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eory from the ruins

The Frankfurt school argued that reason is
dangerous, mass culture deadening, and the
Enlightenment a disaster. Were they right?
Stuart Walton

One wants to break free of the past, eodor Adorno, one of the Frankfurt Schools
leading luminaries, wrote in an essay <http://www.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-
library/Adorno_MeaningOfWorking rough.pdf> in 1959. Rightly, because nothing
at all can live in its shadow, and because there will be no end to the terror as long as
guilt and violence are repaid with guilt and violence; wrongly, because the past that

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one would like to evade is still very much alive. In an age when the meanings of the
past and the functions they are called upon to serve are so hotly contested, Adornos
insight reminds us, in a typically double-edged way, that humanity is both composed
of and trapped inside its history. is view of history underpinned the work of the
boldest and bravest philosophers of the past century: the rst generation of the
Frankfurt School. eir arguments lacked for nothing in theoretical aspiration, and
have scarcely begun to be assimilated, even today.

A key point of disputation for this generation of thinkers arose from the notion that
society, in its progress from barbarism to civilisation according to the narrative of the
European Enlightenment, had been increasingly founded on the principle of reason.
Where mythology once held sway, the rationalistic sciences now reigned supreme.
Among the Frankfurt Schools most provocative contentions was that Western
civilisation had unwittingly executed a reversal of this narrative. e heroic phase of
the 18th-century Enlightenment purported to have freed humankind of antique
superstition and the demons of the irrational, but the horrors of the 20th century gave
the lie to that triumphalism. Far from humane liberation, 20th-century Europeans had
plunged into decades of savage barbarism. Why? e Frankfurt School theorists
argued that universal rationality had been raised to the status of an idol. At the heart
of this was what they called instrumental reason, the mechanism by which
everything in human aairs was ground up.

When reason enabled human beings to interpret the natural world around them in
ways that ceased to frighten them, it was a liberating faculty of the mind. However, in
the Frankfurt account, its fatal aw was that it depended on domination, on
subjecting the external world to the processes of abstract thought. Eventually, by a
gradual process of trial and error, everything in the phenomenal world would be
explained by scientic investigation, which would lay bare the previously hidden rules
and principles by which it operated, and which could be demonstrated anew any
number of times. e rationalising faculty had thereby become, according to the
Frankfurt philosophers, a tyrannical process, through which all human experience of
the world would be subjected to innitely repeatable rational explanation; a process
in which reason had turned from being liberating to being the instrumental means of
categorising and classifying an innitely various reality.

Culture itself was subject to a kind of factory production in the cinema and recording
industries. e Frankfurt theorists maintained a deep distrust of what passed as
popular culture, which neither enlightened nor truly entertained the mass of society,
but only kept people in a state of permanently unsatiated demand for the dross with
which they were going to be fed anyway. And driving the whole coruscating analysis

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was a visceral commitment to the Marxist theme of the presentness of the past.
History was not just something that happened yesterday, but a dynamic force that
remained active in the world of today, which was its material product and its
consequence. By contrast, the attitude of instrumental reason produced only a
version of the past that ascended towards the triumph of the enlightened and
democratic societies of the present day.

S ince these ideas were rst elaborated, they have been widely rejected or
misunderstood. Postmodernism, which refuses all historical grand narratives, has
done its best to overlook what are some of the grandest narratives that Western
philosophy ever produced. Despite this, these polemical theories remain
indispensable in the present globalised age, when the dilemmas and malaises that
were once specic to Western societies have expanded to encompass almost the
whole globe. As a new era of irrationalism dawns on humankind, with corruption and
mendacity becoming a more or less openly avowed modus operandi of all shades of
government, the Frankfurt analysis urges itself upon us once more.

More than any other intellectual venture of the 20th century, the scholarly foundation
established in 1923 in Frankfurt as the Institute for Social Research attained true
institutional status. While other inuential movements in philosophy and cultural
theory coalesced around a nucleus of prominent writers and thinkers, they tended to
be transitory intellectual fashions, as in the case of the passing New York engagement
with continental theory. By contrast, the Frankfurt School, as it became known after
the Second World War, has endured for a full three generations because its ideas, so
vastly ambitious in their reach, keep taking on new signicance in changing
circumstances.

Established by private sponsorship in the wake of the failed revolution in Germany

that followed the countrys defeat in 1918, the Institute was rst and foremost an
educational enterprise. In accord with its radical Left-wing political orientation, it was
to have been called the Institute of Marxism, but the name was changed in the
unstable political climate of the Weimar Republic so as not to appear gratuitously
provocative. Conceived as an academic foundation, it would have a permanent sta
under a central directorship, research students and bespoke premises, and was
loosely aliated to the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. It did not
emerge from within a pre-existing educational institution, however, but was from its
inception an autonomous entity. It was, as such, probably the last school, in the strict
sense of the term, in the Western philosophical tradition. ere has been no other
since that has so decisively coalesced around a central body of thought, and a
sustained critical methodology.

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Working people were being recruited to the opposite of

their own liberation

Its principal theoreticians a convocation of predominantly Jewish Leftists from well-

to-do bourgeois backgrounds that encompassed Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert
Marcuse, Max Horkheimer and Jrgen Habermas produced a body of work of vast
interdisciplinary range, embracing philosophy, sociology, social psychology, politics,
economics and cultural theory, much of which is still consulted today. e Institutes
rst duty was the critical appraisal of existing social reality, and its earliest imperative
was to understand why, if the standard Marxist historical prognosis was to be
credited, the western European working classes had not emulated their Russian
counterparts in overthrowing capitalism in the wake of the Great War, when the old
European empires came catastrophically to blows.

Instead of proletarian revolution in the West, what appeared was a fresh consolidation
of economic power in the hands of old and new capitalist forces. e continent-wide
depression that followed the Wall Street crash of 1929 had been a major destabilising
force, but the reign of capital continued unchecked, and against a background of
privation and unemployment, sinister new political forces were rallying. Working
people were being recruited to the opposite of their own liberation, in the form of
mass nationalist movements that would culminate in fascist dictatorships in Italy,
Germany, Austria and Spain and then in a new, more terrible global conict.

e Frankfurt Schools own story was tragically aected by the spectre of fascism. Not
only did these thinkers diagnose the destructive forces at work in the European
societies around them, but they exemplied them in their own lives. Closed down
during the rst year of Nazi rule in Germany in 1933, the Institutes members were
forbidden to teach, and were shortly driven into exile. e diaspora rst ed to neutral
Switzerland, where an attempt was made to re-establish the Institute in Geneva.
Adorno went to Oxford University, where he undertook four years of doctoral
research at Merton College. Eventually, the Institute would nd a collective refuge in
the United States, rst in New York and then, from the beginning of the 1940s, in
California, in the midst of a community of deracinated European exiles.

T he one notable exception was Walter Benjamin, who had been living in indigent
isolation in Paris since Germany had succumbed to the Nazis. When Hitlers
forces rolled into France in 1940, Benjamin ed southwards ahead of the advancing
occupation, until even sheltering in Provence became fraught with peril. With a small
band of refugees, he undertook an arduous crossing of the Pyrenees on foot, hoping
to be granted safe passage through Spain and Portugal, and then sail from Lisbon to
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the American refuge that his colleagues had managed to secure for him. On their
arrival in the Catalan harbour town of Portbou, the fugitive group learned that
Francos Spain had closed its northern border, and that they would likely be returned
the next morning to occupied France, and thence to a German concentration camp.
Benjamin apparently killed himself in a hotel room with an overdose of morphine,
although some believe he was assassinated by local agents of the Soviet secret service,
the NKVD.

e Frankfurt Schools residency in the US was a matter of uneasy accommodation.

ey owed the country a debt of gratitude for their survival, but they diagnosed
American society with every ill that aicted the democratic world in magnied form.
eir most widely disseminated theory appeared in a book published in German in
1947, co-authored by Adorno and Horkheimer, named Dialectic of Enlightenment. In it,
they attempt nothing less than a new history of Western development by overturning
the standard narrative of a gradual progress from the benighted mythical beliefs of
primeval times to the dawn of rationality in the early modern era, culminating in the
advance of freethinking and the scientic breakthroughs of the age of Enlightenment.
To the authors, this linear narrative from darkness to light overlooked the evident fact
that, in the allegedly enlightened 20th century, humanity had succumbed to barbarity.

In the most general sense of progressive thought, state the opening words, the
Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating people from fear and establishing their
sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant. e
explanation for this, according to the authors, is that the Western Enlightenment did
not, after all, represent the unshackling of the human mind from mythical thought-
forms. It had only converted the old myths into a new one called rationality. While the
power of reasoned judgment was in one sense the agent by which superstitious
beliefs were dismantled, it was then set up as a rigidly unquestionable authority in
itself what the authors termed instrumental reason. When rationalism became an
autonomous force in human aairs, in which the coldness of scientic procedures,
deductive logic and the reign of factuality overcame natural human impulses, the
stage was set for what critical theory calls reication: the transformation of living
entities and processes into inert objects or things.

Although their consumption patterns in the mass are vital,

as individuals, consumers count for nothing

Dialectic of Enlightenment is not an argument for irrationalism. What it seeks to show

is that instrumental reason, once it becomes an authority to which human aairs must
submit, ends up exercising a tyranny over human beings that turns their societies into
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soulless machines, and infects relations between individuals as well. Once they
become the components of a rationally ordered mechanical system, something of
their humanity has been robbed from them. e human race has become divorced
from the very natural world on which it depended for survival in primordial times.
is traumatic separation has led to a progressive subjugation of nature to human
ends, as in the gathering industrialisation of the advanced economies. e alienation
of humankind from its natural origins helped prepare the spectacular descent into
inhumanity that unfolded around the Frankfurt School, the burning of books paving
the way for the bureaucratic destruction of whole classes of society, as millions
perished in camps where the killing was as industrialised as everything else.

It isnt only the obvious crimes of totalitarianism, however, that prompt the authors
critique, but tendencies within society that might appear on the surface to be
innocuous. e books most incendiary chapter addresses the culture industry, in
which the spiritual enlightenment supposedly bestowed by the creative arts is
reconceived as mass deception. At the end of the 19th century and beginning of the
20th, a new industrialised culture began to emerge, controlled by gigantic media
corporations like the Hollywood lm industry, recording companies and commercial
radio. Not only have these institutions replaced genuine works of art with mass-
produced garbage, they also manipulate people into acquiescing in the status quo
and accepting capitalist values. Consumers are given to understand that although
their consumption patterns in the mass are vital, they, as individuals, count for
nothing. To that extent, the authors saw no functional dierence in the conveyor-belt
production of delusion by the American culture industry and the sledgehammer
propaganda techniques of European dictatorships.

W hat, then, is the Frankfurt Schools relation to traditional Marxism? e

political impetus that drives this theory has its roots in Marxism, but it is a
Marxism retheorised for the era in which the expected revolutionary transformation
of industrial societies never materialised. e revolution had either degenerated into
tyranny, as in Russia, or it failed altogether where capitalism was at its most advanced,
as in America. Much critical energy has been expended since the demise of the
Frankfurt Schools rst generation in the late 1960s and early 70s on the question of
whether it remained authentically Marxist in the classical sense. Even if it has obvious
continuities with the work of the younger Karl Marx, author of the Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, it is doubtful whether the fully elaborated economics
of Capital (1867) retained all its authority for Frankfurt critical theory.

From the beginning of his career, Marx embraced what he called the ruthless critique
of everything existing. If the failings of society were to be accurately and eectively

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diagnosed in microscopic detail, nothing should be seen as too trivial to fall within the
scope of a critical theory. Marx inherits from his predecessor Hegel the concept of
history as a generative process, through which humankind both produces its own
consciousness and progresses towards its own liberation, but he stands the cause-
and-eect structure of Hegels historiography on its head. It isnt that human beings
generate the social structures most appropriate to them in any given age; it is rather
that social structures themselves are what generate human consciousness, via the
material conditions in which people have to live. All this is a sine qua non of Frankfurt
social exposition. Where Adorno and Horkheimer departed from Marx was in the
idea that the ideologically deceptive institutions of an unjust society would inevitably
generate from within them a class whose radical discontent would put paid to those
same institutions once and for all. In the midst of the Second World War, and the
mass outbreak of violently repressive, mythically delusional politics on the European
continent, the victory of a revolutionary proletariat had itself passed into mythology.

en there is the question of social collectivity, without which revolutionary

movements and parties stood no chance of overthrowing existing state structures.
When collectivism fails in this endeavour, it is reconstituted into a tool of ideological
domination. What underpins the mass of philosophical and applied sociological
investigations that the Institute undertook during its period of wartime exile in the
US is a concern for the fate of the individual in mass society. As the industrial
economies of the West became subject to automation and an increasingly brutal
division of labour between mental and manual tasks, individuals came to be ever
more subordinated to the collective that they theoretically constituted, but which was
now fast becoming an independent structure of prohibitive authority to which all
must submit. Rather than being the medium in which human hope for liberation
might be invested, the social collective was now a repressive structure that swept
everybody under its homogenising sway. Society had become a functional law unto
itself, in accord with the principle of instrumental reason, and what that resulted in, at
the level of individual human beings and their psychology, was a more desperate
struggle for self-preservation than they had known since they lived in rock-shelters.
at struggle, more than anything else, is what had put paid to the idea of a
historically decisive transformation of society by those of its elements who had the
least to lose.

Revelations of the devastation wrought by the war, and in particular of the depraved
criminality of the Nazi regime, cast another long shadow over the Institutes
philosophy of history. What haunted them was the evidence, everywhere to be found
in the Federal Republic of Germany to which Adorno returned in 1949, that the
fascist era was being airbrushed from history, erased from collective memory in an act

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of repression. e fear was not only that it was being forgotten in itself, but that if not
remembered, it was likely to resurface in unpredictable forms.

One of the rst books that Adorno had published on his return to Germany was a
collection of short essays entitled Minima Moralia: Reections from Damaged Life
(1951). Written in the US in the mid-1940s, they constitute one of the most
remarkable works of personal philosophy of the past century, ranging in reference
from abstract theoretical problems to the minutiae of daily life as it was viewed by a
European migr in California the freeways and hotels, the movies and magazines,
styles of personal address and seduction. roughout the text is woven a mood of
profound melancholy, a wounding sense that the old world has passed, the old culture
of the European Enlightenment had failed in its civilising mission and what remains
is a society of highly trained automata, consuming the otsam of a junk culture that
cares nothing for them, while it does its best to convey the opposite impression. In the
books nal brief meditation, Zum Ende (To the end), Adorno suggests that the
only way to look at the fallen world after the catastrophic events that have overtaken it
is to borrow the theological concept of redemption. One day, the whole human
enterprise may be redeemed in some presently unimaginable way, and whether that
outcome is a realistic prospect or not is virtually irrelevant in view of the necessity of
not resigning oneself to irreconcilable defeat. is was Adornos own stubborn
attempt to prevent the society around him foreclosing on historical memory.

e Institute was reconstituted in Frankfurt under FriedrichPollocks directorship,

and it continued to press the case for a true historical accounting in the aftermath of
the Nazi era, as well as conducting sociological eldwork into the attitudes and
political proclivities of ordinary Germans. Was there, even vestigially, any possibility
that something like Auschwitz could happen again? e Frankfurt thinkers worried
over this question to a degree that led them to see harbingers of mass murder in the
use of insecticide, or even in apparently innocuous things such as the new sliding
windows (using which required more imperious movements than the placid opening
and closing of casements). ough occasionally extreme, these fears reect the notion
that mass psychosis does not spring fully formed from nowhere into murderous
existence, but has its roots in habits of thinking, in coldness, indierence, the
mechanised timetabled life that is, in the reign of instrumental rationality.

The transmutation of collectivity into social medias

connectivity is not the spontaneous production of free
human beings

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When widespread protest erupted on university campuses and among industrial

labourers in the later 1960s, so did a measure of dissension among the rst Frankfurt
generation. Herbert Marcuse, for example, while he shared the Frankfurt Schools
commitment to a relentless social critique, took a more optimistic line on the often
dramatic upheavals. His book One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of
Advanced Industrial Society (1964) became one of the required texts of the
countercultural movements of this period, and when student revolt blew up across
the Western world, from 1967 onward, Marcuse urged all dissident thinkers to
support it. In Frankfurt, to his exasperation, they took a rather dierent view. Adorno,
now director of the Institute, saw nothing but pointless pseudo-activity in most of the
sit-ins and demonstrations, and in 1969 committed what many saw as the enormity of
calling the police to remove a student occupation at the Institute premises.

Student radicalism zzled out as the rst generation of Frankfurt thinkers passed
away. e constant stress brought on by tear-gas on the campus and rowdy
oppositionism in the lecture halls sent Adorno to an early grave in 1969, dead of a
coronary thrombosis at 65. Horkheimer died in 1973, Marcuse himself in 1979.

Whatever remains of the Frankfurt School is fast approaching its centenary. Its
lineage has become so extensive now that its founders would hardly recognise their
original critical project in the work that the second and third generations have
produced. Not only have its sociological methods changed, but its philosophical
orientation has drifted apart from the emphatic Leftist commitments that led the
founders to attempt to repurpose Marxism for their own century. Relentless
negativity, the driving force of the Frankfurt Schools rst 40 years, from its inception
to the publication of Adornos most formidably dicult work, Negative Dialectics
(1966), is not the preferred mode of social philosophy any longer. e very term
critical theory, which once specically designated the work of the Frankfurt thinkers,
has now become elastic enough to encompass all poststructuralist theoretical writing,
whether critical or blandly armative.

Notwithstanding that, there is something that still resonates about the work of the
Frankfurt School. e insight to which it called its readers to awaken was that human
consciousness in the age of mass society was becoming wholly enclosed within the
walls of an ideological fortress, caught in the endless circulations of capitalist
exchange and those repetitive entertainments and distractions that were designed to
obscure the truth. Nothing about the theory of the culture industry lacks traction in a
world where the commodity form reigns supreme. Blockbuster CGI movies; the
relentless extrusion of Greatest Hits CDs by the megastars of the recording industry;
the all-encompassing mania for video gaming, in which mature adults have been co-

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opted into the shamelessly infantile principle of mindless play; the transmutation of
collectivity into social medias mere connectivity: these are the lineaments of a culture
that is not the spontaneous production of free human beings, but rather something
done to them in their unfreedom.

If organised forms of political resistance could be eciently thwarted by such a

system, often by subtle assimilation rather than outright suppression, the last
barricade against it was the individuals own refusal to think and respond in the
prescribed ways. e hardest task facing any emancipatory politics today is to
encourage people to think for themselves, in a way that transcends simple sloganising
and the dictates of instrumental reason. True critical thinking requires not just a
refusal to identify with the present structures of society and commercial culture, but a
deep awareness of the historical tendencies that have brought about the current
impasse, and of which all present experience is composed. at impulse, compared to
the project of constructively helping the system out of its own periodic crises, retains
the spark of a dissidence that might just, one day, throw it into the very crisis that
would prompt a general, and genuine, liberation.

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