Frankfurt School/Critical Theory

[Red Flag Rising]

Anyone here interested in or versed on Frankfurt School/Critical Theory? From what I understand it is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms and mixed with Freud. It was advanced by Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, Carl Grunberg, Max Horkheimer and the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt.

I'd like to know more, if anyone would care to comment.

[Guerrilla22]

Basically, critical theory holds that the capitalist mode of production has itself evolved, which can be used as an explanation as to why Marx's theory on the changing of the productive forces didn't hold true. It asserts that the capitalist mode of production has gone from largely being driven by individauls to a system in which the system and modern bourgeois states are intertwined. What they refer to as "late capitalism"

The capitalist system itself was on the brink of collapsing during the early 20th century, so states became involved to drive the system in order to keep it afloat. they did this and continue to do this through various means such as subsidation, making legislation favorable to businesses, ect. These moden states would also become imperialist in nature as the state would need to exploit other countries for resources in order for their economic system to prosper. They also introduced "safety nets" such as welfare to alleviate the suffering from capitalism on the working class just enough to keep them from revoltiong, while keeping them dependent on selling their labor. Without the system evolving the capitalist mode of production would have collapsed, leading to socialism.

They theorized that eventually people would simply become disenfranchised and stop being motivated by incentives offered by capitalism because they never are able to achieve any of them. They would also lose faith in the ability of the state itself. Once this happens the system would be repalced, although they didn't say for sure what society would repalce capitalism with. It could be socialism, however society could very well revert to barbarianism as well.

[Dean]

Anyone here interested in or versed on Frankfurt School/Critical Theory? From what I understand it is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms and mixed with Freud. It was advanced by Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, Carl Grunberg, Max Horkheimer and the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt.

I'd like to know more, if anyone would care to comment.

Erich Fromm: http://dean.roushimsx.com/fromm.htm

Adorno: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_W._Adorno

Go!

[which doctor]

I've had some renewed interest in the Frankfurt School and I think it has a lot to offer the contemporary left. I think the Frankfurt School have done more to adequately update Marxist theory for modern times than any other tendency or discipline. Not all of their material is valuable, take for instance Adorno's attitudes towards jazz which are bizarre at best and racist/classist at worst. There's also the whole pyschoanalysis method, which I find passé.

But reading some of their work on the culture industry, one finds it more relevant now than ever before. If the Frankfurt School thought culture was commodified and industrialized in the 50's, 60's, and 70's, just imagine what they would have to say now with entertainers like Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus.

Keep in mind that reading the work of the Frankfurt school theorists is no easy task, especially considering the translation. It might be easier to first take on a third-party treatment of the Frankfurt school. I'd recommend Introduction to Critical Theory (http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Critical-Theory-Horkheimer-Habermas/dp/0520041755/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1247693656&sr=8-3) by David Held.

[blake 3:17]

Adorno's writing on jazz is really fucked up. I find the disdain for popular culture kind of creepy.

I do respect Adorno's thought if not always his political conclusions, but the thinkers I most admire connected to the Frankfurt School are Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse. There was a big Benjamin industry in academia but the best intros are probably Michael Lowy, Terry Eagleton and Susan Buck-Morss.

If you check out stuff on the New Left Marcuse is fairly prominent. Like most of the Frankfurt School he was pretty pessimistic about both the working class and the ability to change society. He did become much more optimistic through the radicalizations of the late 60s.

I'd recomment Perry Anderson's Considerations on Western Marxism. Not sure how available it is, but very illuminating. A kind of neat book that should be available as part of the Verso radical thinkers series is Aesthetics and Politics, which has a bunch of debates and stuff from Adorno, Benjamin, Brecht, Bloch and Lukacs. Some of it can seem a little odd if you're not familar with the time or some some of the competing artistic tendencies but pretty neat.

Edited to add:
If the Frankfurt School thought culture was commodified and industrialized in the 50's, 60's, and 70's, just imagine what they would have to say now with entertainers like Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus.

HM/MC is total commodity production, but also pretty good. I don't think it's especially good art, but the TV show is better than most and for tweeny pop music it's pretty good.

I guess that's where the fuckers get us. I might prefer not to like something but it's pretty OK. I actually think she does have an edge of subversiveness that Jonas Brothers and High School Musical don't have.



In times of crisis what do you do with new kinds of language? Comic strips? Do novels even matter? Films?

[MarxSchmarx]

I dunno. The whole lot strike me as people who are interested in pop-culture first, and the class struggle second. In fact, they seem to be people who appreciate marxism because it helps them understand pop culture, and don't have a whole heck of a lot else of appreciation for the broader socialist project.

The only real impression I get from critical theory/frankfurt school type analyses are that they are, at best, basically just documenting even more examples of how the ideology of the ruling class affects culture, you know, extending the "opium of the masses" and the criticism of bourgeois family instituions found in Marx. So they're just fine tuning it a bit.

To be fair, all marxist scholars do this to some extent. But unlike most marxist economists, political scientists or sociologists, they offer very little in how, for instance, the arts should serve the socialist progress.

Nor are they conducting their analyses in such a way that is particularly constructive. Look at those areas of marxist jurisprudence that has been infected by these people - where is the vision for how a socialist legal theory can operate? Something which, for example, marxist economists have given a whole lot of thought in addition to their interpretations of modern capitalism.

What new ideas have they added to our understanding of the class struggle? After Gramsci, not one of these people have done anything concrete to advance socialism except produce ever more and increasingly unreadable writings.Well maybe habermas is an exception.

Nor have they really added to our understanding of how capitalism works, except document additional instances of the primacy of class relations in the arts. One is tempted to compare them to the bourgeois intellectuals who revere Marx that Lenin talks about. Frankly I see a lot of their work as derivative at best and self-serving at worst.


with entertainers like Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus.These are teh same person.

[makesi]

I wouldn't classify Gramsci or Lukacs as part of the Frankfurt School/critical theory branch of Marxism. Obviously, they weren't in the Frankfurt School and the direction of their theories and the evolution of their work was and stayed considerably more "orthodox" than those of the Frankfurt School, particularly Marcuse and Habermas.

I think Adorno and Horkheimer had valuable insights and I wouldn't consider them as simply analysts of popular culture. From what I know of their analysis of various cultural phenomena could be quite recondite and arcane at times--part of the reason why they still have a pall of elitism over them today.

I found them quite useful at the very least for encouraging a critical edge in yourself when taking in various parts of "popular" or everyday culture. Adorno's "The Stars Down to Earth" is an interesting analysis of the horoscope column in the LA Times.

Gramsci and Lukacs, however, with the one's emphasis on hegemony and his delineation of the key characteristics of organizations and the key components of their success is, in my opinion, not easily lumped in with the more purely cultural analysis of the Frankfurt school. And Lukacs was bashed by them for his Hegelianism. His interpretation of the development of bourgeoise thought leading up to the development of fascism in "The Destruction of Reason" (which I kind of liked and want to read again) was called by Adorno "The Destruction of Lukacs' Reason." Apparently, Adorno saw it is an exaggerated, crude and teleological assessment of a wide range of, primarily German, philosophers and social thinkers.

I've only read a little bit of Habermas and don't see myself as becoming a disciple of his theory of communicative action but his book "Philosophical Discourse of Modernity" from what I've read about it and looked at it is a monumental piece of work.

[blake 3:17]

The whole lot strike me as people who are interested in pop-culture first, and the class struggle second. In fact, they seem to be people who appreciate marxism because it helps them understand pop culture, and don't have a whole heck of a lot else of appreciation for the broader socialist project.

I think you are right to some degree. It's a tension or problem that runs through all of Western Marxism. There are a few major intellectual/activists who transcend this -- Sartre, Raymond Williams, Lukacs to some degree. And there are a lot more minor ones who've probably done more than 50 Adornos. I find someone like Fredric Jameson as being dull and irrelevant.

I do think some of the heritage is important, perhaps like why I give some respect to Althusser. They helped to move Marxist theory into different directions than the orthodox. Perhaps its impractical radicalism helped an non-activist academic Left continue to be non-activist.

[Asoka89]

Adorno is 80 percent on the money, 20 percent moronic. I think he's discounted a lot by too many leftists and I believe many of his critiques of the New Left of the 60s were on the money.

[Ned Flanders]

Herbert Marcuse´s "one dimensional man" and Erich Fromm´s "the sane society" are both among my favourites. I would say they are essential for anyone interested in the psychological aspect of modern times capitalist exploitation, or in other words, how the human soul is affected by the alienation of todays capitalist "consumer society.

[narcomprom]

They are immensly popular in German language academia. Seeing all the "vulgar" critical theory appied everywhere for any purpose is disencouraging. I know little of Adorno aside from a couple of overused known to any Germanic schoolchild such that "writing a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric".
Now total fuckwads churn out arbitrary policies and write tasteless essays with bathos overflow on what can and cannot be done "after Auschwitz". I feel a certain repulsion about them as you can only feel about an ideologist on the armament of pharisees and academic careerists.

Adorno's writing on jazz is really fucked up. I find the disdain for popular culture kind of creepy.
It is my feeling that all his writings were supposed to rationalise arbitrary censorship and cultural policy of a moderate social democrat moralism. But, as I said, I know too little to judge him.

One writer I read was Fromm on love. There he promotes hippieist simple living derived from a Marx with Freudian twist as a receip for happiness.

[Asoka89]

I'm reading Habermas' "Toward a Rational Society" now, does anyone have any insights into it or know of any good critical reviews of it.. i know its a longshot!

[gilhyle]

There are a series of books coming out in recent years by Adorno, lecture series published by Polity Press which are much more readible than his own published works - he goes up in my estimation when I read them.

I agree Lukacs and Gramsci were not Franfurt School. Benjamin was but only in a tangental way, I think. Ernst Bloch was similarly tangentally related. Dont forget Alfred Schmidt. Sohn Rethel is also a second level figure sometimes influential (though crap in my opinion).

Seems to me that Habermas brings out into the open the Kantianism which was implicit in the earlier generation - dont know if anyone has ever suggested that Cassirer had an influence on Habermas but I suspect he had.

[black_tambourine]

Seems to me that Habermas brings out into the open the Kantianism which was implicit in the earlier generation - dont know if anyone has ever suggested that Cassirer had an influence on Habermas but I suspect he had.

He comes down pretty hard on Cassirer in On the Logic of the Social Sciences. Early Habermas is okay; most of his stuff after the late 80s is just blah.

[kalu]

Fromm I think is more or less the odd man out, given his strong championing of an early Marx humanism with a Freudian twist. Definitely unconvincing, if fun reading. His best work is probably Marx's Concept of Man, which is mostly selections from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

I haven't read Adorno, but I really must. My friend says Martin Jay is a great commentator.

Benjamin is great, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" is beautiful. He has a real poetic style which is a bit hard to grasp, though his selected writings are filled with gems. He's perhaps one of the most difficult thinkers to sum up, but definitely worth reading.

The Frankfurt School as a whole does not seem to have sustained a serious audience in academia given (post)structuralism and Althusser's influence. Especially their humanism has been the first to suffer. In fairness, however, they were probably the first to bring up the whole issue of "culture" in Western Marxism, and the idea that "The Enlightenment might not have been as liberating as we thought," which has proved extremely important. Additionally, given that the Frankfurt School was based on idiosyncratic personalities, despite their common interest in culture, some scholars like Habermas and Benjamin continue to be considered relevant.

[blake 3:17]

A few things.

To be fair to Adorno, I believe he was primarily writing about early pop jazz a la Gershwin and before many of the real greats of jazz became known. The really challenging artists like Coltrane, Monk or Dolphy just weren't around yet or hadn't developed as serious composers/musicians. He was also a fairly esteemed classical pianist and attached to European high art music and culture.

Michael Lowy's analysis of Lukacs politics/philosophy after the early 30s was basically he saw bourgeois high art (as opposed to popular or avant garde) as the defense against Fascism. For some of the Frankfurt School I think they saw the same, but also a defense against Stalinism.

The Aesthetics and Politics book I mentioned above is quite a blast. These were debates and arguments had during both the rise of Nazi ism and the Stalinist doctrine of socialist realism. Brecht is the only serious artist in the scrum, but all were looking for alternatives to Fascist and Stalinist aesthetics. Most of us here would have a hard time following the debates due to not being familiar with much of the literature/art mentioned. I tend to know portions of it and then not have a clue what's being referred to. There are a lot of histories lost here unfortunately.


Seems to me that Habermas brings out into the open the Kantianism which was implicit in the earlier generation -

Probably right. Gershom Scholem's two brief memoirs Walter Benjamin - the story of a friendship and From Berlin to Jerusalem struck me as kind of odd in their exhiliration around Kant. Apparently Benjamin and Scholem were totally enthralled by lectures on Kant. I always think of him as deeply dull, which is foolish and ignorant.

Exploring Kantian thought might well be very useful for those of us trying to think about renewed Left politics and culture...

[gilhyle]

While Im quite anti Kantian, I recommend Lucian Goldman's book on Kant to anyone who wants to read an intelligent attempt to develop a neo-Lukacsian Kantianism.

[MarxSchmarx]

To be fair to Adorno, I believe he was primarily writing about early pop jazz a la Gershwin and before many of the real greats of jazz became known. The really challenging artists like Coltrane, Monk or Dolphy just weren't around yet or hadn't developed as serious composers/musicians. He was also a fairly esteemed classical pianist and attached to European high art music and culture.Though how well do you think his critique applies to this newer crop of musicians? For instance, Coltrane felt that until he was established, he couldn't experiment. Indeed, to this day he is remembered for the work he considered "sell-out" albums like "My favorite things" and even "Love supreme" instead of the really powerful, if avante garde and atonal, works of his very final years.

[narcomprom]

Though how well do you think his critique applies to this newer crop of musicians? For instance, Coltrane felt that until he was established, he couldn't experiment. Indeed, to this day he is remembered for the work he considered "sell-out" albums like "My favorite things" and even "Love supreme" instead of the really powerful, if avante garde and atonal, works of his very final years.
How does it differ from the things the classics remembered for? Only memorable sings are remembered. And people in the ivory towers then discuss snobbishly discussable things by the people who also wrote memorable things.

[Post-Something]

I know this isn't the films section, so don't mind me posting here.

I just recently saw this documentary called "the century of the self", and I think it sheds some light on the evolution of capitalism, psychoanalysis, and the the reasons why thinkers such as Marcuse responded in the way they did. It's a four part series, and it explains how the public relations field was practically founded by Bernays, and for what reasons. If anyone is interested, you can watch the first episode here (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8953172273825999151).

Also, if anyone has any recommendations of films or documentaries like this, please drop me a message or something.