Rethinking Critique and Theory

Abstract

A distance of exactly 100 years separates our present from the intellectual and institutional context in which talking of “critical” theory, as distinct from “traditional” theory, began to play the identity-forming role to which today's discussion owes its topic. Reflecting not only on the possible continuity but also on this factual distance can be helpful for gaining a clearer perspective of what it can mean to connect to this program today. For, first, it is only in a long history of the impact of certain texts, themes, and a certain style of theory that the impression of unity or coherence of this tradition has emerged, of which there was hardly a trace in the first decades. Neither the objectives of the Institute for Social Research in its founding phase nor the personal composition of the circle of (exclusively male) scholars around Max Horkheimer had made such a unity likely beyond a shared commitment to a heterodox, non-party Marxism.

The internal discussions in the Institute, in the pages of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung and its successor organs, and in scholarly communication with international colleagues were rather diverse and pluralistic. The disputes about the right relation to Marx and Marxism, to “bourgeois” philosophy, to psychoanalysis, to culture, to the Soviet Union, or to the question of revolution from the 1930s to the 1960s were so fierce because the one consensual line was not given and the protagonists of the debates did not agree on much. It would be rather anachronistic to assume coherence retrospectively, where a dynamic, ever-changing context of discussions had formed.

Second, in these 100 years, during which almost no stone has been left unturned in the social, cultural, and technological world, the contexts and conditions of both theory formation in general and of political–critical intervention in particular have changed profoundly. Already between the prewar and the postwar Institute, while the postal address remained the same, there were such profound differences in material endowment, symbolic significance, public efficacy, and embeddedness in academic context that the theoretical and political practice possible in each case was of a fundamentally different form. That this also affects the internal development of academic research should be evident, for it meant something different around 1930, around 1950, and around 1965 to refer to the general state of the social sciences, to react to international developments, or to work in an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary way. That this applies a fortiori to the contrast with the position around 2024 is to be expected. It might therefore be unproductive to create the suggestion of a seamless continuity and availability of an earlier academic-political practice, which was, after all, subject to its own situational contextual restrictions and potentials.

These skeptical remarks are intended to ward off all too great expectations that essential points could be identified for this theoretical–political context, which would then clearly determine who belongs and who does not and who is today more authentically taking on this heritage than others. Those who (like myself) today emphasize the internal plurality of the original institutional and personal context and the historical discontinuity of the surrounding conditions will certainly lose a sense of the solid identity or uniformity of a clear-cut paradigm (or an intellectual brand). Nevertheless, they might gain freedom in the possibility of taking up and carrying on certain elements from the main and the side paths of this tradition.

For it will make a difference whether in the quest for a Critical Theory today, one is guided by Horkheimer's plea for interdisciplinary materialism, by Adorno's early idea of an “interpretive” social philosophy, by Kirchheimer's and Pollock's materialist working through of law and economics, by Fromm's social psychology, by Kracauer's philosophy of culture, or by Benjamin's philosophy of history. This openness reflects itself in the problem of whether one should place the importance of Marx alongside or above that of Hegel, Weber, and Nietzsche as the vectors of influence for the first generation. Taking sides in these issues does not even address the question of whether it is not the shock stemming from the experience of the “rupture of civilization” (or Zivilisationsbruch, to use Dan Diner's term) that has inscribed itself as a central epistemic and political motif into this tradition of thought from the 1940s on that should be taken as the one unifying concern of this tradition to which the individual members reacted differently.

The freedom offered by this perception of a historical distance and of an openness of the paradigmatic profile lies in the possibility to consciously identify and appropriate individual motifs of Critical Theory without fearing to betray the supposedly binding shape of a uniform theoretical approach. Already hidden in the text corpus of the historical protagonists of this tradition lie threads of several different critical theories that can be drawn out in multiple ways into the present. These possibilities are by no means unlimited or arbitrary, for they are determined by a real and well-documented history of texts and authors. Into this history sometimes new positions hitherto marked as peripheral can be integrated (for example, the contributions of Bloch, Sohn-Rethel, Scholem, Negt, Sonnemann, and many others), thus highlighting other webs of the network, which can (but do not necessarily) make for particularly original new readings.

However, such reflections on the inner multiplicity of Critical Theory will remain tied to what occurs in all relevant texts as the main object: domination. One might say that any Critical Theory of the Frankfurt type begins with the premise or presupposition of the existence of social domination. The fact of social domination, to which in the eyes of his 1920s/1930s readers Marx had devoted the exemplary analysis in his theory of bourgeois society and its economic structures, thus indeed, forms a kind of “axiom”. However, how exactly this domination is constituted, on what it depends and who carries it, and in which media and procedures it functions lead again exactly into the midst of the inner-theoretical differences and divergences which make up the history of the theoretical Left in general.

Those who emphasize the above arguments for the internal plurality of the project of a critical social theory inscribed in its Frankfurt line of development and for the temporal distance from its body of theory and political possibilities can look with relative equanimity at some of the seemingly profound differences in the contemporary field of theory formation. If the heritage itself is already so diverse, there will also be more than one way to accept and continue it. Since the emphases have been divergent and contested from the beginning, the differences will tend to intensify as the theory continues to evolve, as more and more additional programmatic and conceptual options, including external ones, are added.

The fact that particularly fruitful developments in the history of Critical Theory's Wirkungsgeschichte for a certain time occurred in pedagogy and social psychology, others in the theory of the state and law, was no accident, but neither were they the only options. The high hopes directed at a synthesis of more functionalist social theories with the elements of earlier Critical Theory have presumably been exhausted, as has the euphoria with which a communication-theoretical grounding of earlier motifs was initially greeted. That reception, in general, had, from a certain point on, focused almost exclusively on the work of Jürgen Habermas, and that almost all debates about Critical Theory demanded partisanship for or against this particular contribution, has certainly tended to obscure the plural character of the overall enterprise, but this time, too, seems to have passed, for better or for worse.

Today's prominent proposals on how to actualize the basic mode of a Critical Theory, such as (to just refer to authors defining the German context) the more Hegelian-oriented theory of recognition of Axel Honneth, a more neo-Kantian grounded theory of justification of Rainer Forst, or a more comprehensive theory of forms of life and their internal normative dynamics of Rahel Jaeggi, can with quite some right claim to take up again specific central motifs of the tradition. The fact that authors as Robin Celikates have emphasized the connection to social movements and practices of resistance and disobedience represents an important counterpoint to some of the overly high-theoretical tendencies of the debate about the forms of critique, which was often conducted in a metatheoretical or methodological manner. The newly flared discussion of a fundamental critique of law, including the contributions by Christoph Menke and Daniel Loick can invoke motifs of the 1920s and 1930s, and yet, at the same time, has an urgency that can hardly be dismissed in an age of crumbling sovereignties and neo-authoritarian state practices. The trend to re-establish the critique of political economy as the central, perhaps even main, field of critical social theory, whether Marxist or not, can rightfully be seen as a necessary correction of a somewhat culturalist one-sidedness of recent decades. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that some of the most powerful positions of recent Critical Theory have emerged at the interface between feminist theory and political theory and have exerted enormous influence, thus already bending the centering on a narrow understanding of the Marxist legacy to a multidimensional or intersectional analysis that also encompasses different subject and identity lines.

The fact that more anthropologically based conceptions like the sociology of resonance of Hartmut Rosa, to refer to another prominent social theory in the German Debate, place themselves in this line might seem astonishing against the background of some of its premises, but because of its practical and diagnostic orientation, it cannot be completely rejected. The fact that in recent years more and more contributions referring back to the Frankfurt tradition have occurred in the field of radical democratic theory and theories of the political shows once again that the political and theoretical impact of a tradition is even more unpredictable and open than some expectations suggest.

Does this mean that all paradigmatic boundaries are blurred? In all these areas, the basic systematic operation remains crucial: Critical Theory in a very general sense takes place wherever philosophical and social-scientific analyses start from the intention of criticizing domination, and here, for many, the reference to the texts, authors, and models of thought of this tradition (in its narrower sense) offers itself as a resource, an inspiration, and a model. This promise of these resources can be illustrated with reference to two current discussions, in both of which voices from the context under discussion here are not absent but not particularly loud either, and for both, it can be argued that this tradition, in particular, could make promising contributions but will also benefit from complementary theoretical tools from other contexts.

It has taken several decades for the full force of the question of the afterlife of colonial and imperialist structures of Western-dominated modernity to be felt in scholarly and political debates, and not all potentially affected fields of scholarship have yet responded appropriately. Developments in recent years in particular have shown how this complex poses enormously difficult problems for which the classical disciplines of the humanities and social sciences are not always well equipped. How does one conceptualize the historical responsibility of entire cultural groups across centuries? What are the epistemic consequences of colonization? What might seem like a particular field of historical phenomena at first, which only came to consciousness in the era of decolonization in the postwar period, on closer inspection concerns the heart of the cultural and moral self-understanding of Western modernity.

Now it has become undeniable that precisely that process which has hitherto been understood primarily as a history of progress and liberation, namely, as intellectual enlightenment and political emancipation, is interwoven with exploitative expansion and dehumanizing subjugation. If, in other words, in historical reality, enlightenment and freedom, on the one hand, were essentially related to slavery and racism, on the other, it is no longer possible to tell the history of modernization in a unidirectional and triumphant way, and this equally affects political, economic, scientific, and intellectual history alike.

Such a readjustment cannot pass Critical Theory without leaving a trace, for this affects its own basic categories. Emancipation and defense against domination are its own urgent interests, and often enough Critical Theory has framed this task as an internal problem of European societies. Despite the internationalist and anti-imperialist elements in the history of Left theory, its theorists have also often remained representatives of a merely Western Marxism in a problematic sense, and the few references to non-European conditions do not provide a particularly favorable testimony here. The suspicion that Critical Theory itself embodies the methodological and political Eurocentrism that a truly cosmopolitan perspective on liberation would actually have to overcome is justified.

Yet, it is precisely in this tradition of thought that resources lie with which to respond to these problems, whether or not their authors might have intended it. Benjamin's partisanship for the perspective of the defeated in historiography, Adorno's and Horkheimer's insistence on the deep ambivalence of enlightenment ideals, and Marcuse's clear-sighted perception of the central role of the excluded and marginalized, whom the capitalist system cannot even properly exploit, are starting points for a radical self-critique of the Western liberation movements, which have yet to admit their own entanglement in domination elsewhere and thus should actually make way for an even more radical, decentered enlightenment and liberation. Critical Theory, perhaps malgré soi, was already partially thinking in this direction. In the urgently needed alliances today, even across geopolitical borders, Critical Theory can (and should) therefore, according to its own understanding, be an ally of the dominated wherever they are—and not a party offended by the accusation of Eurocentric complicity.

A comparable constellation can also be stated for a second topic. By now it should be generally evident that the problem of man-made climate change, threatening ecological catastrophes together with their political consequences, the irreversible extinction of species, and the accelerated destruction of future natural resources represent the most urgent challenge for political action and social awareness in the coming decades. Again, it has taken a long while for the human sciences to address this issue in its full breadth. In the meantime, debates about the Anthropocene and climate justice, sustainability and post-growth, human/animal/plant relations, and the critique of anthropocentrism, fossil capitalism, and geo-capitalism are receiving exactly the attention they deserve, and they even transcend long-established disciplinary boundaries, as basic theoretical and applied, technical, political, and cultural questions are being raised here at the same time.

Critical Theory has so far succeeded only sporadically in setting a particular agenda here, and often enough it looks as if it, too, would become the target of the accusation that it always thinks of politics and power only from the point of view of humans. Beyond the idea of a democracy of free and equal subjects, its conception of the goal of a liberated society remains, at least according to the first impression, astonishingly anthropocentric and unimaginative. This tradition also seems to have little to contribute to the question in which form contemporary communities could face the endangerment of their own survival. To admit that the exploitation of nature and environmental destruction were inscribed in the very functioning of capitalist modernity is just the first step.

Also here, as with the previous topic, it is true that Critical Theory already has produced concepts and models of thought whose relevance is perhaps only fully revealed today. The somewhat esoteric, speculative reflections of Adorno and Benjamin on mimesis and on the relationship of humans to inanimate nature, the persistent focus of the Dialectic of Enlightenment on the domination of inner and outer nature as the flip side of social domination, and the topos of “creative matter” from the history of German Idealism and materialism, which is enormously powerful in Bloch and in the very early Habermas, are just two first, absolutely relevant starting points here. From them, connections to the present conjuncture of the “New Materialism” and new holistic ontologies arise almost by themselves.

The fact that subject–object relations and their distortion and instrumentalization lie at the core of almost all problems concerning the human being, that being human is itself a question of mediations with the other, the non-human, forms a theoretical precondition on which one can build. The conviction that “domination” and “subjugation” are the names for relations on this fundamental, ontological level, and that the theme of power and politics itself is inscribed in the level of being, paves the way for the thematization of deep political relations, a politics of nature as well as an ecology of politics. From here it is only a small step to the expectation that on the basis of such, admittedly rather speculative motifs, helpful perspectives could be gained that might respond to the misery of the present, but also prefigure the possible splendor of a different, alternative relation to nature.

Critical Theory, as I imagine it, can take on these urgent problems of the present and respond to them, not in the mode of problem-solving, but in the mode of self-critical, persistent problematization of the structures of domination that come to bear in them. To this end, it uses all available theoretical insights that serve to see the world in all its divisions and contradictions more clearly in the face of a confusing and often enough paralyzing situation. This would be a possible realization of a problem-oriented, open-ended, cross-disciplinary program in which theory and practice do not merge, but challenge each other, passionately invested in forms of living, feeling, and acting that seek to escape the grip of powers and dominations without indulging in illusions of absolute freedom. This kind of theory, then as now, is all about finding the loopholes and spaces from which to see and experience that things could be different than they are under the spell of current regimes of domination.