An Introduction to the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School

Hartigan – August 7th

I. What is Enlightenment?

The cornerstone text of Critical Theory came from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School, and was entitled Dialectic of Enlightenment. To understand the “Enlightenment” that the authors are criticising in the text, we must first understand what Enlightenment actually is. An understanding of it can come from Immanuel Kant’s essay An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’.

Kant sees the movement of Enlightenment as a release from authority – a kind of authority that is very often mysterious, for example the mystery of the divine right of monarchs, or the Priest’s ability to comprehend the mystery of religion. The enlightened thinker realises that her own understanding has the capability to clarify the world without the resort to mysterious authority: “The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!” For Kant, the light of Enlightenment is the freedom from authority, and the celebration of our own reason.

It is this position that Adorno and Horkheimer are directly responding to, although in The Concept of Enlightenment they refer to Francis Bacon as a figurehead of Enlightenment. According to the Frankfurt interpretation, anything that doesn’t conform to “the rule of computation and utility” is, in the eyes of the Enlightenment, disregarded. The myth (or mystery) of antiquated thought are examples of anthropomorphism: “the projection onto nature of the subjective”; mythic figures of antiquity all share the human subject as the common denominator. The Enlightenment’s attempt to reverse this was a strive towards complete schematisation: “its ideal is the system from which all and everything follows”.

II. The Frankfurt School’s Criticism

Adorno and Horkheimer believed that, in its attempt to demythologise philosophy and science, the Enlightenment created myths of its own – the aforementioned computation, utility, and schematisation. Looking at the violence of the 20th Century, they suggested that the promises made by the Enlightenment were in fact false and lead to nightmarish totalitarianism. Perhaps substituting the dogma of our own reason for the mythical dogma of antiquity can result in equally negative consequences.

Supposedly, the Enlightenment aimed to rid people of the fear that was so common in their lives: “Humans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown”. But, even as the technology and science that modernity worships become ever more prevalent, we need only look around to us to see unprecedented amounts of chaos, destruction, and fear. Why is this? How is it that the reason championed in the Enlightenment has become irrational? The answer lies in the fact that reason and science have distanced themselves from what many philosophers of the Enlightenment and modernity wanted it to be – Hegel, for example, saw science as the absolute knowledge and understanding of the world. But with the increasing prevalence of global capitalism, science (and especially the technology it is manifested in) becomes more focused on controlling the world, rather than understanding it. This use of rationality as an instrument is known, aptly, as instrumental reason (Horkheimer went on to write essays under the name of Critique of Instrumental Reason). We see this phenomenon come to light in consumer technology, nuclear missiles, and a wealth of other modern scientific innovations.

It is for this reason that Adorno and Horkheimer suggested that the source for the nightmare that was the 20th century was a threefold sense of domination: the human domination over nature, domination of the nature within human beings, and the domination of humans by other humans. The motivation for such domination and control is the aforementioned fear of the unknown. If the world is subjected to the control of people, then it will naturally be understood by the people: “Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalised”. In a society like ours, where everything is driven by “progress”, and “progress” is determined by our domination, that which is other, and that which is detrimental to progress, gets shunned or destroyed: “For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry. Unity remains the watchword from Parmenides to Russell.”

Dialectic of Enlightenment contains the bold claim that “myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.” Despite being somewhat unclear, this quote concisely explains the Frankfurt School’s attitude towards Enlightenment, in two points: firstly, the antiquated philosophies that the Enlightenment so strongly opposed contributed to the progression towards the Enlightenment, and so cannot be completely disregarded (“myth is already enlightenment”), and secondly, the Enlightenment has resulted in the establishment of the myths of modernity (the dominating sciences, and so on). It’s important to note that they do not see the Enlightenment as a movement totally without progression, just as they certainly do not glorify the mythical values of the pre-modern era.

III. The Influence of Hegel

As their text’s title implies, Adorno and Horkheimer were clearly applying a method similar to the dialectics of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit when they looked back on the history of philosophy. Just as Hegel applies consciousness’s reason to itself to reveal self-refuting contradictions, the Frankfurt School applied such a determinate negation to the values of the Enlightenment against themselves, resulting in a “dialectical enlightenment of enlightenment”. The Dialectic of Enlightenment “teaches us to read from [enlightenment’s] features the admission of falseness which cancels its power and hands it over to truth.”

This approach also involves another Hegelian method: that of conceptual self-reflection. Following the dialectical enlightenment of enlightenment, it is revealed that thought and knowledge arises from life’s central needs; needs that become distant as reason becomes instrumental.

IV. Conclusion

Overall, Critical Theory can be seen as following two movements within philosophy: predominantly, the Frankfurt school responded to the Enlightenment, but also to German Idealism in a Marxist way.

For Marx and his contemporaries, Hegel was the last great philosopher to be working towards an understanding of history and humanity in itself. Following Hegel, the “point” of philosophy, as Marx famously put it, was not to interpret the world but to change it. Accordingly, Marx and the other Left Hegelians moved from a strictly theoretical Hegelian philosophy into a new, practical philosophy, changing the methods by which society reaches its aims. In formulating Critical Theory, the Frankfurt School followed this turn, incorporating empirical sociology and history into their theorising, whilst retaining the normative descriptions of truth and ethics of traditional philosophy.

Obscurantism in Fiction and Non-Fiction

Hartigan - July 27th

In 1992, multiple scholars (including reputable names like W. V. O. Quine) signed a letter to oppose Cambridge University's granting Jacques Derrida an honorary degree. The basis of their opposition was a criticism that is commonly thrown towards Derrida and a vast proportion of other philosophers in the Continental tradition: obscurantism. The protestors accused Derrida of "tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists", and "little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship". It's interesting to note that in their letter, there isn't a single quoted passage from any of Derrida's texts. Is this criticism of Derrida and other notoriously complex philosophers justified? That is to say – is it really so criminal for a philosophical work to be difficult to interpret, lacking rigorous clarity?

Perhaps we can divide philosophical methodology into two broad styles: the literary and the analytic. To defend one or the other, it should be determined which one has techniques that are more likely to fulfil the purpose of philosophy. This is the first challenge. The second challenge is contained within the first, and that is: what actually is the purpose of philosophy? Some people will laugh at this question; it is so often asked of philosophy that it potentially reveals the inherent pointlessness of the subject. But this is, in fact, wrong: the only reason it is so often asked with regards to philosophy is because philosophy is an inherently questioning subject; the question is just as confusing and difficult when applied to any other academic subject. What is the point of biology? What is the point of mathematics? What is the point of psychology? None of these subjects, it would seem, have a pre-determined goal that they are heading towards.

I would like to use this conclusion – that academic disciplines take a path that is more meandering, rather than headed towards a certain ultimate conclusion – to suggest that all subjects may be closer to the arts and humanities than may initially be supposed. People don't often ask what the point of a novel, painting, or piece of music is, because it's generally accepted that works of art have individual purposes and interpretations for each of their readers. It may very well be the case for the sciences and philosophy. But we should return to the question – how can this defend the literary style of philosophy that is so often accused of obscurantism? We can compare fictional literature with non-fictional philosophy to explore this question.

Hegel said that "philosophy is in the element of universality": it is generally seen as part of the purpose of philosophy (whatever that may be) that it should address matters concerning universal characteristics of the world. A philosophical work concerning human understanding, for example, shouldn't address the human understanding of person X but instead of people in general. This is a contrast with fictional literature, which focuses on particulars: it would be very difficult to find a novel that is about everyone, as opposed to a person in particular. Even literary works with hundreds of characters and hundreds of settings never reach out into the realm of universality.

Despite this particularity, literature still remains valuable. How is this? Well, we should remember James Joyce's idea when referring to Ulysses: "In the particular is contained the universal". This can be interpreted as having a platonist meaning, referring to each particular being containing universally applicable characteristics, or it can be interpreted as an idea pertaining specifically to literature: in one, particular, work of literature, a universality is present in the infinite number of interpretations it can bring about. Every reader of Ulysses has read the same words (if we ignore the fact that there are multiple different editions, corrections, and so on), but it is very plausible to suggest that each of these readers has interpreted and responded to the text very differently. Would the same be the case if the novel had been laid out in as much analytical rigour as the protestors against Derrida valued?

I would like to suggest that the obscure, often metaphorical, and "wordy" nature of novels like Ulysses brings benefits that can be just as valuable in works of philosophy. While the rigorous and meticulously clarified works of Frege, Carnap, or whoever else are certainly valuable at answering particular and specific questions, the more interpretable and literary works of philosophers like Heidegger and Derrida provide us with not only potential answers to particular questions, but also with a wealth of additional questions.

Questions can be just as valuable as answers – if not more – because they contain within them assumptions concerning our understanding of the world and, paradoxically, they help us to clarify the world in some sense: while an answer is conclusive and terminating (provided it is correct), a question will always provide us with more, thus revealing not only the infinite capability of questions pertaining to the world, but also the limitations and workings of how questions can function. Raising a particular question may end up showing us that a question is illogical to ask, it may cause us to question the assumptions that led to us asking it, or it may indeed lead to an unexpected answer which, in turn, causes us to question its validity.

As such, it should be understood that the so-called "obscurantism" of some philosophical works is not something to be derided. Rather, it should be valued for its potential for raising interpretations and questions about the world, just as complex works of art and literature does. The purpose of these kind of philosophical works is incomparable with the purpose of more analytic works, which seek to rigorously provide one answer to one question. Of equal value are the works that provide us with many questions, without necessarily delivering decisive answers.

Addressing and Alluding-To

Hartigan – July 11th
In Cultural Criticism and Society, Adorno famously said that "Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric". What he meant by saying this was not as simple as rendering poetry post-Auschwitz as impossible, but that art in general post-Auschwitz would be engaging with the social structures that were present in the socio-political events that caused the Holocaust, allowing for the continued reification of such structures. Tragically, it is impossible for a poet to genuinely address the victims of  the Holocaust. But in Violence, Slavoj Žižek points out that poetry has always been an art form for those things that cannot be directly addressed to:

"Poetry is always, by definition, 'about' something that cannot be addressed directly, only alluded to. One shouldn't be afraid to take this a step further and refer to the old saying that music comes in when words fail."

What Žižek indirectly relates to here is that aspect of life according to which we rarely address anything directly. We, in fact, refer to them through a medium which essentially transforms things as they "truthfully" are into things that can be culturally understood. This medium may be used by way of metaphor (as in poetry), or – more often – by way of a construct of social reality. When we think we are referring to a material object (such as a car, a book, an animal, or more or less anything else), we are in fact referring to the social concept of that object: that is, the socially-determined implications, purposes, histories, categorisations, and associated terminologies of that object. As such, it is rare (or, perhaps, impossible) that we should ever refer to material things as they are in-themselves.

At first, especially from a metaphysical realist point of view, this doesn't seem plausible. Is it really the case that we cannot refer to an object without redirecting our reference to the object's participation in social reality? In his Logical Structure of the World, Carnap proposes that any scientific object can be defined purely by statements about already-defined objects. But this inevitably presupposes a definition of some axiomatic object which, given the empirical basis of Carnap's philosophy, would surely have to be some indivisibly fundamental material object. The problem with this is not only that it seems unlikely for the natural sciences to find such an object (which would presumably have to be some sort of material Form of the Good), but also that it is in fact impossible for us to genuinely grasp anything in purely material existence.

Regardless of how we comprehend and communicate about an object, it is always transformed from the object-in-itself to the object-for-a-medium. If I am to think of the desk in front of me, the thought in my mind is not the desk but the immaterial concept of the desk: my perception of it, with the immaterial attributes (the word "desk", my ownership of it, the socially determined purpose of a desk, the personally determined purpose of this desk in particular, and so on) appended to it. If I talk to someone about the desk (thereby moving the object-for-a-medium from my own consciousness to the public), there are similar immaterial attributes communicated. When I talk to somebody about a physical object, it is not as though my language somehow shoves the physical object in their mind; rather, the concept of the object is held immaterially in and amongst my language and our mutual understanding of it.

Of course, a response to this comes from reductive materialists, who will claim that such "concepts" are actually just physical objects in my brain – that is, a precise arrangement of electric charges inside my skull. However, this can be challenged by referring back to the example of communication: if two people are talking about a particular object, it is unlikely that the arrangement of electric charges in their brains are identical. What if one person has a particular understanding of that object that the other lacks? Accordingly it is seen that a concept is not simply a material thing because of the varying ways in which it can be manifested. However, this leads us on to the second response from class nominalism. A class nominalist would argue that, in fact, the variance of comprehensions of concepts is perfectly reconcilable with materialism, because when I conceptually refer to a seemingly universal concept (for example, the concept of dogs in the sentence "apples are fruits"), I am just referring to the set of all appropriate material things (following from the example, the sentence simply refers to all apples in the physical world). The objection to this is to ask: what are these "sets" or "classes"? When I refer to the abstract concept of "a class", am I referring to a group of physical things? What physical things are these? Furthermore, we can imagine a world in which the computer had not been invented, but the idea had been developed by some scientists. When these scientists refer to the abstract concept of a "computer", there are no physical things to refer to: does this render the concept meaningless?

As such, it can be concluded that any attempt to refer to material things inevitably condemns us to mere reference to immaterial concepts. To refer back to Žižek's response to Adorno, we can analogously see poetry as he refers to it as the social reality of concepts, and the things that poetry alludes to as everything that we ever think or speak of: just as poetry can never directly address the Holocaust, our thoughts and language can never directly address any of the material world before us.

Mass Media, Culture, and Science

Hartigan – June 29th

By nature of its definition, popular media is not only affected by mass culture but has a significant effect on mass culture itself. The significance of these effects has only increased with the proliferation of media by the Industrial and Information Revolutions, and as such it is reasonable to ask whether or not media sources should alter their output in the hopes of bettering society (whether morally, intellectually, or in any other way). Would it be feasible to impose such a responsibility on the media?

Before we even suggest a change in the functions of media, an observation must first be made on its current mode of presentation concerning science, the arts, and so on. When looking at almost any form of media, a system that affects the presentation of almost all topics is revealed: this is the system of dichotomies, in which topics of interest are divided into the One Thing and the Other. Every newsagents will sell a series of magazines written "for women" and a series "for men", just as cosmetic products are similarly oriented. These are examples of what the post-structuralists have called binary systems, and – for whatever reason they emerge – they are prolific in society, and especially in popular culture. Such an opposition can be seen within the context of science, philosophy, and the arts: when there is portrayal of these topics in the media it is usually withdrawn to niche outlets, and when it enters the media of the mainstream, it is consistently presented as Object to the reader as Subject in a one-way system of spectacle, rather than a two-way system of discourse. As such, a responsibility for the media to educate their consumers in intellectual disciplines is a responsibility to subvert the culturally ingrained dichotomy of science and academic pursuits as Other. Is this too much to ask? That is to say, is it even possible? Normalised systems of culture are never codified; they exist immaterially (but sturdily) amongst the people of the culture and, as such, cannot be manipulated easily.

Perhaps there is an ethical obligation against imposing responsibilities on the media. Writers of the Chicago School of economics would be opposed to the idea, seeing the sole responsibility of a corporation (that is, the corporations that constitute mass media) as serving their shareholders. It is unlikely that the modification of media's mode of presentation in the aim of education is a benefit for shareholders. However, I don't agree with this: even if we assume that the shareholder theory is "correct" for the sake of argument, the media corporations that play a part in determining cultural values are more than simply corporations. The reason for this is precisely the fact that they determine cultural values, by impacting what qualities are deemed "normal", "other", "popular", etc. by society¹. To place the shareholders of these corporations at the utmost executive position of power would be to put them at an executive position in society-at-large, pushing the capitalist world into a situation that is even more dominated by bourgeois morality. However, although this suggests that there should be certain responsibilities imposed upon corporations that have cultural impact, I will still argue that any such responsibilities that aim for education would be completely fruitless.

Mass culture fits its name exactly: it is for the masses. As such, concepts and values that are popularised in popular media become normalised, and enter the consciousness of mass culture as diluted, simplified manifestations of their original concept. This is observable in the mysterious concept of fame, a value which is certainly popular and common amongst mainstream media. But what is fame? It is of course not material, nor is it a measurable goal which somebody can reach – although Ludwig Wittgenstein is acknowledged almost universally within philosophy as one of the central figures of the 20th century, his name is not in the mainstream cultural consciousness. Can we really say that Wittgenstein is "famous" in the way we would say Kim Kardashian is? Clearly, fame is a concept of the sort that only exists vaguely throughout culture and language; its proliferation in mass media has reduced it to such an unclear existence. The same would happen to science or philosophy, if responsibilities were imposed on the media to educate people by popularising them – what the mainstream cultural consciousness would be left with is a vague, indefinable concept that is detached from the original concept itself. Because of this, it can be concluded that any sort of "duty" to be placed upon corporations, commanding them to popularise (and effectively commodify) intellectual and educational pursuits, would be useless if not harmful.

One last thing should be noted – exactly why is it that culturally normalised concepts are so indefinable? The answer lies in the very way that the culture industry (as Adorno calls it) works. To refer to an aforementioned example, why is it that people like Kim Kardashian are famous? To ask what these people do would be a mistake – the more accurate question asks what it is that the culture industry does to them. Many celebrities, even those who are famous for a particular profession, function as mere "containers" for the ideology of the culture industry. A celebrity can appear or perform publicly alongside a particular brand or, alternatively, their performance can be employed to spread popularity of a particular practice. For the culture industry, any normalised concept works in just the same way as these celebrities do: just as fame has become an indefinable concept for the media to use as it wishes, as could science, philosophy, or any other concept. This is similar to the way in which, during pre-modern times, theological concepts were used to supply simpler answers to complex questions (we see this in the way that many archaic theologians seem to beg the question of God's existence). If mass culture continues to proliferate concepts as it has done so far, society runs the risk of worshipping vague, indefinable concepts in just the way archaic society worshipped a vague, indefinable deity.

---

¹ However, we may wish to consider this: do the corporations which we can roughly label "non-cultural" (e.g. accountancy firms, furniture production companies, and so on) have impacts upon cultural values that are simply subtler than those of "cultural" corporations? For instance, every corporation that is involved in managing people's money attaches certain immaterial values and functions to money, and certain immaterial functions and obligations for the people that manage money. Given that money is a central part of the society we live in, it can be argued that these immaterial qualities in turn affect the cultural subconsciousness.