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New Essays on the Frankfurt School
of Critical Theory
New Essays on the Frankfurt School
of Critical Theory
Edited by
Alfred J. Drake
New Essays on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory,
Edited by Alfred J. Drake
This book first published 2009
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
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Copyright © 2009 by Alfred J. Drake and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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ISBN (10): 1-84718-957-1, ISBN (13): 9781847189578
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Credits ....................................................................................................... vii
Editor’s Introduction
Alfred J. Drake ........................................................................................... xi
SECTION I. PREDECESSORS AND SUCCESSORS
Between Immanence and Transcendence: Theorizing the Time
of a Transformative Politics
Bruce Barnhart............................................................................................ 2
Adorno, Nietzsche, and Metaphysics
Bradley Butterfield and Carsten Strathausen............................................ 18
Marx, Mannheim, and the Critique of Ideology: A New Look
at the Sociology of Knowledge Dispute
Ariane Fischer ........................................................................................... 36
Critical Theory and Poststructuralism–a False Antithesis?
Hedwig Fraunhofer ................................................................................... 59
“Neotechnic Means for Paleotechnic Ends”: Lewis Mumford,
Herbert Marcuse, and the Pursuit of Final Causes
J. Adam Johns............................................................................................ 83
Radical Alternatives: The Persistence of Utopia in the Postmodern
Robert T. Tally, Jr ................................................................................... 109
SECTION II. ESSAYS ON THEODOR ADORNO
Adorno’s Intellectual Praxis
Karin Bauer............................................................................................. 124
“The Time Is Out of Joint”: Totality, History and Utopian Form
in Adorno’s Twelve-Tone Philosophy
Koonyong Kim ......................................................................................... 141
vi
Table of Contents
Contesting Hierarchical Oppositions: The Dialectics of Adorno
and Lacan
Claudia Leeb ........................................................................................... 168
Art after Auschwitz: Adorno Revisited
Elaine Martin .......................................................................................... 193
Adorno and the Question of Metaphysics
Andrew J. Taggart ................................................................................... 210
SECTION III. ESSAYS ON BENJAMIN AND OTHERS
Individual Types and Social Praxis in Walter Benjamin
Monika Gehlawat .................................................................................... 238
Walter Benjamin and the Space of Childhood
Timothy R. Kaposy................................................................................... 257
Aura and Trace: Ruins and the City in Walter Benjamin
Rajeev S. Patke ........................................................................................ 271
The Sea, the City, the Ruin and the Whore: Siegfried Kracauer
in Marseilles
Henriette Steiner...................................................................................... 285
Contributors............................................................................................. 307
Index........................................................................................................ 313
CREDITS FOR NEW ESSAYS ON THE
FRANKFURT SCHOOL OF CRITICAL THEORY
The editor has made all good-faith efforts to contact copyright holders to
secure permissions.
From Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, translated by E.F.N. Jephcott,
1974. Used by permission of Verso.
Excerpts from Theodor Adorno, Metaphysics, edited by Rolf Tiedemann,
translated by Edmund Jephcott. Copyright © 2000 by Polity Press. All
rights reserved. Used with the permission of Stanford University Press,
www.sup.org, Polity and Suhrkamp Verlag.
From Max Horkheimer, “A New Concept of Ideology” in Knowledge and
Politics: The Sociology of Knowledge, edited by Volker Meja and Nico
Stehr, pp. 144, 146-147, 147-148, 153, 152, 152, 155-156, 146
(Routledge, 1990). Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Books
(UK).
From One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse. Copyright © 1964 by
Herbert Marcuse. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston.
Excerpts from Technics and Civilization by Lewis Mumford, copyright
1934 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and renewed
1961 by Lewis Mumford, reprinted by permission of the publisher.
From Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 2 (1927-1934) translated
by Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999.
From Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music translated by Anne
G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster, 2003. By kind permission of
Continuum International Publishing Group.
viii
Credits
Excerpt from Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer, translated by John Cumming, © 1969, 1997. Reprinted by
permission of the Continuum International Publishing Group.
From Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called
Utopia and Other Science Fictions, 2007. Used by permission of Verso.
From Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics translated by E.B. Ashton,
1974. Used by permission of Suhrkamp Verlag GmbH & Co., KG.
From Gesammelte Schriften in zwanzig Bänden, ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Bd.
6 Negative Dialektik. Jargon der Eigentlichkeit (1973) by Theodor
Adorno, 1973. Used by permission of Suhrkamp Verlag GmbH & Co.,
KG.
From “Little History of Photography” from “One-Way Street” and Other
Writings, by Walter Benjamin, translated by Edmund Jephcott and
Kingsley Shorte, London: NLB/Verso, 1979.
From Reflections by Walter Benjamin, translated by Edmund Jephcott,
New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978.
From Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called
Utopia and Other Science Fictions, 2007. Used by permission of Verso.
Credits for Images Reproduced in Rajeev S. Patke’s “Aura and
Trace: Ruins and the City in Walter Benjamin.”
Figure 1. Atget, Eugène. “Rue des Ursins, Paris 1923.” Image reproduced
by permission of Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF).
Figure 2. Colonial Architecture, Singapore.
PhotoMann Travel Photography (Doug Mann).
Image Copyright ©
Figure 3. Singapore shophouse drawing. Source: Conservation guidelines
[1995], Conservation guidelines for historic districts, Vol. 2, p. 19.
Singapore Government Publication. Copyright © Urban Redevelopment
Authority. All rights reserved.
New Essays on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory
ix
Figure 4. St. Andrews Cathedral, with Westin Stamford Hotel in the
Background. Image Copyright © PhotoMann Travel Photography (Doug
Mann).
Figure 5. Bombay - Mumbai - India 1980-2000. Image Copyright ©
Mohsin Ahmed.
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
NEW ESSAYS ON THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL
OF CRITICAL THEORY
ALFRED J. DRAKE
In the brief introduction that follows, I will confine myself to offering an
outline of what I believe contributors to the present volume have
accomplished.1 Our contributors cover a variety of authors and topics
related to the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory,2 the fullest appellation
sometimes given to a group of thinkers associated with the Institut für
Sozialforschung, or Institute of Social Research. The Institut was founded
in 1923 in connection with the University of Frankfurt am Main in
Germany and, as a consequence of Hitler’s rise to power in the early
1930s, relocated first to Geneva and then to Columbia University in New
York City, finally effecting a post-war return to Frankfurt in 1950.
As with the existence of the Instutut itself, the influence of the group
that has come to be called “the Frankfurt School” is best understood as
international. With the popularity of Marcuse in the 1960s, the Frankfurt
School theorists began to gain something like broad appeal in American
intellectual life, and in the decades since the 1970s there has been an
impressive accumulation of analysis and insight into the history and
diverse methodologies of associated authors such as Theodor Adorno,
Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Otto Kirchheimer, Leo
Lowenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Friedrich Pollock, and others. Jürgen
Habermas’ work in communication theory, it should be added, marked a
powerful new phase of thought associated with the School, though that
phase by no means sums up the career of Habermas himself.
One of the Frankfurt School’s foundational concerns was the
imperative to rethink Marx in the wake of World War I and then the
advent of the Soviet Union in 1917, and, subsequently, with the
ascendancy of fascism in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany in the
1920s and 1930s, respectively, along with America’s response to
economic collapse, Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” of the 1930s and
xii
Editor’s Introduction
1940s. The question was, to what extent did the Marxism of the previous
century, with its strong claims of historical necessity and inevitability, still
serve as a means of understanding historical developments and as a
vehicle for the achievement of human liberation? But to set forth this
question is only to begin to talk about the Frankfurt School, not to capture
its full range of inquiry or the full measure of its significance.
Our volume offers reflections on philosophical predecessors such as
Marx and Nietzsche along with the “question of metaphysics” and the
continuing significance of the Frankfurt School in the postmodern age.
Music theory, architecture and photography, and the theorization of
childhood find a place in this appropriately diverse collection. Theodor
Adorno is well represented, and Walter Benjamin is the focus of several
contributors. Essays on Lewis Mumford and Siegfried Kracauer in
relation to key Frankfurt concerns broaden the collection’s scope. In what
follows, I will offer brief introductory comments on each of our
contributors’ essays.
“Section I. Predecessors and Successors” begins with an essay by
Bruce Barnhart, “Between Immanence and Transcendence: Theorizing
the Time of Transformative Politics.” Barnhart addresses the risks
entailed by attempts to leave behind the conceptual frameworks of Adorno
and the Frankfurt School that seem so much bound up with the
philosophical concerns of the past. Barnhart argues that Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri’s critique of transcendental temporality in Empire (and
the latter’s Time for Revolution), with its “enough with transcendentalism”
refrain and replacement of the Marxian proletariat with an endlessly
productive and open “multitude,” might benefit from re-immersion in
Adorno’s critique of Heideggerian temporality and “being-towardsdeath”—a point that Barnhart reinforces by casting Peter Osborne’s The
Politics of Time as the genuine successor to Adorno’s Jargon of
Authenticity. A term as laden with philosophical implications as
“transcendentalism” must be handled with care; it can neither be ratified
nor dismissed out of hand without risk, and Barnhart’s essay admirably
brings to the fore the carefulness and rigor of Adornian analysis of
temporality, and in so doing underscores its continuing relevance in the
theorization of possibilities for political change.
Next, in “Adorno, Nietzsche, and Metaphysics,” Bradley Butterfield
and Carsten Strathausen offer a respectful critique of Adorno’s “refusal
to endorse an affirmative metaphysical vision of life under global
capitalism,” or rather they offer an assessment of the cost such a refusal
entails, contrasting Adorno’s Nietzsche with the Nietzsche of Deleuze in
Nietzsche and Philosophy—the one we associate most insistently with
New Essays on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory
xiii
affirmation and joy rather than with suffering and amor fati, the embrace
of things as they have been and are. Butterfield and Strathausen set forth a
strong reading of Adorno’s lectures on metaphysics that, in addition to
reassessing his relationship to Nietzsche’s thoroughgoing critique of
metaphysics, also weighs in on Adorno’s theorization of the human body
as the ground-level register of experience, the locus of suffering and
bearing witness to suffering in the time “after Auschwitz.” They argue
that the nature of the body is itself subject to historical change to an extent
that Adorno and the Frankfurt School were not in their time able to
recognize.
Following Butterfield and Strathausen is Ariane Fischer with “Marx,
Mannheim, and the Critique of Ideology: A New Look at the Sociology of
Knowledge Dispute.” Fischer argues that the affinities sometimes asserted
between the Frankfurt School and the Young Hegelians obscures
Horkheimer and Adorno’s concern to distance themselves from idealistleaning abstractionism; their critiques of Dilthey, Jaspers, Scheler, and
Mannheim, Fischer points out, should rather be understood as analogous
to Marx and Engels’ critiques of the “metaphysical materialism” they
found in Stirner and the Young Hegelians. As such, the essay serves as a
valuable historicization of Frankfurt interpretations of their
contemporaries, one that places Horkheimer and Adorno squarely against
“the depoliticization of Marxian theory.”
In “Critical Theory and Poststructuralism—a False Antithesis?”
Hedwig Fraunhofer, in general accord with feminist theorist Nancy
Fraser, reads the Frankfurt School in light of Foucault’s work on
normativity (in The History of Sexuality and elsewhere) and Kristeva’s
work on “abjection” (namely, a transgression against and blurring of
identities; see Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection). With
regard to Foucault, she criticizes common assertions of a fundamental split
between Foucauldian thought and Frankfurt School theory based on
Foucault’s opposition to “the repressive hypothesis” (i.e. the notion that
maintaining social and political control have mainly to do with repressive
tactics, whether of a physical or psychological nature) as well as
Habermas’ disagreement with the French author’s treatment of the
philosophical tradition of “critique.” Fraunhofer’s essay is an insightful
contribution to the literature on “modernity” and a fine analysis of the
relationship between Foucault and Kristeva and the Frankfurt School on
the modern family, gender, and sexuality.
In “‘Neotechnic Means for Paleotechnic Ends’: Lewis Mumford,
Herbert Marcuse, and the Pursuit of Final Causes,” J. Adam Johns takes
up another aspect of the Frankfurt School theorists’ relationship to the
xiv
Editor’s Introduction
utopian dimension of philosophical thought. In this case, the topic is
Marcuse’s surprisingly strong “belief in the possibility of the literal
pacification of nature, the creation of a utopia under the sway of reason not
only for humans but for all life,” as manifested in One-Dimensional Man.
Johns offers a valuable exploration of Mumford’s Technics and
Civilization as a precursor text to Marcuse on technological change,
demonstrating that even before Marcuse, Horkheimer, and Adorno
addressed the substitution of means for ends in the modern era’s thinking
on technology, Mumford had shown the way. As such, Johns’s essay
provides a valuable historical and interpretive framework for a key area of
concern to the Frankfurt School.
In the first section’s concluding essay, “Radical Alternatives: The
Persistence of Utopia in the Postmodern,” Robert Tally Jr. offers a strong
reading of Fredric Jameson as one of the few and most recent defenders of
the radical or “iconoclastic” Utopian over against its more determinate
“blueprint” form (terms used to good effect by Russell Jacoby in Picture
Imperfect), and in so doing he contributes to the discussion of how
utopianism figures in Marcuse in particular and the Frankfurt School more
generally. A key point in Tally’s essay is that the great value in the
concept of iconoclastic Utopia lies in its response to a formal and political
crisis in representation, a crisis that might otherwise condemn us to an
anti-utopianism so thoroughgoing as to constitute its own impulse towards
totalitarian thinking and practice. In Tally’s reading, Jameson, in works
such as Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other
Science Fictions, emerges as a prime mediator between the older Frankfurt
School critical theorists and “postmodern” thought.
“Section II. Essays on Theodor Adorno” begins with an essay by
Karin Bauer entitled “Adorno’s Intellectual Praxis.” In it Bauer reflects
upon the role that the figure of the intellectual plays in Adorno’s thinking.
Her aim is not simply to resolve the contradictions in Adorno’s treatment
of intellectual labor, but rather to allow those contradictions to stand and
consider their implications for those who would achieve a “nonhierarchical” integration of theory and praxis. Adorno’s refusal to satisfy
the common demand that the intellectual embrace the realm of praxis must
not be dismissed as elitist withdrawal, she argues, or labeled as a semiNietzschean swearing-off of rationality. As such, Bauer’s essay is a
valuable contribution to the body of thought regarding the long-contested
category of the intellectual in the materialist tradition.
In “‘The Time is Out of Joint’: Totality, History and Utopian Form in
Adorno’s Twelve-tone Philosophy,” Koonyong Kim deals with Adorno’s
critique of the philosophical category of totality, and is concerned to
New Essays on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory
xv
reinforce our understanding of Adorno’s wisdom in not entirely abandoning
that category. Form is an important factor in Adorno’s critical strategy,
and Kim, in admirable complementarity with Fredric Jameson’s important
work on the history and vitality of the utopian dimension in social and
political theory, explores how Adorno finds in Schoenberg’s compositional
forms a way to pursue his critique of totality and yet retain some sense of
utopian possibility. It has been a lesson of modern (and especially
continental) philosophy that a jettisoned or denigrated theoretical framework
may well turn out to be a destabilizing force at the very point when
something genuinely new seems to be on the intellectual horizon (Jacques
Derrida’s critique of structuralism is perhaps one of the most noteworthy
demonstrations of that insight3). Like this volume’s other contributors,
Kim has certainly given due regard to the nuanced efforts of Adorno and
his fellow Frankfurt School associates to avoid the intellectual consequences
of such untimely abandonments.
Following Kim’s essay is “Contesting Hierarchical Oppositions: The
Dialectics of Adorno and Lacan,” in which Claudia Leeb examines the
theoretical frameworks of Adorno and Lacan to show the potential in each
as tools in current feminist theory’s critique of traditional oppositions that
structure discourse about social and political life and, indeed, impoverish
those key dimensions of life. Comparing the Adornian “non-identical”
with Lacan’s theorization of “the Real,” she finds in both a valuable means
of conceptualizing subjectivity without reduction to essentialist notions of
gender or other limiting factors.
Next, in “Art after Auschwitz: Adorno Revisited,” Elaine Martin
returns to a dictum that has become so much a part of the understanding of
Adorno’s oeuvre and significance that it demands close attention: namely,
his remark in “Cultural Criticism and Society” (1949) that Auschwitz
rendered further acts of writing poetry “barbaric.”4 Martin interprets the
remark as issued in its original context not as an absolute injunction
against art but as an assertion of a realization startling in the intensity of its
aporetic quality: “post-Shoah art,” as Martin writes, “is not permissible but
is simultaneously indispensable.” No new and simple pronouncement
about the value and role of art post-Auschwitz is possible; no attempt to
“make sense of” (rationalize) or escape from or transvalue the Shoah must
be allowed to pass into orthodoxy. In a crisis of representation
precipitated by unutterable cruelty, Martin argues, Adorno’s muchrepeated statement responds with salutary caution and unsparing acuity.
Concluding the section on Adorno is “Adorno and the Question of
Metaphysics,” in which Andrew Taggart offers a robust defense of
Adorno’s “negative dialectics.” Taggart argues that Adorno’s emphasis on
xvi
Editor’s Introduction
“constellation” by no means implies quietistic withdrawal from engagement
or passivity in the face of hope.5 Instead, he writes, the “transition from
immanent critique to the positive character of negative dialectics” is far
more viable than is recognized by those who have leveled this charge of
withdrawal against Adorno (and other members of the Frankfurt School).
Adorno’s model, says Taggart, provides “the formal conditions for the
possibility of ‘full, unreduced experience,’” and as such, that model does
well in acknowledging the presently unattainable reconciliation between
philosophy, self, and the world in which a “wrong state of things” prevails.
“Section III. Essays on Walter Benjamin and Others” addresses some
of Benjamin’s key concerns and helps to elucidate both his affinities with
and distance from other members of the Frankfurt School. Monika
Gehlawat begins this section with “Individual Types and Social Praxis in
Walter Benjamin,” in which she perceptively extends Susan Buck-Morss’
work in The Dialectics of Seeing on Benjamin’s abiding interest in
Baudelairean “types” (such as the flâneur, the gambler, and the prostitute)
that exist in the margins of commodity culture and embody the
contradictions of modernity. Those who study the Frankfurt School will
know that its members at times criticized Benjamin for his supposedly
undialectical interest in the individual in seeming isolation from broader
socio-political contexts. But Gehlawat argues strongly that we need not
invoke this charge of reification and insufficient mediation against
Benjamin; his interest in types and his emphasis on the image as
“dialectics at a standstill” is part of a broader methodology that involves
literary montage and allegory, a supple methodology that challenges
readers to engage in their own dialectical reading of the cultural objects to
which they have been introduced.
Ultimately, writes Gehlawat,
“Benjamin works with types precisely because he is ambivalent about the
status of the individual in society, and in particular, about the individual’s
power to create revolutionary change in capitalist society.” Benjamin’s
attention to embodied types, as Gehlawat argues well, is best understood
as a call to active interpretation and critique.
Following Gehlawat’s essay is “Walter Benjamin and the Space of
Childhood,” in which Timothy Kaposy focuses on Benjamin’s interest in
childhood as a way of coming to understand that author’s theorization of
temporality and the potential of individuals to effect transformation in the
social and political sphere. While theorists such as Hanna Arendt and
Giorgio Agamben have analyzed the first years of life with the aid of
abstract categories (natality, infancy, etc.) that connote a certain power of
bringing about radical change in the patterns and rhythms of the social
order, Benjamin, Kaposy points out, reflects upon “the reified, generic
New Essays on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory
xvii
qualities of new life in its embodied and social implications,” on factors
that begin early on to impose the weight of social conformity and inertia.
At the same time as he partly conceptualizes childhood in terms of loss,
however, Benjamin’s view is by no means nostalgic, and Kaposy’s focus
on Benjamin’s interest in the German children’s theater of his time sheds
welcome light on the potential that author sees in childhood for both
individual and collective forms of experience. On the whole, we arrive at
a sense of balance in the Benjaminian conception of childhood—one that
neither claims more for this period of life than it can deliver in terms of
political transformation nor dismisses the genuine importance of thinking
its significance and potential.
In “Aura and Trace: Ruins and the City in Walter Benjamin,” Rajeev
S. Patke demonstrates the continuing vitality of Benjamin’s meditations in
The Arcades Project and “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical
Reproducibility” (“Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen
Reproduzierbarkeit”) about the way in which modern technology and mass
culture transform the relationship between works of art or architecture and
the public. Patke’s focus is on urban photography, with special attention
to select cityscapes of Singapore and Bombay, and his subtle readings of
the images he includes suggest a close, even ineradicable, relationship
between aura and trace rather than the separation Benjamin seems mostly
to have maintained or the historical “degradation” of aura to trace that he
invokes in his now-famous essay on “technical reproducibility” or
“mechanical reproduction.” Instead, argues Patke, the rendering of
architectural objects in such images seems bent upon generating auratic
distance, a sense of bygone cultural splendor, and yet also seems to be
engaged in “the domestication of the viewer to his own estrangement.”
Finally, in “The Sea, the City, the Ruin and the Whore: Siegfried
Kracauer in Marseilles,” Henriette Steiner concentrates on Benjamin’s
contemporary (an architect by training) for his essayistic attempts to
represent the modern city, an interest that allies him with Benjamin.
Steiner offers a valuable explanation of the affinity between the
Benjaminian Denkbild or thought-image and Kracauer’s concentration on
ornament as a way of avoiding over-rationalization in the representation of
an already rationalized urban life. Ultimately, argues Steiner, we may find
in Kracauer’s work on urban spaces a dual perspective that sees in them
“sources of chaos and deprivation as well as order that the texts call on by
marking out aesthetic utopian signs in the city.”
Her approach
complements the efforts of the volume’s Benjamin contributors to explore
that author’s relative autonomy of interest and methodology within the
Frankfurt School.
xviii
Editor’s Introduction
I am pleased to have been privileged to work with the volume’s
sixteen contributors on this collection of fifteen essays on the Frankfurt
School, and it is my hope that readers (those with a general interest in
theory as well as specialists) will find it a valuable addition to the
historical and theoretical literature on one of the most important
intellectual movements of the twentieth century. Our contributors,
individually and read together, offer a diverse, balanced examination of
the Frankfurt School’s major concerns and tendencies, its limitations and
its potential as a spur to further thinking about politics, literature, and art.
Notes
1
Those who would like a full introduction to the history of the Frankfurt School
may want to consult Martin Jay’s excellent study, The Dialectical Imagination: A
History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research—1923-1950
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996 [1973]). A recent work on the
resurgence of interest in the School is Jeffrey T. Nealon and Caren Irr, Rethinking
the Frankfurt School: Alternative Legacies of Cultural Critique (Albany, NY:
State University of New York P, 2002).
2
“Critical theory” is of course a complex term, one that has come to be used by
today’s literary theorists in a manner not always closely related to Frankfurt usage.
Readers new to the Frankfurt School might do well to return, as a point of
departure for subsequent Frankfurt articulations, to Max Horkheimer’s 1937 essay,
“Traditional and Critical Theory,” which can be found in Critical Theory: Selected
Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell and others (New York: Continuum, 1972). At
base, Horkheimer’s initial aim was to delineate a critical approach that would serve
the cause of genuine social progress rather than passively piling up data or
maintaining a rigid separation between one branch of social study and another.
The relationship between this initial aim and Marx’s original critiques should be
discernible, even though the Frankfurt School’s relation to Marxist thought became
increasingly complex over time.
3
See in particular Jacques Derrida’s 1966 essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the
Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278-93.
4
See Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society” in Prisms, tr. Samuel
Weber and Shierry Weber Nicholsen, MIT Press, 1983, 34. Our contributor refers
in her essay to the German-language version, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft.”
5
A clear definition of the key term “constellation” may be found in Martin Jay,
Adorno, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984, 14-15.
SECTION I:
PREDECESSORS AND SUCCESSORS
BETWEEN IMMANENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE:
THEORIZING THE TIME
OF TRANSFORMATIVE POLITICS
BRUCE BARNHART
A thought that is purely consistent will irresistibly turn into an absolute for
itself.
—Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics1
In the 2000 work Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri wed their
reconceptualization of power and hegemony to an understanding of
temporality as “collective constitution.”2 As they unfold their conception
of Empire’s contemporary formation and its attendant temporality, Hardt
and Negri look briefly in the rear-view mirror at the work of the Frankfurt
School. This work represents for them a position that Empire has
superceded: Hardt and Negri express an admiration of the Frankfurt
School thinkers as part of “a long tradition of ‘anti-modern’ thought that
opposes modern sovereignty,”3 but they see their focus on the
unidimensionality of totalitarian capitalist development as out of tune with
a historical situation that calls for a thinking of the “paradox[es] of
plurality and multiplicity.”4 For Hardt and Negri, Adorno and the other
members of the Frankfurt School may be exemplary thinkers of
disciplinary society, but the post-war passage to the “society of control”
has undone the continuing relevance of their thought.
Behind this dismissal of Adorno and his fellow thinkers as possible
resources for theorizing the present is a decision against the
Hegelian/Marxist tradition and against this tradition’s emphasis on the
category of negation. Negri and Hardt reject the Hegelian tradition and
instead attempt to take their orientation from Spinoza, a thinker whom
they admire for his conception of an immanent temporality free from nosaying or negation. In their dedication to what Negri calls Spinoza’s
“positively open and constitutive time,” Hardt and Negri have sparked an
immensely productive re-orientation in the thinking of temporality and of
the link between temporality and qualitative political change.5 While there
Bruce Barnhart
3
is no doubt that their insistence on an open and immanent temporality is a
crucial component of any move beyond the political aporias of the
present, the nature of Hardt and Negri’s insistent emphasis on a particular
form of this temporality has produced a conception of the social subject/s
inhabiting and producing this temporality that suffers from a strange lack
of differentiation. This is “the multitude,” a social agent that replaces the
Marxist proletariat, and which Negri defines as “the always open striving
of the multiple singularities within the constitution of the common.”6
Negri’s definitional characterization of the multitude as “always open”
shows the intimate connection between temporality and the multitude; it
also hints at the way in which the multitude’s immanent temporality tends
towards a static continuity at odds with the rich heterogeneity that Negri
claims for this time.7 If the multitude is always open, its rhythm of
existence depends on something indifferent to time itself.8 There is a
symptom here of Negri’s avoidance of the contradictions of temporality,
an avoidance that manifests itself in the homogeneity of the multitude.
This homogeneity is something for which many critics, and many of
the best critics, have faulted Negri. Exemplary is the critique of Ernesto
Laclau. In a short review article, Laclau asserts that Hardt and Negri’s
“multitude” is “lacking a theory of articulation” and that without such a
theory, “politics is unthinkable.”9 Here, Hardt and Negri’s dismissal of
Adorno as without resources for thinking the “paradoxes of plurality and
multiplicity” comes to sound like an eerily prescient critique of their own
thinking of social formations. That is, Laclau’s critique of Negri’s
inability to come to terms with contemporary antagonisms of plurality and
multiplicity echoes Hardt and Negri’s similar critique of the Frankfurt
School. What I want to consider here is the way in which Hardt and
Negri’s critique of the Frankfurt School can be read as a proleptic and
uroboric self-critique of certain inadequacies in their own conception of
temporality and of the social formations that move to this temporality.
The inadequacies in Hardt and Negri’s conception of the multitude would
thus be a kind of return of the repressed, a symptom of some missed
opportunity in their rapid move past the theoretical resources of Theodor
Adorno. What do we gain, I want to ask, by making Negri’s thinking of
temporality move through Adorno’s thought rather than past it? I want to
argue that in Adorno’s critique of Heidegger, and in his conception of the
way relations of production work in and through the subject, there are
resources for yoking Negri’s critique of transcendental temporality to a
more heterogeneously differentiated concept of the multitude. My goal is
not to dismiss Negri’s thought, but to augment and extend its most
promising elements.
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Theorizing the Time of Transformative Politics
My essay has three main parts: a reading of Negri’s theory of
temporality in Time For Revolution, a brief contrast of Negri’s methodology
with Adorno’s, and a sketch of how a thinking of temporality influenced
by Adorno can be productively conjugated with Negri’s work. This last
section contrasts Negri’s approach to temporality in Time for Revolution,
with the treatment of temporality appearing in Peter Osborne’s work, The
Politics of Time.
Part I
Throughout all of Negri’s work runs a consistent and sharply voiced
critique of transcendental structures of thought and social coordination.
His emphasis is on the productivity of everyday experience, on the way in
which the coordination of social vectors at work in social and economic
production consistently create new modes of life and thought. Instead of
conceiving the mass of working individuals as engaged in resistance to
structures of action imposed from above, Negri conceives of this mass as
the source of all productive powers, to which the forces of capitalist
command and control can only react.10 For Negri, resistance is on the side
of capitalism and social hierarchy rather than on the side of those who are
ruled by these forces. Put simply, for Negri, the proletariat does not say
“no” to existing social hierarchies, it says “yes” to its own creative power.
This orientation shapes Negri’s thinking of both temporality and social
organization. Both are produced not by the capitalist forces of command,
but by the productive forces of the proletariat themselves; these forces
produce themselves as “the multitude,” rather than as a class defined by
their relationship to existing relations of production.
Given this orientation, the targets of Negri’s critique are clear: the
“transcendental” forces that attempt to contain, command, or “pervert” the
immanent productivity of the multitude. Conceptions and practices of
time that attempt to ground themselves transcendentally rather than in
experience, practice, or the rhythm of social existence are a crucial part of
the way in which existing powers of command attempt to mute or
attenuate the forces of the multitude. Thus, in the realm of philosophy, the
names Kant, Husserl, and Hegel are inherently suspicious. In the realm of
practice, the targets of critique are those institutions that work to remove
the shape and rhythm of time from the social networks out of which it
arises, and to arrogate to themselves the responsibility for maintaining a
reified version of this time. Examples of these institutions in the
American twentieth century include the Federal Reserve Board, the state’s
endorsement of the railway’s time zones, and the first employment of
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daylight savings time. The coincidence of these institutions’ establishment
with a rising tide of demotic culture validates a Negri-esque reading of
them. That is, it suggests that they are reaction-formations to this rising
tide and to the increasingly mobile and visible masses that created and
enjoyed themselves in it. The impulse behind the establishment of these
institutions, and behind institutions sharing their logic, is to remove
decisions about time and the proper weight of the future from the realm of
the social and political, and to rationalize them in ways that ask for
nothing from individual subjects besides assent or acquiescence.
Looked at from the perspective of either Negri or Adorno, the
prevalence of such reactive strategies makes the critique of transcendental
time an inescapable imperative.11 Both Negri and Adorno see a suspect
conservatism motivating transcendental forms of time and the
transcendental impulse to present temporality as an element of social and
subjective organization exempt from challenge. Despite these similarities,
the two thinkers propose substantially different strategies for critiquing the
transcendental impediments standing in the way of all movements aiming
at a qualitatively different future.
Negri’s critique is presented in Time for Revolution, an English
translation of two different works: the 1981 The Constitution of Time and
the 2000, Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo, written after the well-known
and much-discussed Empire. The two texts work over a related thematic;
the later Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo is meant to rectify the major
theoretical shortcomings of the first text. According to Negri’s preface to
the latter text, he saw it partially as a response to the ‘just-war’ rhetoric of
the European and American intervention in Kosovo, an intervention that
he refers to as “transcendentalism in action.”12 The premise of Negri’s
work is “enough with transcendentalism”; his goal in these two works is to
sketch a non-transcendental, or “materialist” theory of time.13 He does
this primarily through his emphasis on the productive powers of what he
calls either “the common” or “the multitude.” In Time for Revolution as in
Negri’s other works, the working class is the source of all innovation and
all productive power. It not only provides the labor that drives capitalist
production, it provides the organizing structures of this production and the
modes of co-operation involved in it. According to Negri, the capitalist
class does not organize production; it merely imposes a structure of
command on it. The “collective proletarian subject” both produces value
and organizes the production of it. The result is that the working class
generates its own modes of temporality.
Time is an index of coordination, and every mode of cooperation
generates its own temporality. In order to cooperate, one orients part of
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Theorizing the Time of Transformative Politics
one’s activities to the activities of someone else. This requires a shared
time, and the give and take of productive cooperation is reflected in the
dynamic nature of the time that results from it. The “complex, cooperative, technico-scientific labour” of capitalist production generates
what Negri refers to as “the time of co-operation” and “time as collective
substance.”14 This is a fluid time, a time that is “multiple, antagonistic
[and] open.”15 Negri opposes this time to the transcendental form of time
that he identifies in capitalist forms of command, but there is an
asymmetry between the two. For Negri, the time of co-operation is
ontological, the real result of the way social existence is organized. The
“command-time” of capital that is opposed to the time of cooperation is
not ontological; it is an arbitrary imposition on ontological reality. This is
fundamental to Negri’s critique of the transcendental time of command: in
his words, this time is “a transcendental schematism accomplished because
presupposed.”16 Not only is this time a parasitical imposition on the time
of cooperation, it actually lacks any real relation to the time of cooperation
and to the social ontology on which it imposes itself. Negri gives this lack
of relation a historical justification. According to him, the post 1968
world is characterized by a total break between the structure of capitalist
command and the relations of production on which it depends. In the past,
the transcendental structures of command-time were in a dialectical
relationship with the time of cooperation, but now this time, and the social
organization out of which it emerges, is totally autonomous.
In announcing the total autonomy of co-operative temporality Negri
not only critiques transcendental theories and practices of time, he posits a
total break between the immanent, productive time of the working class
and the transcendental time of the state. This marks a major flaw in
Negri’s work. Moving beyond a critique of transcendentalism and an
analysis of the way in which the forces of labor engender their own timestructures, Negri invests the time of cooperation with the power to free
itself not only from the forces of command but from the weight of the past.
The sharp break between the two forms of time creates a situation in
which the weight of the past seems to pull only on the time of command
and not on the time of cooperation. For Negri, the time of command is a
bald imposition motivated only by the dead weight of the past. It is dead
labor bearing no relationship to forms of living labor: all creative,
innovative powers lie exclusively with the time of cooperation. Negri
creates a sharp analytic bifurcation between the transcendental time of
command and the immanent time of cooperation, and this split lends itself
to an understanding of political struggle as primarily a struggle between
the pull of the past and the pull of the future. The Constitution of Time is a
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valorization of an immanent time composed out of “a clash of diverse and
antagonistic temporalities,” but it valorizes this time by relying on a
distinction between the past and the future incapable of dealing with the
complexities of this time.17 By reifying the distinction between living
labor and dead labor, Negri obscures the role that dead labor plays in
shaping living labor. The productiveness of his critique of transcendental
time is sharply attenuated when he denies the role that this time, and its
relation to the past, plays in present configurations of time.
In Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo this distinction between the past and
the future takes on a different form. In his 1997 afterword to The
Constitution of Time, Negri addresses what he sees as the theoretical
shortcomings of his earlier text. His main diagnosis is that the text’s
theoretical investigation was blocked by “the rigidity of the antagonistic
development of the two tendencies of temporality (capitalist and
proletarian).”18 This sounds a bit like the criticism I have just voiced, a
realization that the severe distinction between the two forms of temporality
renders the text unproductive. However, Negri is actually saying
something quite different. For him the failure of The Constitution of Time
is not that it posited too much of a break between the two temporalities,
but that it didn’t make the break total. When he refers to “the rigidity of
the antagonistic development of the two tendencies of temporality,” he is
referring to the fact that the two forms of temporality are paralleled to each
other. His remedy is to leave off any joint analysis of these two
temporalities and to focus exclusively on the proletarian “time of
cooperation.” He writes “the immaterial proletariat has no need of either
transcendental symmetries, or a machinery opposed to it….The sense of
constitutive temporality, by disconnecting itself from opposition to the
enemy, autonomizes itself” and foreshadows “a new paradigm and a new
practice.”19 Negri sees The Constitution of Time as flawed by its inability
to totally separate the productive time of the proletariat from the capitalist
time of command. Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo flows directly out of
this diagnosis; it is focused (particularly in Kairòs) entirely on a
proletarian temporality seen as totally autonomous from the transcendental
structures of capitalist time.
The Kairòs section of Negri’s later text sketches an immanent
proletarian temporality unconnected to any form of transcendentalism.
This temporality is resolutely non-transcendental because it has nothing to
do with any form of time as measure and instead concerns itself entirely with
the immeasurable. In Kairòs, time is defined as “the immeasurableness of
production between” the past and the future.20 This definition reflects
Negri’s characterization of the present period as a situation in which the
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Theorizing the Time of Transformative Politics
total socialization of labor has eliminated any exteriority that might serve
as a measure. In such a situation, time is both immeasurable and
immeasurably poised between the weight of the past and the openness of
the future. Negri borrows from classicism the term kairòs; it refers to the
instant in which an archer releases an arrow.21 This image is meant to
suggest the incommensurability between the stored-up energy of the past
and any pre-determined knowledge of where the arrow might eventually
land. The point is that in Kairòs any measurable relation between the past
and the future is suspended.22
In Negri’s characterization of the pregnant present of Kairòs we see
repeated the same sharp distinction between the past and the future that
operated in The Constitution of Time. Negri seems aware that this
distinction between the past and the future is inadequate to the task he has
set for himself, and he spends some time considering how a conception of
time as Kairòs redefines the past and the future. He characterizes the
future constructed by Kairòs as the ‘to-come’, an expression of the “force
of invention,”23 the past is re-defined as “the eternal,” the “indestructible
mass of life that precedes us.”24 However, despite these redefinitions of
temporal dimensions, they still exist in the same relationship to each other,
still sharply divided and without any communication between them. This
is a symptom of the extent to which Negri’s later text repeats, in an
exacerbated form, the shortcomings of his earlier text.
Consider the image given of temporality: the archer releasing an
arrow. This image conveys well a moment in which the stored up energies
of the past release themselves toward the future. However, as an emblem
of the immeasurable, this image has some problems. When an arrow is
released by an archer, several predictable things result. The arrow flies
from the bow with a direction, trajectory and force determined by the past
actions and training of the archer. The more skilled the archer, the more
likely it is that the arrow will land exactly where intended. What Negri
has left out of his considerations is the way in which the future is shaped
by the past, the way in which inherited structures shape production and
innovation, even when these come from the working class. In his divorce
of the productive time of the workers from the transcendental time that
attempts to command production, Negri leaves himself without a
framework capable of thinking the specific ways in which the future opens
itself up to the present. His declaration of “enough with transcendentalism”
is premature because it posits an end to the effects of transcendental
structures before the real intellectual and political work of disassembling
these structures has been done. Negri is right in equating transcendental
time with dead labor, but his disgust with transcendentalism leads him to
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underestimate both the persistence and the productivity of structures
inherited from the past. Dead labor was once living labor, and its modes
of reproducing itself are sedimented within the productive and reproductive strategies of the proletariat whose time Negri is so invested in
valorizing. Just as the archer uses the weight of the past to direct the flight
of his arrow, so does productive labor make use of practices and
conceptions inherited from the past to direct its production.
Part II
Throughout all of his work, Theodor Adorno stresses this sharp
imbrication of living and dead labor. He gives a particularly compelling
formulation of this imbrication in Minima Moralia, when he writes of “the
high organic composition of capital within the living subject.”25 The
higher the organic composition in any formation of capital, the greater the
preponderance of tools, machines, and other technological apparatuses, i.e.
things constructed out of living labor’s past efforts. Adorno’s positing of
a high preponderance of such apparatuses within the subject speaks of the
intimate relationship that formations of living labor have with forms
inherited from the past.
From Negri’s perspective, this formulation is part of a pessimism that
doesn’t grant the subject of living labor its proper autonomy. For Negri,
Adorno’s commitment to a negative thinking informed by Hegel and Marx
leaves him capable of seeing coagulations of productive forces only as
formations that capture or blunt the productive energies of the multitude.
Negri’s move past Adorno attempts to shift emphasis to the boundless
productivity and creativity of living social forces. This is a welcome shift,
but what has disappeared with Negri’s move past Adorno is attentiveness
to the singular shape of living social formations.
Here, Negri’s theory of temporality is intimately linked to a discursive
mode that has problems thinking through the intricacies of actually
existing social formations. Here, also, we see the shadow of Adorno and
the Frankfurt School. Adorno and the Frankfurt School represent not only
a certain kind of Hegelian/ Marxist tradition, but also a mode of thinking
that takes seriously the everyday efflorescences of lived culture, whether
the participants in this culture are conceived of as the multitude or the
working class. From Adorno’s reading of the astrological columns in the
Los Angeles Times to Benjamin’s interest in fortune-tellers, the Frankfurt
School was committed to reading the practices and vernacular culture of
the multitude. This methodological privileging of the everyday is not
divorced from the approach to temporality and subjectivity at work in
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Theorizing the Time of Transformative Politics
Adorno’s writings. Attentiveness to the everyday is necessarily linked to
an acknowledgment of the sharp entanglement of the past and the present
focusing the energies that Negri reads as directed at the future. Thus,
when we think of Negri’s seemingly constitutive inability to refer to any
concrete practices of the multitude, we see how his attempt to decisively
divide the immanent from the transcendental deprives him of the analytic
framework necessary for thinking the multiplicity and differentiation of
the multitude.
Consider the following passage from Time for Revolution:
“Transcendental perversion opposes exercise and fashion to bodies;
disinformation and censorship to languages.”26 This is a rare instance in
which any identifiable feature of the contemporary social landscape is
made visible in Negri’s text. Negri’s point is clear: the body works to
realize itself directly without recourse to the false structures of
“transcendental perversion,” but “transcendental perversions” and “new
institutions of measure try to control them and bring them under their
rule.” Despite the sophistication of Negri’s analysis, moments like this
betray the tendency of Negri’s thought to regress into either a fairly vulgar
Marxist critique of ideology or a vitalist celebration of the forces that
precede and evade social institutions.27
Adorno’s readings of practices like fashion and exercise differ from
Negri’s in a couple of crucial ways, a difference that speaks compellingly
of the way in which the mode of critiquing transcendental time-structures
determines modes of reading the present. In Minima Moralia and
elsewhere, Adorno wants to read the interaction between ossified
structures of command that pass themselves off as transcendental and the
structures created out of the living energies of the present. Adorno’s
readings tend to conclude that these living energies are harnessed to
perpetuating the hierarchies of the past, but they proceed by way of a close
consideration of the mechanics of popular practices. Thus while Adorno is
ultimately close to Negri in his critique of practices like fashion and
exercise, he takes these practices seriously as sites in which the desires and
productivities of the multitude are tempered and shaped. The result is an
analysis that takes account of the complicated ways in which the
multitude’s cathexes of the world and itself work both through and against
popular practices, i.e., the back and forth cathexis of these practices by the
multitude and the multitude by these practices.
In Minima Moralia, Adorno looks closely at toys, exercise, the
language of newspaper obituaries, and other concrete manifestations of
everyday life. The conclusion is not only that everyday life is haunted by
“transcendental perversions” of genuine impulses, but that what Negri
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calls “transcendental perversion” have been taken into the subject and
become an intimate part of the subject’s psychic and libidinal life. This is
what Adorno refers to as the “high organic composition of capital within
the subject.” Adorno’s formulation speaks of the way in which the
opposition between living labor and dead labor is internal to the subject
and cannot be easily disentangled. The close reading of everyday social
practices demonstrates the impossibility of making sharp distinctions
between the “transcendental perversions” by which dead labor attempts to
capture living labor, and the impulses of living labor itself.
An analysis that takes account of the “high organic composition of
capital within the subject” sees how history, including the history of
capitalist command, works in and through the individual and collective
subjects, dividing them up in ways that both limit and foster their ability to
innovate new modes of accessing the future. It is the differential weight of
dead labor on and in formations of living labor that gives these formations
their heterogeneity and differentiation. To reject this weight is to risk an
idealism that cuts up actually existing social formations in the name of a
not-yet-present futurity, cutting up the multitude by cutting them off from
their imbrication in practices that present themselves as transcendental.
In reading Time for Revolution, one gets the feeling that Negri believes
transcendental structures of time will eventually wither away of their own
accord. This is part of a stance that both takes transcendentalism too
seriously and not seriously enough. Negri’s writings on time take
transcendentalism and its time-structures too seriously because they tend
to take the ideology of the transcendental at face value. Transcendental
forms of time are not transcendental; they are derived from specific forms
of experience and then present themselves as transcendental. They grow
out of and reflect real power relations, and thus have a real effect on the
structure of social existence. Negri’s divorce of transcendental time from
immanent time exempts important structures of the social from critique
and analysis. Moreover, in its alignment of transcendental time with the
dead weight of the past and productive time with the to-come, his analysis
cuts off consideration of the way the different dimensions of time are
entangled in the present.
Part III
Adorno’s anticipation of these problems in Negri suggest the ways in
which Negri’s construction of immanent temporality might be enriched by
a dialogue with the Frankfurt School. Adorno’s critique of Husserl and
Bergson, and the way this critique informs the overall movement of
12
Theorizing the Time of Transformative Politics
Negative Dialectics is one possible site for such a dialogue,28 but given
Negri’s emphasis on the distinct energies of the contemporary moment, a
more recent critique of transcendental temporality seems more suitable.
One particularly compelling version of such a critique is Peter Osborne’s
1995 work, The Politics of Time. Osborne’s work is, like Negri’s, an
attempt to critique transcendental conceptions of time in order to open up a
space for the articulation of immanent forms of temporality. Unlike
Negri’s work, The Politics of Time is both informed by Frankfurt School
thought and continues Osborne’s ongoing engagment with the work of
Adorno and other Frankfurt School thinkers. As a result, Osborne’s
methodology differs from Negri’s in important and productive ways.
Written in 1995, between the two works that make up Time for
Revolution, The Politics of Time is an attempt to think the temporality of
the postmodern present through an analysis of the way it repeats and/or
negates the temporality of modernity. The part of Osborne’s work that
most concerns me here is his critique of Heideggerian temporality.
Osborne’s critique of Heidegger’s ecstatic temporality is invested in
purging its residually reactionary elements in order to rescue what
Osborne sees as this temporality’s progressive potential. He does this
primarily by attempting to socialize the death that provides the ultimate
horizon of Heideggerian temporality, preserving the motion of this
temporality while yoking it to a social rather than ontological telos. The
terms transcendental and immanent are not operative in Osborne’s text in
the same way they are in Negri’s, but Osborne’s critique is invested in
exposing the social underpinnings of Heideggerian temporality and of
moving towards a theorization of time that emerges out of the rhythms of
social existence. The structures of Heideggerian temporality can be
understood as transcendental insofar as the hermeneutic of reading
experience only exposes these structures; it does not read these structures
as actually dependent on experience. Thus, while Heidegger is not usually
thought of as a thinker of the transcendental, it is clear that the temporality
of Dasein is not derived from experience.
Osborne focuses his critique on what he considers to be the most
transcendental of Heidegger’s presuppositions, the assumption that the
fundamental meaning of human temporality is given through an
orientation towards a death that cannot be shared. For Heidegger, it is
self-evident that “by its very essence, death is in every case mine.”29 In
Heidegger’s system, death has no provenance and no shared social
meaning; it merely functions as a privately given determinant of being. It
is this mute givenness that Osborne takes issue with. For him the
elevation of an individual and socially undetermined death to the status of