1-ViraVerita: Is Critical Theory, which has historically sought to critically engage with and transform the existing social conditions, still capable of fulfilling its promise while addressing the new challenges of our era? Can we question the current state of Critical Theory through the methodologies and perspectives proposed by Adorno and Horkheimer, particularly in light of their critique of the Enlightenment’s promises? In other words, can one speak of a “dialectic of Critical Theory” by following the framework established in the Dialectic of Enlightenment? If so, how do you think we can approach such a dialectic?
1-Fabian Freyenhagen: Critical Theory today can still fulfil its promise of critically engaging with and transforming the existing social conditions, but it needs to return to its earlier roots to do so. In my view, it somewhat lost its way by taking a particular kind of intersubjective turn and focusing so much of its energy on the non-issue of normative foundations. The former – the particular kind of intersubjective turn – has made Critical Theory not well-equipped to address one of the, if not the key challenges of our era: the climate emergency and wider ecological crises. It is no accident or surprise that currently many who work in the Critical Theory tradition return to the work of the first generation, notably Dialectic of Enlightenment, in thinking about how to navigate this challenge. The latter – the focus on the non-issue of normative foundations – has truly threatened Critical Theory’s essence, erasing the difference to traditional theory (as Horkheimer analysed and criticised it in his seminal 1937 paper). A misguided search for impartiality has driven a wedge between theory and practice that even Adorno, who famously stood against letting theory be subordinated to the dictates of practice, would have rejected; and this search has led to a forgetfulness of historical context that made the theories of later generation Frankfurt School thinkers prone to complicity with a colonial logic.
Can one speak of a “dialectic of Critical Theory”? Yes, in at least the following way, we can: the worry that the positive achievements of the Enlightenment (and modernity more generally) got lost in the negativistic critique of it by Horkheimer and Adorno, have led Habermas, Honneth, and many of those working with their frameworks to become uncritical of central facets of our modern capitalist world in such a way that they blind themselves to at least some of the forces that threaten the achievements. Honneth is a good example here. Even at his supposedly more radical – when advancing the idea of socialism – he rules out experimenting with social organisations that do away with markets. Similarly, both Habermas and Honneth construe social pathologies in such a way that they build a status quo bias into their very approach: social critique becomes solely one of keeping particular spheres (such as the market or bureaucratic administration) in check, ruling out altogether from the off that the social body as a whole might need replacing. And instead of a pluralistic approach, the concern with normative foundation and a particular kind of systematicity has led to a normative monism or even, in Honneth’s case, to claiming that we have reached the end of (normative) history. The worry about dogmatism of a partisan Critical Theory has, ironically, resulted in dogmatism, including about which picture of social critique is appropriate.
To approach such a dialectic will require a combination of using the tools of disclosing critique like satire and other rhetorical devices in pushing back against Critical Theory’s losing its way – as well as a healthy dose of doing things differently when engaging critically with society. The second is particularly important for the first might simply perpetuate the navel-gazing philosophising about philosophy that we have seen so much in recent decades, and that has come often at the expense of what really matters: offering a critical theory of society, one that both changes as the object of critique (i.e., the modern capitalist social world) changes and stays true to itself in recognising that this object has stayed the same in its essential features.
1-Eva von Redecker: Critical Theory came about because the early generation of thinkers enriched the marxist framework, not only with contemporary empirical work from the social sciences, but also with additional philosophical ingredients, such as Nietzsche and Freud’s metapsychology. And the Frankfurt School went on to expand, in some places more than others. I don’t think that process was always strictly dialectical, but at the outset of what became the Dialectic of Enlightenment, it surely was. Horkheimer was faced with an acute crisis, a breakdown even, of his theoretical convictions. Both the hope that the working class would be the champion of emancipation, as well as the assumption that economic crises could unlock historical progress were shattered by the emergence – and victory, at the time of Californian exile – of fascism. To me the most stunning and underappreciated innovation in the Dialectic of Enlightenment is the shift to the domination of nature, inner and outer nature, as the driver of – now negatively dialectic – historical development. It becomes really clear if you read the book backwards, starting from the speculations about animals and evolution. What is released in annihilatory fascist violence is the charge of traumatized nature, nature that cut itself from the potential for mimesis by projecting hostile rigidity onto the entire world. I think this approach is more relevant today than ever. In the planetary crisis we experience, any analytic framework that thinks totality as a purely social, societal phenomenon falls short. So we might say that we are at a dialectical moment where reappriciating the critique of instrumental reason might be a revolutionary step forward. But you see, I’m not a proper dialectitian, and I don’t see learning only as an endemic, crisis-ridden development. Sometimes there are encounters. If we want Critical Theory to develop, we also need to appreciate the counterfactual ones, the missed chances. Imagine, for instance, that after arriving in US exile, Adorno had listened to C.L.R. James, who was on a lecture tour there in 1938/39. I think that could have been more fruitful for Critical Theory than, say, discussing twelve tone music with Thomas Mann.
1-Rocío Zambrana: Adorno and Horkheimer’s classic Dialectic of Enlightenment is deeply relevant today. In this timely text, Adorno and Horkheimer launched an essential critique of modernity, albeit one that should be deepened through a consideration of the colonial violence distinctive of the project of modernity as a form of rationality and as a historical event. Recall the central claim of the text: “Myth is already enlightenment and enlightenment reverts to mythology.”[i] It is urgent to explore the force of this claim in light of the colonial matrix of power that enlightenment rationality articulated and installed, creating conditions for the ecological catastrophe, ongoing forms of dispossession and precarity, enduring racial terror, lethal forms of gender violence, and rising fascism that we are experiencing today. That enlightenment is or operates as a myth, to be sure, marks the text’s claim that the regressive rather than progressive actualization of modernity should be countered by a notion severed from instrumental rationality. We might deepen the claim shifting away from a defense of modernity, considering other forms of organizing life that remain despite the devastation birthed in the early modern world – the futures-past of Indigenous peoples who have continued to birth worlds despite the apocalypse of the so-called age of discovery, for example.[ii]
Adorno and Horkheimer’s text is nevertheless key today in helping us explore the persistence of the epistemic and libidinal bases of capitalist modernity, with its race/gender order, despite vast evidence of its forms of violence. Rather than a text that might allow us to confront western rationality on its own terms, in other words, it allows an exploration of the persistence of the image of and desire for conceptions of ‘nature’, body, time, the human, community, so on, that have brought us to the current predicament. Adorno and Horkheimer’s insistence on a more consistent conception of enlightenment might shed light on our cruel attachment, to think with Lauren Berlant, to modernity itself.[iii] This form of engagement would imply a radical self-awareness of critical theory’s own contribution to said epistemic bases and libidinal investments, confronting its own theses with the claims of others weathering the historical harms of the very project of the enlightenment. It is through this radical form of self-awareness that, in the vein of the first generation, a dialectic of critical theory would have much to contribute to the futures-past of the worlds beyond the catastrophe of ecological degradation, dispossession, racial terror, genocide, and fascism. Pressing further rather than taming Adorno and Horkheimer’s pessimism, I am thus suggesting, might take the deep insights of their key text in a new direction.
2-ViraVerita: Reflecting on the historical trajectory of Critical Theory from its roots to the present, we observe both discontinuities and continuities between the first generation and the subsequent generations. Do you think there are any lost insights that have been overlooked due to changing socio-historical conditions, which merit reevaluation in today’s context? In what context and how would you suggest revisiting and discussing these insights? Conversely, are there views inherited from the first generation of Critical Theory that, given the current socio-political landscape, no longer offer a relevant framework and can thus be regarded as “outdated”? If so, why should these be set aside, or how should they be revised?
2-Fabian Freyenhagen: Yes, there are, definitely, lost insights from the first generation of Critical Theory that merit reevaluation today. I already mentioned our relation to nature as one area where a number of theorists have recently recognised that we would do well to return to the reflections on this by the earlier generation. This is not to say that we can simply transpose the earlier reflections in a way that will yield direct application to today. In particular, we might go wrong if we think we can isolate some specific insights (in the sense of propositional content) about, say, the domination of nature, from the context and form in which they were written. Indeed, it might actually be the form of writing – disclosing critique – that we need to revisit and redeploy. An important and promising attempt in this direction is the critical naturalism manifesto written by Federica Gregoratto, Heikki Ikäheimo, Emmanuel Renault, Arvi Särkelä and Italo Testa: https://criticalnaturalism.com/
Similarly, the entanglement of progress and regress is a theme that has been productively taken up from the first generation of Critical Theory, most notably by Amy Allen’s The End of Progress. And again, this is not simply a matter of transposing specific propositional content from one historical or dialectical context to another. In good part, it is about renewing and redeploying genealogy as a problematising device.
Other examples would be the way the earlier Critical Theorists, notably Adorno and Marcuse, used psychoanalysis to highlight problems with fascist propaganda or consumerist integration of subjects into post-WWII capitalist societies. For example, psychoanalytically informed reflection about fascist propaganda could not be more topical at this point in time, in light of Trump’s second successful election campaign. Among the devices of personalized fascist propaganda deployed was what Adorno describes by the concept of the “great little man”: someone who presents themselves as both an ordinary guy of the people and as having unique abilities for achieving greatness, allowing people to identify with this person as someone they actually are, while also identifying with this person as realising a fantastic ideal of who they would want to be. To give one more example of lost insights, instead of craving to the dogma that markets would have to be part even of socialism, we can deploy an Adornian critique of ethical consumption that highlights the reproduction of the problematic market logic of commensurability (as Estelle Ferrarese has done recently in her Le marché de la vertu).
Even what might look outmoded on the face of it, could, in fact, be pertinent to the current form of capitalist modernity, if taken up in the right way. For example, one might think that what Adorno and Horkheimer describe as “culture industry” is outmoded, since we are less dealing with a straightforwardly homogenising cultural sphere operating at industrial scale than a splintering of this sphere into ever-smaller echo chambers and sub-cultures. Yet, algorithm-driven personalisation can be understood has having the same devastating effects on critical abilities that standardisation and mass production of cultural products in the 1940s had, according to their classic discussion of this in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Indeed, despite all the personalisation, one might question whether even the thesis of homogenisation at the level of contents is really outmoded, given how many of us watch cat videos and listen to Taylor Swift.
In some cases, it might also be less of a matter of setting aside the insights of the whole first generation of Critical Theory than of siding with one of these thinkers rather than another on specific issues about which they themselves disagreed. For example, Critical Theory – both back in the 1960s and today – might be better served with Marcuse’s wider conception of where resistance and critical consciousness can come from than Adorno’s (arguably) narrower view of this.
2-Eva von Redecker: I guess the above already addressed some of this, so let me maybe say something on the gist of this question. I think it is fatal for Critical Theory, or any emancipatory project, to think of itself in generational turns. The world is really in too much peril for us to waste time with killing our fathers, reappreciating our grandparents, etc. We need everything, and much more than we inherited from them. Rahel Jaeggi always says “Critical Theory is a constellation, not a school or a dynasty”. I think that is a very good way to look at it. If you study Adorno because you want to become part of the Frankfurt School and not because you think the world needs the ideas you find there, then you are not doing Critical Theory. But since you asked about continuities, one thing that I find very inspiring is that the theme of reification is so constant even in bodies of work that otherwise strongly differ. You have it in Habermas’ XX and you have it in Minima Moralia. Rahel Jaeggi and Axel Honneth have written about it, Cristoph Menke’s Critique of Right could be read as a critique of the reification of politics, there is Daniel Loick’s Abuse of Property. So this is a constellation I find hugely helpful when trying to reformulate the current authoritarian wave as driven by the defense of phantom possession.
2-Rocío Zambrana: The first generation holds key insights for thought and praxis in today’s context. Its critique of instrumental rationality, exploration of political economy in a consistently anti-capitalist vein, consideration of the problem of desire, attention to the question of history, and unwavering proximity to socio-historical reality remain essential for theory and praxis today. In being unconstrained by the question of normative foundations, which displaced the task of critical theory to a metaphilosophical reflection that deepened rather that questioned the epistemic bases of capitalist modernity, the first generation holds the key to the future of critical theory. In fact, it remains relevant for theory and praxis beyond the European and Eurocentric contexts. Walter Benjamin’s work is here exemplary. A reference for Decolonial, Latin American, and Caribbean thought as well as Black Critical Theory, Benjamin’s views on history, memory, the interruptive force of the strike, the strictures of a materialist method, and the force of engagement with philosophical and literary canons help understand our contemporary moment of planetary, sociopolitical and economic danger.
To be sure, there are many features of the first generation that must be left behind, for example, the racialism of Adorno’s aesthetic theory or the lack of attention to the experimentation with forms of violence in colonial contexts that made possible sociopolitical life in the core. However, in replicating the epistemic bases of capitalist modernity, and hence its race/gender order, the question of normativity that has marked subsequent generations should left behind. The question of normative force within or about critical theory and praxis places any reflection on the present in the terms of philosophical and categorial assumptions that replicate the order of meaning, sense, and reason of capitalist modernity and its liberal order, with its conceptions of freedom, autonomy, and rights. This gesture fails to uproot conceptions of ‘nature’, body, time, the human, community at the heart of the very phenomenon that is being questioned. Replicating the epistemic bases of capitalist modernity returns critical to the traditional theory that it sought to leave behind at a hundred years ago. Radical self-awareness and revision of these persistent features would renovate the promise of a critical theory of society.
3-ViraVerita: What is the role of intellectuals in ensuring social transformation through Critical Theory? Would you agree that today there is an intellectual blockage in this regard? If so, what possibilities could there be for overcoming it?
3-Fabian Freyenhagen: As suggested above, both a particular kind of intersubjective turn in Critical Theory and the focus on the non-issue of normative foundations tend to be intellectual blockages today. So, in part, the role of intellectuals needs to be to undo these blockages. Both in this and – more generally and importantly – in the critical engagement with society, the role of disclosing critique should not be underestimated. (In this context, it is a curious fact that Honneth, in one text, recognises how important this form of critique is to Dialectic of Enlightenment, but this insight has practically zero impact on how he goes about his own work.)
In particular, this will probably have to involve conceptual innovations of one sort or another. The already mentioned idea of “culture industry” is a case in point of how early Critical Theory innovated terms that have the potential to make us look at our social world afresh. Conceptual innovation might, however, not be about creating neologisms. Instead, it might be about new, more expansive ways of thinking about existing concepts. One example would be Nancy Fraser’s recent attempts to use concepts like “labour” and “work” as a coalition-building device to unite workers, feminists, and anti-colonialists against capitalism. Another example would be expanding the notion of social pathology in such a way that it plays a more radical role than it has often done in the Critical Theory tradition – and to apply it to contemporary challenges, like in relation to psychic suffering, its social context, and the obfuscation of both through medicalisation of such suffering.
3-Eva von Redecker: The neoliberal university defenitely blocks and diverts serious intellectual engagement. I’m very grateful that my work can happen outside of it, but that doesn’t mean that the odds for it being transformative are better. But I would never say that the role of Critical Theory is to instigate, let alone “ensure” social transformation anyway. At best we can observe and clarify the tendencies that are already underway, make them more graspable, so that actors have greater freedom to reflect. But even this assumes a space of public discourse that we are at the danger of losing. Anything discussed in the culture-industry-chapter, a chapter so long deemed totally exaggerated, pales in comparison with social media under corporate capture and artificial intelligence deluge. Ours is a privatized, digitized public sphere. I think it is not overstated to say that we witness the enclosure and commodification of meaning itself. Large Language Models create content from past statistical likelihood, without any reference to the real world and without the capacity for negation (Really! Chatbots cannot operationalise the meaning of a “not”). There is extraction and theft of huge amount of data, but there is also the creation of a plastic language, eerily fluid but totally vacuous. Getting used to this automated thoughtlessness destroys our capacity for autonomy and democracy. According to Adorno/Horkheimer, the loss of reflective capacity, “Reflexionsausfall” in German, is at the core of fascism. In big tech’s alliance with Trump, this loss is a fait accompli, a circumstance even more horrenduous when we take into account that we are entering a radically new era, the anthropocene, where next to nothing will follow the course that past data suggest and huge innovations are needed to safeguard non-destructive forms of living.
3-Rocío Zambrana: The role of critical theory of society might be thought of as that of decipherment, in Sylvia Wynter’s sense, as a task of tracking and unbinding of the epistemic and libidinal bases of capitalist modernity and its race/gender order.[iv] If there are blocks within the sociohistorical context for critique and praxis, they are deepened rather than interrupted by the insistence on normative paradigms that replicate the ideological basis of the world of capital. Critical Theory today might let itself be radically transformed by a return to the intuitions of the first generation, resisting the need, for example, to return to a figure like Marx yet reducing the critique of political economy to questions of normativity or ethical demands or as a matter of rights or as a new form of humanism. Without engaging the economic, political, and epistemic work not only done in but to be done with Marx’s corpus – for example, considering the relation between capitalism and slavery, questioning Marx’s own eurocentrism, examining the modern colonial gender system as tied to conceptions of the public and the private stabilized through practices of experimentation in the Caribbean plantation[v] – we forgo the critical task distinctive of the desire and aims of this tradition of social thought. The work of critique might return to an exposition of the historicity and work of its most basic categories, then, seeking to undo, unbind, decode their unreflective hold over thought, desire, praxis.
Thank you!
[i] T.W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002).
[ii] See: Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, “The Future Already Was: A Critique of the Idea of Progress in the Sex-gendered and Queer Identitarian Liberation Narratives in Abya Yala,” trans. Papusa Molina, Palgrave Handbook in Gender and Critical Race Studies(London: Palgrave, 2022); Indigenous Action, Rethinking the Apocalypse: An Indigenous Anti-futurist Manifesto, 20 March 2020, http://www.indigenousaction.org/rethinking-the-apocalypse-an-indigenous-anti-futurist-manifesto/?fbclid=IwAR0JFfA9tbAcR2ktNSy4D19JMtTl3ZGGJBm9CbEQrnN8fTI11Qj1915FuaY; Kyle Whyte, “Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1:1-2 (2018), and my “Dystopia and Countermemory, Decolonial and Afropessimist: Approximations from Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso and Saidiya Hartman,” forthcoming in Philosophizing Contestation, ed. Adam Burgos and P. Khalil Saucier (Lexington, forthcoming) (originally in French in Angélica Montes’s translation from Spanish unpublished manuscript as “Dystopie et contre-mémoire décoloniale et afro-pessimiste: Réflexions autour de Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso et Saidiya Hartman,” Utopie et dystopie dans l’imagination politique, ed. Obed Frausto and Angélica Montes Montoya [Paris: L’Harmattan]).
[iii] Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
[iv] See Sylvia Wynter “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes towards a Deciphering Practice,” Ex-iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema, ed. Mbye B. Cham (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1992). See also Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, “Against Criticism: Notes on Decipherment and the Force of Things,” No Humans Involved (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2021).
[v] See Celenis Rodríguez Moreno, “La metamorfosis de género: la plantación caribeña como laboratorio de sexo-género,” forthcoming with Small Axe.
