The Dialectical Imagination. Martin Jay

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In fact, there is little in the work done by the Institut on economic issues, it has to be admitted, that illuminates the post-1973 restructuring of capitalism.¹¹ It is, however, on the level of its cultural correlate that the rise of the post-Fordist system of flexible accumulation may help explain the Frankfurt School’s staying power. For, if Harvey is right, what has become known as postmodernism is a cultural condition that somehow expresses and reflects—as well as at times resists—the economic changes that can be dated from around 1973. In contrast to many of the other variants of Western Marxism, Critical Theory has found this new climate relatively hospitable, if more so in America than in Germany, where the battle lines between post-modernists and second generation Critical Theorists have been sharply drawn. As questions of political economy and political praxis have been marginalized and those of culture and aesthetics gained center stage, the School’s varied and far-reaching explorations of these domains have stirred renewed interest and controversy.¹²

It would be mistaken, of course, to reduce the legacy of Critical Theory tout court to a prolegomenon to postmodernism, however we may define that vexed term. Habermas’s spirited defense of the uncompleted project of modernity,¹³ Lowenthal’s last warnings against “irrational and neomythological” concepts like “post-histoire,”¹⁴ and Adorno’s insistence on the distinction between high and low art and partisanship for modernists such as Beckett, Kafka and Schoenberg against the leveling impact of the Culture Industry, all make it plain that in many important ways the Frankfurt School resists wholesale inclusion among the forebears of postmodernism. In fact, as Fredric Jameson has pointed out, it may well be the eclectic pastiches of Stravinsky (which Adorno despised) rather than the progressive innovations of Schoenberg (which he generally admired) that can be said to have anticipated a key feature of postmodernist culture.¹⁵ The central role of “ideology critique” in Critical Theory is, moreover, relegated to the margins of most postmodernist theory, which lacks—or rather, deliberately scorns the possibility of—any point d’ appui for such a critique, preferring instead a cynical reason, if indeed a reason at all, that attacks all transcendent positions as discredited foundationalism and mocks utopianism as inherently fallacious.¹⁶

And yet, in certain respects, the general theoretical trajectory of at least several members of the School’s first generation can be said to have prepared the ground for the postmodern turn and thus found a new audience for its work. Most obviously, their reluctant jettisoning of a triumphalist notion of impending human emancipation, based on a single story of species-wide progress produced by class struggle, resonates with the characteristic postmodernist abandonment of any meta-narrative, especially one culminating in redemption. In fact, the temporalities of the Frankfurt School, the complex narratives they fashioned of rise, fall, and recurrence, were often as mixed and contradictory as those adopted by many postmodernist thinkers. So too, the radical critique of the Western tradition of instrumental, technological rationality, most extensively elaborated in Dialectic of Enlightenment with its dark ruminations about the entwinement of myth and reason, can be seen as potentially consonant with post-modernist suspicion towards all versions of reason.¹⁷ Indeed, it has sometimes been taken as such by those in the School’s second generation, like Habermas, who themselves resist precisely that conclusion.¹⁸

Adorno’s “negative dialectics” and Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction have also earned frequent comparisons because of their common rejection of totalizing philosophies of identity, distrust of first principles and origins, suspicion of idealist ideologies of sublation, and valorization of allegorical over symbolic modes of representation. Although the resolutely Utopian Adorno resisted accepting the repetition without resolution that has been so congenial to the deconstructive temper,¹⁹ his “melancholy science” has seemed to some only a small step away from the principled refusal to mourn in Derrida. The multi-faceted defense of a certain notion of benign mimesis both in Critical Theory and the work of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has also attracted attention, as have certain affinities with Lacan’s critique of ego psychology.²⁰

So too, Michel Foucault’s genealogical history of the body, hostility to normalization and discipline, micrological attention to detail, and fascination with the relations between knowledge and power have been seen as close to the concerns of Critical Theory. Although Foucault famously criticized the Freudian Marxism of Marcuse in his History of Sexuality for assuming a trans-historical norm of libidinal realization, significant parallels have been found in their common questioning of dominant notions of normative sexuality and critique of repressive desublimation.²¹ Indeed, Foucault himself once admitted that “if I had encountered the Frankfurt School while young, I would have been seduced to the point of doing nothing else in life but the job of commenting on them. Instead, their influence on me remains retrospective, a contribution reached when I was no longer at the age of intellectual discoveries.’”²²

A lively battle has also been waged over the contested legacy of Walter Benjamin, in which deconstructionists like Paul de Man, Samuel Weber, Rainer Nägele and Werner Hammacher have sought to read him largely in their terms.²³ Derrida himself has been intrigued by Benjamin’s earliest writings, most notably his Critique of Violence, with its still mystical evocation of a notion of divine justice and fascination with primordial violence, as an antidote to the leveling egalitarianism of its human (and humanist) counterpart.²⁴ Benjamin’s complicated debts to French Surrealism have been remembered at a time when the importance of such Surrealists as Georges Bataille for post-structuralism has been widely recognized.²⁵ Although the stubbornly redemptive moment in Benjamin’s thought, as well as his belief in an Adamic Ursprache in which name and thing were one, are hard to reconcile with deconstruction’s suspicion of plenitudinous origins and endpoints, there is sufficient warrant in the tangled web of texts he left behind to place him at least in a tense constellation with these later thinkers.

This is not the place to present a serious analysis of all the parallels and contrasts between Critical Theory and postmodernism their various guises. Suffice it to say that the post-New Left context of reception has been generally hospitable to the continued appropriation of at least certain legacies of the Frankfurt School, which have become powerful “stars” in what Richard Bernstein has dubbed “the new constellation” of contemporary thought.²⁶ As Jean-François Lyotard himself has acknowledged, “when one reads Adorno now—above all texts like Aesthetic Theory, Negative Dialectics and Minima Moralia —with these names [Derrida, Serres, Foucault, Levinas and Deleuze] in mind, one senses the element of an anticipation of the postmodern in his thought even though it is still largely reticent, or refused.”²⁷

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