction and the fetish attractor, in order to fix them. In Adorno’s liminal expression referred to Schumann and cited by Jelinek, astonishment is the moment before, the moment in which the musician perceives a crisis in his conscience and, before surrendering, composes one of his most unprecedented masterpieces, a “dissolution without realizing it”, as Adorno says in reference to Schumann’s Fantasia, when it “approaches his ears with nostalgia, mourning the loss of the most precious thing: one’s own self”.17 Astonishment is like the moment before. It is the condition of the researcher when he or she starts to do ethnography alone. In this moment, astonishment opens every pore of one’s feelings towards something or someone one is going to face and who is not yet known – a stranger or an unknown person and just for this reason, one wants to meet. The unknown as such, opens the mental pores of the subject to receive the uncanny. This bodily disposition to astonishment absorbs

16 G. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1972). 17 E. Jelineke, Die Klavierspielerin (Hamburg, Rowohlt Verlag GMBH), trans. La pianista, Milano, ES, 2002, 79 (Italian translation). 218 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis and opens the subject a moment before one is facing what is going to happen, but has not just yet. It is the imminent moment in which conscience expands towards perceptions still unknown. They may be related to a funeral ritual, or literary or musical compositions and become less significant as one might imagine. It is impressive that the researcher wishes to absorb every empirical event like a sponge and so his body-corpse perceives the potential transformation, ejecting it perhaps outside. These themes are presented in Said’s text, On Late Style, suggesting the researcher “to explore the experience of late style that covers a non-harmonious, non-serene tension, and above all, a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness going against ”.18 The last style is productive whilst it elaborates work and, at the same time, puts into question the instrumental principle of productivity. Inspiration is taken from a fragment of Adorno’s called Spätstil Beethovens:

For Adorno, far more than anyone who has spoken before about Beethoven’s last works, these are the compositions that belong to what is known as the composer’s third period (the last five piano sonatas, the Ninth Symphony, the Missa Solemnis, the last string quartets, the seventeen bagatelles for piano). These works constitute an event in the history of modern culture: a moment when the artist, fully in command of the medium, abandons, nevertheless, a communication with the established social order of which he is part, and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship with it. Beethoven’s last works constitute a form of exile.19

Said’s reading of Adorno does not bring his own experience of Palestinian exile to that of an isolated musician, as an easy biographical reading might suggest. Alas, on the contrary, to listen to a philosophy connected to music, challenged by the late style, invents a cultural trait beyond a given social order. From a sociological point of view, I contend that Adorno was not sufficiently well-read in this area, as he preferred to concentrate his criticism on pop music and jazz (had he only listened to Coltrane instead of Glenn Miller … ). Adorno’s research was fundamental on so-called classical music. The research regarding, in particular, the Opera 111 and the final quartets of the last Beethoven, was perhaps less well known to social scientists. These compositions continue to spread the philosophical positioning in the deepest sense of the word: a sonata for piano and some string quartets penetrate in the order established by restorative politics and a systemic philosophy (Congress of Vienna). Both, sonata and quartets live the alienation that history is promulgating and challenge acoustic and dialectical paradigms through unprecedented sonic landscapes. The sonata and quartets are still presented today, to us, as unknown entities to be listened and to be discussed – and sung: a musical art applied to the dialogic dissonance rather than dialectic and harmony. For all

18 E. Said, On Late Style (New York, Vintage Books, Random House, 2006). 19 Ibid. An Astonished Facticity 219 this, the perspective of composition transits from music to art, from architecture to anthropology. It composes a fragmented montage of arts. The final method slides through any qualitative or quantitative definition. This positioning faces astonishment on the very previous moment. In the relationship between unheard notes and unintelligible writings, new perspectives are shaped for sociology: a sociology-without-society, as previously written by Adorno himself, in another essay. The philosophy that makes empirical research and produces works is irreducible to the present state of things, or the history-of-the-discipline: by itself, history is insufficient, if it does not process knowledge here and now. Music becomes philosophy when it feels pieces flowing onto other pieces. In the notes of the piano sonata op. 111, one could anticipate a possible future; stopped, though, in the second movement, rejecting the conciliatory synthesis of the third movement, foreseen by the canon and dialectic. It is a farewell to the sonata-form that could be followed by a farewell to the dialectic and to the essay-form. As the op. 111 recoils from synthesis, it escapes the biting and incomprehensible dissonances of the Grosse Fuge. Those were compulsive arrhythmias of philosophical notes rejected by violinists of the time, who accused Beethoven of being deaf and incompetent. Listening today to both masterpieces excites even the eyes. They move to unimaginable sonic visions even for the current sound systems, technically adapted to dissonances. Said and Adorno joined together signifies practising the astonishment as a montage between philosophical areas and post-colonial cultures, even among their profoundly diverse stories of life, changed by the exile. Thanks to this diversity, these stories may help us to penetrate and transform the multi-verse of living and radical fetishism: an unreified meta-fetishism. This page has been left blank intentionally Index

actionism 57, 64, 65–6, 68, 73, 74, 76, 78 Anderson, Perry 51–2, 53, 55, 60, 63 Adorno, Theodor W. 15, 42–3, 78–9, anti-Judaism 70–72, 77–8, 80, 81–2, 83 194–6, 197–9, 201–4 anti-Semitism 71, 77, 81, 94, 95, 96, actionism 57, 64, 65–6, 68 99–100 aesthetic theory 3, 33, 35–6, 48, 203–4 antinomies, theoretical 117, 118–19, astonishment 211, 212, 213, 217 120–121, 123, 124, 125–6, 128, austere negativism 60–61, 62, 64 129 Benjamin 205, 206–11, 212 astonished facticity 205, 206, 212, 213, capitalism 3, 10, 11–12, 21–2, 25–7, 217 28, 29, 31, 39, 40, 62–3, 194 astonishment 205, 207, 211, 212–13, critical theory 12–13, 29, 52, 54–5, 214–15, 217–18, 219 63–5, 77 austere negativism 60–61, 62, 63, 64 determinate negation 6–9, 10, 15, autonomy 2, 30–31, 34–5, 137, 171 17–18, 34–5 Dialectic of Enlightenment 20, 33–4, Benhabib, Seyla 151, 164, 165–6 77, 78, 95, 101, 102, 103–7, 109, Benjamin, Walter 3, 88, 90n25, 173, 126, 195, 208 189–90, 205, 208, 212, 213, 214 domination 20, 21–2, 28, 31, 34, 36–7, Adorno 205, 206–11, 212 38, 39–40, 44–5, 132, 198–9 bit information 72, 73, 75, 76, 80, 81, 82, global subject 5, 13–14, 15–16 83 grey (color) 190, 192–3, 201 Marxism 19, 20–23, 24–9, 31–2, 36, capitalism 1, 2, 15, 23, 27, 28, 33, 42, 48, 52, 63 43–4, 45, 46, 49, 160–161 natural law philosophy 135–6, 137, Adorno 3, 10, 11–12, 21–2, 25–7, 28, 143 29, 31, 39, 40, 62–3, 194 natural right philosophy 134–5, 138–9, Habermas 174, 175, 181, 182, 184 140 Hegel 28, 39, 40, 131 philosophy of praxis 125, 126–7 Marx 5, 11–12, 20, 21, 39, 40, 42, Philosophy of Right 137–8, 139 141–2 praxis 33, 35, 41–2, 54–5, 60–61, Marxism 2, 3, 21–2, 28, 34, 130 63–7, 68, 89, 199 Castro-Gómez, Santiago 102, 107–10, 111 rationality 36–7, 39–40, 46, 47–8 coloniality of powers 111–12, 114–15 self-preservation 5, 8, 10–11, 12, 13 color 189, 190, 191, 192–3, 198, 201, 202, student movement 29–30, 42n24, 54–9, 203 62, 64–5, 66, 68, 194–5, 201, 203 concepts 91–2, 93 theory 33, 35, 36, 39, 42, 44–5, 49 constitutional democracy 62n47, 64, 155, totality 44, 47, 48 163–4, 185–6 Adorno’s Grey (Steyerl) 190–191, 194, constitutional reform 183, 184, 186–7, 188 195, 204 consummate negativity 9, 137 aesthetic theory 3, 33, 35–6, 48, 203–4 222 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis context-transcending critique 148, 149, fetishism 205, 206, 209–10, 211, 213, 150–151, 152, 153, 156 215–17, 219 Cooke, Maeve 148 Fordist organization 23–4, 183 critical theorists 1, 15, 18, 133, 145, 146, Frankfurt School 1, 2, 3, 23–4, 34, 54–7, 151, 156, 157, 164, 166–7, 168, 60, 62, 101, 121, 125–8, 174 174 Fraser, Nancy 164, 165, 166–7 critical theory 86, 102, 131–4, 144, 145–6, freedom 2, 16, 17, 48, 131, 135, 136, 137, 147–51, 155–7, 173–4 138–9, 170–171, 172 Adorno 12–13, 29, 52, 54–5, 63–5, 77 Critical Theory 1, 2, 3, 87, 89, 90, 91, Germany 31, 53–4, 57, 62, 95, 134, 175–6, 97, 159, 161–2, 163, 164, 167–9, 186, 196, 200 171n29 student movement 29–30, 42n24, 53–9, critical thinking 64, 75, 76, 89 62, 64–5, 66, 67–8, 194–5, 196–8, 199, 201, 203 Debord, Guy 191–2 global subject 5, 13–14, 15–16, 18 democracy 28–9, 43–4, 46, 183–4, 185–6 Gramsci, Antonio 117, 174 constitutional 62n47, 64, 155, 163–4, grey (color) 192–3, 201 185–6 determinate negation 6–10, 15, 17–18, Habermas, Jürgen 57, 94–5, 101, 105n20, 34–5, 93, 99 162–4, 174–6, 177–82, 186–7 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer capitalism 174, 175, 181, 182, 184 and Adorno) 20, 33–4, 77, 78, 95, constitutional reform 183, 184 101, 102, 103–7, 109, 126, 195, context-transcending critique 149, 153 208 domination 179–80, 181, 182 domination 46–7, 48, 49, 106, 107, 140, Linguistic Turn 151–2 173 solidarity 177, 181, 182, 183, 184–5, Adorno 20, 21–2, 28, 31, 34, 36–7, 38, 186–7 39–40, 44–5, 132, 198–9 Hegel, G.W.F. 6, 36, 40, 88, 92–3, 118, Habermas 179–80, 181, 182 137–8, 140, 192, 193, 200–201 Horkheimer 20, 34 capitalism 28, 39, 40, 131 Marx 21, 24, 38–9 concepts 91–2, 93 Dutschke, Rudi 54, 57, 58, 59, 170, 174, Philosophy of Right 137, 138, 139–40, 197 141, 143, 191 Honneth, Axel 101, 169, 185, 186n39 emancipation 29, 30, 35, 159, 169, context-transcending critique 149, 151 170–171, 172 Critical Theory 164, 167–8, 171n29 enlightenment 102–4, 106, 201 Horkheimer, Max 20, 27, 85, 86, 87, 97, Enlightenment 2, 213 98, 160 equality 104, 170–171, 172, 183 Dialectic of Enlightenment 20, 33–4, estrangement 9, 11–12 77, 78, 95, 101, 102, 103–7, 109, Eurocentrism 112–13 126, 195, 208 Europe 25, 53, 69–70, 71n4, 83, 135, 177 domination 20, 34 anti-Judaism 70–72, 80, 81–2, 83 human rights 173, 183, 184, 187–8 exemplary normativity 155, 156, 157 humanity 11, 13, 14, 47–8 facticity 205, 211, 212, 213, 214, 216–17 immanent critique 107, 111, 113, 116, astonished facticity 205, 206, 212, 213, 147–8, 149, 150, 151, 152, 155, 217 156, 157 Index 223

context-transcending critique 148, 149, music 208–9, 217, 218–19 150–151, 152, 153, 156 myth 102–4, 106, 207, 213 radical contextualist critique 148, 149, 151, 152–3 nationalism 93, 94–5, 96–100, 185 immanent normativity 150, 151, 152, 155, natural law philosophy 135–6, 137, 139, 156 142, 143–4 instrumental rationality 34, 38, 65, 73, 77, natural right philosophy 133, 134–5, 137, 105, 108, 126 138–40, 141, 191 internal criticism 147, 148 negation 6, 18, 34, 38; see also determinate negation Jews 69, 71–2, 77–8 Negt, Oskar 57, 58 anti-Judaism 70–72, 77–8, 80, 81–2, 83 Nietzsche, Friedrich 34, 41, 47–8, 132, 198–9 Kant, Immanuel 2, 13, 16, 123, 143, 149 non-concurrence claim 159–60, 161, natural law philosophy 134, 136 162–3, 164, 166, 168, 169, 172 natural right philosophy 133, 134, 135, normative ambivalence 102, 108, 110, 111, 139, 140 115–16 Krahl, Hans-Jürgen 54–5, 57, 58, 59, 63, normativity 3, 34–5, 150, 151, 152–4, 155, 197, 199 156, 157 Kunkel, Benjamin 74n13, 75–6 Ohnesorg, Benno 53–4, 196–7, 199 Latin America 107–8, 110–111 rationality 107, 108–9, 110, 111 philosophy of praxis 117–19, 121, 129–30 Left movements 74–6 Adorno 125, 126–7 Lenin, V.I. 51 Frankfurt School 125–8 Linguistic Turn 151–2 Lukács 121–5, 129 Lukács, Georg 31, 33n1, 52, 118, 142, 160, Marcuse 125, 127–8, 129 198n29 Marx 119–21, 129, 130 philosophy of praxis 121–5, 129 Piketty, Thomas 73, 74n13 reification 118, 121–5 Philosophy of Right (Hegel) 137, 138, 139–40, 141, 143, 191 Marcuse, Herbert 3, 9–10, 30, 62, 65, 129, political economy 20–21, 73, 86, 129, 159 181, 197 Pollock, Friedrich 20, 27 philosophy of praxis 125, 127–8, 129 positivism 44, 88, 90, 91, 93, 129–30, Marx, Karl 1–2, 6, 20, 21, 25, 30–31, 32, 142–3, 208 37–9, 117, 140–141, 159, 174 practice 86, 160, 161, 162, 168–9, 199 capitalism 5, 11–12, 20, 21, 39, 40, 42, praxis 59–60, 73 141–2 Adorno 33, 35, 41–2, 54–5, 60–61, domination 21, 24, 38–9 63–7, 68, 89, 199 philosophy of praxis 119–21, 129, 130 theory 33, 35, 37, 41–2, 60, 66–7, 79, Marxism 1, 2, 36, 52, 123, 129, 130, 160 89, 99–100 Adorno 19, 20–23, 24–9, 31–2, 36, 48, Pritchard, Elizabeth 6, 7 52, 63 ‘procedural paradigm’ 162–4 capitalism 2, 3, 21–2, 28, 34, 130 proletariat 1, 23, 25–6, 39–40, 43, 120, modernity 101, 102, 103, 104–7, 108, 109, 123–4, 126, 161 110, 112–13 Morandé, Pedro and Parker, Cristián 108, Quijano, Anibal 102, 112–13 109 coloniality of powers 111–12, 114–15 224 Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis

totality 111, 113, 114 social totality 33, 34, 38, 40, 43, 44, 46, 48, 92, 113 radical contextualist critique 148, 149, 151, solidarity 16, 18, 45, 46, 47, 74, 173–4, 152–3 183, 185–7, 188 radical methodological reflexivity 150, 156 Habermas 177, 181, 182, 183, 184–5, rationality 1–2, 34, 41, 45, 46, 47, 49, 102, 186–7 103, 104, 105–7, 118, 122–3, 130 Specter, Matthew 175, 176, 181 Adorno 36–7, 39–40, 46, 47–8 State capitalism 20, 27 instrumental 34, 38, 65, 73, 77, 105, Steyerl, Hito 190–191, 194, 195, 204 108, 126 student movement 29–30, 42n24, 53–9, 62, Latin America 107, 108–9, 110, 111 64–5, 66, 67–8, 194–5, 196–8, 199, rationalization (Weber) 43, 107, 108, 109, 201, 203 122 Reich, Robert 73 theory 85, 87, 88–9 reification 16, 42, 73, 92, 105, 122, 126, Adorno 33, 35, 36, 39, 42, 44–5, 49 129, 207 practice 86, 160, 161, 162, 168–9, 199 Lukács 118, 121–5 praxis 33, 35, 37, 41–2, 60, 66–7, 79, revolution 1, 23, 25–6, 33, 41, 51, 57, 89, 99–100 59–60, 61–3, 119, 169–70, 171 totalitarianism 13–14, 22, 41, 60, 131, 132, rights 132–3, 136, 140–141, 144 142, 174 human rights 173, 183, 184, 187–8 totality 88, 91, 92, 94, 96, 102, 111, 115 Rorty, Richard 74, 75, 149, 152 Adorno 44, 47, 48 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 153–5 Dialectic of Enlightenment 105–6, 109 Quijano 111, 113, 114 Said, E. 218, 219 transcendence 8, 33, 148, 150 SDS (Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund), see student Vaki, Fotini 8 movement Vattimo, Gianni 71, 78 self-preservation 5, 8, 10–12, 13, 34, 44, 45 Vietnam war protests 58, 66, 67 social antagonism 15, 17–18, 28, 29, 41–2, Volk 93, 94 87–8, 98 social movements 25, 41–2, 127, 129, Weber, Max 105 169–70, 171–2, 183 rationalization 43, 107, 108, 109, 122 social research 85–6 workplace democracy 36, 45–6, 182