Volume 3 is entitled ‘Contexts of Critical Theory’. It brings together two distinct contributions. First, it discusses how critical theory emerged and developed in dialogue with and through the critique of other traditions and discourses, some of which it appropriated and transformed such as Marxism and psychoanalysis, others by way of challenging, critiquing or indeed polemically rejecting them. Second, it explores how critical theory lives on in a variety of contemporary contexts, likewise either by illuminating them critically, or negating them conceptually, or opposing them polemically. Volume 3 comprises three sections on the contexts of its emergence, the contexts of its later development, and finally on the elements of critical theory in the contemporary critique of capitalism and in contemporary social and political movements and theories, including feminism and gendered dynamics of social reproduction.
This Volume reaches back to Volumes 1 and 2 in that it provides theoretical context for the emergence of critical theory, its further developments, and themes. The specific contributions and stance of critical theory developed through the critique of alternative approaches and by means of interdisciplinary argument and approach. Reality is always already-experienced reality mediated by thought. In this manner reality is a cognitive category that expresses social experience in theoretical terms. The dialogue with and critique of other traditions and discourses is therefore more than just a scholastic exercise of theoretical positioning and fine-tuning of a distinctive theoretical approach. Rather it is the development of theoretical understanding and insight into reality by means of immanent critique. It is through dialogue and critique that theory deepens its understanding of, and judgement on, the prevailing conditions of human-social existence, its conceptuality, dynamic and necessities, however contradictory and antagonistic this existence might be. The exploration of the contexts of critical theory thus reaches back to the key contributions in Volume 1, adds an explanatory framework to the key themes of Volume 2, and establishes the contemporary character of the critical theory tradition, its rationale and immanent critique of contemporary social objectivity, probing the conditions of its ‘transformability’ [Veränderlichkeit], as Krahl put it.1
Part VI, ‘Contexts of the Emergence of Critical Theory’, contains chapters that chart the development of critical theory as a critique of and in relationship to Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Council Communism, Positivism, Humanism and Existentialism, Neo-Kantianism, Sociology of Knowledge, art theory, Philosophy of Language, and Weberianism.
Frankfurt School Critical Theory emerged in the 1920s as a heterodox Marxist critique of political economy against the then-prevailing orthodoxy of the Second and Third Internationals. The characterization of orthodoxy has to do with its positivist manner of theorizing and its endorsement of historical materialism as the theoretical oracle of a supposedly quasi-mechanical unfolding of history, as Benjamin argued in his Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940). It was further characterized by its scientistic approach to social objectivity, economistic standpoint and politicist worldview. According to the then-orthodoxy, capitalism is the transition to socialism by means of the state. Jan Hoff’s chapter expounds the critical theory critique of the Marxist orthodoxy and establishes its distinction from this tradition. The chapter conceives of critical theory as a reconstruction of Marxism as a critical social theory. The following chapter by Felix Baum introduces the council communist tradition and charts the significance of Karl Korsch’s work for the founding of critical theory. Pollock in particular, and Horkheimer too, held close links to council communism and bemoaned its decline. Marcuse and Mattick, who was a leading proponent of council communism, disputed the character of working class incorporation into the institutions of post-war capitalism. According to Marcuse, Mattick’s objections to his One-Dimensional Man (1964) were the only ‘solid’ ones.
Anders Ramsay explores the dispute between critical theory and positivism, from Comte via the Marxist inclined Vienna Circle to the positivism dispute in the 1960s. For critical theory positivism obstructs a critical approach to society because it takes the social phenomena at face value without questioning its social contents. Yet, as became evident in the positivism dispute, positivism deals with posited reality, not idealized alternatives or fetishized social constructions, and for this reason positivism is an initial element of critical thought. Oliver Schlaudt explores the Frankfurt School’s reading of sociology of knowledge, in particular the founding contribution by Karl Mannheim and his ostensibly Marxist-leaning theory of ideology. Schlaudt continues to explore Boltanski’s more recent ‘break’ with Bourdieu, a rehearsal once again of the distinction between critical theory and sociology of knowledge. Sociology of knowledge attempted to understand the relationship between knowledge and society and establish the historical character of mind and life. It requires from the sociologist self-awareness of his or her standpoint of analysis. Critical theory rejects ‘standpoint’ thinking as ideological in character. For critical theory, reflexivity entails thinking through the social object whereas for sociology of knowledge it entails thinking about the object from different standpoints. Critical theory thus charges sociology of knowledge with providing ‘sociological accounts’ of society from a variety of plausible standpoints and perspectives, without in fact touching society by thought. Klaus Lichtblau deals with the importance of Weber for critical theory. Originally, Georg Lukács set out to connect Marx’s analysis of the commodity with Weber’s diagnosis of the age of bureaucratic rule. Later critical theory considered Weber’s insights into instrumental rationality as decisive for the patterns of rule and behaviour in developed capitalist societies. However, although much could be learned from Weber’s sociology, its development of a formal framework of basic sociological concepts or types cuts short social critique. Lichtblau focuses on receptions and discussions of Weber in the works of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse, concluding with Habermas’s studies of Weber’s work.
Philip Hogh explores the connection between critical theory and the philosophy of language. The linguistic turn of critical theory is conventionally attributed to Habermas’s communicative action, in which language and linguistic speech acts are the means of reason. However, the philosophy of language was decisive also for the critical theory of Benjamin and Adorno. In their understanding language is not a socially independent category of reason. They emphasize the historical dimension of language. For them language does not transform the social relations. It expresses them. The critique of society is therefore also critique of language. Inara Luisa Marin’s chapter explores Freudian psychoanalysis and the emergence of Freudian Marxism within critical theory, especially in the work of Fromm and Marcuse. She also discusses the later reading of Freudian psychology by Honneth. She argues that in abandoning Freudian drive theory, Honneth falls into a biologism that ceases to provide an account of social relations. By doing so, Honneth undermines what is critical about critical theory and ends up reaffirming a normative model of social critique. For Marin a critical theory of psychoanalysis is fundamentally the analysis of the inner physiology of bourgeois society. Dennis Johannssen’s chapter examines the engagements of critical theory with humanism and philosophical anthropology from Walter Benjamin to Ulrich Sonnemann’s Negative Anthropology (1969). Although the members of the first generation rejected the concept of an invariant human nature, they developed compelling ways to analyze and interpret the restrictions and limitations that antagonistic societies impose on the human being. In this context, critical theory proposes the concept of a ‘negative humanism’ that takes its cue not from what is essentially human, but from what is inhumane and has to be abolished. In contrast to Fromm and Marcuse, Adorno spurned anthropological assumptions of any kind, while interpreting in a dialectical fashion how human beings are restrained and negated under the conditions of repressive societies. Negative Anthropology demanded a ‘permanent anthropological revolution’, seeking to demonstrate the impossibility of any conclusive knowledge of the human being. In the final chapter of this part, Jasper Bernes examines the concept of participation in art in critical theory and assesses its significance for its aesthetics. Within critical theory and beyond, many of the debates about the status of art turn, explicitly or implicitly, upon this concept. Though the debates between Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht and others are often discussed through concepts such as autonomy, totality, and mimesis, this chapter argues that we might usefully reorganize our understanding of such debates by thinking through the links between aesthetic and political participation. Articulated in this manner, continuities between critical theory and other theorizations – such as those of the Situationist International – become visible. The chapter assesses the potent critiques of participation as an aesthetic and political ideology as well as the impasses that participatory theory and practice encounter over the course of the twentieth century. These impasses are shown to be especially prominent within the social movements and cultural practices of the new century.
Part VIII, ‘Contexts of the Later Developments of Critical Theory’, charts the development of critical theory in relationship to Situationism, Feminism, Autonomist Marxism, Neo-Hegelianism, Cultural Studies, post-colonialism, Open Marxism and post-Marxism. Anselm Jappe interrogates the relationship between the concept of the ‘culture industry’, which was developed by Adorno and Horkheimer in the 1940s, and Guy Debord’s ‘spectacle’, which he developed in his key situationist text The Society of the Spectacle (1967). According to Jappe the similarities between the two concepts are striking. Both concepts build on Marx’s critique of the commodity form. The distinction between them has to do with the judgements about the critical role of art in bourgeois society. Whereas Debord argues that art can no longer play a critical role, and instead must either be ‘realized’ in everyday life or find itself transformed into another form of ‘spectacle’, Adorno holds that the ‘autonomy’ of art must be defended as a last refuge from the barbaric forces of capitalism. The following chapter by Vincent Chanson and Frédéric Monferrand explores the connection between autonomist Marxism and critical theory focusing on the early workerism of Raniero Panzieri and Mario Tronti and later elaborations by Antonio Negri. Both traditions are indebted to Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (1923) and its theory of reification, and develop distinct interpretations of this text, from Pollock to Panzieri and from Tronti to Adorno. They differ in terms of their accounts of the possibility of emancipatory praxis, which is most clearly brought out later in relation to Negri and Krahl whose texts nevertheless were most influential for the development of autonomia in the 1970s. Christos Memos introduces theoretical developments that fall under the title Open Marxism starting with Axelos’s original use of the term in the 1950s, the work of Agnoli from the late 1960s to the later contributions by Simon Clarke, Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn and John Holloway. Open Marxism is distinguished by its negative critique of capitalist society. According to Memos, it continues to advance the critical purposes of the early Frankfurt School, both as critique of traditional theory, especially the prevailing positivism and scientism in the Marxist tradition, and as a project committed to human emancipation. Memos emphasizes that both traditions are characterized by their understanding of class as a negative category of social practice. Christian Lotz presents a critical overview of central issues in ‘Post-Marxism’, which he discusses as a set of distinctive theoretical conceptions of the social and philosophical vision of society, theory, and politics. Lotz argues that the core of Post-Marxist thought can broadly be defined by how critical philosophers (such as Mouffe, Laclau, Honneth, Castoriadis, Lefort, Gorz, Negri, and Badiou) have moved away from a Marxian critique of political economy as a critical theory of constituted social forms. Instead, he explains, most Post-Marxists argue that the political sphere and a multiplicity of social struggles are more fundamental than the social-economic structure of society. It thus identifies the social subject as an independent agent that is capable of politics independently from the mode of production that governs its social reproduction.
Tom Bunyard examines the interrelations, echoes and distinctions that can be identified between critical theory and cultural studies. Concentrating primarily upon its British and American instantiations, the chapter outlines the emergence and development of cultural studies, and, drawing on Horkheimer’s seminal definitions of ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’ theory, places its central ideas in relation to those of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Gudrun-Axeli Knapp explores the early Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory in order to establish why it proved so cumbersome for a broader reception by feminists. She holds that for contemporary feminist critique a re-inspection of its theoretical stance might be fruitful. Leaving aside the continuing relevance of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s epistemology and critical methodology, she emphasizes two specific reasons for this. Firstly, and in the light of contemporary socio-political transformations, there is its insistence on the ‘innately coercive character of capitalist society’ (Negt/Kluge). The Frankfurt School critique of capital as social relationship is decisively non-economistic in character and allows for the elucidation of the psychodynamics of socially induced forms of ‘feral self-preservation’ (Adorno). Secondly, critical theory represents a historically oriented way of thinking that can account for its own function and situation in society.
Richard Gunn and Adrian Wilding place Axel Honneth’s thought within the context of academic political theory’s adoption and domestication of the notion of recognition. By exploring the meaning of recognition in Hegel and Marx, the traditional character of Honneth’s version is indicated and recognition’s original revolutionary implications highlighted. Reviving a revolutionary notion of recognition, the chapter concludes, may contribute to a much-needed renewal of critical theory. Asha Varadharajan interrogates the traditions of Frankfurt School critical theory in conversation with the contemporary discourse of human rights and the critique of development. In particular, she examines the concerns of post-colonial theorists, specifically Edward Said, and the critical theory of Theodor Adorno to ascertain distinctions and common grounds. She argues that in particular Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) offers valuable resources for posing the kind of questions that might animate the future of post-colonial studies.
Part VIII is the final part. It contains contributions about the elements of critical theory in the context of contemporary social and political movements and theories. In particular, it explores the manner in which critical theory operates as a force of negative reason within and against a variety of contemporary movements and contexts, Foucauldian notions of biopolitics, international relations theory, theories of space and urbanity, anti-imperialism, the internet and digital culture industry, environmentalism, feminist theories of social reproduction, false solidarity and rackets, capitalist crisis, contemporary anti-capitalism and social struggle. Frieder Vogelmann explores Foucault’s concept of ‘biopolitics’. Although the debate about this concept is prolific, voices from the Frankfurt School tradition in critical theory have been absent from it. Vogelmann’s chapter makes this good. He argues that Foucault’s model of critique in which ‘biopolitics’ finds its conceptual home is very similar to that of the early Frankfurt School’s model of critique. In a first step he relates Foucault’s subtle distinction between a critical and a descriptive conceptualization of ‘biopolitics’ to Horkheimer’s famous distinction between critical and traditional theory. He then connects Foucault’s and Adorno’s model of critique. Both, he argues, conceive of critique as a diagnostic practice of the present, which produces an effective knowledge about the conditions of emancipation. By paying attention to these affinities the understanding of the meaning of ‘biopolitics’ is changed from a conventional description of neoliberal governmentality towards critique of contemporary conditions. Shannon Brincat’s chapter looks at the way in which the discipline of International Relations (IR) was subjected to a radical critique of its epistemology, ontology, and methodology, through the introduction of the themes and methods of the Frankfurt School in the 1980s. The theory that emerged, Critical International Relations Theory (CIRT), exposed the deep relation between the dominant approaches to IR theory and the interests of power they served in world politics. Many scholars in CIRT have since engaged with broader, normative questions of the purposes and interests of IR theory and the possibilities for advancing human emancipation. Brincat examines some of the key themes in this emancipatory approach based on intersubjectivity, dialogue, coexistence, and social equity, and identifies some of its limits, outlining the future tasks for critical theorizing in IR.
Greig Charnock explores geographical concepts of space and urbanity as categories of a critical social theory. The chapter introduces Neil Smith’s notion of the production of space, which he develops in a dialogue with Alfred Schmidt’s notion of the production of nature. This sets the framework for the elaboration of Henri Lefebvre’s theory of ‘the production of space’. Lefebvre’s theory parallels the critical theory of the Frankfurt School insofar as it subjects traditional theories of space and urbanity to critique on a human-social basis. The chapter expounds Lefebvre’s contribution to the analysis of space as a social product, his theory of urbanization, and his writings on the politics of space, before reviewing significant criticisms of that contribution. For a critical theory of space and urban form Lefebvre’s work is ground-breaking. The chapter by Marcel Stoetzler develops a critical theory of anti-imperialism. Frankfurt School critical theory aims to formulate a critique of the capitalist mode of production that includes the phenomena typically addressed as ‘imperialism’. It rejects the traditional notion that ‘imperialism’ is an object in its own right that is to be distinguished from the capitalist mode of production, and that imperialism could thus be fought ‘as such’. The chapter establishes the ways in which the concept of ‘imperialism’ is used in the writings of Marx as well as in the texts of some of the canonical writers of critical theory. It is argued that the critical theorists’ Marxian usage of the term prevented the emergence of a concept of ‘anti-imperialism’ in their writings: ‘imperialism’ was for them, as for Marx, simply an aspect of capitalism. It thus criticized imperialism without recourse to the concept of ‘anti-imperialism’. The chapter argues that the concept of ‘anti-imperialism’ implies the reification and fetishization of ‘imperialism’ as a seemingly independent term of social objectivity.
Nick Dyer-Witheford revists Horkheimer and Adorno’s account of the culture industry for a critique of today’s digital culture industry. As Dyer-Witheford points out, Horkheimer and Adorno were writing in wartime North America where computers and networking were already emerging. Over the next fifty years, digital technologies incubated within the military-industrial-academic complex, diffused into every aspect of production, circulation and financialization, and created a cybernetic capitalism. Early popular adoption of the Internet was disruptive for established media and seemed to contradict pictures of impregnable cultural control. Amidst a wave in networked counter-cultures and alterglobalist resistance, critics declared Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique obsolete. However, after the dot.com boom and bust, Dyer-Witheford argues, internet capital has consolidated itself under the business model of Web 2.0, with Google and Facebook as its flagships. Search engines and social networks lead a new wave of commodification. Futhermore, this reaffirmation of capitalist cultural control is now itself being convulsed as the network outcomes of the financial crash of 2008 and the subsequent recession hit home. Michelle Yates contributes on Environmentalism and the Domination of Nature. She examines critical theory’s conceptualization of capitalism’s domination over nature, from Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Alfred Schmidt to the work of contemporary scholars like John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett. In this literature, domination over nature is situated in social mediation, specifically that labor mediates and determines the human relationship to nature. She argues against the anthropological notion of labor, a notion of labor per se, which treats labor in capitalism one-dimensionally. In this context she explores insights from the works of Norbert Trenkle and Moishe Postone about the abstract character of labor in capitalism. It is in analysing this abstract dimension that the historically unique character of capitalism’s domination over nature can be unveiled.
Roswitha Scholz explores the value form analysis of Wertkritik as a way of moving feminist critical theory forward from its focus on gender relations towards a theory of social form, exploring gender relations as form-determined. With recourse to the work of Horkheimer and Adorno she expounds the meaning of social form and explains it as critique of patriarchy. Her contribution warns both against apologetic accounts of the Enlightenment that endorse equality without regard to specific social contents and against the tendencies of counter-Enlightenment thought in contemporary identity politics. She presents value form analysis as critique of identity. The chapter by Amy De’Ath makes connections between key works in queer Marxism, value-critique, and social reproduction feminism to argue that gendered social relations are form-determined by capitalism’s imperative towards the production of surplus-value. De’Ath’s contention is that analyzes of gender based on a critique of reification, while productive in several ways, fall short of accounting for the relationship of gender to capital’s general laws of motion, and thus for gender’s continued existence. Instead of locating the production of gender at the level of exchange, De’Ath argues that gender’s relation to capital accumulation must be conceptualized through the opposing and mutually constitutive dialectic of production and circulation. This point has significant consequences for social reproduction feminism because a focus on the reification of gender at the level of exchange necessarily excludes a consideration of how gender is produced through reproductive activities that are defined by their unpaid and unsubsumed status – in other words, their dissociation from exchange.
Gerhard Scheit assesses the contemporary meaning of the term racket. Critical theory adopted this term to designate the continued or reconstructed relations of personal dependency in conditions that had ostensibly abolished that dependency: the rule of law and the social relations of capitalism. The juxtaposition of rackets to the law also opens up a new perspective on the law. It is no coincidence that in the legal sphere the term racket refers to illegal economic practices and criminal methods that frequently run alongside contractual agreements or replace them and that must be combatted to maintain the rule of law. When the concept of the racket is applied to the issue of state sovereignty, the very principle of legality is called into question, as was explained by Max Horkheimer in his analysis of societies ‘that organize themselves along totalitarian lines’. Joshua Clover tackles the term subsumption, which is a term of art within Marx’s critique of political economy that has had a complex reception history. It is subdivided into formal subsumption and real subsumption. These terms designate changes to the production process during the transition to, and ongoing development of, capitalism. These changes in the character of subsumption mediate the metamorphosis of human making into capitalist labor. Subsumption expresses the compulsion towards ever-greater productivity and accompanying changes, imparting a directionality to the history of capital often identified as modernization. Because of this historical dynamic, subsumption is intimately related to efforts at periodization that compass orienting strategies of accumulation, the changing relation between capital and labor, and the possibility of capitalist crisis. This entry provides an expanded definition, reviews publication and reception history, and assesses in particular the rise of ‘subsumption narratives’ after the Second World War wherein periodization, relations of production, and crisis come to the fore. It concludes with a theoretical synthesis of subsumption and capitalist crisis.
Amy Chun Kim writes about ‘the figure of crisis’ in critical theory. At its emergence the Frankfurt School sought to expose the contradictions of capitalism in the face of dramatic and potentially irreversible defeats of the labor movements in the West. The chapter surveys the understanding of ‘crisis’ in critical theory from its early conceptions via Habermas’s arguments for greater democracy under welfare state capitalism to more contemporary contentions over where the focus of an adequate critique of capitalism should lie. The last is to be understood more generally as a debate between those interested in the ‘value form’ of social relations – the abstract social logic of capitalism – and those working on the theorization of capitalist crisis. Chun Kim’s overview underscores the relevance of the legacy of Adorno and Horkheimer today. How might their work be adapted to account for the inequality, precarity and stagnation that characterize the latest phase of capitalist development? Charles Prusik develops a critique of neoliberal economics through Adorno’s concept of natural history [Naturgeschichte], in order to articulate the formation of what he defines as neoliberal ‘second nature’. Through engagements with economic history, he demonstrates how the neoclassical, and neoliberal economic traditions have naturalized the concept of the free market in their relevant notions of value, efficiency, and competition. Drawing from Adorno’s materialist engagements with Karl Marx and Alfred Sohn-Rethel, he develops the category of commodity fetishism in order to grasp the logic by which the self-regulating market appears as the subject of social coordination. Through engagements with Friedrich Hayek’s critique of socialist calculation and the emergence of information sciences, he analyzes the reconceptualization of markets as information processors, as well as organisms of self-development. By delineating the logic by which the self-regulating market emerges as a natural process of immanent self-determination, Prusik’s chapter demonstrates the way in which capitalist social relations and institutions of coercion are legitimated through their appearance as natural necessity.
The final two chapters explore contemporary arguments about human emancipation and conditions of misery. Sergio Tischler Visquerra and Alfonso Galileo García Vela focus on the contemporary potential of emancipation and revolution. Their argument emphasizes the importance of zapatismo as an alternative to classical ideas of revolution and emancipation. Within the Marxist tradition two distinct ideas of revolution are present; one stresses the importance of the party and taking state power, and the other rejects the centralism of the communist party and focuses instead on the autonomy of struggles and the creation of new forms of social reproduction that are referred to as communizing. They develop their argument for autonomy through a critical reading of the works of John Holloway, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin. The final chapter is by Aaron Benanav and John Clegg. They conclude the Handbook by surveying the contemporary crisis of capitalism, both economic and political. The chapter specifies the ways in which our era differs from that of the post-war critical theorists, both in the contours of class struggle and the potentials for emancipation. On the basis of these differences, Benanav and Clegg question the usefulness of much of the theoretical legacy of the earlier generations of critical theorists. They offer their own twenty-first-century ‘return to Marx’, reading his original theory of immiseration (dismissed by many during the post-war economic boom) as a precocious theory of deindustrialization, and spell out the implications of this reading for the understanding of capitalist crises and the potentials of emancipation.
1. Hans-Jürgen Krahl (1971): Konstitution und Klassenkampf. Zur historischen Dialektik von bürgerlicher Emanzipation und proletarischer Revolution (Frankfurt am Main: Neue Kritik, 2008, p. 350).
We are most grateful to our translators who worked wonders in translating from German, French and Spanish into free-flowing English. Jacob Blumenfeld translated ‘Feminist Critical Theory and the Problem of (Counter)Enlightenment in the Decay of Capitalist Patriarchy’ by Roswitha Scholz, and ‘Frankfurt School and Council Communism’ by Felix Baum. Adrian Wilding translated ‘Critical Theory and the Philosophy of Language’ by Philip Hogh, and ‘Constellations of Critical Theory and Feminist Critique’ by Gudrun-Axeli Knapp. Niall Bond translated ‘Critical Theory and Weberian Sociology’ by Klaus Lichtblau. Lars Fischer translated ‘Rackets’ by Gerhard Scheit. Memphis Krickeberg translated ‘Workerism and Critical Theory’ by Vincent Chanson and Frédéric Monferrand. Donald Nicholson-Smith translated ‘The Spectacle and the Culture Industry, the Transcendence of Art and the Autonomy of Art: Some Parallels between Theodor Adorno’s and Guy Debord’s Critical Concepts’ by Anselm Jappe. Anna-Maeve Holloway translated ‘On Emancipation …’ by Sergio Tischler Visquerra and Alfonso Galileo García Vela.