The possibility of an alternative

Is there no alternative within the Marxist framework? In fact there is an excluded alternative occasionally evoked in the course of the dialogue. This alternative is Marcuse, who hovers like Banquo’s ghost over the conversation. Adorno comes closest to articulating this position and is pulled back by Horkheimer each time. At one point he remarks, “I cannot imagine a world intensified to the point of insanity without objective oppositional forces being unleashed.”⁴⁴ This will turn out to be the thesis Marcuse hints at in One-Dimensional Man and develops in An Essay on Liberation. But Horkheimer rejects this view as overly optimistic. A bit later Adorno refuses to accept that human nature is inherently evil. “People only become Khrushchevs because they keep getting hit over the head.”⁴⁵ But again Horkheimer rejects the hope of a less repressive future and even ridicules Marcuse, claiming that he expects a Russian Bonaparte to save the day. Finally, there is a passage in which Adorno seems to be seeking an appropriate style for the manifesto. He says, “You have to find the point that wounds. Offending against sexual taboos.” And Horkheimer immediately calls him to order: “Marcuse, take care.”⁴⁶

What are we to make of this ghostly presence of a Marcusean alternative? It seems to me that these remarks already anticipate and condemn Marcuse’s openness to the return of history with the New Left. Where Horkheimer and Adorno ultimately rejected the New Left, Marcuse took the Hegelian–Marxian-Lukácsian plunge back into history. He was well aware that the New Left was no equivalent of Marx’s proletariat, but he tried to find in it a hint of those “objective oppositional forces” of which Adorno spoke in 1956. Marcuse’s important innovation was to recognize the prefigurative force of the New Left without identifying it as a new agent of revolution. In this way theory might be related once again to practice without concession to the existing society, although also with no certainty of success.

This formulation still reflects the duality of theory and practice that Lukács resolved in the revolution. But no such resolution is possible for the Frankfurt School. Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse all agree that philosophy and art conserve the transcending content of experience. This content also comes to the surface periodically in social struggles that attempt to realize it in reality. The two sources of transcending content remain separate, independent of each other. And yet they can and do communicate on occasion. The later argument between Adorno and Marcuse was over whether such communication had taken place in the New Left.⁴⁷

Adorno’s position is explained at length in a 1969 essay entitled “Marginalia to Theory and Practice.”⁴⁸ Amid much interesting discussion of the nature of theory and practice, Adorno indulges in a polemical attack on the New Left, which he dismisses repeatedly as a pathetic caricature of real political resistance. He insists on the importance of rational, theoretically informed practice and measures the New Left by that standard. This text rejects his earlier assumption in the Manifesto dialogue that the unity of theory and practice is desirable and necessary. Now, faced with an actual practical movement, Adorno discovers the virtues of their separation.

Marcuse was predisposed to a more positive evaluation of this historical experience than Adorno. In earlier writings he had praised the twentieth-century avant-gardes for attempting to overcome the separation of art and life. He interpreted this as a salutary challenge to the affirmative culture of the nineteenth century. The much overrated religion of art called forth the mockery of Dada and the cadavres exquis of surrealism.⁴⁹

When the New Left emerged, Marcuse interpreted it on the model of the early avant-gardes as an attempt to realize the imagination in reality. Although Adorno was at first sympathetic, he soon came to the conclusion that the movement was simply a scene on which the “pseudo-activity” of a psychologically damaged youth played itself out. And certainly the narcissism and reification Adorno complained of were manifest in many aspects of the New Left. He was not entirely wrong to argue that the society had corrupted its adversaries.⁵⁰

Marcuse was far from uncritical and constantly insisted that the New Left base its actions on theory and solidarity rather than wishful thinking and impulse.⁵¹ But he did so in dialogue with the New Left and not as a hostile critic. On the whole he considered the New Left as a popular breakthrough to a critical relation to advanced capitalism. Critique was historical once again, no longer only philosophical and artistic. What impressed him most were manifestations of solidarity and the rejection of consumerism, the principal glue holding the one-dimensional society together. Marcuse recognized what we now accept as a commonplace, namely, that despite its flaws the New Left redefined the possibilities and goals of the opposition to advanced capitalism. It introduced a new form of radicalism freed from vanguardism and workerism. In Marcuse’s thought this conclusion was associated with a quasi-Hegelian teleology reinterpreted non-dogmatically: freedom is not the necessary outcome of history, but when struggles for freedom do occur they can be recognized as contributing to a possible destiny humanity may yet fulfill.

Marcuse’s interpretation of the New Left depends on a theory of experience that has a certain similarity to Lukács’s theory of consciousness. Recall that in History and Class Consciousness the proletariat is able to transcend its reduction to a commodity because of the gap it recognizes between its reified form as wage labor and the concrete life conditions that depend on the rate of wages. The mismatch between these two determinations, the one stemming from the commodity form and the other from concrete experience, gives rise to an original practical mediation that is the basis of the revolutionary movement and of Marxist dialectical method as well.

Marcuse argued that the New Left was rooted in a radical form of experience that mediates the reified, one-dimensional reality of capitalism. That mediation results from the recognition of the unrealized technical potential of the production system, chained by capitalism to waste and war when it could easily supply all the needs of the population. Poverty and the competitive struggle for existence are now technologically obsolete. Recognition of this gap between the potential and the existing reality, like that which Lukács identified in the case of the proletariat, is not merely a matter of opinion but, Marcuse claims, has the force of a somatic necessity for the youthful revolutionaries.

Marcuse offers revealing examples of such recognition, and argues that it corresponds to a generalized aesthetic sensibility that finds beauty in the affirmation and flourishing of life. He explains that this “new sensibility” achieves a partial desublimation of libido and a redeployment of erotic energy beyond the bounds of sexuality as a generalized aesthetic relation to reality. The new sensibility promises to rejoin reason with life in a new science and technology. It overcomes the restrictions Horkheimer and Adorno believe block access to an experience of potentiality. This would be the realization of the Frankfurt School’s dream of a truly enlightened reason able to reflect on itself and to motivate solidarity with humanity and nature. I will have more to say about these radical ideas in the next chapter.

 

1 Horkheimer was less influenced by Lukács than Adorno and Marcuse. See John Abromeit, Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Accordingly I will focus primarily on the latter two.

2 One is reminded of Nicholas Berdiaeff’s epigraph to Huxley’s Brave New World: “Les utopies apparaissent bien plus réalisables qu’on ne le croyait autrefois. Et nous nous trouvons actuellement devant une question bien autrement angoissante: comment éviter leur réalisation définitive ? … Les utopies sont réalisables. La vie marche vers les utopies. Et peut-être un siècle nouveau commence-t-il, un siècle où les intellectuels et la classe cultivée rêveront aux moyens d’éviter les utopies et de retourner à une société non utopique moins ‘parfaite’ et plus libre.” (“Utopias appear much more realizable than used to be believed. And we now find ourselves faced with a still more agonizing question: how to avoid their definitive realization? … Utopias are realizable. Life is marching toward utopias. And perhaps a new century is beginning, a century in which the intellectuals and the educated class will dream of means to avoid utopias and to return to a less ‘perfect’ and freer non-utopian society.”)

3 For Lukács’s theory of the unity of theory and practice, see the Appendix.

4 Theodor Adorno, “Reconciliation Under Duress,” in E. Bloch, G. Lukács, B. Brecht, W. Benjamin, T. Adorno, Aesthetics and Politics, trans. R. Taylor (London: New Left Books, 1977), 151.

5 Stefano Petrucciani, Introduzione a Adorno (Rome: Editori Laterza, 2007), 127. “In quanto sta dentro la totalità falsa, pero, la dialettica negative non può essere già questo ‘altro pensiero’; ciò che può fare è soltanto evocarne la figura.” (“Insofar as it lies within the false totality, however, the negative dialectic cannot already be that ‘other thought’; what it can do is only to evoke its outlines.”)

6 Ernst Bloch, “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing,” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. J. Zipes and F. Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 12.

7 Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Seabury Press, 1947).

8 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. J. Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 54.

9 Ibid., 40 (translation modified). The German text is to be found in Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1944, reprint n.d.), 55.

10 Ibid., 41 (55).

11 Ibid., 255 (305). It is in this context that they claim that “All reification is a forgetting” (230, translation modified).

12 Habermas and his followers have been particularly active in pursuing the irrationalism issue. See also Anke Thyen, Negative Dialektik und Ehrfahrung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 245–67, and J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 266–8.

13 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury, 1973), 162.

14 The non-identical in this crude sense is an immediate particular that transcends all mediation. Without confounding this notion with Adorno’s deeper intent, Robert Pippin has mocked it as “asterisk” philosophy: every time a universal appears, it should be accompanied by an asterisk sending readers to the bottom of the page where they will be informed that particulars are always more and other in some respects than the concepts under which they are classified. See “Adorno on the Falseness of Bourgeois Life,” in Robert Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 105.

15 See Brian O’Connor, Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of a Critical Rationality (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2004); Bernstein, Adorno.

16 This is the theme of Bernstein’s, Adorno.

17 Theodor Adorno, “On Subject and Object,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. H. W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 247.

18 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor (London and New York: Continuum, 1997), 46–7, 68. For a comprehensive account of Adorno’s ideas on nature, see Deborah Cook, Adorno on Nature (Durham, NC: Acumen Publishing, 2011).

19 Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Early Writings, trans. and ed. T. B. Bottomore (London: C. A. Watts, 1963), 206–8.

20 Adorno, “On Subject and Object,” 247.

21 See Andrew Feenberg, “Marxism and the Critique of Social Rationality: From Surplus Value to the Politics of Technology,” Cambridge Journal of Economics, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2009), 37–49.

22 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 29–30.

23 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 147.

24 Theodor Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, trans. E. Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 161–2, n15.

25 A longer version of this section is published as “Waiting for History: Horkheimer and Adorno’s Theatre of the Absurd,” available at platypus1917.org.

26 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 66, 68.

27 Theodor Adorno, History and Freedom, trans. R. Tiedemann, ed. R. Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 170.

28 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. A. Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), 22.

29 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “Towards a New Manifesto?”, trans. R. Livingstone, New Left Review, No. 65 (September–October 2010). I am well aware that this text does not represent Horkheimer and Adorno at their best. Perhaps that is one of the reasons it is so interesting. Their unguarded comments reveal much that is masked in more polished presentations.

30 Ibid., 36.

31 Ibid., 53.

32 Ibid., 44.

33 Ibid., 46–7.

34 Ibid., 48–9.

35 Ibid., 61.

36 Ibid., 56.

37 Karl Marx, “Letter to Ruge,” in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, trans. and ed. L. Easton and K. Guddat (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 213.

38 Adorno and Horkheimer, “Towards a New Manifesto?”, 55.

39 Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Early Writings, 28.

40 Adorno and Horkheimer, “Towards a New Manifesto?”, 58, 52.

41 Ibid., 56.

42 Ibid., 58.

43 Ibid., 52.

44 Ibid., 42.

45 Ibid., 44.

46 Ibid., 46.

47 For their differences, see “Correspondence on the German Student Movement,” trans. E. Leslie, New Left Review, No. 233 (January–February 1999), 123–36. Compare also Theodor Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Practice,” in Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, with Herbert Marcuse, “The Failure of the New Left?”, in Herbert Marcuse: The New Left and the 1960s, ed. D. Kellner (London and New York: Routledge, 2005).

48 Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Practice.”

49 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 149–50. Adorno objected to Marcuse’s early essay on “Affirmative Culture” that Marcuse underrated the critical import of art in his denunciation of its socially conservative, compensatory function. For the disagreement with Adorno, see Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. M. Robertson (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1994), 220–2. Marcuse’s later views are further developed in Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 31–2. For a discussion of Marcuse’s theory of the avantgarde see Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. M. Shaw (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 50–1.

50 Adorno condemned the whole New Left on terms appropriate only for a small fraction of the movement. Unfortunately that fraction did gain disproportionate influence, but this must not blind us (as it did Adorno) to the largely humane and democratic objectives of the mass of participants. I attempt to explain the problem in a more balanced way in Andrew Feenberg, “Paths to Failure: The Dialectics of Organization and Ideology in the New Left,” in A. Reed, ed., Race, Politics and Culture: Critical Essays on the Politics of the 1960s (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 119–44.

51 For example, Marcuse criticized those New Leftists who advocated pure spontaneity: “Within the repressive society, and against its ubiquitous apparatus, spontaneity by itself cannot possibly be a radical and revolutionary force. It can become such a force only as the result of enlightenment, education, political practice—in this sense indeed, as a result of organization.” Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 89.