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INTRODUCTION

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“The splinter in your eye,” wrote Theodor W. Adorno, “is the best magnifying glass.”¹ This provocative assertion is made in section 29, called “Dwarf Fruit,” of Minima Moralia. It appears alongside other, now canonical aphorisms, most notably: “in psychoanalysis nothing is true except the exaggerations” and “the whole is the false.” Although not immediately obvious, Adorno’s vivid if implausible image plays on the celebrated admonition against judging, lest you be judged, from the Gospel of St. Matthew (7:3–4): “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me cast out the mote out of thine eye; and lo, the beam is in thine own eye?” For what is normally translated from the original Aramaic as “mote” in English is rendered as “Splitter”² in German, the common German word for “splinter,” which is the way E. F. N. Jephcott then retranslated it into English. Although perhaps imprecise, the word choice was fortunate. For whereas “mote” suggests a speck of dust that can seem trivial in comparison to the “beam” (or sometimes “plank”) in the eye of the hypocritical judge, a “splinter” is far more irritating, producing a pain that cannot be ignored. Adorno, moreover, turned the metaphor in an unexpected direction. Not only did he adopt the perspective of the other—the brother whose eye has the “splinter” rather than his judgmental sibling with the “beam” in his—but, more importantly, he made the irritation itself into an inadvertent virtue by claiming that only through discomfort might we more clearly glimpse the truth. Indeed, only by registering the experience of suffering—one’s own and, through empathy, that of others—is valid knowledge of society possible.³ Magnification induced by pain produces the exaggerations that grant Freudian theory—and not it alone—its insights.⁴

There is, however, one important limitation that follows when one magnifies details or fragments, painful or otherwise: it inhibits our ability to view the whole with a panoptic gaze. Indeed, one of the consequences of what Adorno called our “damaged lives,” where “wrong life cannot be lived rightly,”⁵ is that there is no privileged vantage point from which to observe the totality and even less warrant to call what we can see “true” in a normative, emphatic sense. Nor is there a coherent meta-narrative that can read “world history” as if it were a meaningful story, whether of progress or decline.⁶ All we have left are shards of a splintered totality and a kaleidoscope of disjointed temporalities. If there is a coherent “whole,” it can be grasped only inferentially from its effects, in particular through the pervasive force of capitalist relations in our lives. But rather than being a whole replete with positive meaning, it is an oppressive totality that thwarts our potential to enjoy lives that might be “lived rightly” and provide a vision of a different whole that could be justly called the “true.”⁷ That laudable alternative can only be posited, if at all, as an absent desideratum in tension with what is the case. For, as Adorno was to put it in a discussion of Schoenberg’s atonal music, “the whole, as a positive entity, cannot be antithetically extracted from an estranged and splintered reality by means of the will and power of the individual, if it is not to degenerate into deception and ideology; it must assume the form of negation.”⁸

But however totalizing and pervasive capital’s oppressive power might have been for Adorno and his Frankfurt School colleagues, the gap between concept and object emblemized by the epistemological value of exaggeration means that it is never so dominant as to render critique itself impossible. After all, an exaggeration that knows itself as such necessarily registers an incongruence between idea and object or word and thing, and this implies that efforts to master the contingent messiness of the world through conceptual domination—and by extension, social, economic or political domination as well—will inevitably come up short. Because there is always a remainder that stubbornly resists inclusion, always a block to total control, there is also a chance for critical theoretical distance, and some opportunity, however slim, to undermine actual oppression. The concept of a fully “one-dimensional society” producing only “one-dimensional men,” famously elaborated by Herbert Marcuse, was thus itself an exaggeration allowing some room for resistance, some space for negation, to manifest itself. But what form such a critique should take—macro- or micrological in scale, immanent or transcendent in vantage point, hypotactically or paratactically presented, written esoterically or for a general public—has never been a question easily answered. Nor, of course, were the practical political implications clear that were supposed to be drawn from that critique, which ranged from the maximalist resistance of Marcuse’s “great refusal” to what Jürgen Habermas called Horkheimer and Adorno’s more cautious “strategy of hibernation.”⁹

Because these questions remain open, it would be problematic to formulate a fully coherent and normative, let alone “orthodox” version of Critical Theory comparable to the “orthodox Marxism” Georg Lukács defined in methodological terms in History and Class Consciousness.¹⁰ In fact, the very concept of orthodoxy is anathema to an approach that knows the dangers of “straightening” opinions—the Greek etymology of the word “orthodox”—into a uniform doctrine requiring uncritical fidelity. What goes under the name “Critical Theory” has always been an open-ended, internally contested field of overlapping but never fully congruent assumptions, methods and arguments. If it hangs together, it is more in terms of Wittgenstein’s family resemblances than in those of a rigid system with logical consistency, impermeable boundaries and fully shared conclusions. Even in terms of styles of presentation, its adherents have embraced a wide range of strategies, ranging from impressionistic thought-images (Denkbilder) and condensed aphorisms to social scientific research reports and extensive philosophical treatises. Symptomatically, when Leo Löwenthal, the last surviving member of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, was pressed to define it by his biographical interviewer Helmut Dubiel, he playfully kicked the can down the road: “It is a perspective. For that reason I’m always a bit baffled when someone requests that I offer a seminar on Critical Theory—I never know how to deal with that.” He then added, with his usual puckish humor, “I usually call my friend Martin Jay and ask him to define the main characteristics of the so-called Critical Theory. Now I’ll ask you—after all, you wrote a book about it.” To which Dubiel replied: “It’s really impossible to come 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.