1. Horkheimer’s critical theory was formulated against the evaporation of the revolutionary hopes that had inspired Lukacs. He sees the economic collapse into world-wide depression, the rise of European Fascism and the failure of the socialist revolutionary parties as crucial moments in the determination of the further trajectory of critical theory. Horkheimer articulates the most radical explanation of the problem confronting radical politics. Already at an early stage he argued in a collection of aphorisms entitled Dawn and Decline Notes 1926-1931 that post-First World War economic and political developments had fractured the unity of the working class and decisively impaired its capacity for revolutionary praxis. This judgement was reinforced by early studies in 1929 conducted by Eric Fromm that revealed the strong authoritarian bias in the typical personality structures of the working class. This diagnosis drastically distinguishes Horkheimer from Lukacs. The latter has understood Marxist theory as the self-consciousness of the proletariat, which he, in turn, identified with the Communist Party. Horkheimer contests precisely this key idea of the unity of theory and praxis.
2. Horkheimer maintains that in the twenties a fundamental
split has emerged in the working class dividing it into two distinct groups:
the employed and the unemployed. The employed have relative security and a real
stake in bourgeois society. They therefore were reluctant to endanger their own
still tenuous position. These workers were organised, educated but lacked the
essential motivation for revolutionary politics. The chronic unemployed, on the
other hand, lived in conditions of utter hopelessness. They had an objective
interest in radical social change but lacked the organization, education and
class consciousness to press their demands with a theoretical understanding of
the fundamental causes of their misery. This split signified a clear divorce
between radical motivation and the capacities and qualities to actualise the
revolution. At the same time, this split also impaired the proletariat’s
ability to resist Fascism.
3. Horkheimer maintains that this sociological division of
the working class is reflected politically in the organisational fragmentation
between the reformist Social Democratic Party and a dogmatic, revolutionary
German Communist Party dedicated to social revolution. The present strategies
of these two parties were blocking the practical unification of the working
class. He was especially critical of the Social Democrats; they represented the
interests of the employed workers, appreciated the complexities of the real
world but had become integrated into bourgeois politics and lost the will to
radical change. In their acquiescence to bourgeois culture, they had abandoned
revolutionary theory. In the early thirties, Horkheimer is more sympathetic to
the Communist Party. They typically won the allegiance of the chronic
unemployed. While they maintained a revolutionary stance, this was based more
on blind conviction and the appeal to canonised texts than by realistic
political analysis. While Horkheimer castigated the Social Democrats for their
acceptance of reified social conditions, he was equally unwilling to condone
the Communist’s dogmatic avoidance of contemporary empirical knowledge. This
left the Communists isolated from the masses and with only restricted influence.
Such unshakable conviction in revolution led to the passive acceptance of a
worsening situation with only a vain hope that deteriorating circumstances
would somehow generate a messianic change. The mutual critique and polemics
between the parties merely divided the proletariat and condemned it to
political impotence.
4. Horkheimer’s prognosis of this impasse was for a long
educational process that would draw the two parts of the working class
together. Naturally, this implies a fundamental change in the meaning and role
of critical theory. It is interesting that Horkheimer concludes the inaugural
lecture but stating that the guiding impulse of the institute would be the
‘inexhaustible will to unswervingly serve the truth’ BP&SS, p.14. It might
seem strange that somebody who was so politically committed should see the task
of the institute in such traditional terms. However, this is misleading.
Horkheimer clearly does not view the quest for truth as requiring merely the
desire for knowledge and academic detachment:
…the truth is advanced because
the human beings who possess it stand by it unbendingly, apply it and carry it
through, act according to it, and bring it to power against resistance…The
process of cognition includes real historical will and action just as much as
it does learning from experience and intellectual comprehension. The latter
cannot progress without the former. BP&SS, p.193
Horkheimer goes on to maintain that critical theory is
neither deeply rooted like totalitarian propaganda nor detached like the
liberal intelligentsia. In this historical context, it must remain independent
in relation to contemporary left politics. Because both existing working class
parties had some justice, only by remaining detached could critical theory hope
to have some influence and effect on both the Communists and the Social
Democrats. Horkheimer’s strategy is to uphold an important role for theory in
conditions of radical split in the workers movement. Horkheimer does not revoke
the Marxian idea of the unity of theory and praxis. However, he also maintained
that there was no pre-established harmony between the two. Critical theory is,
for him, an aspect of the movement to change society. Materialism is not a
doctrine about the ultimate structure of being but a practical theory
principally concerned with changing definite social relations:
In the materialist
conception…The intervention of reason in the processes whereby knowledge and
its object are constituted…does not take place therefore in a purely
intellectual world, but co-incides with the struggle for certain real ways of
life. (Postscript, P245)
But Horkheimer does want to reinterpret the character of
the theory/praxis unity. Rather than Lukacs’ simple identification of the
theory with the historical agents consciousness, he wants to provide theory
with a relative independence; this means that the theory/praxis unity is
reconstituted as a dynamic unity of conflict between party activists, theorists
and the masses. Horkheimer views the task of the critical theoretician to
‘reduce the tension’ between his own insight and that of oppressed humanity’
(CTp.221) but this mediation is not equated with renouncing independence. As he
puts it, “mind is liberal’ but it also cannot cut loose from society.
Horkheimer repudiates the detachment from all classes that is an essential mark
of the intelligentsia and traditionally a sign of its superiority. In crisis
times like those of the late 30’s this formalist understanding of mind was a
distorting indulgence that could not be afforded. Horkheimer asserts that in
such times truth may seek refuge in small groups of admirable men (CT p. 237)
but that such truth can still play a decisive role at critical moments (CT p.
241). Of course, we can say that the 1930’s were a very difficult time for the
leftist intellectual and there were no easy options. Horkheimer had to emigrate
from Germany and only narrowly escaped arrest by the Gestapo. Of the options available, Horkheimer
probably chose the best when one compares his intellectual fate to that of
Lukacs. But of course there were
also costs. The immediate problem that emerges with even this degree of disengagement
from the workers was to distance theory from immediate politics. Horkheimer and
Adorno retreated into philosophy. The insulation of their theory from those it
aspired to communicate with may have been inevitable in the difficult
historical conditions of these years. During the 30’s Horkheimer was clearly
convinced that Marxist theory had been confirmed by developments in bourgeois
society (On the Problem of Truth, p.198), that the conditions for a truly
rational society were already at hand and that, despite certain setbacks in
practice the theorist was entitled to hold obstinately to the basic structure
of the theory (Truth, p.200).
5. For Horkheimer, the need to revise the concept of
critical theory is not confined to his analysis of the divided working class
politics of the early 1930’s. More fundamentally, the crisis in critical theory
is related to a more general crisis of bourgeois culture that he interpreted,
first of all, as a crisis of scientific rationality. For him, science is a
social practice with a social function; it is socially conditioned in its
direction and scope. The object of science, scientific interests as well as
scientific method all change in history. Science is also a real factor in
social change as a productive force but it can also be ideological. However,
this is not to say that evaluation of the social utility of science is the same
as the evaluation of its truth. Although he wants to argue that science is a
historically conditioned activity, he still wants to make a claim for its
truth-value:
…only that theory is true which
can grasp the historical process so deeply that it is possible to develop from
it the closest approximation to the structure and tendency of social life in
the various spheres of culture. It too is no exception to the rule that it is
conditioned like every thought and every intellectual content, but the
circumstance that it corresponds to a specific social class and is tied up with
the horizon and the interests of certain social groups does not in any way
change the fact that it is also valid for the others who deny and suppress its
truth and must nevertheless experience it for themselves. BPSS, p. 194
For
Horkheimer, the crisis of science has two levels (a) The utilisation of
science—the orthodox contradiction between productive forces and relations of
production (b) In respect to truth—there is both a legitimation crisis and an
organisational crisis. Concentrating on the legitimation crisis, he argues
there is a growing scepticism in regard to scientific rationality. This is the
outcome, however, of the internal crisis of science. In this early phase, he
believed that physics had overcome its crisis in the last decades through a
shift from the classical paradigm to relativity theory and indeterminancy. In
regard to the social theory, Horkheimer argues that contemporary scientific
rationality is abstract, ahistorical and individual. Positivism asserts both a
pure facticity—a realm of unambiguous facts and a clear distinction between
facts and norms, facts and values.
Phenomena are viewed in abstraction and the totality of historical
movement, or immanent historical dynamics is methodologically ignored. Science
cannot justify its own procedures and methods. Science does not reflect on the
social problem of its own value choices and research direction. In regard to
social science, Horkheimer maintains that science has lost its social relevance
and philosophical irrationalism has arisen to challenge it. The new metaphysics
from Nietzsche to Heidegger abandons the idea of truth, of saying something true
about reality in favour of viewing all the great philosophical systems of the
past as mere expressions of psychological or cultural needs. Horkheimer’s
position is that both orthodox science and the new metaphysics have completely
justified critiques of one another. The result, however, is the mass suspicion
of contemporary scientific knowledge and a complete fracture and narrowing of
what knowledge and rationality should be.
6. The interpretation of the crisis of the organization of
science is less elaborated but its outlines are fairly clear. (a) Research becomes arbitrarily
specialised in unrelated ways. Each discipline treats its field as a separate
reality and its conceptualisation is completely fetishised without ensuring
that this is well founded (economics, psychology). (b) Research is increasingly
funded and directed by corporate interests, which are largely able to define
the direction of research and the uses made of it.
7. Horkheimer views his own critical theory as a response
to the crisis of contemporary scientific rationality as well as what he refers
to as an existential judgment on the whole bourgeois society. It reveals the
shortcomings of both bourgeois science and the new metaphysics and also allows
some understanding of the cognitive obstacles to working class consciousness,
as at least part of an explanation of its capitulation to contemporary
authoritarian state capitalism. Clearly what is most striking in this analysis
is the topic itself. That Horkheimer offers a critique of bourgeois rationality
already demonstrate a shift from the issues—primarily economic and political
that had formerly occupied Marxists.
Traditionally, Marxists had concentrated on contradictions within the
economic reproduction of bourgeois society and viewed culture merely as a
superstructural phenomenon. But Horkheimer inverts these priorities to focus on
the crisis of science and rationality.
Dialectic
of Enlightenment
1. Although
Horkheimer’s first version of critical theory articulated a new more independent
role for theory itself, mediating between the masses and the party avante guard, this concept could not be
sustained after the victory of Fascism, the collapse of working class
resistance in Europe and in the face of doubts that soon emerged about the character
of the socialist society emerging in the Soviet Union. The posited addressee of
the theory had been defeated, the posited unity of theory and praxis was
broken, and the theory’s reception is now reduced to those few isolated
survivors who, like themselves, had managed to find a way into emigration. We
have already seen that Horkheimer’s version of critical theory shifts the
emphasis to culture and focuses its attack on the crisis of scientific
rationality as a whole. However, despite this emphasis, Horkheimer was still
initially committed to a Marxist theory of historical progress. By the 1940’s
when Horkheimer and his colleagues had to emigrate to the US to save themselves
from Fascism and then began to understand the magnitude of the crimes against
the Jews and other denationalised peoples as well as the horrific destructive
potential of the new atomic weapons, the concept of progress itself will become
the aim of an explicit critical assault. The underlying idea here, it that the
critique of commodity reification which was the object Marxist critical
political economy did not delve sufficiently deeply to capture the real source
of the crisis. In this respect, Horkheimer was influenced by his increasing
closeness to Theodor W Adorno, who, in this respect, had been heavily
influenced by his friend Walter Benjamin. Unfortunately in this course we do
not have the time to consider his or Adorno’s early ideas independently.
However, the Dialectic of Enlightenment,
which Horkheimer and Adorno wrote together, was viewed by both as ‘a single
philosophy’ that expresses both a more critical attitude to the very idea of
historical progress and the need for critical theory to become even more
precious about its own independence.
2. The
Dialectic of Enlightenment was Adorno
and Horkheimer’s response to the historical catastrophe of Fascism and its
accompanying historical reversals. This entails not only developments in Soviet
Russian under Stalin but also the direction of Roosevelt’s New Deal US, where
the new regulative role of state control was combined with the beginning of a
consumer culture as the United States took over from Britain as the greatest
economic power in the world. These developments seemed to foreshadow the
further incorporate the worker into a totally administered society. Whereas
traditionally Marxists had argued for an objective notion of historical
progress, even while they spoke about its uneven or alienated character, Adorno
and Horkheimer now subjected the idea of progress to a fundamental critique. If
the totality of bourgeois society no longer immanently generates those social
forces aspiring to a new social arrangement, then the progressive character
both of the society and of history as a whole is put in question. Furthermore,
the critique of progress is now intimately bound up with an exposure of the
totalitarian tendencies of the modern social form, which appeared to have
attained a new level of complete administration and manipulation.
3. Dialectic of Enlightenment is an
all-encompassing cultural critique that turns its attention to Western
civilisation as a whole. If this civilisation fails to achieve the real social
improvement of which it was objectively capable, then perhaps the fault lies
not merely in its contemporary form but deeper in the very project of
civilisation itself. The idea of Enlightenment as rational progress is declared
a myth with the myth of progress being set against the reality of its own
concrete irrational history. The analysis works through binding together
allegedly antithetical conceptual pair like progress/regress,
enlightenment/myth, reason/barbarism, science/myth to reveal the fault lines
that expose the ideology of progress to the critical truth underlying it.
4. The
central thesis is an analysis and critique of the idea of reason as
enlightenment. Even Lukacs had assumed that the human relation to nature
unfolded in history as an emancipatory dynamic of humanisation and growing
human mastery over nature. In this narrative, reification is a specific but
only temporary configuration of alienation in which the commodity form has
assumed the appearance of an independent and autonomous world of social and
economic relations operating according to its independent laws and values. Yet,
for him, this is a contradictory development insofar as it is also the bearer
of the objective forces in the shape of class struggle that will eliminate the
commodity as the principal form of socio-economic organisation. Horkheimer and
Adorno now broaden the concept of reification into the new concept of
instrumental reason. Commodification plays a crucial role in the
universalisation of domination because it exemplifies a mode of identity
thinking that increasing permeates the whole of bourgeois society. The
disastrous weakness of this thinking is that it works in terms of quantitative
equivalence and thus expunges all marks of quality, difference and
self-reflexivity. However, in this new configuration commodity fetishism is
only one configuration of the much more encompassing process of
instrumentalisation that begins with the original division of labour and the
quest for self-preservation though the mastery of nature. Rather than an index
of the process of historical self-humanisation, instrumental reason exemplifies
the increasing civilisatory need for domination, sublimation and repression. In
other words, the increasing mastery of nature has been gained a the cost of
increasing control of inner nature, the disciplining and self deprivation of
the domination of others; the corollary of a more rationalised nature is the
more sophisticated and complete contemporary shape of societal domination. Our
authors here postulate a clear nexus between the development of civilisatory
rationality and various forms or domination both barbaric and subtle: as
violent as a Gestapo interrogation and as gentle as the latest popular crooner.
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