Book Review: The Dialectical Imagination
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The philosophers of the Frankfurt School practiced a technique called negative dialectics, where concepts are defined as much by what you can’t say about them as what you can. Appropriately, the Frankfurt School has ended up defined by what you can’t say about them.
You can’t say that they invented a new form of left-wing thought called Cultural Marxism. This would be (according to Wikipedia) the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, a “far right anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that misinterprets Western Marxism, especially the Frankfurt School, as being responsible for modern progressive movements, identity politics, and political correctness”. You’re not supposed to dub them a transitional stage between Communism and postmodernism. You’re not allowed to speculate that a lot of the academic humanities, as they’re practiced today, descend from the Frankfurt School’s brand of critical theory. You’re not supposed to think of them as the point where the muscular pro-technology leftism of the early 1900s shattered into the pessimistic degrowth leftism of the present.
Art is long, life is short. Most of us only manage to not do a few things in our limited span on Earth. But the Frankfurt School managed to not invent so many movements - to not be involved in so many of the crucial ideological shifts of the past century - that they caught my attention. Who were these people? What other aspects of our culture might we be unable to say they were involved in? For answers, I turned to the classic history of the group, Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination.
The basics are simple enough: the School was founded in Frankfurt in 1923. It attracted great philosophers like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse. When the Nazis took power in the early 1930s, the mostly-Jewish Frankfurters fled to America, where friendly locals helped them continue their work in affiliation with Columbia University. Mid-century Americans were suckers for sophisticated European intellectuals, and when the rise of fascism and World War II started dominating headlines, the German-Jewish Frankfurters were natural experts to help Americans process the situation. By the end of the war, they were firmly established as thought leaders. Some - including Horkheimer and Adorno - returned to Germany to rebuild its intellectual culture from the ruins; others stayed in America and remained relevant through the 60s and 70s.
But figuring out what the Frankfurters believed is more complicated. Forget about the thin line between universally-acknowledged fact and fascist conspiracy theory. The School itself was famously coy, worrying that if they explained themselves too clearly, people would caricature their beliefs and integrate them into the existing capitalist system. Even when they did speak “clearly”, it was in the sort of German philosophical register where “the negation of the negation” is a totally normal thing to say.
Having only read a single book on them, I will no doubt fall into all the failure modes that they and their successors warned us against. But here are the analogies, intuition pumps, and parables that I found helpful.
Now The Wheels Of Heaven Stop, I Feel The Devil’s Riding Crop
In the early 1900s, most intelligent and compassionate people had at least some communist sympathies.
The capitalism of the day was typically eighty-hour weeks in sweatshops, tightening screws in an assembly line until your joints and back gave out and you were thrown on the street to die. All the money went to some investor from the landed nobility who spent it on more gilding for the reception room of his palace. It didn’t take a radical to notice something was wrong, or to speculate that we could do better.
And the modern arguments in capitalism’s favor - it’s more productive, it leaves us freer - had yet to dominate. Actually, many economists assumed communism would be more productive: you could do rational central planning to allocate each resource to its optimal use, instead of making companies waste all their energy on competition. Marx promised it would be freer, too - you could “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, do literary criticism after dinner”. The Soviet experiment had yet to progress far enough to falsify any of this.
Luckily, Marxist orthodoxy said we didn’t have long to wait. The contradictions of capitalism would build up until there was a sudden >pop< - a paradigm shift, a phase transition - and everything would change. Human nature would do a 180, society would have a revolution, and the promised utopia would arrive.
By the 1930s, people had started to notice that this wasn’t happening. Although capitalism had suffered some crises - World War I, the Great Depression - countries had responded with what the Marxists called state capitalism, a broad term for hybrid systems including New Deal America, Stalinist Russia, and Fascist Italy. Most people seemed to like their own country’s variety of state capitalism. Some Marxists began to worry that maybe Revolution wasn’t inevitable after all.
The proper genre for this realization is cosmic horror. You should imagine how a pious Christian would feel if the Pope told him that, okay, you know how the Bible says that God will defeat Satan during the Last Days, well, turns out Satan’s put in an unexpectedly strong performance, and we might have gotten that part wrong. It was this horror that led fellow-traveler Antonio Gramsci to his famous maxim: “The old world is dead; the new world is not yet born; now is the time of monsters.”
And the monsters were not slow in coming. The rise of Nazism in Germany was vastly worse even than this already-depressing picture. Certainly it didn’t help that many Marxists were being personally persecuted, exiled, or killed (some for being Jewish, others just for being socialist). But beyond that, it suggested that history was doing something worse than simply stopping. It was going off the rails. Instead of real communism, we were getting insane twisted funhouse-mirror versions of communism that kept the Hegelian directionality but seemed to be marching directly towards Hell.
Faced with this parade of disasters, the intellectuals turned heterodox. If Marx had been wrong about the inevitability of Revolution, maybe he had been wrong about other things. And maybe some of those things could provide a clue to how to avert the dark fate our society seemed doomed to.
The Frankfurt School concentrated on one particular tenet of Marxist theory, the relationship between the economic base and the cultural superstructure. According to Marx, most of society is downstream of the era’s pattern of economic relations (eg feudalism, capitalism, etc). This includes legal systems, religions, and politics, but also to some degree cultural artifacts like art, music, religion, architecture, etc. Symphonies weren’t just the expression of timeless aesthetic truths, they might also express something about capitalism. Maybe they were useful in training the habits of mind that made capitalism possible, or maybe they were an overflow bin where things that didn’t make sense under capitalism could bubble up and be harmlessly defused. But this base-superstructure relation covered even deeper things like our consciousness and our very way of being. There was no such thing as human nature full stop, only the sort of human nature that was “natural” in a capitalist (or feudal, etc.) society.
Accordingly, Orthodox Marxism wasn’t too interested in culture. If it was good, fine; if it was bad, then it would change to glorious communist culture after the Revolution. But the Frankfurters argued that the relationship might be bidirectional. Not only was culture downstream of capitalism, but capitalism was, in a sense, downstream of culture. Maybe the gears of History were jammed because something was wrong with the culture. If you could make the culture better, maybe you could unjam them and get the Revolution at last.
Papua New Guinea As Hot New Startup Hub
This was the first of many points where I started to lose the plot. It didn’t seem like they meant something simple, like how if we just made everyone watch Les Miserables enough times they’d develop revolutionary spirit and we’d be back on track. The Frankfurters wanted something much weirder.
Here’s the analogy that finally helped me: primitive hunter-gatherer tribes are famously incapable of participating in capitalism. Forget entrepreneurship, they’re not even good sweatshop laborers. They can’t punch in at 9 AM because they have no concept of time. Once they do show up, they’ll get bored and wander off a few minutes later. If you tell them they have to stay until the end of the workday, they’ll ask why. If you try to pay them a salary, you’ll find that although they might have some concept of money (eg cowrie shells), it’s superficial and inadequate (maybe they can only exchange it within their clan, or on certain festival days, and it’s taboo to spend it on anything outside a small set of goods they don’t want). If you ask them to guard the cash register, they’ll give all the money in it to their cousin, because obviously they have more of a duty to their cousin than to a random businessman like you. Some of them (most famously the Piraha) refuse to believe any assertion that the speaker has not personally witnessed. Some of them may count “one, two, many”.
When colonizers wanted to get these tribes involved in capitalism, they didn’t start by building factories. They started by spreading Christianity, opening schools, and otherwise inculcating them into European culture. It went so-so: sometimes they could make the natives do manual labor, but New Guinea still isn’t the hot new startup hub.
Communism, under this theory, equally requires new habits of mind. Maybe if people had them, it would grease the wheels of history and unjam the system. But how can you know what they are? If you wanted to open a school, what would it teach?
Marxism-Lurianism Will Win
On the surface, communism is a simple and practical philosophy. Some people are hoarding all the stuff. Let’s rise up and take it from them. A+ pitch. But dig deeper, and it becomes much stranger, even mystical.
Communism aims at the free and equal society without oppression or class divisions. What else is like this? What about feminism? The feminists aim for a free and equal society without gender-based oppression or division. An orthodox Marxist might say the feminists’ problem is fully downstream of capitalism: in a populace governed by the repressive logic of capitalist production, men must force women into a subservient role to produce their babies and household goods - but under communism, these divisions would naturally melt away. The superstructure-curious Frankfurter might posit that gender-based oppression is partly downstream of capitalism, but also partly upstream of it. They’re two interlocking forms of oppression; you can unjam the wheels of history by working on either.
But once you start saying things are like other things, where do you stop? Divisions between bourgeois and proletariat, between men and women, between whites and blacks all naturally fit into this framework. But what about the divisions between ego and superego, between man and nature, between reason and emotion, between subject and object? There is, the Frankfurters speculated, a single wound in the world that runs through all of these. The fact that history is jammed and failing to progress to Communism is not entirely unrelated to the fact that you have bad sex that never reaches orgasm. The Communist Revolution and the Alchemical Marriage are the same sort of reconciliation of opposites, maybe literally the same thing.
Joyce channeling Hegel: “All history is moving towards one goal, the manifestation of God”. Marx was a left-Hegelian, which meant he filed the serial numbers off God and called Him “communism”. But all of these seemingly-simple slogans about taking people’s stuff are just epiphenomena of God trying to manifest Himself. And the failure of God to manifest properly is damaging the economy, the psyche - and yes, your sex life.
This is the usual point where I would jokingly call everyone an amateur kabbalist. I can’t do that here, because at least one member of the Frankfurt School, Walter Benjamin, really was an amateur kabbalist (he personally studied with Gershom Scholem!) This makes sense, right? The idea of healing a wounded God, of a Messianic Age that will come as soon as humans develop the concepts to name it correctly. I don’t want to overemphasize this part - even classic Hegel seems at least a little kabbalistic, and Benjamin died in World War II and missed the Frankfurt School’s later discussions. But I found it to be one more place to start in my attempt to figure out what was going on.
If You Seek It, You Are Turning Away From It
Several religions have converged on the same idea of negative theology. The Christians call it via negativa (“negative way”), the Hindus neti neti (“not this, not that”), the Muslims ta’til (“nullifcation”). Adorno described its Jewish formulation as the Bilderverbot (“prohibition on graven images”). It means that God is so far beyond any human concept that any positive attempt to describe Him will necessarily fail; you can only highlight what He is not. “Praise be to Allah. He is such that senses cannot perceive Him, place cannot contain Him, eyes cannot see Him and veils cannot cover Him. He cannot be described through parts, or through limbs and organs, or by an accidental quality or alteration… It cannot be said that He has a limit or extremity, or end or termination… He is not inside things or outside them.”
Some forms of Buddhism take the same approach to enlightenment. This is why Zen doesn’t look like studying the Buddhism textbook until you memorize exactly what enlightenment is. It looks like sitting motionlessly, or getting hit by a stick, or seeing a butterfly land on a leaf, or pondering koans. My favorite:
One afternoon a student said “Roshi, I don’t really understand what’s going on. I mean, we sit in zazen and we gassho to each other and everything, and Felicia got enlightened when the bottom fell out of her water-bucket, and Todd got enlightened when you popped him one with your staff, and people work on koans and get enlightened, but I’ve been doing this for two years now, and the koans don’t make any sense, and I don’t feel enlightened at all! Can you just tell me what’s going on?”
“Well you see,” Roshi replied, “for most people, and especially for most educated people like you and I, what we perceive and experience is heavily mediated, through language and concepts that are deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking and feeling. Our objective here is to induce in ourselves and in each other a psychological state that involves the unmediated experience of the world, because we believe that that state has certain desirable properties. It’s impossible in general to reach that state through any particular form or method, since forms and methods are themselves examples of the mediators that we are trying to avoid. So we employ a variety of ad hoc means, some linguistic like koans and some non-linguistic like zazen, in hopes that for any given student one or more of our methods will, in whatever way, engender the condition of non-mediated experience that is our goal. And since even thinking in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce our undesirable dependency on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this kind of analytical discourse.”
And the student was enlightened.
This is also how the Frankfurt School thinks about God Communism.
I’ve long complained that communists refuse to specify the details of how a communist society will work, or why it would be good. Adorno thought of this as a principled injunction, like the Jewish prohibition on graven images. We don’t have the appropriate concepts to describe communism, any more than hunter-gatherers have concepts to describe capitalism. If a hunter-gatherer philosopher tried to speculate about capitalism, then even directionally-correct thoughts like “We’ll all be rich” would get diverted along paths like “We’ll all have more of the cowrie shells we use as money” and then to something silly like “the secret of capitalism is that we’ve got to dive deeper in the ocean to get more cowrie shells”.
The closest real-world equivalent to primitive tribes trying to invent capitalism from first principles is the cargo cult. The tribes knew that the thing they liked (US planes bringing them consumer goods) involved runways, signals, and wings. So they build fake runways in the jungle and had priests dressed like airport staff wave signals to the empty sky. I think this is basically how the Frankfurt School thought of Lenin. He hadn’t Done The Work to get the incommensurable new concepts that Communism would require, so he just sort of gestured at Communist-sounding things - collective farms are involved somewhere, right? It went about how you would expect.
What would you do if you were a primitive tribe who wanted to really, genuinely, invent capitalism? First, stop thinking about airplanes and consumer goods at all. Second . . . hmmmm. Maybe you would live life attentively, so that you could see places where new institutions like “market exchange” and “the clock” might be valuable. Maybe you would give yourself a high mutation rate, refusing to keep doing things a certain way because it’s “tradition” or “how we always did it”. And maybe you would challenge existing institutions like chiefs and shamans, on the grounds that you’re pretty sure capitalism wouldn’t have anything like these, and whatever you replace them with might be slightly closer to capitalism in some way that’s helpful.
This is more or less the Frankfurt School’s prescription for us too.
The Structure Of Unscientific Revolutions
I’ve used a lot of mysticism and Zen analogies here, but the other one that really resonated for me was Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions on paradigm shifts in science.
Most science is normal science. Scientists perform experiments, gather facts, buttress their ways of understanding the world. We know there are 118 elements, but maybe someone will discover a 119th. We know of many antibiotics, but we can always use more. We’re not really sure what ball lightning is, but probably it will turn out to be something something plasma.
But occasionally, science undergoes paradigm shifts, where we change not just our facts, but the entire preconscious mental structure that we fit facts into. In the old days, chemists believed that substances could change mass as easily as they changed color. It was only after we developed atomic theory, conservation of mass, and modern chemistry and physics that we realized that color change was natural and boring, but apparent changes of mass had to involve losing atoms into the air (or taking extra atoms from the air). Geocentrism → heliocentrism, Newton → Einstein - these shifts changed not only what we knew about the world, but what we cared about, what kinds of categories we used, and what scientists even thought of themselves as doing.
You can’t (stressed Kuhn) just sit down and develop the next paradigm. Paradigm shifts come from finding irregularities, inelegances, and contradictions in the previous paradigm. At the same time, good work is clearing up what would otherwise be problems with the new paradigm (for a long time, heliocentrism was thought implausible because it would require the fixed stars to be unfathomably far away; eventually we got other reasons to think this and resigned ourselves to the fact). Finally - sometimes by changing minds, more often funeral by funeral - there’s a >pop< and a phase transition, and we go from one way of looking at the universe to a different, incommensurable one.
The Frankfurters wanted a Kuhnian paradigm shift in human affairs, where all our categories would snap into a different pattern. They thought the only way to get there was the “normal science” of gradually noticing and highlighting the contradictions in existing society, until the new paradigm revealed itself. If you tried to go any faster than that, you would get cargo cults and Lenin.
But Why Art Criticism?
Given all this, why did the Frankfurt School focus on art criticism and eventually go down in history (incorrectly! you’re not allowed to say it!) as the “Cultural Marxists”?
In the normal Hegelian dialectic, thesis + antithesis = synthesis. A period of history encounters its own contradictions, tension builds, it finally snaps into something newer and better that embodies all the contradictions productively, and we’re one step closer to manifesting God at the end of history.
The Frankfurters’ “negative dialectic” adds their theory of negative theology. Thesis does merge with antithesis into synthesis, but the synthesis is only an approximate solution. There is a certain portion of thesis and antithesis, called the residual, which the synthesis fails to capture. Of course, you must treat this as mystically as possible. The residual is the orbit of Mercury that can’t be explained within the current scientific paradigm, and the Seeing Like A State style failure in technocratic schemes, and the repressed material in the Freudian unconscious, and the suffering of the voiceless.
For the Frankfurters, and especially Adorno, this was the “solution” to the challenge of negative theology. You couldn’t specify God-Communism, the ultimate synthesis that would include all good things and no bad ones. But you could notice the hidden failures of the existing system, and then you would have learned something interesting about God-Communism - it’s the type of thing which could resolve these failures. Someone in the primitive tribe notices that their rain dances don’t work as advertised, and now they’re only ninety-nine steps away from inventing science. Or they notice that raiding enemy villages and torturing their captives to death seems a little harsh, and now they’re only ninety-nine steps away from inventing hedonic utilitarianism. Therefore, Critical Theory, emphasis on the critical. Your job is not to solve problems (which you can’t do, and which would make you a cargo cultist). It’s to point out ways that the existing order sucks.
And therefore, art criticism. For Adorno, the purpose of art is to highlight the residual. It is to be slightly eerie, to point out flaws in the schemas the viewer uses to interpret the world.
Does this mean that all art should be left-wing propaganda?
A more sympathetic interpretation: suppose someone starts with a stereotyped concept, like that all lawyers are useless slimeballs. Then they read a novel about the life of a lawyer, in detail, with all of its ups and downs. Although it doesn’t necessarily prove their stereotype to be directionally wrong, they at least realize that reality is much richer and more interesting than they imagined. Their synthesis has been proven incomplete.
But when you read the comments of actual Frankfurters, they’re rarely this straightforward, and sometimes they do sound like a demand for all art to be left-wing propaganda.
“A successful work, according to immanent criticism, is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.” In other words, until social contradictions were reconciled in reality, the utopian harmony of art must always maintain an element of protest. “Art,” Adorno wrote, “and so-called classical art no less than its more anarchical expressions, always was, and is, a force of protest of the humane against the pressure of domineering institutions, religious and otherwise, no less than it reflects their objective substance.” In short, the aesthetic sphere was inevitably political as well.
The Frankfurters’ saving grace was that they were much too weird and obscurantist to be satisfied with normal, comprehensible left-wing propaganda. Instead they wanted things that symbolized the Left in incomprehensible kabbalistic ways. For example, here’s what the book has to say on Adorno’s criticism of the Russian composer Stravinsky:
Stravinsky represented an antipsychological, neoclassical “objectivism”, which ignored the alienation of contradictions of modern society and returned to prebourgeois forms such as the dance. Unlike the romantics, who used the past as a negation of the present, the objectivists belonged with the purveyors of volkisch culture, who undialectically adopted old forms to current needs. Although the mediating connection was difficult to illustrate satisfactorily, Adorno went so far as to suggest that objectivism was in a sense the correlate of fascism. Its use of neoprimitive rhythms corresponded to the shocks of unintegrated experience fostered by fascist society. The irrationality of the objectivists’ principle of composition - the composer’s “taste” rather than the immanent dialectic of the music was decisive - suggested the arbitrary control of the fascist Fuhrer.
Adorno’s least favorite style of music was jazz. This scandalizes his modern leftist disciples, who worry he must have made some sort of catastrophic error to dislike something so closely associated with black people. But he was taking no prisoners:
"I remember clearly," Adorno admitted later, "that I was horrified when I read the word 'jazz' for the first time. It is plausible that [my negative association] came from the German word Hatz (a pack of hounds), which evoked bloodhounds chasing after something slower."
Whatever the initial verbal association, jazz remained for Adorno a source of continued horror. He began his article by emphatically rejecting any kind of purely aesthetic analysis of jazz in favor of psychosocial critique. Here the verdict was uncompromisingly unfavorable. Jazz, he wrote, "does not transcend alienation, it strengthens it. Jazz is commodity in the strictest sense."
All of jazz's claims to express liberation Adorno scornfully rejected. Its primary social function, he contended, was to lessen the distance between the alienated individual and his affirmative culture, but in the repressive manner of volkisch ideology. It thus served to reverse what Brecht had called the Verfremdungseffekt (estrangement effect) of true art in the modern era. At the same time, jazz gave a false sense of returning to nature, whereas in fact it was totally a product of social artifice. Furthermore, jazz was pseudo-democratic in its substitution of collective for individual fantasies. It was likewise pseudoindividualistic, all alleged improvisation being repetitions of certain basic forms. The "hot" varieties of jazz represented only an illusory sexual emancipation. If anything, the sexual message of jazz was castration, combining the promise of liberation with its ascetic denial. Moreover, its ideological function was confirmed in the myth of its Negro origins. In fact, Adorno argued, "the skin of the Negro as well as the silver of the saxophone was a coloristic effect." If the Negro contributed anything to jazz, it was less his rebellious reaction to slavery than his half-resentful, half-compliant submission to it. In a later essay on the same subject, Adorno made the point even clearer: "However little doubt there can be regarding the African elements in jazz, it is no less certain that everything unruly in it was from the very beginning integrated into a strict scheme, that its rebellious gestures are accompanied by the tendency to blind obeisance, much like the sado-masochistic type described by analytic psychology."
He just keeps going:
From a purely musical point of view, jazz, Adorno argued, was also completely bankrupt. Its beat and syncopation were derived from the military march, which suggested its implicit relation to authoritarianism, despite its being banned in Germany. Cool jazz was similar to the musical impressionism of Debussy and Delius, but watered down and conventionalized. Its subjective element was derived from salon music, but it had long since lost any spontaneity. In fact, any attempts to reintroduce elements of true spontaneity were quickly absorbed into its reified system. "The pseudo-vocalization of jazz," Adorno wrote in yet another treatment of the subject, "corresponds to the elimination of the piano, the 'private' middle-class instrument in the era of the phonograph and radio." The piano, we scarcely need to add, was Adorno's own instrument and his bias in its favor obvious.
More significant still, jazz tended to spatialize rather than temporalize musical movement. Here Adorno was pointing to one of the key characteristics of mass culture as the Institut understood it: the substitution of mythic repetition for historical development. "In jazz, one substitutes the immobility of an ever-identical movement for time." The decline of temporality was connected implicitly with the liquidation of the autonomous individual.
The Dialectical Imagination contorts itself to rescue Adorno - maybe he heard the wrong kind of jazz? Maybe he only heard popular, capitalist jazz, and that was how he could make such an uncharacteristic mistake? But to me the whole thing seems so crazy (really? jazz is about the liquidation of the autonomous individual?) that it hardly seems surprising if the crazy thing might be in a direction that later becomes unpopular for other reasons.
The best I can do in understanding this part is - let’s say you see a piece of modern art. It does unusual things with color that challenge your normal paradigm of how color works. You think “Ah, I suppose my previous paradigm of color was subtly flawed. And since everything is secretly the same thing, that means the paradigm underlying Society could also be subtly flawed. I should start a communist revolution.” That’s good.
But if you see an insipid Disney movie with a happy ending (what Adorno would have called part of “the culture industry”), then you might think “Cinderella got her prince, which means everything was fine in the end. And since everything is secretly the same thing, that means society is also fine, and there’s no need to start a communist revolution.” Problematic!
In Partial, Grudging Praise Of Herbert Marcuse
While Adorno, Horkheimer, etc were doing insane obscurantist art criticism, Herbert Marcuse was sitting around thinking “Wait, I thought we were supposed to be Communists here. I never got the message that we stopped being Communists. Let’s just have a normal, object-level Communist revolution.” He even (shock! horror!) wrote books describing how communism might work in real life. This makes him a sort of Rosetta Stone for what a more straightforward Frankfurtism might have looked like.
Marcuse stayed focused on the question of why history hadn’t progressed towards communism. Suppose that productivity dectupled from 1850 to 1950. People could have chosen to take those gains by only working 1/10th as hard. If you only need 1/10th as much work, you can probably give most jobs to people who genuinely enjoy them, and the remainder can be a rare period of national service rather than a soul-draining lifetime career. This seems like a good start for communism.
Instead, everyone kept working themselves to the bone - humiliating themselves in jobs they hated, coming home too exhausted to pursue hobbies or raise a family - but “living standards” (as measured in some capitalist way) increased 10x. This seemed so unlikely to be anyone’s real preference that Marcuse suspected a conspiracy. Capitalists invented new desires, like fancy vanilla lattes and Disneyworld vacations, then inflicted them upon the populace through advertising campaigns. Instead of accepting a four-hour work week, you go into the office on weekends so you don’t fall behind the Joneses on the all-important total-number-of-cruises-taken metric. And even if an individual sees through the ruse, society is so centered around this ethos that it’s hard for him to personally defect (eg there aren’t many high-powered jobs that let you work four hours a week, and if you got a low-powered job, the whole culture would unite to call you a loser). If Critical Theory is supposed to notice and call out the contradictions of society, then the contradiction between ever-increasing productivity, stable work week length, and stable happiness would make a good start.
So is Marcuse’s vision of communism a world where everyone only works 10% as much, wisely distributed so that people mostly do jobs they enjoy? That was a big part of it, but he couldn’t resist adding a little insane mysticism. According to Marcuse, in order to spend their lives working at jobs they hated, capitalist subjects had to learn to exercise willpower, eg dominate their own bodies. On a Freudian level, this domination corresponded to the domination of the genitals over the rest of the body, and to the reconceptualization of eroticism as a purely sexual and genital-based phenomenon. After capitalism fell, the genital focus of sex would fall with it, in favor of a “polymorphous perversity of the body” where eroticism inhered in every activity, especially work. So under communism, not only would people who loved gardening get to garden all day, but they would be having constant gardening-related sexual pleasure while they do so. Or whatever you called the much better version of sexual pleasure that people would get under communism.
Again, least weird Frankfurt School member.
Pessimism Of The Intellect, Pessimism Of The Will
We now have the following litany of complaints against capitalism: poverty, overwork, bad concepts, bad art, ruins your sex life, probably some others I forgot. But the Frankfurt School went further. They insisted that capitalism was in the process of becoming something even more sinister. It might have dropped the sweatshops and jackboots (at least in the First World). But in exchange, it - and especially its mass media and “culture industry” arms - was subtly turning everything into meaningless parodies of themselves, threatening the very existence of human value.
For example, on language:
The greatest failing of the Enlightenment mentality was not its inability to create social conditions in which name and thing might be legitimately united, but rather its systematic elimination of negation from language…Language thus became, to use Marcuse’s later term, one-dimensional. Incapable of expressing negation, it could no longer voice the protest of the oppressed. Instead of revealing meanings, speech had become nothing more than a tool of the dominant forces in society.
On individuality:
It might be argued that the Frankfurt School’s most pressing fear in the postwar era was [that] the existence of genuine individuality was declining at an alarming rate . . . The bourgeois subject was free and unfree at the same time. [But] in the forced identity of mass men with the social totality, there was no freedom at all … What was left in its place was a cruel parody of the dream of positive freedom. The Enlightenment, which had sought to liberate man, had ironically served to enslave him with far more effective means than ever before. Without a clear mandate for action, the only course open to those who could still escape the numbing power of the culture industry was to preserve and cultivate the vestiges of negation that still remained.
On the social sciences:
Adorno argued that sociology must no longer be considered a cultural science, because the world, dominated as it was by reification, could scarcely be understood as meaningful. “The much-abused inhumanity of empirical methods,” he told his audience, “is always more human than the humanization of the inhuman.”
On the family:
As Horkheimer argued in an essay written in 1949, the more the economic and social functions of the family were liquidated, the more desperately it stressed its outmoded, conventional forms. Even the mother, whose warmth and protectiveness had once served as a buffer against the arbitrary harshness of the patriarchal world . . . was no longer capable of functioning in the same way. “The ‘Mom’, Horkheimer wrote, “is the death mask of the mother.”
Many of these share a concern with “instrumental reason”, the sort of reason useful in technology and economics that lets you figure out what is most efficient. The Frankfurters thought modern society was so good at this (understandably, since instrumental reason produces techno-economic prosperity) that it had lost the ability to employ “substantive reason”, the sort of reason that lets you figure out what is truly valuable. Mystically, our domination of nature has led to a domination of ourselves, where we are incapable of relating to our own lives except as tools to be employed.
So what is substantive reason? What should we be aiming for? Like some other philosophers, the Frankfurters seem more comfortable with attacking others for lacking a unified morality than with developing a unified morality themselves. But their Hegelian commitment lets them partially sidestep this objection: the Good is the thing God is trying to manifest as: the end-state of history freed from all contradictions.
Does this really rejustify substantive reason and save us from our dystopian focus on technical rationality? Here I come to the ultimate blocker I have with all Frankfurt School thought: the central point of all their criticism is that modern society is corrupt and barbaric for trying to unambitiously implement its little political reforms and improve GDP one percent, instead of trying to manifest God through History. But why should we believe that manifesting God through History is a real thing? Hegel only gives a nice story about how some historical periods seem to have embodied certain forms of intellectual progress; Marx only adds some bad economics and failed predictions. If you take away the belief that history can phase transition into a utopia utterly different from and superior to modern life, then trying to improve things normally through human reason and human effort seems like the way to go. In this sense, the Frankfurt School feels like the exact opposite of preaching to the choir. If a preacher tells the choir that they need to prioritize God over their career and family, all nice and well; if he says the same to an audience of inveterate atheists, he’s missing a step, and would do well to replace himself with a missionary. But the Frankfurters seemed interested in every part of the logical chain except justifying dialectical mysticism to an America which clearly did not believe in it.
The Frankfurt School would have predicted my confusion. As a subject of late capitalism, I am so stuck in its concepts that I fail to understand that a better world is possible. When I hear “language”, I think of the weak, impoverished parody of language that I and all my friends use, totally unaware that I am already communicating in a Newspeak that has been robbed of its true representational power.
Some of the School’s work on mass media and the decline of the human condition had obvious similarities with modern concerns about how social media is stealing our souls - instead of being able to truly enjoy things, we process them for a gallery of Instagram observers; instead of going out and experiencing the world, or even reading about it, we get it in bite-sized pieces from TikTok influencers. But the Frankfurters were saying the same thing about mass media when mass media meant the radio (even TVs had yet to take off during most of this period). Does this discredit the whole narrative, in the sense that everyone always thinks the latest form of media is destroying the human soul? Or, in the spirit of this post, should we treat the different eras as independent confirmation of the same downward spiral? Has the human soul been deteriorating longer and more thoroughly than we can possibly imagine? Even if a modern teenager broke out of prison of TikTok and Instagram and regained the lifestyle of their grandparents, would that still be a pale shadow of true humanity? Would they have five or ten further iterations left to go before they were anywhere normal and healthy?
Here I think back to the Frankfurt School’s origins. The intellectual scene of interwar Central Europe seemed like another, better world. You would wake up in your bedroom in your beautiful Art Nouveau villa. Leisurely eat a Sachertorte at the cafe while perusing a Thomas Mann novel. Debate the meaning of language with Wittgenstein. Get analyzed by Carl Jung. Write a long letter in flowery cursive to your father Baruch saying that for the last time, you couldn’t take over the family wine business, you were doing important intellectual work elucidating how the bourgeois order suppressed the negation of the negation, and he must send over your monthly allowance of 1,000 German marks post haste, before leaving to attend a Mahler symphony at the Staatsoper in the evening. Looking back at these people - all of whom spoke ten languages, played five instruments, and had read more books by age twenty than I will get to in my entire life - they seem like a superior species.
If, upon having their world destroyed and accepting exile in America, they pronounced the people they found there to be a inferior species - in the least-racist, most Communist language possible - were they remarking on this same difference from the opposite perspective? If so, do we have any reason to trust their diagnosis of what was lost? If we stopped listening to radio, and maybe made a conlang that expressed negation effectively again, could we get Art Nouveau back? Would we be able to have good Sachertortes in America?
So, Did The Frankfurt School Cause Everything You Hate, And Should You Blame The Jews?
We opened with Wikipedia’s diagnosis that you shouldn’t use the phrase “cultural Marxism”, and especially shouldn’t blame it on the Frankfurt School. Has our extra knowledge given us any new insight into the validity of this commandment?
The usual Cultural Marxist story is that radical intellectuals invented the idea of the long march through the institutions: taking over colleges, journalism, and mass culture, and leveraging them for more communist propaganda. Marcuse can fairly be accused of supporting this (not inventing it!), but it was after his Frankfurt School days. The orthodox Frankfurters had no more interest in taking over institutions than in taking over anything else. They just wanted to do weird mystical art criticism:
The Frankfurt School increasingly treated any attempt to realize the promises of philosophy as instrumentalization. In an aphorism on propaganda, Horkheimer and Adorno excoriated the instrumental use of philosophy and language to bring about social change…”Is activism, then, especially political activism, the sole means of fulfillment, as just defined? I hesitate to say so. The age needs no added stimulus to action. Philosophy must not be turned into propaganda, even for the best possible purpose.” As a result, programmatic advice for methods to change society was not very evident in any of the Frankfurt School’s work.
The reason some people accuse the Frankfurt School of this is that Marcuse, previously a famous Frankfurt School member, was among the strategy’s high-profile adherents. But the reason that other people so vociferously defend the School against this accusation is that it diametrically misrepresents what made the Frankfurt School special among Marxists - their belief that you shouldn’t be trying to immediately change society, you should be producing weird mystical art criticism and hoping that it makes society snap into a new polymorph of its own accord.
But it would be an exaggeration to call the Frankfurt School sterile and unrelated to later leftist movements. Their weird mystical art criticism was a forerunner of Derrida’s deconstruction and the whole postmodernist movement. The Frankfurters themselves weren’t postmodernists. They thought there was something like an objective good: that which unjammed the wheels of history and manifested God correctly. But you can see how their negative dialectics, wielded by less careful hands, could degenerate into postmodernist meaninglessness.
Even beyond that, there seems to be a Frankfurt “vibe” across modern progressivism in its glorification of criticism and protest for their own sake. Leftists may criticize police while having little plan for an alternative law enforcement system, or reflexively thwart new development even when it seemingly serves their goals, or protest global warming while opposing any actual plan that would stop global warming because it doesn’t also “end capitalism”. All of this would make perfect sense to the Frankfurt School: the goal isn’t to immediately replace bad capitalist institutions with better communism-informed institutions, it’s to kick the system as hard as you can and see if you can restart History.
In its most degenerate form, Frankfurtism decays into slacktivism. Too greedy to donate to the poor? It’s fine, that would just stabilize the existing system. Too scared to start a violent protest? It’s fine, any revolt within the current paradigm would merely be a cargo cult. The actually useful thing to do is write weird mystical art criticism. Or if you’re not an IQ 200 interwar Central European Jew and weird/mystical isn’t your style, maybe you can write on Tumblr about how someone’s Harry Potter fanfic is problematic.
This would be a devastating criticism of the Frankfurt School if they hadn’t said, again and again, that they expected their work to be misinterpreted and misused. They had hoped that burying it in fifty layers of mystical obscurantism would protect them. Maybe they should have gone for fifty-one.
Does this interpretation founder on the fact that most modern leftists don’t know about this? The average fanfic-criticizer doesn’t understand negative dialectics and the premature end of history, do they? Maybe they do - lots of leftists are really into “theory”. My brain is already filled with enough analytic philosophy that I find the Continent hard to navigate, but maybe someone who learned it as their native philosophical dialect can understand these ideas much more easily than I could manage. Or maybe understanding isn’t necessary. Some habits are sticky - we still say “God bless you” long after having forgotten that people once believed the post-sneeze vacuum could let demons enter the body. Maybe postmodernist academics remember enough of the theory to teach their students the disposition even without the details, and the disposition is all they need.
In conclusion, the Frankfurt School probably did not single-handedly cause everything you hate. As for whether you should blame the Jews, I think it’s 50-50. It was the Frankfurters who gave the Gentiles the kabbalah, even though the whole Jewish corpus is laced with warnings never to do that. But it was the Gentiles who accepted it. No going back now; may the Messiah come speedily and in our days.
