up with a few general characteristics and say: this is Critical Theory.”11
Not only, pace Löwenthal, have I long shared Dubiel’s reluctance to essentialize the tradition into easily digestible sound bites, but I am also aware that however much a historian may seek to fashion a comprehensive and unified account, narrative coherence has been no less elusive. Even with the wisdom of hindsight, it has not been easy to craft a fully intelligible, neatly packaged history of what came to be called Critical Theory. An inadvertent brand name (like “the Frankfurt School”), it has seemed to some as little more than a euphemism for Marxism, coined only to cover its exponents’ radical tracks.12 But whatever its origins and intended function, it came to designate an ongoing, still developing series of efforts by a disparate and ever-growing cast of unruly theoreticians spanning several generations and situated in more than one location. During the earliest days of Max Horkheimer’s directorship of the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt—a position he assumed in 1930 and maintained for a quarter century, through his American exile and return to Germany—efforts were made to follow an organized, interdisciplinary research program. But the inclinations of different members and the vicissitudes of history soon drove them apart.13 If “marginalization,” “exile,” “outsider” and “extra-territoriality” were the descriptive terms often adopted as honorifics by the participants themselves to define their condition, and the virtues of “non-identity” one of their highest values, it would do a certain violence to their diversity to yoke them together as obedient students in a distinct “school” with a shared curriculum. And no less problematic is the imperative, so often urged on intellectual historians, to situate them firmly in the contexts of their genesis and receptions, entirely immanent in the milieux that formed them. For in addition to deciding which of these might have been determinant and which not—an issue raised, for example, in considering the oft-mooted question of their debt to their predominantly Jewish backgrounds and experiences—their own cogent theorizing about the reductive dangers of a sociology of knowledge approach makes it difficult to subject them to its mandate.14
As a result, attempts to fashion a synthetic narrative—and I count my own earlier efforts among them15—have always had to contend with even such basic challenges as whom to include among the protagonists of the story and how to weigh their respective importance. Just to list a few of the questions that have arisen: Should Erich Fromm’s role before his bitter estrangement from his colleagues in the late 1930s be emphasized or minimized?16 Was Walter Benjamin ever really a core member or, as Adorno once said, a l’écart de tous les courants?17 Can Siegfried Kracauer be considered a heterodox Critical Theorist or merely an ambivalent fellow traveler?18 Were Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer outsiders beyond the inner circle or did they constitute a subordinate current within the tradition?19 Should the conflicting economic analyses of Institute members, most notably Henryk Grossmann and Friedrich Pollock, be given their due?20 If it is true that “without the United States,” as Detlev Claussen argues, “there would be no Critical Theory,”21 how should we treat the roles of Benjamin and Habermas, who never migrated? Moreover, were all who were exiled in America as isolated and alienated from its cultural life as is sometimes claimed?22 Did Marcuse’s activism in the 1960s set him apart from the publicly cautious Horkheimer and Adorno, whose unwillingness to jeopardize the liberal political achievements of post-Nazi Germany was seen as a betrayal by their more radical students? Were the contributions by second-generation figures like Habermas and Albrecht Wellmer, third-generation ones like Axel Honneth or fourth-generation individuals like Rainer Forst creative revisions of the first generation’s work or tacit betrayals of its abiding, if somewhat attenuated Marxist sympathies?
No less problematic in fashioning a coherent historical account are the issues of scale and focus, for, as Kracauer was fond of pointing out, there is no easy passage for the historian from micro- to macrohistory, no smooth path from densely detailed accounts of individual lives, episodes, events or texts to larger generalizations that hover above the fray.23 Telling anecdotes, no matter how meaningful, are not always simple illustrations of larger patterns. The lives of individual figures do not always follow parallel trajectories or cohere into shared generational experiences. Nor is one level of analysis inherently closer to the truth of the past, as each captures an aspect of the heterogeneous historical universe that defies fully synthetic coherence, even with the benefit of hindsight. If we return to our guiding metaphor and consider the paradoxical effect of magnification as an obstacle to a panoptic gaze, it becomes clear why the Devil as well as God is often taken to be “in the details.”24
Kracauer’s argument was intended to apply to all historical narrations, especially ones that seek to build a cohesive general account by accumulating more proximate microhistorical stories and synthesizing the results into a single master narrative. But it is perhaps especially cogent for attempts to write the history of the particular cluster of thinkers who have come to be collectively identified with the Frankfurt School. Smoothing over their differences, homogenizing their ideas, commensurating their styles of argumentation and presentation all clearly have their costs. Although there may be a discernible common denominator underlying their work—and perhaps one even more substantial than that vague critical “perspective” of which Löwenthal spoke—it is important to remember that the numerators of their individual trajectories were never the same.
Thus, we might say, to give Adorno’s words a slight twist, that their history was itself always already a “splintered reality.” To amplify the power of those splinters might well require acknowledging their awkward tension with other shards of a whole that was perhaps never unbroken in the first place. Rather than pieces of a coherent puzzle, they may always defy smooth integration into a single pattern, giving new meaning to Adorno’s well-known phrase, “torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up.”25 Benjamin’s predilection for “dialectical images” and the metaphor of a “constellation” he shared with Adorno acknowledge the value of jarring juxtapositions rather than the sublation of negations into positive mediations. For all of the Frankfurt School’s respect for the legacy of Hegelian dialectics, it resisted the urge to follow his triumphalist logic of historical development, which could, even in its Marxist guise, produce what Adorno called, with reference to the late Lukács, “extorted reconciliations.”26
Fidelity to this metaphor of splintered reality also requires taking into account the inevitably partial and changing vantage point of the historian in whose eyes the splinters may lodge, eyes that cannot avoid experiencing the discomforts they provoke, even as he or she hopes for the magnifications they may provide. For there can be no dispassionate distance, no serene objectivity granted to the commentator who is drawn to the exigent questions posed by Critical Theory, questions whose answers still elude us today. In fact, one of the beneficial results of immersion in the history of the Frankfurt School is a heightened self-reflexivity about the evolving constellation of interactions between past and present, which prevent judgments from ever becoming final and assessments definitive.
In accordance with this lesson, the exercises that follow are left in their unintegrated form, with no pretense to be a coherent narrative written by a disinterested observer hitching a high-flying ride on Hegel’s owl of Minerva. The scale of their approach varies—some are more focused, others wide-ranging—and they often include ruminations of a more personal nature than is typical of academic prose, including on the author’s own earlier attempts to present the Frankfurt School’s legacy. Although confining themselves to figures drawn from the School’s first generation, they are informed by lessons learned from subsequent ones, which have been elaborated elsewhere in more totalizing narratives.27 And they conclude with considerations of a troubling and, alas, increasingly potent misappropriation of the legacy of Critical Theory, which has gained recent popular credence and a political significance that would be laughable were its consequences not so tragic. Here eyesight has truly been blinded by beams rather that magnified by splinters, and the pain is, unfortunately, not in the service of greater insight.
