Out of the Red and into the Purple; or, the Institutgraf's Maltese Falcon: Clemens Albrecht, Gunter C Behrmann, Michael Bock, Harald Homann, Friedrich H. Tenbruck: Die intellektuelle Gründung der Bundesrepublik: Wirkungsgeschichte der Frankfurter Schule (Campus Verlag, 1999, 572 + 77 pp.)
What is the time-hallowed way of approaching Critical Theory? uncritically.
I must admit that I have always found the work of the leading Critical Theorists, as sociology, tendentious, subjective, verbose, and methodologically weak. This is not one of the (many) good ways of writing sociology of art. No-one would choose their work when offered that of Norbert Elias, Eric Kohn-Bramstedt, Arnold Hauser, or Jost Hermand. On the other hand, the periphery about them produced a number of classic works (Behemoth, by Franz Neumann, Wittfogel's theory of hydraulic state-formation, One-dimensional Man), and Kracauer did find one of the ways of doing sociology of art. As for their ethics, one only has to think of the career of Kissinger (a younger German emigre) to realise the merit of talking endlessly about the narrowness of practical reason, and to appreciate the austerity and integrity of Horkheimer and Adorno. My assumption is that goodness is a basic human concept, and that the high ethical standards which Critical Theory promoted did influence the atmosphere of the Bundesrepublik while it was the official philosophy. Moving from a few dozen prolific writers to a few hundred thousand educated Germans is difficult, but why doubt that the weakness or absence of a New Right in Germany in the 1980s points to an ethical sense shockingly missing in Britain, good at liberty but not at equality.
The Frankfurt style is ideally suited for invalidating other ideas. An intimate part of this is the refusal to take opponents seriously, to address their arguments; and this inflexibility accounts also for the lack of nuance of the school's stars, their unwillingness to accommodate to fact. This serene ability to ignore both the adversary and events was very attractive to poets. Hauteur is prestigious in itself, but the fellows of the IfS surrounded it with a mighty prosody, suggesting endless scruples, immense erudition, a majestic verbal command, limitless leisure, attentiveness, and self-admiration. This is simply the language of authority. However, the style was too abstruse for anyone but an elite. They were ignored by philosophers for dealing with reality, and then ignored by other marxists for not being Leninists. They could not be read in the German-speaking world after 1933; in the USA, they insisted on publishing in German, to keep standards up. This was the period of Flaschenpost, of messages in a bottle. Dialektik der Aufklärung was published in 1946 by a non-academic émigré press with no customer base in Germany, in a small edition. It was virtually unread until the new edition in 1969. Why wasn't it republished before? Because Horkheimer was too careful of his contacts in government and regarded the book as too anti-authority.
The photo of Theodor Adorno on the cover bears a marked resemblance to the figure of Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon. Searching (Forschung) for the elusive plays as large a role in our story as the skimping of plain facts. The falcon, yes sir! the falcon. The Mysterium which they were stewards of (p.71) was either the fact of their concealed Marxism or the fact of their concealed abandonment of anything like Marxism. We just can't find out which. Or perhaps it was the capital dowry provided by Felix Weil; or perhaps the fact that Fred Pollock had lost the dowry by an unfortunate speculation in 1937, and that the mimicry of independence and superiority was enough to persuade the powerful of this world to supply them with independence and the leisure to reflect. Pliny speaks of "stars, which perch upon the yards and other parts of the vessel, with a sort of vocal sound, like migrating birds. This kind of star is dangerous when it comes singly; it causes the ship to sink." The Dialektik includes a colourful chapter on Odysseus and the Sirens, and it is likely that the falcon, beneath its Tarnhelm of lead housing, was really a Siren; or, the birth of pessimism out of the spirit of music. Adorno's indifference to fact proves how imbued he was with this spirit of music.
[Tillich on corrleation of self and world. teddy never reached the start line for doing sociology. ]
In the later 1920s, the Institut für Sozialforschung (IfS) grouped together a number of Marxist philosophers, opposed to democracy as so many people were while it was available, and with some notion of applying philosophy to social reality. We are reminded that there were other lines of German sociology at the time, which disappeared for institutional reasons. Michael Bock usefully compares the Institut to the circle around Stefan George: a sodality of elite hermit-sages, true heirs of an archaic and difficult European culture. A wrong turning was apparently taken with the accession of Max Horkheimer, a non-sociologist, to the directorship. The group went into exile, via France and Geneva, in New York, becoming the New School for Social Studies. After a certain point it consisted only of Horkheimer and Adorno; and abandoned belief in the Soviet Union, (probably) in Marx, and in the working class. This, and American anti-marxism swelling after 1940, led to the adoption of the code-word Critical Theory. The search for funds in the USA saw the conversion of prestige into bearer bonds in the situation of supporting grant applications (p.100). The tendering process makes assets explicit but does not, notoriously, tend to promote pure science at the expense of gestural prestige and distinction. In the bankers' drafts of affirmative culture, the ability to consider ideas detached from their market value is realised at its market value. The centrepiece of the book is Horkheimer's rise to eminence in the 1950s. On returning home, Horkheimer sought out mainly Catholic and conservative politicians. An American citizen, he became Rector of Marburg university in 1951, and represented (in the eyes of the conservative pro-business politicians who ran the Wirtschaftswunder), rectitude, intelligence, and honour. For at least a few years, and at least in Land Hesse, Horkheimer was being asked to pass candidates for jobs as academic philosophers, on the basis of their political record; he was the gatekeeper. (Haggard national-conservative philosopher: This filthy Jew is accusing me of being an anti-semite!) Around H. there arose "a public-affecting network of relations, which among others embraced the Frankfurter Hefte, the Hessian radio, Suhrkamp Verlag, the Sigmund Freud Institut in Frankfurt, and the Max Planck Institut. It reached from the President of the Republic, via the Foreign Office, the "Darmstadt" and "Nuremberg" Colloquia, to the working group of social-democratic academics." (p.185) The school became the standard-bearer of post-war German philosophy, the public face of intelligence. He prevented the group's early works (notably Dialektik der Aufklärung) from being republished, thus evading charges of premature anti-Fascism. He adopted quite advanced Cold War stances, for example condemning the peace movement (in 1950) for encouraging Soviet aggression. A pendant to this era of social arrival is the return to disquiet after the 1959 episode of swastikas being smeared on a certain Jewish graveyard. Their publications withdrew into the subjects of aesthetics and religion in the post-war decades. After the German publication of Herbert Marcuse's best-seller One-dimensional Man in 1967, the legend of a Frankfurt School was created by radical students who read the older books of the school (in pirate reprints) and rejected its living bishops. As the new radical agenda was being set up, diverted into lifestyle issues, and eventually abandoned, the Frankfurt School expired, although the tomb-slab collected works number at least 100 volumes. In the 1990s, we are reminded, almost half of the German parliament was composed of people who had been students in the post-1968 upheavals; their behaviour in power shows the history of effect, the Wirkungsgeschichte, of the IfS and its ideas. Their work is "community-building", and was popular because it gave a sense of belonging in which morality made sense. Their popularity as radio talkers shows, not only that they had "cut out" competing schools, but also that they had found a way of talking to a wide audience.
What was the basis of the IfS prestige in the new Germany? If Adorno was asked to help in officer selection for the Bundeswehr, this was partly because he was an American citizen, the German Army had recently been beaten by the Americans, and he was (or seemed to be) qualified to advise on the American method of linking different social classes in one fighting body of high morale. The American foible is to describe their social institutions as a form of technology —which can be exported, like tractors. And perhaps charged for (franchise charges?). The prestige of the IfS with conservative politicians of the restoration regime was due to their credibility as masters of the polling method of empirical research, glamorously linked to American superiority in general, but in particular in marketing. They were felt able to replace the German tradition (incarnated by Simmel) of sociology without research. Sociology was felt as a managerial science, and, for various reasons, there was (almost) no competition in Germany —if you disqualify the Marxists, an important proviso—to found the new sociology departments. So, they were unemployed in the 1930s and founders of successful concerns in the 1950s.
We can question whether the prestige of Adorno and Horkheimer in the Adenauer era was anything to do with their Leftism. And whether they did any empirical sociology after arriving back in Germany. Perhaps the commitment to data collecting was connected with bidding for research contracts from moneyed foundations who wouldn't show you their money if you did it any other way.
The whole concept of "authoritarian personality" seems to have been a description of the German patriarchal family structure (famille autoritaire in Emmanuel Todd's terms) mistakenly projected onto the American subjects of the research. The research contract, or its write-up, was hijacked in order to provide confirmation of a thesis published in some detail by Horkheimer 20 years earlier, in 1931. The idea that you could study German anti-semitism and authoritarianism by using American proxies was a false one, an error fortunately compensated for by Adorno's ruthless skewing of the data to prove his own preconceptions — which, if applied to Germany, were quite reasonable. Only Adorno's authoritarian personality could rescue anything from the wreck of one of the great methodological disasters of the 20th century.
The original issues of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung spent the 1960s nailed in a chest in the cellar of the Institute. The Falcon, too, had its obscure years. Marcuse plays the role of Brigid O'Shaughnessy, charged with gifts of Eros; in a trill of hormones, he made the Siren start singing again.
The engagement of the IfS with certain leading institutions of the young Bundesrepublik leads one to think about the rules governing such an accession of philosophy to power. It was temporary; because it was on a personal basis, and the relationships of trust grew old with the individuals engaged in them; it was bound to leave a hangover, as the loss of prestige of the politicians shed twilight on the philosophers; it was practical reason, and was in service to the policy problems of the day. It was not "institutionalised': we can hardly imagine a government official, in the Red scare of the 1970s, ringing up Habermas to ask if a candidate Dozent was sufficiently non-Marxist to be given a job. Real politics are fragile, and, if we fail to register this, our lens is not clear enough. When the paramount chief dies, his dog is likely to accompany him to the tomb; and so are his court philosophers.
The detachment (from teleology and economic appetite) of academic scholarship only comes into its own when it is being sold to the politically powerful, who will only buy it if is certain not to clash with their own teleology.
The absolutist regime in so many German states gave rise to a special brand of lawyer, a cameralist, in state service, planning absolute law. There was no adversarial tradition underlying this; the arguments were one-sided, and priority in drafting was more to give state employees unambiguous instructions. Because there was no limiting body of case law, or of civil rights, and no Opposition, these laws could start with a blank page. They resemble Idealism. Carl Schmitt, writing to prove that the government could commit no crime (as an anticipatory justification of the Third Reich's policies), is a descendant of these cameralists. There is a dialectic here, whereby the lawyer of a great client is more important than the lawyer of a small one; and the more the lawyer acquires the speech of the state's intentions, the more he comes to regard himself as the mind of the state. The more he ignores the confusing details of what citizens want, how interest groups behave, and what other scholars say, the more authority he will appear to possess. This needs to be borne in mind when analysing the appeal of Adorno and Horkheimer. The mistakes in evaluating monopoly are related to this predilection.
The relationship between the cameralist telling the tyrant what to say, and the tyrant telling the cameralist what to think, is an ambiguous one. There is a scale of prestige, whereby the more independent the adviser is from the ruler, the more valuable his advice is; and the more tied to detailed and undiscussable commands from above, the less valuable his services and opinions. The ideal servant for a tyrant is one who combines the maximum of apparent independence, suffusing an aura of legitimacy, with the maximum of reliability.
The practical usefulness of vetoing the appointment of ex-Black/ national-conservative thinking academics is not in doubt. Its resemblance to later unplanned career breaks for too-far Left academics, in the wake of 1968, is not diagnostic.
They became sincere converts to democracy as a result of living in the USA. Their shared belief was that fascism was the future of capitalism (hence the famous phrase about "capitalism making war on its own future", as a description of the Second World War). So, the result of their philosophising was wrong. Twenty years of lived experience taught them better. What does this say about the value of philosophising à l'allemande? as opposed to the empirical method based on dialogue in real-life situations. The precious feathered cargo, carried as contraband from the shipwreck of democratic Germany, was perhaps a set of mistaken propositions. They simply took the Anglo-Saxon world as extensions of Germany; a basic misunderstanding of the variety of European culture, imitated by certain followers who believe that Adorno's theses about Central Europe in the 1930s can be translated to Britain. If experience is so important, the "priestly knowledge" to prophesy, and to generalise across societies, vanishes—it is a Siren, a prosody without meaning.
Ideas come out of power and are mimics of it. Ideas have a daily life; they breed only by getting married —to governments and bankers. My problem is that this pattern of intellectual policy-making networks, richly implanted with structure at many levels, is just the kind of political science never even considered by the IfS. No talk from them about Filz, of prosopography, of interlocking directorates, of fractions of capital. How much more we prize books by Carroll Quigley and Fritz Fischer (for example), which detail the links between business, intellectuals, and government, and name names. State policy is the realisation of an idea, the wishes of certain conscious individuals for concrete advantages. It is not just "what happens" but the solution to a series of problems. Because they need to communicate with each other, these policy makers leave a paper trail, which survives for historians to read. (Of course there are also many speeches, press releases, etc., which are idealised and deceitful.) If you want to enter the governmental process, you have to form alliances with the people already there. Every elite has a structure—in the symbolic field. H. had a remarkable grasp of networking, but this grasp is completely missing from the Institute's accounts of politics; politics itself is missing, replaced by an idealist ghost-world in which will and representation develop without interference from other wills. They completely misunderstood the civil society of the English-speaking world because of their obsession with monopoly, which fulfils these idealistic rules. Their theory fails on games with more than one player.
There is an interesting reference in an old Lobster to a book on research in influencing populations which pinpoints Paul Lazarsfeld and his group as recipients of CIA funding and originators of key aspects of the theory of psywar. This would follow on from the research into radio audiences by which several of the IfS members earned their bread during the war. Inherent guilt? hardly. The arrival of democracy in either electoral or totalitarian forms has made propaganda an obligatory weapon of war. The research into the reception of radio broadcasts could have been used for countering Nazi propaganda among ethnic German citizens of the USA, for encouraging hope in occupied Europe, for demoralising the Wehrmacht, and for teaching democratic attitudes to the (von Hause aus totalitarian) population of the defeated Reich. Such studies of diffusion are a necessary counterpart to writing difficult treatises which will reach a tiny minority (but still aim at influence). In the 1950s, the Cold War project wanted the best researchers and generally got them, since after all it controlled most of the available funding. A paranoid view would be that the concept was for a dozen critical philosophers to get a message to the inner circles of the government, and for the government to translate the message into diffusible terms and transmit it to broad sectors of the population; a trickle-down of intellectual wealth.
After a failed request for funding from Princeton, three fellows of the Institute (Neumann, Kirchheimer, and Marcuse) went to work for the OSS, the predecessor of the Office for Policy Co-Ordination, which became the Central Intelligence Agency. German-speaking economists were presumably a "treasure" for analysis of intelligence. (The atmosphere inside OSS, we believe, was one of deep frustration, as all the field agents were Jews with perfect German, and the American preppies forming its cadre had to stay in the office because they weren't good enough to survive undercover.) It is not surprising that the IfS never discussed the links between the Department of Defense, the CIA, and the American universities. Honey, honey, honey. Get up offa that money. A memorable misprint rewrites Geheimdienst to Gemeindienst. The low prestige of scholars in America forced American sociologists to acquire knowledge, since they couldn't sell Wisdom, thus giving us modern sociology. The downside to this gun for hire willingness was the emerging dependence of the universities on DoD contracts.
The strenuous revision of the history of Critical Theory arouses the question of its relevance to the Grosseteste school of English poetry, often claimed to take its bearings from the Frankfurters. The possibility of such a stance vanishes as we read Die Gründung. "For me there was no Critical Theory, no somehow cohering doctrine. Adorno was writing culture-political essays and and otherwise was giving Hegel seminars. He represented a certain marxist background— and that was it(.)" (Habermas) There is no detectible consistency in the writings of the school, nor is there any core position, unless we classify mystery as such. The IfS cannot be identified with a view of society, or with an idea of how to behave in political and social life. There is nothing here for poetry to latch onto; any specific doctrine would have to be explained within the poem, or at least nearby, and the idea of a silent collusion of the intelligent is quite foolish. If something unstated is understood by five people in five different ways, the term is not implicit, but misunderstanding. Perhaps this is the subtext of the Ferry/Grosseteste school and its epigones: a vast, ramified, mutually supporting, set of tacit misunderstandings. You cannot use Adorno as the mysterious unstated core of your poems when the core of his own writings is unstated and unaccountable. There is no added value to loot here. It is rare, in English small press poetry, to find a statement about politics or a reference to the groups which actually hold power; this is due to being bored with politics. Adorno-ism covers the boredom with aristocratic disdain. Maybe the position of our poets is, simply, that "our social system is basically corrupt" and that "I am not part of the government".
The reception of the school in England was only possible because of the pre-eminent position which they held in the official culture of the Bundesrepublik, so the mass availability of their works. But the image received here was one of fastidious, pessimistic, exiled hermits. The idea that Adorno's elitism and pessimism can be taken out of the life context of an exile, bitterly nostalgic for the Weimar Republic, which decayed from within, and transferred to Britain, in the 1970s, or in 2000, seems callow and uncritical. If history is unmoving (a kind of featureless flesh hidden beneath a film of merely apparent changes), then consciousness has no effect, and philosophy is pointless. If his ideas are to be applied to Britain, with its mixture of democracy, market forces, and social exclusion for a large minority, they have to be fundamentally modified. I suspect Adorno's position (at least, that of Minima Moralia and Dialektik der Aufklärung) has been used to construct a political stance with economics and sociology omitted: a merely aesthetic position, sustaining wan gestures of incurious pessimism. Philosophy is difficult, and can be used to construct a competitive game with few winners: if goodness is competitively confined to half a dozen highly educated male academics, this is quite a luxurious feeling for those individuals. The poetry they write, although fundamentally lazy, will offer a fabulous dose of self-regard to those who are initiated into its indulgence.
The prestige of the person speaking is, after all, the key to the value of what is being said. The logic of the authoritarian or Stammfamilie is one of primogeniture and lifelong status; that is, if you are the true heir to the family farm, all your rivals can simply be left out of the picture. They don't leave, they just stay around and work for you. This is much more attractive than the standing of someone from an absolute nuclear family (in Todd's nomenclature): you have to compete with your rivals every day, they keep trying new things, you never draw away from performance to reach secure status, all the spectators are fascinated by uprising and overthrow of (intellectual) authority. Indeed, they find it hard to concentrate on anything else. British scholars do not work as hard as German ones because they are insecure about the status of their knowledge; anything which is not fashionable and amusing is just not going to get read. A society of nuclear families is chronically undisciplined, and always prepared to be briefly fascinated by intellectual projects which are disciplined and carried out in the long term. What the German says is more substantial simply because it represents a long-lived intentional state, a monumental arbitrariness, compared with the British intent to pick up your jacks and move on, in a serial disappointment. The fantasy of being German is thrilling because it implies status, prestige, freedom from being interfered with. But it cannot be more than a fantasy. Indiscipline is the wish of the reading market, not to be repealed by the apanaged High Landgrave of Fendom.
The camera style of the Frankfurters impresses because it is so disciplined and methodical, even if it registers the object very poorly. We could define the object of philosophy as self-control; a state of mind that will remain stable for thirty days. This is unnatural for someone from England. Acquisition of these cognitive skills would be an advance, and would start to transform the poetry we have. Sociology in Britain seems to have collapsed because there is no belief in the authority of the scholar; the wish to include the wishes and selfrepresentations of everyone is so compulsive that positive values dissolve and the book ceases to be a worthwhile experience. After a point, shifting points of view and breaking down datasets into single, particular, members are vices. We envy anyone who can write a whole book without shifting the grounds of judgment. The logic of a society of nuclear families is a constant marginalisation of emphasis. So much of science has come from fixing the frame of observation.
Although it is a history of Critical Theory with passing references to policy-making in West Germany, rather than vice versa, Die Gründung nonetheless provides a view of the complete lifecycle of ideas, from the philosopher on the mountain, with his eagle and his serpent, through retailing, to consensus, and to the policy committees. I experience this as a classic book, reason and knowledge in perfect harmony.