Preface to the 1996 Edition xvii that the rise of the post-Fordist system of flexible accumulation may help explain the Frankfurt Schools staying power. For, if Harvey is right, what has become known as postmodemism is a cultural condition that somehow expresses and reflects-as well as at times resists-the economic changes that can be dated from around 1973. In contrast to many of the other variants of Western Marxism, Critical Theory has found this new climate relatively hospitable, if more so in America than in Germany, where the battle lines between post-modermists and second generation Critical Theorists have been sharply drawn. As questions of political economy and political praxis have been marginalized and those of culture and aesthetics gained center stage, the Schools varied and far-reaching explorations of these domains have stirred renewed interest and controversy. It would be mistaken, of course, to reduce the legacy of Critic Theory tout court to a prolegomenon to postmodemism, however we may define that vexed term. Habermas's spirited defense of the un- completed project of modernity, bLowenthal's last wamings against irrational and neomythological"concepts like"post-histoire, "4 and Adormo's insistence on the distinction between high and low art and partisanship for modernists such as Beckett, Kafka and Schoenberg against the leveling impact of the Culture Industry, all make it plain that in many important ways the frankfurt School resists wholesale in- clusion among the forebears of postmodernism. In fact, as Fredric Jameson has pointed out, it may well be the eclectic pastiches of Stravinsky(which Adorno despised) rather than the progressive inno- vations of Schoenberg(which he generally admired) that can be said to have anticipated a key feature of postmodernist culture. The central role of"ideology critique"in Critical Theory is, moreover, relegated to the margins of most postmodernist theory, which lacks--or rather, de- liberately scoms the possibility of-any point d' appui for such a cri tique, preferring instead a cynical reason, if indeed a reason at all, that attacks all transcendent positions as discredited foundationalism and mocks utopianism as inherently fallacious. 6 s And yet, in certain respects, the general theoretical trajectory of at ast several members of the Schools first generation can be said to have prepared the ground for the postmodern turn and thus found a new audience for its work. Most obviously, their reluctant jettisoning of a triumphalist notion of impending human emancipation, based on a single story of species-wide progress produced by class struggle, res- oates with the characteristic postmodernist abandonment of any meta-narrative,especially one culminating in redemption. In fact, the temporalities of the Frankfurt School, the complex narratives they fashioned of rise. fall, and recurrence were often as mixed and contra-
xviii The Dialectical imagination dictory as those adopted by many postmodernist thinkers. So too, the radical critique of the Western tradition of instrumental, technological rationality, most extensively elaborated in Dialectic of Enlightenment ith its dark ruminations about the entwinement of myth and reason, can be seen as potentially consonant with post-modernist suspicion to- wards all versions of reason. 7 Indeed, it has sometimes been taken as such by those in the Schools second generation, like Habermas, who themselves resist precisely that conclusion Adormo's"negative dialectics"and Jacques Derridas deconstruction have also earmed frequent comparisons because of their common rejec tion of totalizing philosophies of identity, distrust of first principles and origins, suspicion of idealist ideologies of sublation, and valorize- tion of allegorical over symbolic modes of representation. Although the resolutely utopian Adorno resisted accepting the repetition without resolution that has been so congenial to the deconstructive temper, his"melancholy science""has seemed to some only a small step away from the principled refusal to mourn in Derrida. The multi-faceted de- fense of a certain notion of benign mimesis both in Critical Theory and the work of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has also attracted attention, as have certain affinities with Lacan,s critique of ego psychology. 20 So too, Michel Foucault's genealogical history of the body, hostility to normalization and discipline, micrological attention to detail, and fascination with the relations between knowledge and power have been seen as close to the concerns of Critical Theory. Although Fou- cault famously criticized the Freudian Marxism of Marcuse in his His- tory of Sexuality for assuming a trans-historical norm of libidinal real ization, significant parallels have been found in their common questioning of dominant notions of normative sexuality and critique of repressive desublimation. 2 Indeed, Foucault himself once admitted that"if i had encountered the frankfurt School while young, I would have been seduced to the point of doing nothing else in life but the job of commenting on them. Instead, their influence on me remains retro. spective, a contribution reached when I was no longer at the age of in- tellectual 'discoveries. 22 A lively battle has also been waged over the contested legacy of Wal- ter Benjamin, in which deconstructionists like Paul de Man, Samuel Weber, Rainer Nagele and Werner Hammacher have sought to read him largely in their terms. Derrida himself has been intrigued by Benjamin,s earliest writings, most notably his Critique of violence, with its still mystical evocation of a notion of divine justice and fasci nation with primordial violence, as an antidote to the leveling egalitar- anism of its human(and humanist) counterpart. Benjamin,s compli- cated debts to French Surrealism have been remembered at a time
Preface to the 1996 Edition xix when the importance of such Surrealists as Georges Bataille for post- structuralism has been widely recognized. 2 Although the stubbonly redemptive moment in Benjamin's thought, as well as his belief in an Adamic Ursprache in which name and thing were one, are hard to rec- oncile with deconstruction's suspicion of plenitudinous origins and endpoints, there is sufficient warrant in the tangled web of texts he ieft behind to place him at least in a tense constellation with these later thinkers This is not the place to present a serious analysis of all the parallels and contrasts between Critical Theory and postmodemism their vari- ous guises. Suffice it to say that the post-New Left context of reception has been generally hospitable to the continued appropriation of at least certain legacies of the Frankfurt School, which have become powerful "stars"in what Richard Bemstein has dubbed "the new constellation' of contemporary thought. As Jean- Francois Lyotard himself has ac nowledged "when one reads Adomo now-above all texts like A thetic Theory, Negative Dialectics and Minima Moralia-with these names [Derrida, Serres, Foucault, Levinas and Deleuze] in mind, one senses the element of an anticipation of the postmodem in his thought even though it is still largely reticent, or refused. What must, of course, also be acknowledged is that Critical Theory has served for some in the new context as a bulwark against what ha seemed the most nihilistic, relativistic and counter- Enlightenment im- plications of certain postmodem theories. Adomo's anticipatory re- fusal of postmodemism(to which Lyotard alludes in the remarks cited above) is derived from his stubborn reluctance to give up on the ques- tions of social justice and truth(understood ultimately as"the true so- ciety), or forego any hope for finding a political means to realize them. Many current exponents of Critical Theory, such as the editors of the new joumal Constellations, Seyla Benhabib and Andrew Arato follow Habermas in tenaciously maintaining the viability of the project of modemity as the way to achieve those goals, stripped, to be sure, of its redemptive or utopian implications If, however, one accepts the distinction between a postmodemism of resistance and one of affirmation, then it may be that the former can legitimately be seen as one of the plausible, if unexpected, offshoots of the Frankfurt School, once at least its more orthodox Marxist baggage is thrown overboard. Even those postmodernists who refuse to move yond the horizon of Marxism, like Jameson, have found at least Adomo, once a" doubtless ally when there were still powerful and op- positional currents, " now"a dialectical model for the 1990s. His intro- spective or reflexive dialectic befits a situation in which--on account f the dimensions and unevenness of the new global world order-the
xx The Dialectical imagination relationship between the individual and the system seems ill-defined, if not fluid, or even dissolved. "2 What Habermas once called 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 radi- cal 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 epi- tomized 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 196os stalled in the decades that followed, turning into an interminable sojourn without much prospect of-and it often seems no longer much interest in-ex- iting at the other side. Perhaps only the alarmist Right has taken seri- sly 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 academ- ization of the New Left is just as likely to be bemoaned as an emblem of political exhaustion. Whatever the truth of these interpretations, it cannot be doubted that Critical Theory has achieved an unexpectedly secure--perhaps ironically even a canonical-status as a central theo- etical 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 Frank furt School for a Japanese audience, it quickly became clear how cen- tral it actually had become. Among the large pool of possible contribu tors 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 isola- tion of the Frankfurt School during its initial period in America, docu- mented in this book, was obviously a thing of the past. That peculiarly fruitful, if often painful, alienation from traditional institutional con- texts, whose importance for the development of Critical Theory I later attempted to trace in an essay written after The Dialectical imagina tion appeared, no longer obtained; Adorno's Flaschenpost, his mes- sage 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 explo- ration 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
Preface to the 1996 Edition xxi sphere of it that we call the academic community. That such"success' may well pay tribute to the domesticating power of the cultural appara- tus of capitalism cannot be denied, but only those who assum ality is by itself and in all conditions a self-evident virtue could acknowledge a certain benefit The same might be said of the history of the School itself, which ha 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 migra tion from Nazi germany, rival currents in Western Marxism and alter native 2oth-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 Sollner, Barry Katz, Rus- sell Berman, Wolfgang BonB, 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 with their life histories, ir 0 e is even now a glossy"photobiography of the Schooi. which provides images of all the relevant figures, along The general outlines of the narrative, however, have remained largely intact and so I have resisted the temptation to tamper with the original text cf 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 Schools legacy. Although a detailed histori- cal synthesis appeared in 1986, Rolf wiggershaus's treatment of the story up until Adomo' s death, which is now happily available in Eng lish, 2 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 lacu nae in The Dialectical imagination, I know how daunting the task now is. It is my hope that the book's reissue can stimulate as much in terest in the years to come as the first edition did nearly a quarter cen- tury ago. For if the Frankfurt School has been so successful in tran- scending its original context and resonating with the very different concerns of the sixties and the eighties, stubbonly surviving to be- come one of the mainstays of that uncertain and beleaguered amalgam we can call fin-de-siecle socialism, it may still have unexpected things to teach us well into the 2Ist century Berkeley, July,1995