Chapter 1: Our Theoretical Quandary

We face many of the threats that earlier critics stared down. Like Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and others in the 1920s and 30s, we too face a troubling conjuncture of world-historic crises that are challenging our own understanding of both our present and possible futures. But something important has changed. The unity of critical theory has fractured.⁸ Critical theory finds itself today in an uncomfortable predicament. It was not always this way.

In the late nineteenth and for most of the twentieth century, those advocating for a more equitable society—those on the critical Left—were mostly influenced by Marxist ideology and the category of class struggle. Class struggle defined the historical narrative, identified the central political problematic, and provided the basic solution. For a century or more after Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto, the critical Left was under the spell of class struggle.

Whether you agreed or not with Marx about the centrality of class conflict—and I would argue that today, most critical theorists no longer do, or at least not within the classically Marxist framework of workers versus the bourgeoisie—what is plain is that the dominance of the category of class struggle produced a far more coherent and unified vision on the critical Left of what was to be done. The struggle was to take the form of a social revolution—either through a vanguard party or through more democratic processes. The first approach was captured well by Lenin, the second by Rosa Luxembourg. Lenin, in his April Theses, argued for a second truly proletarian revolution to succeed the first bourgeois revolution of February 1917. Lenin’s Theses were highly controversial among Marxists at the time because of their vanguardism, and there were, naturally, sharp differences in strategy and tactics.

But on one thing everyone agreed: social revolution. The question of political action—or what was referred to, at the time, as praxis—predominantly passed through a workers’ revolution that would bring about complete social transformation. It would translate, depending on the context, into internationalism, syndicalism, anti-imperialism, or anti-colonialism. It extended to agricultural workers, or what were referred to as “peasants,” and colonial subjects. But regardless, there was a coherence and straightforward answer to the question of what was to be done: a people’s revolution against capitalism. This revolution was grounded on a Marxist philosophy of history, and it was inevitable.

The interwar period serves as a good illustration. The political situation was at least as confounding as today, with the rise of fascism. But back then, critical praxis was far more coherent and unified, even among the most intellectual of intellectuals. So, for instance, when Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht were planning the launch of a new journal, Krise und Kritik, in 1930, the critical scaffolding was firmly embedded in a Marxist register—as you will see.⁹

I.

“A new journal is at issue, and indeed the only one to have overcome my firmly rooted conviction that I could never again get involved in anything like it […] and it will be called Krise und Kritik.”

— Walter Benjamin, letter to Gershom Scholem, October 1930.¹⁰

“The journal is political. By that is meant that its critical activity is consciously anchored in the critical situation of present society—that of class struggle.”

— Krise und Kritik Memorandum, c. 1930.¹¹

In January 1930, the crises were equally troubling, but the critical framework was far more unified and cohesive. When Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht planned the launch of their new journal, Krise und Kritik, along with the writer Bernard von Brentano and the drama critic Herbert Ihering, the critical framework was firmly Marxist. They all agreed on what was needed: scientific expertise by critical intellectuals to demonstrate the validity of the dialectical materialist method, the foundational role of class struggle, and their implications for understanding the crisis—and even perhaps contributing to it. They understood, or at least Benjamin did clearly, that the economic and political crises had begun to produce, or in Benjamin’s own words, “must produce manifestations of crisis in the superstructure.”¹² The disagreements surrounding critical theory were far less dramatic. To be sure, Brecht was perhaps too crude or vulgar theoretically for Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, or Friedrich Pollock, and troublingly supportive of Stalin; the Institute members were perhaps too bourgeois still for Brecht; and Benjamin was a source of concern for all as he navigated between them.¹³ But everyone was working in the same register of class struggle, dialectical materialism, and a certain kind of positivism.

Benjamin’s plans for Krise und Kritik were starkly positivist and foundationalist. The role of the intellectual, Benjamin declared in conversation with Brecht, was not to lead the proletariat, but rather to fulfill “a subordinate function” of proving the validity of the dialectical materialist method—essentially, of providing scientific research to solidly establish the proper and necessary sociological positions.¹⁴ The journal was intended, Benjamin maintained, to publish the scientific expertise of scholars, to engage not in journalism but in academic research. The program that Benjamin and Brecht set was clear: “The journal’s field of activity is the present crisis in all areas of ideology, and it is the task of the journal to register this crisis or to bring it about, and this by means of criticism.”¹⁵

“Interventionist thinking” was the order of the day. “Inconsequential thought” was to be avoided.¹⁶ Krise und Kritik—also for a short time called Kritische Blätter (literally Critical Pages but more metaphorically Critical Notebooks or Critical Papers)—was to be a journal that would permit “an active, interventionist role, with tangible consequences, as opposed to [the] usual ineffectual arbitrariness.”¹⁷ Benjamin clearly expressed what he had in mind for Krise und Kritik:

The journal was planned as an organ in which experts from the bourgeois camp were to undertake to depict the crisis in science and art. This was meant to demonstrate to the bourgeois intelligentsia that the methods of dialectical materialism are dictated to it by its own most necessary characteristics—necessities of intellectual production, research, and existence. The journal was meant to contribute to the propaganda of dialectical materialism by applying it to questions that the bourgeois intelligentsia is forced to acknowledge as those most particularly characteristic of itself^.18

The project was thus deeply positivistic, in a scientific Marxist sense. Critique would lay the foundation for revolutionary political change. As Brecht wrote, in the context of that projected journal, the concept of Kritik was “to be understood in the sense that politics is its continuation by other means.”¹⁹ It should not come as a surprise that Erdmut Wizisla, who published the extensive materials recording the planned publication of Krise and Kritik, compared, as “near equivalents,” the intended method of Benjamin and Brecht with the logical positivism of the Vienna School.²⁰

Ultimately, this positivist ambition foiled the project. Benjamin felt that the first three articles received were not in fact expert science. They had not lived up to the ambition of the journal and could not “claim to have been written by an expert authority.”²¹ The German translation of the article by Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov, a Russian Marxist who had died in 1918, titled “Idealist and Materialist World Views,” for instance, was decades old and outdated. If it could have claimed expert authority, Benjamin wrote, that would have been twenty-five years earlier.²² Benjamin withdrew from the project at the end of February 1931, followed by Ihering, then the financial collapse of Rowohlt and the emergency press restrictions of July 1931—which finally ended the project.²³

The terms Krise and Kritik would be taken up again and again, inverted, resignified, but for the most part, they remained associated with a deeply Marxist and post-Marxist tradition until the 1960s at least. The 1988 English translation of Koselleck’s 1959 book, Kritik und Krise, did not get past the period of Rousseau and Raynal and so did not directly engage the twentieth century, though it was written explicitly for a post-war “state of permanent crisis.”²⁴ Koselleck of course had no reason to elaborate on Benjamin and Brecht’s interventionist thinking or their planned journal, Krise und Kritik—focusing instead on the way in which the Kantian conception of critique had so influenced the utopianism that would, apparently and recurrently, lead to terror—but his work forwarded in different ways their earlier project.

II.

Today, by contrast, the critical framework has been fractured by anti-foundationalist interventions that have fissured the cohesion of the Marxist scaffold.²⁵ In the 1960s, radically different conceptions of power, of desire, of subjectivity challenged post-Marxist thought from within the critical framework. Gilles Deleuze, in his 1962 monograph, Nietzsche et la philosophie, turned Nietzsche into the critical philosopher, the founder, the inventor, in Deleuze’s words, of “une philosophie critique,” in the process displacing even Kant, who, according to Deleuze, missed the target and did not do “real critique.”²⁶ Deleuze located in an anti-foundationalist Nietzsche the pure form of critique, the very essence, the core: namely, the questioning of the value of values.²⁷ The critical element, Deleuze wrote—italicizing the word “critique” in “l’élément critique”—is precisely “the creative element of meaning and of values.”²⁸ Michel Foucault as well, and many after him, drew from Nietzsche the model of a truly critical approach. Nietzsche’s work, in Foucault’s words, “seems to me to be the best, the most effective, the most pertinent of the models that one can draw upon” to do genealogical work.²⁹ These critical interventions would violently upend the traditional link between critique, power, and the Marxist and post-Marxist tradition.³⁰

In the aftermath of May ’68 and the repression of the student uprisings and anti-Vietnam War movements, critical theorists then, again, refashioned their conceptual tools to better grasp the circulation of power and the troubled times in which they found themselves. It was a time of intellectual ferment. The decade of the 1970s was particularly fruitful for critical theory, but it sent critical theory in many different directions. Some critics returned to foundations and enriched the earlier generation of critical theory. Louis Althusser supplemented his scientific interpretation of Marx with concepts of ideology and ideological state apparatuses, in his Notes Towards an Investigation published in 1970. Hannah Arendt returned to notions of civil disobedience, violence, and revolution, to reconsider the active political life in her 1972 collection of essays, Crises of the Republic. Jürgen Habermas reworked legitimation theory to offer a new diagnosis of crisis tendencies specific to advanced capitalism in Legitimation Crisis published in 1973. Other critics challenged foundations and charted new directions for critique. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari upended notions of desire and reconceived the will to power, turning the Oedipal myth into a bourgeois conspiracy, in their Anti-Oedipus published in 1973. Michel Foucault reconceptualized relations of power, this time on the matrix of civil war, in his lectures on Penal Theories and Institutions in 1972, on The Punitive Society in 1973, and then in his book, Discipline and Punish published in 1975.

A series of other critical interventions erupted at the same time, including Frederic Jameson’s Marxism and Form (1971), Jean Baudrillard’s The Mirror of Production (1973), Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973), Silvia Federici’s Wages Against Housework (1975), Cornelius Castoriadis’ The Imaginary Institution of Society (1975), Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism (1976), Luce Irigaray’s This Sex which is Not One (1977), Mario Tronti’s On the Autonomy of the Political (1977), Stuart Hall’s Policing the Crisis (1978), Nicos Poulantzas’ The State, Power, Socialism (1978), Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), among others. The critical production from the 1970s was truly remarkable—stimulated by a period of global political upheaval—but it substantially fractured the coherence of Marxist thought.

In the decades that followed, new critical theorists augmented and, at times, rebelled against these various frameworks, and in the process developed new critical tools and concepts to address their own critical times. Some turned to the concept of the Anthropocene to capture humankind’s effect on the earth and to historicize the phenomenon of global climate change³¹—with some even extending this into the domains of surveillance and digital technologies.³² Others turned to the framework of neoliberalism and biopolitics to capture the globalization of a new political economy of profiteering, financialization, and consumerism.³³ Others looked for new definitions of populism in order to capture the rise of right-wing political developments in Hungary, Poland, or the Philippines, the election of Donald Trump, Brexit, or the electoral turn-out of the Front National in France and of right-wing candidates in the Netherlands, Austria, and elsewhere. Still others crafted new concepts of precarity, necropolitics, racialized assemblages, intersectionality, critical anthropology, decolonizing, and other theoretical frameworks to make sense of our present.³⁴

These new or retooled critical concepts often invigorated critical theory, but they also at times splintered critical theory, at least from the perspective of traditional Frankfurt School writings. And since that time, the intellectual framework has remained fractured, and critical theory caught in debates over influence and intellectual genealogies—with some returning to Kant, others turning to deliberative democratic thought, or even Rawls, and still others drawing on Nietzsche or Freud. Subsequent generations of the Frankfurt School gravitated first toward Kantian liberalism, then toward Hegelian recognition, then back to Kant—leaving students of critical theory somewhat bewildered and also démuni before the crises that would come, in waves, with neoliberalism, then neoliberal penality, then neoliberal warfare, and on and on.

The different epistemological sensibilities fragmented the critical project. The contrast, even with the more literary and aesthetic thinkers like Benjamin, was deep. In his notes from the time of Krise und Kritik in 1930, under the telling header “Some Remarks on Theoretical Foundations,” Benjamin underscored his “thesis,” in his own words, that “true validity,” “fruitful validity,” “genuine validity” is only “guaranteed by the closest possible connection to social reality,” because, he said, “Truth cannot be established by digression, by the collection and addition of all that’s thinkable, above all by arbitrary flight from its consequences. Rather must it repeatedly be confronted with reality at every stage and point.”³⁵ The contrast with the anti-foundational approaches of the 1960s could hardly have been greater.