Theory and practice25

The Frankfurt School recapitulates many of the themes of philosophy of praxis. Marx’s metacritique reconstructed the concept of need in the forms of rationality, overcoming their antinomial opposition in traditional philosophy. The Frankfurt School’s metacritique of value-free technological rationality achieves a similar result: reason is once again tied essentially to need, the need for self-preservation. Lukács’s theory of reification is a direct and acknowledged influence. The Lukácsian dialectic of form and content, and its consequences in the antinomies of philosophy, has its parallel in the Frankfurt School’s critique of the cultural effects of commodity fetishism. And like Marx and Lukács, the Frankfurt School argues that capitalism contains the potentiality for a socialist society that would transcend alienation and reification.

But there is a characteristic difference in emphasis that distinguishes Adorno’s philosophy especially from philosophy of praxis. In Marx and Lukács, potentialities are manifest in social struggle and realized through the immanent transformative effects of proletarian consciousness and action. In the absence of such historical manifestations of real potentiality, Adorno explains it as an objective striving in things themselves toward their own perfected forms. The “damaged life” of modern capitalist society, not only in persons but also in nature, aspires more or less unconsciously to a full and flourishing life possible only under socialism.²⁶

Once it no longer appears in the struggles of the dominated, this aspiration risks tipping over into outright re-enchantment of the disenchanted world of modernity. To avoid this facile outcome, Adorno argues that potentialities are revealed negatively in the structure of damaged life through immanent critique and art. Potentialities are no longer manifested in the experience of a revolutionary class, but depend now on the critical consciousness of the intellectual or artist. Adorno of course wishes that critical consciousness were more widely shared but he does not expect this to happen any time soon and certainly does not attribute it to an active historical subject.

The conditions of Lukács’s “principle of practice” are no longer fulfilled. The realization of philosophy is no longer a historical task. In a late lecture, Adorno says, “What is at stake is that, given that philosophy is faced with the challenge of transcending itself, if I can put it in this somewhat portentous way, this task should not simply be reflected on, but should really be carried out rigorously through the medium of thought.”²⁷ Note: thought, not practice as in Marx and Lukács.

Does this represent a regression to the sort of moralizing critique Hegel and Marx overcame with the historical concept of potentiality? Brecht ridiculed the last critics in his Tui Roman and Lukács admonished Adorno for abandoning history for the “Grand Hotel Abyss.”²⁸ The Frankfurt School philosophers would deny that charge. Their critical standpoint is historically justified by the quasi-dystopia of rational domination that emerges from the failure of the revolution. But this conclusion threatens the structure of an argument developed from the premises of the philosophy of praxis.

Before their final renunciation of the revolution, Horkheimer and Adorno searched hopelessly for a solution. In 1956 they engaged in a dialogue on the theme of “a new manifesto.”²⁹ This dialogue is easily dismissed as an aberration among their works, but it is symptomatic of a fundamental problem. The dialogue presupposes the logic of Lukács’s interpretation of the theory–practice relation. Here one can see how Horkheimer and Adorno hang in suspense on the results of the philosophy of praxis in which they no longer quite believe. Their dialogue reveals the consequences of the breakdown of the third moment of the philosophy of praxis, the historical resolution of the antinomies. That breakdown blocks the production of the manifesto and determines the peculiar tone of the dialogue.

The pretension to update the Communist Manifesto, written by Marx and Engels in 1847, is astonishing, particularly given the silliness of much of the talk. For example, what are we to make of the first exchanges on the misplaced love of work, which then devolve into a conversation about the anal sounds emitted by a worker’s motorcycle? The dialogue returns constantly to the question of what to say in a time when nothing can be done. The communist movement is dead, killed off by its own grotesque success in Russia and China. Western societies are better than the communist alternatives that nevertheless symbolically represent an emancipated future. Horkheimer is convinced that the world is mad and that even Adorno’s modest hope that things might work out someday stinks of theology. Horkheimer mocks his friend: “Teddie wants to rescue a pair of concepts: theory and practice. These concepts are themselves obsolete.”³⁰ Instead, he remarks, “We probably have to start from the position of saying to ourselves that even if the party no longer exists, the fact that we are here still has a certain value.”³¹ In sum, the only evidence that something better is possible is the fact that they are sitting there talking about the possibility of something better.

In this situation Horkheimer asks, “In whose interest do we write?”³² “People might say that our views are just all talk, our own perceptions. To whom shall we say these things?” He continues, “We have to actualize the loss of the party by saying, in effect, that we are just as bad [off] as before but that we are playing on the instrument the way it has to be played today.” And Adorno replies, cogently and rather comically, “There is something seductive about that idea—but what is the instrument?”³³ Although Adorno remarks tentatively at one point that he has “the feeling that what we are doing is not without its effect,” Horkheimer is more skeptical. He says, “My instinct is to say nothing if there is nothing I can do.” And he goes on to discuss the tone and content of the manifesto in such a way as to reduce it to absurdity: “We want the preservation for the future of everything that has been achieved in America today, such as the reliability of the legal systems, the drugstores, etc. This must be made quite clear whenever we speak about such matters.” Adorno replies, “That includes getting rid of TV programs when they are rubbish.”³⁴ Contradicting himself, Horkheimer concludes the recorded discussion with the grim words, “Because we are still permitted to live, we are under an obligation to do something.”³⁵

My description of Horkheimer and Adorno’s dialogue may seem unfair. Do they deserve mockery? “Yes and no,” to quote Horkheimer. In one sense their dialogue is already self-mocking. Horkheimer claims that the tone in which the manifesto is written must somehow overcome its futility in the present period when it can have no practical effect. Something similar takes place in the dialogue. The lighthearted tone reveals the contradiction between the existential situation of the speakers and their project.

What is most peculiar about this exchange is the refusal of these two philosophers to derive a critical standard from philosophical reflection once history can no longer supply it. This is what Habermas would do later: admit the breakdown of Hegelian-Marxist historicism and substitute a transcendental critique. If no “next step” lights the way, perhaps ethics can do the job in its place. But Horkheimer and Adorno insist on the importance of situating their thought historically both in terms of their own position and the absence of a party and a movement. As Horkheimer notes, “We have to think of our own form of existence as the measure of what we think.”³⁶ But how can critique negate the given society when that society is the critic’s sole existential support? The critic is the highest cultural product of the society. In the absence of any realistic alternative, his capacity to negate the society justifies it. He can neither escape from history into the transcendental, as Habermas would have it, nor can he rest his historical case on the progressive movement of history. No wonder the dialogue wavers between the comic and the portentous.

How did the Frankfurt School end up in such a bind? The answer to this question leads back to Marx and Lukács. History and Class Consciousness contains the most influential reflection on the relation of theory and practice in the Marxist tradition. Lukács renewed the Hegelian-Marxist historicist critique of abstract ideals that underlies the dilemma at the heart of the dialogue. This argument was known to Horkheimer and Adorno and its impact on their reflections in the Manifesto discussion is obvious.

As we saw in Chapter 2, Lukács introduces the problem of theory and practice through a critique of an early text in which Marx demands that theory “seize the masses.” Instead, philosophy must proceed from the living contradiction of ideal and real. The philosopher must “explain to the world its own acts,” showing that actual struggles contain a transcending content that can be linked to the concept of a rational social life. “The critic,” Marx concludes, “therefore can start with any form of theoretical and practical consciousness and develop the true actuality out of the forms inherent in existing actuality as its ought-to-be and goal.”³⁷ Lukács elaborates these Marxian ideas in a critique of Kantian ethical idealism echoed in Horkheimer’s statement that “reality should be measured against criteria whose capacity for fulfillment can be demonstrated in a number of already existing, concrete developments in historical reality.”³⁸ As Marx writes, “It is not enough that thought should seek to realize itself; reality must also strive toward thought.”³⁹ Theory must be tied to practice, to real historical forces.

But, Adorno argues, Marx did not live in a world in which utopia is blocked by the very working class he had charged with realizing it. Now that the revolution has failed, there appears to be no way out of the trap set by the tension between norm and history. Under these conditions, the speculative temptation beckons, but the pressure to satisfy the Hegelian-Marxist historicist criterion blocks the further progress of thought. It is impossible to return to what Marx once called the “roasted pigeons of absolute science,” that is, to some sort of utopian or transcendental thinking.

Horkheimer poses the dilemma in two contradictory propositions, saying, on the one hand, “Our thoughts are no longer a function of the proletariat,” and on the other, that “Theory is theory in the authentic sense only where it serves practice. Theory that wishes to be sufficient unto itself is bad theory.”⁴⁰ He concludes that “the idea of practice must shine through in everything we write” without any compromise or concession to the actual historical situation, a seemingly impossible demand.⁴¹ This yields what he calls “a curious waiting process,” which Adorno defines as, “in the best case … theory as a message in a bottle.”⁴²

Marx and Lukács establish the methodological horizon of Marxist politics for the Frankfurt School. Horkheimer and Adorno discuss their new manifesto under that horizon. They accept the critique of pure theory and ethical idealism; but now that the proletariat no longer supports a transcending critique of society, any concession to practice drags theory back into the realm of everyday political wheeling and dealing or, worse yet, into complicity with the murder of millions by totalitarian communist regimes. As Horkheimer remarks, “What is the meaning of practice if there is no longer a party? In that case doesn’t practice mean either reformism or quietism?”⁴³