Jeffrey T. Nealon
When considering literary theory’s emergence and development in the English‐speaking academy, there were three main ways the Frankfurt School was initially received and lives on within its various successor discourses. First, it emerged decisively in the world of literary theory through Jurgen Habermas’s skepticism towards various postmodernisms or poststructuralisms (as the abandonment of Enlightenment rationality), and lives on through ongoing defenses of political liberalism and its commitments to the regulative ideals of universal justice and recognition. Second, it lives on within cultural studies and related strands of media studies—discourses which to this day remain caught between Theodor Adorno’s pessimism and Walter Benjamin’s hope concerning the culture industries and the freeing or constraining role of technology in art and everyday life. Finally, the Frankfurt School has successors in the ongoing traditions of cultural Marxism and its diagnoses of capitalism, working out the tensions between economic production and cultural production in the present, and assessing the fate of aesthetic experience in a commodified world.
In beginning to assess the Frankfurt School’s place within the rise of literary theory during the 1970s and 1980s, Michel Foucault’s comments will stand as a kind of provocative introduction, or at least give us a kind of through‐line for thinking about the ways in which consideration of the Frankfurt School came late to the academic theory world of structuralism and post‐structuralism. “Perhaps if l had read those [Frankfurt School] works earlier on,” Foucault laments in 1978, “I would have saved useful time, surely: I wouldn’t have needed to write some things and I would have avoided certain errors … Instead, their influence on me remains retrospective” (Foucault 1991: 119–20). I quote Foucault here to suggest, by analogy, that in the emergent world of literary theory in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States, the Frankfurt School was not really a major presence, even though Marxism was a vital player on the scene (Brenkman 1989; Ohmann 1987), and there certainly were scholars in literature departments (especially German departments) all along writing books and teaching seminars about major Frankfurt School thinkers like Adorno, Benjamin, and Habermas (for a history, see Hohendahl 1991), as well the group that coalesced around the journals New German Critique and Telos.
University of California historian Martin Jay’s 1973 The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950, decisively put the Frankfurt School on the map of twentieth‐century intellectual historians, and the legacy of the Frankfurt School at the New School for Social Research in New York (where many expatriate German thinkers were welcomed during the Nazi years in Germany) kept the tradition current in the discipline of philosophy in the United States. Likewise, Leo Lowenthal’s work kept the Frankfurt School’s mode of analysis vibrant in the discipline of sociology, and Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm were important and influential public intellectuals in the United States, giving voice and encouragement to the hopes of the new social movements in the 1960s. However, while Marcuse’s and Fromm’s differing brands of utopian libidinal politics had a great deal of influence in the streets, readings from their works were not prominently featured in the academic seminar room.
Considered specifically in terms of literary theory, perhaps the Frankfurt School had limited impact in the early years because of the dispersed nature of the different thinkers’ intellectual itineraries (there were as many disagreements as agreements within the first generation of the School), but perhaps even more because the objects and topics of Frankfurt School analyses tended to range so widely across myriad forms of cultural production, such as film, popular music, propaganda, and mass psychology (Adorno even wrote a book about newspaper astrology columns). Thereby the Frankfurt School offers no easily distillable set of protocols or methods geared toward producing interpretations of literary texts, in contrast to the teachable hermeneutic methods associated with new criticism, American deconstruction, feminist criticism, psychoanalysis, or new historicism. Literary theory in its early days was largely concerned with teaching students various methods of explication de texte, but the Frankfurt School thinkers offer precious little in the way of an interpretive template to be laid over texts. It’s easy enough to imagine a “deconstructive” or “feminist” reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter; it’s much harder to say what a “Frankfurt School” reading of the text would look like.
But in the postmodernism debates of the early 1980s, Jurgen Habermas—the leader of the Frankfurt School’s second generation—defended modernism and modernity, autonomous subjectivity and Enlightenment rationality itself, against poststructuralists like Derrida and Foucault who championed interpretive undecidability and the deconstruction of the stable, centered subject. Modernity was not, Habermas argued, merely or primarily a failed Eurocentric project of exclusivist, male, white, bureaucratic rationality (and thereby a discourse to be abandoned or overcome by a more open‐ended or democratizing postmodernism). Rather, modernity constituted what Habermas famously dubbed “an incomplete project” of universal recognition and communicative rationality. It was modernity’s conversational grounding, and modernism’s rational belief in the “unforced force of the better argument,” that could continue to show the way forward toward emancipation, or at least stave off what Habermas (among others) saw as the irrationality and anarchist danger of poststructuralism (mostly of the French and American varieties), which finally sees Enlightenment rationality as bound up at all points not with normative consensus, reciprocal recognition and mutual agreement among autonomous subjects, but with the irrational, naked exercise of power within a world of anarchic and irreducible dissensus (Habermas 1986). As Foucault sums up the position to which Habermas objects, “I believe one’s point of reference should not be to the great model of language and signs, but that of war and battle. The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning” (Foucault 1984a: 56).
It may be then that the Frankfurt School first decisively enters the fray of North American literary theory through Habermas’s 1986 Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, a book designed to eviscerate what Habermas saw as the “young conservatives” of the postmodern theory movement, most notably Derrida and Foucault. Habermas’s line of argumentation against the “irrationalist” discourses of poststructuralism often comes down to their hidden grounding in two suspicious and indeed disqualifying argumentative maneuvers. One is “cryptonormativity,” which is the charge that any wholesale critique of normative rationality secretly depends on a prior normative claim about the inherent good of transgressing norms. The other is what Habermas calls “performative contradiction”: when poststructuralists say that meaning and consensus are impossible, how or why is it that anyone with linguistic competence can perfectly well understand that claim? As Habermas argues concerning the postmodern critics of normative rationality,
If they were to be consistent, their own investigation of the other of reason would have to occupy a position utterly heterogeneous to reason—but what does consistency count for in a place that is a priori inaccessible to rational discourse? … This methodological enmity toward reason may have something to do with the type of historical innocence with which studies of this kind today move in the no‐man’s‐land between argumentation, narration, and fiction.
(Habermas 1986: 302)
That last is a stinging charge, especially if you’re trying to appeal to literary theorists. Habermas went on to suggest that much of what Derrida does is merely to mistake the rigorous, rationalist practice of philosophy for the imaginative, undecidable fancies of literature, and Habermas thereby sacrificed the potential interest of many literary theorists at the altar of normative reason. All in all, Habermas’s Philosophical Discourse of Modernity constitutes an old‐fashioned scolding of poststructuralism—an extended stern lecture that makes Adorno’s infamously acid dismissals of jazz or Hollywood movies look sunny by comparison; though we should note there were more nuanced contemporary versions of the debate between the Frankfurt School and its competitors in the 1980s—the account offered for example in Andreas Huyssen’s 1986 After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism.
From this point in the mid‐1980s to the present, Habermas’s work has had little influence on literary theory. Nor do literary theorists have much interest in Habermas’s student Axel Honneth, who has staked most of his theoretical energy on putting the Hegelian drama of political and social “recognition” front and center in his rethinking of social theory (see Honneth 2014). Thinkers like Nancy Fraser and Seyla Benhabib, though critical of Frankfurt School members Habermas and Honneth on some fronts (especially around the question of gender in the public sphere), have nevertheless taken these insights into some new territory in the disciplines of philosophy (see Fraser’s dispute with Honneth over Recognition or Redistribution? for example) and political theory (Benhabib’s Situating the Self). However, neither Fraser nor Benhabib has a primary interest in literature or literary theory per se. Probably the most prominent neo‐Habermasian today in a literature department today is Amanda Anderson, and she has largely taken up and modified Habermas’s work on intersubjectivity—the argumentative contours of agreement and disagreement—in the realm of theory itself (for example in her 2005 book The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory), as well as examining the place of literature in the public sphere of the Victorian era.
Indeed, it is within the theoretical discourses of feminism where the relations among the concerns of second‐generation Frankfurt School thinkers and literary and cultural theory have been most intensely worked out. Most succinctly, Fraser and Benhabib have posed some of these Frankfurt School questions to poststructuralist theory in dialogue with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell, among other feminist poststructuralists (see Benhabib et al. 1994). For example, Benhabib argues (against Butler’s work) that the deconstruction of the subject is dangerous for feminism, because purposive socio‐political agency disappears alongside the upending of the purposive agent. She repeats Habermas’s primary concern in Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, that there must be a position “outside” the reach of power in order to mount a rational critique of the wrongs found in society. In Situating the Self (1992), for example, Benhabib writes,
alongside the disappearance of the centered, rationally‐choosing subject disappear of course concepts of intentionality, accountability, self‐reflexivity, and autonomy … If this view of the self is adopted, is there any possibility of transforming those expressions which constitute us? … The strong version of the Death of the Subject thesis is not compatible with the goals of feminism … If we are no more than the sum total of the gendered expressions we perform, is there ever any chance to stop the performance for a while, to pull the curtain down, and only let it rise if one can have a say in the production of the play itself?
(Benhabib 1992: 214–15)
Butler (1993) counters by wondering in turn about the socio‐political costs of such a centered, autonomous notion of normative subjectivity: “it seems important … to question whether a political insistence on coherent identities can ever be the basis on which a crossing over into political alliance with other subordinated groups can take place, especially when such a conception of alliance fails to understand that the very subject‐positions in question are themselves a kind of ‘crossing,’ are themselves the lived scene of a coalition’s difficulty” (Butler 1993: 115). While the discursive climate in the feminist debate between the Frankfurt School and poststructuralism was considerably more engaged and respectful than between Habermas and postmodern theorists, at the end of the day substantial (and many would say productive) frictions have remained between the legacy of the Frankfurt School and postmodern or poststructuralist feminist theory.
Ironically, however, Habermas’s treatise Philosophical Discourse of Modernity brought renewed attention to the work of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, and especially to Adorno. In Habermas’s pantheon of “postmodernist” (and postmodernist avant le lettre) targets, he includes all the usual suspects (Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Bataille, in addition to Foucault and Derrida); however, he also devotes one lecture to a surprising “postmodernist” target: Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (2007). Habermas is careful to mark his intervention as one meant to save Adorno and Horkheimer from a kind of poststructuralist sainthood, a fate worse than death: “under the sign of a Nietzsche revitalized by poststructuralism, moods and attitudes are spreading that are confusingly like those of Horkheimer and Adorno. I would like to forestall this confusion” (Habermas 1986: 106). However, in his attempt to distance Adorno and Horkheimer’s first generation Frankfurt School work from these more dangerous poststructuralist “moods and attitudes,” Habermas ends up making Adorno and Horkheimer’s work, not to mention “Benjamin’s now ironic hope of the hopeless” (1986: 106), into full‐blown poststructuralist precursors. And thereby the first generation figures from the Frankfurt School ironically became important players in poststructuralist literary theory discourse going forward, included as they are in the pantheon of important “irrationalist” thinkers about whom Habermas is concerned. Alongside the others, Adorno and Horkheimer are chided for their lack of respect for the gains of Enlightenment rationality. As Habermas writes about Adorno and Horkheimer’s work, “what is unexplained throughout is their certain lack of concern in dealing with the (to put it in the form of a slogan) achievements of Occidental rationalism. How can these two men of the Enlightenment … be so unappreciative of the rational content of cultural modernity that all they perceive everywhere is a binding of reason and domination, of power and validity?” (Habermas 1986: 121).
Habermas’s own work since the 1980s has veered decisively away from engagement with the continental philosophy canon that underlies literary theory in America, and instead his primary attentions have gone in the direction of analytic and pragmatic Anglo‐American philosophy, engaging more with the work of political philosopher John Rawls than with Foucault or Derrida. While substantial sympathy for his project remains within literature departments, much of it has shied away from commentary on Habermas, or applications of his insights into literary texts, and gone into various defenses or reconsiderations of liberalism (in for example John McGowan 1991) or a kind of return to the ethics of subjectivity and argumentation (in Amanda Anderson 2005), though of course there has remained all along a robust engagement with all legacies of the Frankfurt School in German departments, as well as in the disciplines of philosophy, sociology, and political theory.
The second generation of the Frankfurt School, then, lives on in literary theory less through application of their philosophical frameworks to literature, but in subject‐centered defenses of Habermas’s or Honneth’s central themes of universal communication, recognition and defending the progressive traditions of Enlightenment liberalism. One might argue that there’s even a fourth generation of the Frankfurt School being born in Rainer Forst’s work, extending Habermas’s and Honneth’s arguments concerning the Enlightenment themes of universal justice, tolerance, and justification (see Forst 2013 Justification and Critique: Towards a Critical Theory of Politics, dedicated to Habermas). While somewhat outside the realm of literary theory proper, I should also mention that Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s work on the commodification and instrumental takeover of nature has had an impact on recent work in environmental studies (Cook 2014) and in the realm of postcolonial theory (Allen 2016).
While Herbert Marcuse’s books Eros and Civilization and One‐Dimensional Man had great influences on the youth movements of the 1950s and 1960s, the academic study of popular culture didn’t really get off the ground in the North American academy until the 1980s, though it had been a thriving enterprise in England since the founding of the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in 1964. The Frankfurt School has had a particularly fraught relation to the myriad discourses and methodologies of contemporary theory that travel under the name “cultural studies” in England and America through the 1990s and into the twenty‐first century. However, in the end, the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies today is probably where the Frankfurt School finds its largest number of “successors,” people who continue to talk about founding Frankfurt School topics like the power of technology, media, and monopoly capitalism within the expanding culture industries.
In February 1939, Adorno posed a question, in response to a draft of Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility,” that is still being answered today: “What will become of human beings and their capacity for aesthetic perception when they are fully exposed to the conditions of monopoly capitalism?” (Adorno and Benjamin 1999: 305). Insofar as this remains a crucial question in media, technology, and cultural studies (a question certainly intensified by the massive technological leaps in the portability and ubiquity of sonic and visual media since the early 1990s), the Frankfurt School finds one of its most crucial successors in contemporary cultural and media studies; and by and large these fields will find their inspiration not primarily in the second generation of the Frankfurt School, but in the first.
On many accounts, however, English‐language cultural studies gets off the ground precisely by rejecting the Frankfurt School and its high‐culture style of critical analysis. The litany of charges levelled against the School is almost too familiar to bear repeating: Frankfurt School theorists put forth a totalizing view of culture as somehow controlled by capitalist masters; they are far too sober, serious, and dire in their condemnations of everyday life and its pleasures; and, the most serious and universal charge, Frankfurt School theorists are painted as cultural elitists who evidence little faith in the agency of the common people, and show no interest whatsoever in uncovering the hidden subversive codes seemingly buried in the rituals and products of popular culture. Adorno's work on jazz is routinely cited in this context as proof positive of the Frankfurt School’s mandarin elitism. While a certain reading of Benjamin (emphasizing his work on snowglobes, book collecting, hashish, or wandering the arcades) offers a counter to Adorno’s pessimism about everyday life and capitalism, both Adorno and Benjamin consistently use terminology that paints everyday people as a kind of malleable “mass.”
However when Lawrence Grossberg, the dean of cultural studies scholars of popular music, laments that “at the level of theory … I do not think that writing about popular music has significantly changed (to say nothing of ‘progressed’) in forty years” (2002: 29), he at least partially references the way that cultural studies in the English‐speaking world was shaped by the founding documents and arguments of the Frankfurt School, and even more specifically the debate between Adornian pessimism concerning popular culture, and Benjamin’s more utopian hopes for producing subversion within the new, commodified forms of mass aesthetic experience. Decades later, the themes of this 1930s debate between Adorno and Benjamin continues unabated, in endless articles wondering, for example, whether the internet is a place of surveillance and capitalist apologetics, or a brave new world of communal possibilities.
Though perhaps one could venture that Benjamin’s optimism, rather than Adorno’s pessimism, has been the primary heritage of the work of the Frankfurt School, or at least was in the so‐called New Times Cultural Studies since the 1990s. And this Benjaminian cultural optimism continues to be front and center in much contemporary work produced in digital media and technology studies, rather than what looks like Adorno’s mandarin commitments to high culture. Simon During’s massively influential anthology The Cultural Studies Reader (1993) stands as a representative example of Adorno's traditional role within cultural studies. In During’s collection, Adorno’s Frankfurt School pessimism concerning the products of popular culture remains important to Cultural Studies primarily as a kind of negative or naive moment, as that which has to be overcome for cultural studies to legitimize itself at all. An excerpt from Adorno and Horkheimer’s “Culture Industry” essay opens the collection, but During’s headnote carefully frames the essay for the collection’s student audience: “Adorno and Horkheimer neglect what was to become central to cultural studies: the ways in which the culture industry, while in the service of organized capital, also provides the opportunities for all kinds of individual and collective creativity and decoding” (During 1993: 30). Adorno’s dire determinism concerning “mass deception” has to be overcome, During argues, if cultural studies is to take up and valorize the central role of the subject and the subversive agency—the “creativity and decoding”—that is performed every day in the face of capital. On this reading, Adorno is dismissed for remaining territorialized on economic questions about unification or mass production, rather than exploring diversification or subversive consumption.
From its inception in England to its present configurations in North America and Australia, much (but certainly not all) English‐language cultural studies has maintained a skeptical distance from the Adornian wing of the Frankfurt School, locating its genealogies and critical concepts elsewhere in modern Europe. From its engagement with theorists like Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser through Foucault and Michel de Certeau, cultural studies has predominantly focused its intellectual and political energies on unleashing subjective resistance and “agency,” the subversive multiple potentialities of the individual in his or her everyday life. In this context Benjamin’s odd melancholy brand of hope in the face of technological and economic colonization has been of use, particularly to media theorists. But if cultural studies in the future is to remain fixated on the insurgent agency of the consuming subject and the secretly transgressive qualities of cultural commodities, then the Frankfurt School will just as likely remain a merely negative or archaic moment in the ongoing study of the present.
In recent years, however, cultural studies has been undergoing something of a crisis, as the “transgression” model has come increasingly under fire, with several critics pointing out the snug fit between notions of transgression in cultural studies and the contemporary right‐wing ideology of consumer choice and niche marketing. Given this potentially unhappy state of affairs (where cultural theory finds itself aligned with the powers that it ostensibly wants to transgress or resist), scholars have been turning away from celebrations of subjective transgression, and back toward trying to understand how subjects are produced by the channeling of desire on a “mass” scale. For many, this has entailed a rethinking of the Frankfurt School—both rethinking Adorno’s supposed pessimism, and thinking more about the melancholy that underlies Benjaminian hope. Read in a certain way, the Frankfurt School shows you how the culture industry doesn’t primarily produce products at all; rather, it produces subjects. Adorno and Horkheimer’s “Culture Industry” essay in Dialectic of Enlightenment, for example, argues that modern capitalist society is a kind of Fordist factory, but the assembly line finally yields only one product: consumers. And more specifically, this brand of cultural capitalism produces consumers who ideologically understand (or misunderstand) their own consumption practices as transgressive or authentic. “Something is provided for everyone,” they intone, “so that no one can escape” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2007: 97).
Historically, it is just such an emphasis on Fordist subject production—a very hard version of “interpellation”—that has caused many contemporary theorists to hesitate before Frankfurt School analyses. If “everyone, however powerful, is an object”—as Adorno writes in Minima Moralia (1974: 37)—then there would seem to be very little room for the individual or collective subject to resist reduction to inert passivity. Cultural construction, in the world of the Frankfurt School, can all too often seem like cultural determination. But recent and continuing work on interpellation and subjection has opened up new ways to conceptualize thorough‐going cultural construction as other than ham‐fisted cultural determination, and has thereby sent many thinkers back to the Frankfurt School with a fresh set of conceptual apparatuses and questions. Of course, one could easily argue that the School was there all along, informing contemporary work on subjectivity and interpellation; and perhaps only now can it be re‐examined and affirmed as a crucial component in the toolkit for studying contemporary life.
There seems at least one other obvious historical reason for re‐emerging interest in the Frankfurt School. The “transgression” thesis in cultural studies was based on a parallel historical thesis about diversification in the culture industry’s modes of production. As the argument goes, the Frankfurt School theorized in a much more hierarchal world of cultural products; their theses may have some relevance to the middle of the twentieth century, but at the dawning of the twenty‐first, their analyses seem clumsily based on an outdated, paranoid and totalizing model of corporate control.
During highlights this supposedly antiquated quality of Frankfurt School analysis, specifically referring to Adorno and Horkheimer’s work on the culture industry: “when this essay was written,” he argues, “the cultural industry was less variegated then it was to become, during the 1960s in particular. Hollywood, for instance, was still ‘vertically integrated’ so that the five major studios owned the production, distribution, and exhibition arms of the film business between them; television was still in its infancy; the LP and the single were unknown; the cultural market had not broken into various demographics sectors—of which, in the 1950s, the youth segment was to become the most energetic” (During 1993: 29–30). Ironically, During’s charge that the Frankfurt School’s moment is over (and his rather rosy version of diversification in the culture industry) seems itself rather dated today: since about 2004, there has been an unprecedented consolidation within the multinational “infotainment” industry. The rise of Facebook and the dominance of Google have further intensified this consolidation in the new “attention economy,” which depends on glances and clicks to collect for internet advertisers. Mass media is, it seems, no longer just a convenient catch‐phrase.
Indeed, Frankfurt School attitudes toward cultural levelling (the dreaded “totalization” for which the Frankfurt School is commonly reproached) seem again to make very good sense in the twenty‐first century—in the Disneyfied world where the corporate orthodoxy is local diversification and individualized niche marketing, while the corporate reality is global consolidation. The Frankfurt School’s theses on totalization and massification seem to have a new (or, perhaps, an enduring) relevance in the present economic climate of global corporatization—where not only individual cultures and indigenous practices, but public spheres on a global scale seem in danger of collapsing into a kind of corporate monoculture.
Indeed, as studies of the contemporary moment turn to concern themselves more with economic questions about production and multinational circulation, and less with subjective questions about transgression and recognition, the Frankfurt School is re‐emerging as a key site of historical and theoretical tools. Ironically, contemporary theorists find themselves turning back toward the Frankfurt School precisely for the reasons it was once scorned: for notions of interpellated subjectivities whose desires are less liberated and multiplied than they are produced and channeled by a far‐reaching, very‐nearly totalizing global culture industry.
And with the rise of the internet and other technological advances, and the birth of a whole subfield called the digital humanities, Benjamin again becomes a touchstone figure in thinking and rethinking the continually changing relations between artistic production and technological innovations. Simply put, Benjamin’s argument his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility” is that differing technological regimes produce artistic “aura” in different ways, and we have to pay attention to changing social and economic conditions if we want to understand the changing functions of art in the present. Benjamin for example shows how the technology of film doesn’t simply eradicate the aura that an audience experienced in the live theatre, but that film machines its aura differently—by cuts, close‐ups, pans, slowing down or speeding up narrative time, and so on. In short, Benjamin remains crucial to Media Studies because he demonstrates that the development of new media technologies spells not the death of artistic aura, but aura’s reinvention, uniquely each time, within differing media, social and technological environments (see Paul North’s 2011 work on Benjamin in The Problem of Distraction).
In the present configuration of literary theory, it is perhaps Fredric Jameson’s work (especially since 1991’s mammoth Postmodernism; or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism) that is the most obvious successor to Frankfurt School insights concerning social critique of capitalism and culture as an industry. Jameson inherits the dialectical mantle of Adorno and Benjamin by running a middle course through their founding disagreements concerning popular culture. Jameson splits the difference between Adorno’s condemnation and Benjamin’s utopianism by hanging onto both. Insisting that his discourse on postmodernism and late capitalism is largely a diagnostic discourse—explaining how the relations among capitalism, cultural production, and everyday life has shifted in recent years—Jameson neither celebrates nor laments those changes. Rather he tries to follow out their emergence and consequences within the frame of an intensifying global capitalism, just as the Frankfurt School did in its day, by diagnosing the changes wrought in cultural production by both capitalism and fascism. While he is not located in a literature department, David Harvey’s sociological work (like his 2007 Brief History of Neoliberalism) has likewise proven to be an influential successor to Frankfurt School analyses in the humanities.
It may seem odd that it was Adorno and Benjamin, rather than their successors in the Frankfurt School, who have proven most relevant to the world of literary theory. But this turn back to the first generation mirrors what Foucault calls, in “What is an Author?” (1984b), the place occupied by “founders of discursivity”—figures like Marx or Freud whose author‐function extends not merely to a series of authored books, but to an entire discourse. Technology, the reach of the culture industry, and the increasing saturation of capitalism within the practices of everyday life: these are the Frankfurt School’s signature questions, and we’re still dealing with them in the era of Facebook, MP3 downloads, and the ubiquitous screens of computer and smartphone technology. The Frankfurt School helps us to frame what is maybe the most crucial question for literary theory today: What will happen to aesthetic perception, indeed what will happen to literature or reading itself, in a world inundated with an over‐abundance of screens and sounds that do not elicit the kind of “reading” that we associate with literature?
As I’ve stressed throughout, the Frankfurt School thinkers (and most of their successors) were never solely or primarily interested in the problem of textual hermeneutics, as literary theory has been throughout most of its history. But as literary theory finds itself looking today for tools to deploy in a post‐reading world (in the wake of recent critical or theoretical provocations like distant reading, surface reading, or post‐critical reading), the Frankfurt School’s aggressive engagement with the whole of cultural production can perhaps provide ways forward for literary theory in the twenty‐first century. Attention to the future of social criticism will entail attention to its past, and to the foundational work of the Frankfurt School, who on the topic of the present and the future were of course often simply channeling Marx himself: “Even if we have no business with the construction of the future or with organizing it for all time, there can still be no doubt about the task confronting us at present: the ruthless criticism of the existing order, ruthless in that it will shrink neither from its own discoveries, nor from conflict with the powers that be” (Marx 1843).