The Dialectical Imagination. Martin Jay

Adorno’s “strategy of hibernation” now looks less like the cowardice the Mark Rudds of a generation ago so scornfully dimissed than a model of radical intellectual survival during an endless political winter.

Ruminations of this sort have become familiar now that the academy has become virtually the last refuge of critical thinking of the type epitomized by the Frankfurt School and the opportunities for its practical realization have virtually disappeared. What was hopefully proclaimed the “long march through the institutions” in the 1960s stalled in the decades that followed, turning into an interminable sojourn without much prospect of—and it often seems no longer much interest in—exiting at the other side. Perhaps only the alarmist Right has taken seriously the paradoxical “success” of the “long march” project, which helped fuel its often hysterical campaign against the alleged specter of “political correctness.” On the other end of the spectrum, the academization of the New Left is just as likely to be bemoaned as an emblem of political exhaustion. Whatever the truth of these interpretations,²⁹ it cannot be doubted that Critical Theory has achieved an unexpectedly secure—perhaps ironically even a canonical—status as a central theoretical impulse in contemporary academic life.

When, in fact, I was recently asked by colleagues in Osaka to edit a two-volume collection of essays by American followers of the Frankfurt School for a Japanese audience, it quickly became clear how central it actually had become. Among the large pool of possible contributors were tenured faculty in philosophy, political science, history, German literature, and sociology departments at Harvard, Cornell, Stanford, Columbia, Rice, Northwestern, the University of Texas, the University of Chicago, the New School, and other leading institutions. Only the occasional exception, such as the independent culture critic and gadfly of the academy Russell Jacoby, proved the rule. The isolation of the Frankfurt School during its initial period in America, documented in this book, was obviously a thing of the past. That peculiarly fruitful, if often painful, alienation from traditional institutional contexts, whose importance for the development of Critical Theory I later attempted to trace in an essay written after The Dialectical Imagination appeared,³⁰ no longer obtained; Adorno’s Flaschenpost, his message bottles thrown into the “flood of barbarism bursting on Europe” have reached many shores in our thankfully less barbarous times. Now the inheritance of the Frankfurt School—and the continuing exploration of its possibilities in the present—can be judged in the full glare of that public sphere of whose vital, if often precarious existence Habermas has made us all so aware, or at least in the significant sub-sphere of it that we call the academic community. That such “success” may well pay tribute to the domesticating power of the cultural apparatus of capitalism cannot be denied, but only those who assume marginality is by itself and in all conditions a self-evident virtue could fail to acknowledge a certain benefit.

The same might be said of the history of the School itself, which has continued to be researched and rewritten by a host of scholars from many different countries. As new archival materials have come to light and the last surviving members have passed from the scene, the story I attempted to tell in this book has gained in complexity and nuance. Comparative research on other dimensions of the intellectual migration from Nazi Germany, rival currents in Western Marxism and alternative 20th-century theoretical traditions have put it ever more sharply into relief. Such scholars as Susan Buck-Morss, Gillian Rose, David Held, Helmut Dubiel, Ulrike Migdal, Alfons Söllner, Barry Katz, Russell Berman, Wolfgang Bonß, Douglas Kellner, Richard Wolin, Miriam Hansen, Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Willem van Reijin, Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and Stephen Eric Bronner—to mention only some of the most prominent—have fleshed out many of the details of the story and added new perspectives. There is even now a glossy “photobiography” of the School, which provides images of all the relevant figures, along with their life histories.³¹

The general outlines of the narrative, however, have remained largely intact and so I have resisted the temptation to tamper with the original text of this book, a few factual corrections aside, and integrate all of the new information recently recovered or contend with the flood of new interpretations of the School’s legacy. Although a detailed historical synthesis appeared in 1986, Rolf Wiggershaus’s treatment of the story up until Adorno’s death, which is now happily available in English,³² even its nearly 800 pages cannot do justice to all of the work that has been and continues to be done on the figures and ideas it treats. Having myself attempted elsewhere to address some of the lacunae in The Dialectical Imagination,³³ I know how daunting the task now is. It is my hope that the book’s reissue can stimulate as much interest in the years to come as the first edition did nearly a quarter century ago. For if the Frankfurt School has been so successful in transcending its original context and resonating with the very different concerns of the sixties and the eighties, stubbornly surviving to become one of the mainstays of that uncertain and beleaguered amalgam we can call fin-de-siècle socialism, it may still have unexpected things to teach us well into the 21st century.

       Berkeley, July, 1995

      NOTES

1. It turns out that even royalty was curious. When he was a student at Cambridge, Prince Charles was told to read Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man by his tutor Peter Lazlett. According to one account, “Charles told him he read it ‘with father’ while on a royal tour of Australia, They inspected troops during the day and read about bourgeois mystification in the evening. . . . Charles did not comment on what he had learned.” Bryan Appleyard, “King of a Fragile New Europe?,” The Sunday Times, London, July 22, 1990, p. 6.

2. Friedrich Pollock to Martin Jay, Montagnola, May 13,1970.

3. Dick Howard and Karl E. Klare, eds., The Unknown Dimension: European Marxism Since Lenin (New York, 1972).

4. At the fifth annual Socialist Scholar’s Conference in September, 1969,1 gave a talk entitled “The Metapolitics of Utopianism,” which was published, under a variety of titles chosen by their editors, in Radical America, 4,3 (April, 1970); Dissent, 17, 4 (July-August, 1970); George Fischer, ed., The Revival of American Socialism: Selected Papers of the Socialist Scholars Conference (New York, 1971). It was republished in my collection Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration From Germany to America (New York, 1986). In it, I criticized Marcuse’s totalizing notion of the “Great Refusal” as a kind of aesthetic metapolitics that underestimated the importance of pluralism.

5. It was written before I joined Lowenthal on the Berkeley faculty and was privileged to develop a warm and close friendship with him. For my reflections on his legacy, see my introduction to the Festschrift for his 80th birthday in Telos, 45 (Fall, 1980) and “Leo Lowenthal: In Memoriam,” Telos, 93 (Fall, 1992).

6. They are, however, by no means entirely neglected. See, for example, the recent collections Erich Fromm und die Frankfurter Schule, eds., Michael Kessler and Rainer Funk (Tübingen, 1992); On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives, eds. Seyla Benhabib, Wolfgang Bonß, and John McCole (Cambridge, Mass., 1993); Marcuse: From the New Left to the Next Left, eds., John Bokina and Timothy J. Lukes (Kansas, 1994).

7. See, in particular, William E. Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule