Frankfurt school

ive only ever read a bit of Marcuse and his one dimensional man, whcih while interesting in parts its basic hypothesis kind of fell flat on its ass with the events of 1968 and what have you

You'd have to post it before we could make comments.

personally I've never been that keen on the Frankfurt School. Elitest determinest nonsense for the most part I thought. Didn't Adorno say that Jazz was evidence of the cultural decadence of capitalism?

The difficulty is that the Frankfurt School is not homogenous. They were an institute with a wide range of people at various times, who had a variety of opinions. They also went through definite periods of change in their political and theoretical orientation that make treating their work as entirely homogenous a problem.

There are two very good books that help navigate the Frankfurters, Susan Buck-Morrs' book and Helmut Dubiel's odd but extremely informative Theory and Politics. Martin Jay's books are also supposed to be quite good.

But your question is very hard ot answer as it is framed.

Chris

The Frankfurt school copped a lot of criticism for being intellectually aloof from working-class movements (justified, methinks). Georg Lukacs once criticised his former Frankfurt Marxist colleagues for preferring to remain in a “grand hotel abyss”, a beautiful hotel where one could contemplate the void in first class comfort. I quite like that criticism and i wheel it out quite often.

As for Marcuse, he wrote some good stuff, but as vaneigemappreciationclub has already hinted, Marcuse's view that the proles in the first world had no revolutionary potential anymore, and we should only look to people on the margins, was refuted in May 1968.

Some questions: was Marcuse a closet anarchist? was Walter Benjamin and others the first inventor of the spectacle rather than the Situationists?

can a philosopher be an anarchist? (hint: maybe everybody is a philosopher, as philosophising is part of everyday life) (whoopsie, i've had too much to think ) anyways, i got the same impression as you. At the time, a lot of people claimed Marcuse was semi-anarchist cos he saw revolutionary potential in the lumpen elements and rejected economic determinism and whatnot. It's funny how people often see Marxists who break from Marxist orthodoxy as anarchists eg. Pannekoek as an anarcho-syndicalist.

I always had a soft spot for Marcuse. And I think Fromm's To Have Or To Be is worth reading.

I accidently shoplifted Fromm's "Marx's concept of Man" from the Tate Modern and i have to say it's not that good, infact it ends up just a humanist inversion of structuralism.

As for marcuse he's just utter, utter shite.

They're of their time, and worth knowing about if you're into knowing that kind of stuff.

Not strictly true. His essay on liberation was entirely prescient concerning the paris uprising, he even wrote a preface in post-1968 edition "In france, it [the student opposition] has for the first time challenged the full force of the regime and recaptured, for a short moment, the libertarian power of the red and the black flags; moreover it has demonstrated the prospects for an enlarged basis."

Plus it wasn't the case marcuse saw the proletariat as having lost its revolutionary potential, more that the working class (in advanced capitalist societies) has been so stabilised and integrated into capital that any radicalisation would depend on a catalyst outside of its ranks; that the potential was there just the political role of labour as agency was not. I recommend you reading 'an essay on liberation'.

To answer your questions

1. marcuse certainly did have anti-authoriratian tendencies

2. i would go back even further and say siegrfried kracauer (both a contemporary of benjamin's & inspiration to adorno) 'invented' of the idea of the spectacle.

Marcuse was a fucking clown who took Adorno's superficial analysis of "mass society" (Adorno is the thinking mans Crimethinc) and got lucky enough that it dovetailed with the counter culture stuff of the 60's.

His study into soviet marxism is however quite interesting.

No, i bloody well aren't Hegelian, that's just slander spun by a papist Foucuntian.

"We thought we were dying for the fatherland. We realized quickly it was for the bank vaults" Anatole France

it depends what you want from your marcuse, he went through 3 distinct intellectual phases, his later stuff by far the most interesting.

What is remarkable about marcuse (adorno & the rest of the frankfurt school) is they lived their history.

By that i mean imagine being a young radical in Germany in 1918 on the brink of a social revolution, only to see that revolution betrayed, & from that betrayal emerge nazism. And as you fled persecution (as a jew and marxist) to the US you witness fascism being destroyed by a more advanced capitalism - instead of the subjugation of the working class by the tyranny of physical coercion, you witness the subjugation of the working class by the tyranny of psychological coercion. Adorno especially made the direct correlation between nazi propaganda and capitalist advertisng as a means of establishing hegemony

Much of the frankfurt school's work then concerned itself with why the working class had failed to fulfil its role as revolutionary agent.

Oddly adorno, especially during the social upheaval of the 1960's, eschewed the notion of 'doing summink' and advocated critical reflection to the point of passivity. Not dissimilar to some 22 year old shoplifters on libcom.

Ho, ho, how did I see that one coming.

Adorno of course, atleast didn't make a fanny of himself by pinning his hopes on some degenerate middle class white kids reciting awful Beat poetry.

hmmm, i suppose you could interpret him that way (in a generous sort of way), but a less generous and more cynical interpretation is that he did give up on the "industrial" working class and instead fetishised the counter-culture (eros effect), students and lumpens as harbingers of the (cultural) revolution. after he did once say that workers were “no longer agents of historical transformation”.

anyway, i would very strongly dispute his claim that the working class was docile and integrated into the system in the 1950s and 1960s. On the surface this is true. Most wokrers seemed content with the Keynesian class compromise and welfare state and rising wages and consumer society. But as the good bottom-up studies of Socialism or Barbarism and Johnson-Forest tendency showed, there was a simmering discontent with capitalism, a dissatisfaction with everyday life, and some unofficial revolts here and there that prefigured that of 1968. Because the unions were so bureaucratic in the 1950s and 1960s, most workers struggles were of necessity wildcat, outside and against the unions. In France in the early mid 1960s there were a number of workplace occupations that became discussion forums open to all workers, students, members of the community, occupations that prefigured 1968 eg. the "Sorbonne soviet".

btw, who is siegrfried kracauer? never heard of him.

well a generous interpretation only in respect he actually said those things.

Kracauer was an interesting character. Friends with Benjamin (when they both tried to escape france during the war, they were stopped at the spanish border & refused permission to leave, benjamin killed himself, while kracauer hung around and eventually made it out) he wrote seriously about popular culture of his day. Not in dismissive and elitist terms as adorno did but as a way of understanding the rationality of peoples ('the masses') everyday relation to capital, & the rationality of capital's cultural relationship with the masses; the facade and the function of mass distractions. So we get essays on cinema and cinemas, photography, the detective novel, hotel lobbies, urban shopping arcades, but where as adorno could only despair kracauer saw these distractions as containing the germs of their own opposition. He's pretty much forgotten now, which is a pity.

I'd recommend the mass ornament - a collection of his articlesand essays from the 1920's. Inspired reading.

Ernst Bloch is also someone worht checking out, his stuff about the media and utopia is excellent, it's almost like a pre emptive critique of the situationists and the role of imagination leaves room for a critique based on immanence not essence.

coffeemachine -- thanx for the info on Kracauer. He sounds interesting. I kind of have a similar interpretation of the spectacle (used in its vulgar sense to mean cinema, tv, media, shopping malls, etc) but haven't thought it thru that well. So i'll have a look at the mass ornament one day.

and i've heard of Ernst Bloch too, but never read him. He talked of "warm communism" as opposed to mechanistic, puritanical communism, right?

Ernst Bloch was very much into to unravelling the uptopian impulses and dreams amongst mass culture, and how our imaginations were what always made us somehow ahead of ourselves, never at one with the world.

I'm very shocked that he hasn't been more explored by post structuralists, maybe his writings are not encoded in the correct language, afterall he's not in the big canon of phemomonology (or stating the fucking obvious against the absurdities of Platoism as it should have been called).

spot on

but Bloch seems to be disagreeing with Marcuse. if we have utopian impulses them we are in fact 'two-dimensional', surely?

yeah that's why I think Bloch's the shizzle, cos he grasps that "ideology" is not a totalised, closed system, but rather is always open ended. Infact for ideology to be closed would be for it to die, it must allow room for distancing for interpretation if it is to harness peoples hopes and desires. Just like how capital can never totally dominate the proletariat without total stagnation.

It's also a basic restatement of Marx's dialectic, that we are never at one with ourselves but rather are always extended forward and always contain latent hopes and desires from the past, from what "could have been".

Really Marcuse should have called his book,"One Dimensional Critique", the twat!

Why is it that fuckwits like Marcuse are so well known but Bloch who shat on him from a great height is left in obscurity. It's almost liek Marcuse, like the situationists, represent the "idealisation" of ideology, not so much their nightmares but the just the inversion of their dreams.