Abstract
In the highly charged political climates of a number of European cities in the mid-to-late 1960s students such as Hans-Jürgen Krahl, Esther Leslie writes, ‘versed in critical theory,’
were demanding that theoretical critique turn into practical political action. Theory was a brake on the movement, alleged some, as they denounced fellow students — mocked as Adornites and Habermice — for promoting theory for theory’s sake and disregarding their professor’s function as a left alibi for bourgeois society. The Frankfurt Schülers, ‘left idiots of the authoritarian state’, had become ‘critical in theory, conformist in practice’, stated a leaflet put out by sociology students in December [1968].3
The Academic Life. Frankfurt. Theodor W. Adorno, 65, till recently philosopher of the Student Left (…) was prevented last week from holding his usual lecture on ‘Introduction to Dialectics.’ The interruption in Hörsaal VII of Frankfurt University was due to a campaign of ‘planned tenderness.’ After the distribution of a leaflet entitled ‘Adorno Als Institution Ist Tot,’ [Adorno as institution is dead] three young revolutionary females from the ‘Basisgruppe Soziologie’ circled around Professor Adorno, at first waving their bouquets of flowers, then kissing him, exposing their breasts, and confronting him with erotic pantomime. Professor Adorno, who had called the police last semester when 76 student radicals occupied his Institute for Social Research, tried to protect himself with his briefcase, and then left the lecture hall. He has since announced that his lectures and seminar on ‘Dialectics’ would be indefinitely postponed.2
See: Löwenthal, L. ‘Theodor W. Adorno: An Intellectual Memoir,’ An Unmastered Past: The Autobiographical Reflections of Leo Löwenthal, Ed. Martin Jay (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 189.
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Notes
See: Löwenthal, L. ‘Theodor W. Adorno: An Intellectual Memoir,’ An Unmastered Past: The Autobiographical Reflections of Leo Löwenthal, Ed. Martin Jay (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 189.
Leslie, E. ‘Introduction to Adorno/Marcuse Correspondence on the German Student Movement,’ New Left Review, Volume I, Number 233, January/February 1999 (London: New Left Review Ltd), 119. This same leaflet, according to Leslie, ‘quoted Horkheimer’s Dämmerung from 1934: ‘A revolutionary career does not lead to banquets and honorary titles, interesting research and professorial wages. It leads to misery, disgrace, ingratitude, prison and into the unknown, illuminated by only an almost superhuman belief’. In March 1969, a pirate edition of Dämmerung appeared, and on its back cover was a photograph of the sociology department under occupation, renamed Spartakus department and festooned with a banner that quoted words from the book: ‘If socialism appears unrealizable then it is necessary to make it a reality with an even more desperate determination.’ Discussions were heated in Frankfurt. Some activists had been going further, grasping at alarmist tactics. In April 1968, Andreas Baader, Thorwald Proll, Horst Söhnlein and Gudrun Ensslin set two Frankfurt department stores alight, ‘as a protest against the indifference to war in Vietnam’. At the end of October 1968 they were sentenced to three years imprisonment each (ibid.).
Rubin, A. ‘The Adorno Files,’ Adorno: A Critical Reader, Eds Nigel Gibson and Andrew Rubin (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 183.
According to Wohlfarth: ‘Slogans such as “Adorno: public enemy number one” were, it is true, sad reflections on a younger generation’s “anti-authoritarian” pretensions. But “parricide,” the anxious slogan of our conservative elders, was an equally cheap shot. Cheap, but not wrong — merely misconceived. How else to do justice to so potent a father without paying him the wrong tribute? “To be just,” wrote Baudelaire, “criticism must be partial, passionate, political” — in short, unjust.’ Wohlfarth, I. ‘Hibernation: On the Tenth Anniversary of Adorno’s Death,’ Theodor W. Adorno: SAGE Masters of Modern Social Thought; Volume I, Ed. Gerard Delanty (London: SAGE Publications, 2004), 361.
‘Not a few of the impulses which motivate me are related to those of the present-day youth: desire for a better life and the right kind of society, unwillingness to adapt to the present order of things. I also share their doubts about the educational value of our schools, colleges, and universities. The difference between us has to do with the violence practiced by the young, which plays into the hands of their otherwise impotent opponents. An open declaration that even a dubious democracy, for all its defects, is always better than the dictatorship which would inevitably result from a revolution today, seems to me necessary for the sake of truth. Despite her adherence to the Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg, whom so many students venerate, said fifty years ago that “the remedy which Trotsky and Lenin have found, the elimination of democracy as such, is worse than the disease it is supposed to cure.” To protect, preserve, and, where possible, extend the limited and ephemeral freedom of the individual in the face of the growing threat to it is far more urgent a task than to issue abstract denunciations of it or to endanger it by actions that have no hope of success.’ Horkheimer, M. Critical Theory: Selected Essays, Trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), viii.
Adorno considered them stunts because, ‘barricades are ridiculous against those who administer the bomb; that is why the barricades are a game, and the lords of the manor let the gamesters go on playing for the time being. Things might be different with the guerrilla tactics of the Third World; nothing in the administered world functions wholly without disruption. This is why actionists in advanced industrial countries choose the underdeveloped ones for their models. But they are as impotent as the personality cult of leaders who are helplessly and shamefully murdered. Models that do not prove themselves even in the Bolivian bush cannot be exported.’ Adorno, T. W. [1969], ‘Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,’ Trans. Henry W. Pickford, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 269–70. Hereafter cited in the text as MTP. ‘I think their zeal for action is attributable to desperation, because people feel how little power they really have to change society. But I also think these individual actions are doomed to failure; that was shown by the May revolts in France’ (BIT 65).
Krahl, H. J. ‘The Political Contradiction in Adorno’s Critical Theory,’ Telos, Number 21, 1974 (New York: Telos Press), 165. Hereafter cited in the text as PC.
Bürger, P. ‘Aesthetic Fragments,’ Adorno: The Possibility or the Impossible: Volume I, Eds Nicolaus Schafhausen, Vanessa Joan Müller, and Michael Hirsch (Frankfurt: Frankfurt Kunstverein, Lukas & Sternberg, 2003), 114. For Bürger it was an ‘unfair accusation,’ and for many students outside the ranks of the SDS, the latter’s activism against Adorno and his lectures represented an indulgence: ‘action for action’s sake.’ For his part, Adorno regarded the student demand that he ‘carry out public self-criticism as pure Stalinism.’
Adorno, T. W. ‘Correspondence on the German Student Movement,’ Trans. Esther Leslie, New Left Review, Volume I, Number 233, January/February 1999 (London: New Left Review Ltd), 127. Hereafter cited in the text as GSM. ‘We older representatives of what the name “Frankfurt School” has come to designate,’ Adorno wrote, ‘have recently and eagerly been accused of resignation. We had indeed developed elements of a critical theory of society, the accusation runs, but we were not ready to draw the practical consequences from it. And so, we neither provided actionist programs nor did we even support actions by those who felt inspired by critical theory’ (R 289).
Nicht mitmachen or non-participation was, according to Löwenthal, the ‘slogan’ of and ‘concern for independence,’ which animated the nonconformist intellectuals of the Institute. Löwenthal, L. ‘The Institute of Social Research,’ An Unmastered Past: The Autobiographical Reflections of Leo Löwenthal, Ed. Martin Jay (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 59.
Marx, K. [1845], ‘Theses on Feuerbach,’ Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 173. According to Adorno, ‘One clings to action for the sake of the impossibility of action. Admittedly, already in Marx there lies concealed a wound. He may have presented the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach so authoritatively because he knew he wasn’t entirely sure about it. In his youth he had demanded the “ruthless criticism of everything existing.” Now he was mocking criticism. But his famous witticism against the young Hegelians, the phrase “critical critique,” was a dud, went up in smoke as nothing but a tautology. The forced primacy of praxis irrationally stopped the critique that Marx himself practiced’ (R 290). ‘The hostility to theory in the spirit of the times, the by no means coincidental withering away of theory, its banishment by an impatience that wants to change the world without having to interpret it while so far it has been chapter and verse that philosophers have merely interpreted — such hostility becomes praxis’s weakness’ (MTP 265).
Goethe, cited in Arnold, M. [1867–1869], ‘Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism,’ Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, Ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 184. Hereafter cited in the text as CA.
Kant, I. [1795/1796], ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,’ Trans. H. B. Nisbet, Kant: Political Writings, Ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 (Second Edn)), 93.
Rancière, J. and Hallward, P. ‘Politics and Aesthetics: An Interview,’ Trans. Forbes Morlock, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Volume 8, Number 2, 2003 (Oxford: Taylor & Francis Journals), 208. Hereafter cited in the text as PAT.
Habermas, J. [1983], ‘Theodor Adorno: The Primal History of Subjectivity — Self-Affirmation Gone Wild,’ Theodor W. Adorno: SAGE Masters of Modern Social Thought; Volume III, Ed. Gerard Delanty (London: SAGE Publications, 2004), 340.
Bolz, N. ‘Gnosis and Systems Theory: A Conversation between Norbert Bolz and Michael Hirsch,’ Trans. Steven Lindberg, Adorno: The Possibility of the Impossible: Volume I, Eds Nicolaus Schafhausen, Vanessa Joan Müller, and Michael Hirsch (Frankfurt: Frankfurt Kunstverein, New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2003), 105–6.
Kierkegaard, S. [1843], Either/Or. A Fragment of Life: Part II, Trans. and Eds Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 163.
Adorno, T. W. [1969], ‘Critique,’ Trans. Henry W. Pickford, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 282.
Berman, R. A. ‘Adorno’s Politics,’ Adorno: A Critical Reader, Eds Nigel Gibson and Andrew Rubin (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2002), 113–4. ‘The outbreak of the Third Reich did, it is true, surprise my political judgement, but not my unconscious fear’ (MM 192). Adorno’s fragment is dated 1935.
Jarvis, S. Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 9.
Rancière, J. The Nights of Labor: The Worker’s Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, Trans. John Drury (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), xi.
Kant, I. [1784], ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’ Trans. H. B. Nisbet, Kant: Political Writings, Ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 (Second Edn)), 54. Hereafter cited in the text as WE.
Adorno, T. W. [1969], ‘Critique,’ Trans. Henry W. Pickford, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 281.
Berman, R. ‘Adorno’s Politics,’ Adorno: A Critical Reader, Eds Nigel Gibson and Andrew Rubin (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2002), 111.
‘Incomplete documentation indicates that between 1950 and 1969 Adorno participated in more than 160 radio programs. (…) The Adorno emerging here is a far cry from the stereotypical mandarin aesthete. (…) His engagement in the mass media was a logical consequence of his eminently practical intentions to effect change.’ Pickford, H. W. ‘Preface,’ Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), viii–ix.
Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Löwenthal, Pollock and Neumann all had FBI files. See: Rubin, A. ‘The Adorno Files,’ Adorno: A Critical Reader, Eds. Nigel Gibson and Andrew Rubin (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 172–90.
Lüdke, W. M. and Löwenthal, L. ‘The Utopian Motif in Suspension: A Conversation with Leo Löwenthal (Interview with W. Martin Lüdke),’ Trans. Ted R. Weeks, An Unmastered Past: The Autobiographical Reflections of Leo Löwenthal, Ed. Martin Jay (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 241.
In his introduction to Adorno, Alex Thompson cites Pensky’s review and draws a similar conclusion to Demirovic, ‘while one may with hindsight wish to argue that particular decisions made by Adorno and Horkheimer were wrong, it is difficult to claim that there was a turn away from politics in their work: if anything, there is a turn towards it.’ Thomson, A. Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2006), 35.
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Hellings, J. (2014). Excursus II — The Prevalence of a View: ‘Don’t participate:’ The Politics of Social Praxis. In: Adorno and Art. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137315717_4
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