An Elitist Critique?

It is, however, hard to overcome the apparent aloofness of Frankfurt School thinkers from our times and from popular culture in general. Its famous first generation (which included Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse) hailed from privileged bourgeois industrialist backgrounds and wrote famously convoluted academic treatises. Critics, not without good reason, charged them with obscurantism, cultural elitism, liberalism, anti-activism, and even deep state collusion.

The last of these accusations has stuck most tenaciously, despite being the least plausible. Marcuse was, during the interwar and war years, in the employ of America’s Office for Strategic Services, a forerunner organization to the CIA. Critics, Marcuse wrote to Jürgen Habermas in the 1960s, “seem to have forgotten that the war was a war against fascism.” Within the context, aiding the United States was not a crime for which he had “the slightest reason for being ashamed.”

Similarly, Adorno wrote for a number of journals that received covert CIA funding in the postwar period, such as the German Der Monat, British Encounter, and Italian Tempo Presente, although none of them contradicted Adorno’s public positions, their principal aim being to counter totalitarian currents.

While the charge of CIA collusion can be easily disregarded, those of obscurantism, elitism, crypto-liberalism, and anti-activism are harder to counter. These slurs are most commonly leveled at Adorno, not least as he has emerged as the most quoted of his group of peers. Even as an Adorno scholar, I at times struggle to defend him. He, after all, favored elite art forms over bourgeois culture, detested jazz, prioritized theory over political praxis, and once called the police on his own students while they occupied his faculty.

Capitalist Abstractions

In a 1977 TV interview with the philosopher Bryan Magee, Marcuse called Adorno “a genius,” who spoke in fully formed “ready to print” sentences, only to state later in the same interview that he himself did not always fully understand Adorno’s prose. Such contradiction enforces a suspicion widely held in both right populist and left activist circles that critical theorists prefer the mystique of academic obscurity to textual clarity. The issue of clarity, however, was somewhat more complicated for Adorno who saw the fragmentary nature of his own writing as a response to the fragmentation of late capitalist society.

While capitalism tends toward homogenization of cultural forms, it fragments working, social, and home life. In the introduction to Adorno’s Minima Moralia — a book entirely comprising short aphoristic texts and subtitled Reflections From Damaged Life — the philosopher states that to properly give expression to societal conditions one must reject formal coherence. His hope, ambitious as it may sound, was that the fragmentation of the text would expose the false harmony of consumer society.

This tendency toward fragmentation can also be seen in Adorno’s preference for abstract art, a perennial target in accusations of cultural elitism from both the Left and the Right. Stalinism maintained a deeply hostile attitude toward Russia’s avant-garde, preferring social realism instead. The Nazis of course dedicated exhibitions to “degenerate art.” What “cannot be understood . . . but needs some pretentious instruction book to justify [its] existence will never again find [its] way to the German people,” Hitler said of expressionist and abstract painting.

The perceived distance of abstract art from reality threatened the reactionary idea of social order. Yet Adorno argued it was capitalism that caused and expedited estrangement of nature, a phenomenon that had its roots in humankind’s tendency toward identity thinking — i.e., the need to control nature by categorizing and identifying it.

The second generation of the Frankfurt School saw such estrangement as a main theoretical concern. They had firsthand experience: the first half of the twentieth century witnessed both the most developed societies that have ever existed and the advent of world wars, mass displacement, genocide, and the dawn of the nuclear age — tragedies that showed the utopian and dystopian sides of modernity.

The response of the Frankfurt School was to challenge the idea that the progress celebrated by liberal society was as complete as it seemed. The transition from first nature — the sphere of animal instinct and biology — to second nature — language and culture — was far from complete. Despite the best intentions of Enlightenment thinking and early science to mediate between humanity and nature through rational inquiry, industrial capitalism was red in tooth and claw to a demonstrably greater degree than nature itself. It was, Adorno argued, reasonable to develop a healthy skepticism toward the promises of Enlightenment because “no universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.”

The cruel irony of modernity is that industrial society emerged to resist the unavoidable pull of human life toward death yet created lethal threats of a new kind. This did not just mean illness and want, but also destructive tendencies toward violence, which humans are capable of inflicting on themselves and others — what Sigmund Freud, the strongest influence on the Frankfurt School other than Marx, referred to as the death drive. But instead of an escape from our destructiveness, modernity armed human beings with more lethal capacities for self- and other-directed harm. From the trenches of World War I to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, human beings have proven capable of dealing out death on an unprecedented scale.

Dialectics of Enlightenment

This dialectic of Enlightenment was observed by the main figures of the Frankfurt School, who linked it to a growing sense of cultural malaise. Not only had industrial society produced new forms of human suffering, but the industrial reproduction of art stripped it of its quasi-spiritual calling. Analyzing the transformation of human subjectivity, Marcuse referred to the “one-dimensionality” of life in the postwar period, arguing that in the context of abandonment of transcendent forms of meaning, consumers settled into accepting weak fulfillments of their actual desires.

Like Adorno, Marcuse felt that one of the greatest tricks of an advanced industrial society was to make citizens and consumers feel that they were happily choosing their subjugation (and an inferior fulfillment of their desire). We can observe this trend today amongst internet users who seek the adoration of followers rather than real life friendship, subordinating themselves to stereotypes conveyed via social media to gain recognition.

To the extent that Adorno was an obscurantist or a thinker who preferred abstraction, it was a reaction against the co-optation of culture by industrial capitalism. The cultural figures he lauded — Charles Baudelaire, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Gustav Mahler, Edgar Allan Poe, Arnold Schoenberg — all incorporated an element of aesthetic dissonance into their work.

For Adorno, this shock was capable of confronting individuals with the reality that artworks were the product of the labor of individuals, a revelation that he called the artwork’s “truth content.” Far from being an elitist and an obscurantist, Adorno intended to break the false spell of a culture industry, which hid human labor behind glossy packaging and glitzy images. Ultimately, his reasons for favoring high art were that it operated with far more honesty about the conditions in which it was produced than popular culture.

But Adorno’s hostility toward the culture of his present also manifested as a deep suspicion of its politics. The latter came to a head infamously when the Frankfurt professor called the police on protesters at his university in 1969. In a correspondence with Marcuse, who held a far more sanguine view of the student movement, Adorno wrote that he was “the last person to underestimate the merits of the student movement; it has disrupted the smooth transition to the totally administered world. But it contains a grain of insanity in which a future totalitarianism is implicit.”

The letter exchange signaled a wider rift between the two thinkers. While Adorno feared his students, Marcuse had become a regular attendant and speaker at protests in the United States. But there were costs to be paid on either side of the barricade. Marcuse’s embrace of the student movement led critics to accuse him of helping to found a New Left less interested in class struggle in the workplace and more concerned with race and sexuality.

Indeed, Marcuse did emphasize the need for the creation of an alliance of migrants, students, and workers, as part of the “Great Refusal” — an uprising against consumerist and imperialist values that would usher in a new world. But the philosopher’s emphasis on nonworkers was primarily an attempt to find a vantage point from which the bamboozling effects of one-dimensionality could be challenged, rather than to supplant trade unionism altogether.

Marcuse saw in the hippy and student countercultural movements of his time wellsprings of resistance to the stupefying effects of the media. Yet in his An Essay on Liberation (1969), he also warned that the aesthetic and hedonistic movements of the 1960s counterculture allowed for their own co-optation and conversion into media spectacle and consumer fad. The idealistic hedonist, in their effort to turn away from capitalist society, was at risk of rejecting the discipline needed to change society for the better. Before long, Marcuse’s fears were realized and hippy culture would become a fashion, co-opted by the culture industry adorning Coca-Cola adverts on billboards.

But the Frankfurt School’s interest in the leveling effects of capitalism on culture remain salient today. As governments across the globe have worked to restrict the right to protests, political resistance has largely moved online, taking the form of maximalist sloganeering and the embrace of radical political symbols, often mediated through the internet language of videos and memes. When these ideas filter up into the mainstream, it is in the form of xenophobia and bigotry modeled on, or responding to, fringe political discourse.

What is referred to as “the culture wars” grew up on social media before becoming part of mainstream political debate. The language in which concerns about the oppression of minorities is broached often ignores the material reality underpinning them. This, too, can be seen as a sign of one-dimensionality. In the absence of political possibilities, people, rather than grapple with this difficulty, have chosen to withdraw into a sphere in which action seems possible, yet only at the expense of theoretical rigor. Their need to engage politically is only falsely satisfied, in terms of attacks on other hapless online subjects.

This returns us to Adorno’s consideration of identity thinking as an irresolvable problem at the core of human thinking and action. While technology gives us the means for ever more political expression, we are reduced to controlling identificatory practices: i.e., call-out and cancel culture. Adorno and Marcuse may have had differing solutions to the challenges of modernity, yet they each prefigured the cultural malaise of our digital age.