> Lukacs was the main intellectual influence on the Frankfurt School.
Benjamin was the big influence here, not Lukacs, though the latter's classic "History and Class Consciousness" made a big splash with the F-School folks when it came out in the late Twenties. I'd also mention Ernest Bloch, the great millenarian Marxist, who also did a great deal of work on cultural theory, and was something of a fellow traveler of the F-school.
> Trained as a composer, [Adorno] worked with Alban Berg and others in the
> highly challenging and often unlistenable 12-tone school.
Twelve-tone works are quite listenable: their techniques have long ago been absorbed into our mass-culture (just listen to the soundtrack of any Fifties sci-fi B-film, and you'll hear 12-tone dissonances all over the place). The works of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg are glorious in their own right, equal to the best of Count Basie, Thelonius Monk and John Coltrane.
> Adorno and Horkheimer sometimes acted like scoundrels...
> They also bowdlerized Walter Benjamin's "Art in the Age of
> Mechanical Reproduction," deleting various references to Marx in it. During
> the Vietnam war, Adorno defended US policy and German students raised hell
> in his classrooms to his great dismay. He died of a heart attack in 1969, a
> bitter and isolated man.
Adorno was nervous about the naive adoption of the NLF as a political model for the student movement, and said as much. Adorno was by no means bitter or isolated at the end of his life, just very ill (heart disease). I haven't heard anything about A&H trashing Benjamin's text; this sounds improbable, given the tremendous esteem they held for his thought. As the collected letters between Adorno and Benjamin show, it wasn't the F-school which got its Marxism from Benjamin, in fact Adorno consistently criticized Benjamin for being too theological and not anti-capitalist enough.
> While the working-class was never a central actor in the earlier
> work of Adorno, in the 1950s it became a subject of Adorno's "negative"
> criticism. He questioned Marxism's preoccupation with production and
> declared that one of the missions of "critical theory" was to call for the
> abolition of labor. The workplace was not seen as an arena of struggle, but
> as a symbol of degradation.
Absolutely, completely, screamingly wrong -- but a very, very common misconception of what Adorno was doing. No offense to Joel, who's cool and all, but it's this problem that Adorno's works are written in an amazing species of German -- refined, subtle, polyrhythmic, indeed poetic, where every word, phrase and tone is latent with dialectical subtexts -- which is very difficult to translate into English. "Minima Moralia" comes close at times, but is a bit too British when you actually look at the German text; the translation of "Negative Dialectics" is simply horrible, an unbearable mass of jargon in the English, and a horrible violation of a text which remains one of the greatest works of Left theory this century. What Adorno does in that book is extend, not remand, the concept of class struggle: he opens up culture, sociology, history, and other discourses in a new way, not trashing them for being "bourgeois" but decoding their inner content as a field of class polemics, positions, and struggles. He never, ever, gives in to the easy post-structuralist illusion, that "it's all just text" and "we're all theory-stars nowadays"; he constantly ferrets out the non-identical or dialectical aspect of cultural works, concepts, thought-systems etc., i.e. *thinks through* the contradiction, instead of naively abolishing such. Adorno's point is that the working-class is, in capitalist society, an *object* of domination, and not a subject. Normally only the bourgeoisie, or its allies, get enough of the social surplus to educate themselves and enjoy (and think about) the finer points of life; the IMF is the perfect model of a powerful, effective class solidarity. So to think through what a potential workingclass solidarity might look like, you have to think through the IMF *negatively* -- criticize the damn thing from the ground up, understand how the tentacles of global finance capital work, read Doug Henwood's "Wall Street" at least ten times, etc. etc. etc. This is lots of hard work, and can't be waved away with blind obedience to a Party or the no less blind actionism which wants to smash 19th-century states in the middle of late 20th-century welfare capitalism.
> Joel's final comment on the Frankfurt school ended on a personal note. He
> said that Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse demonstrate the danger of
> intellectuals being detached from the mass movement. In recent years, he
> has tried to avoid this by getting involved in green politics. Showing his
> willingness to put his beliefs on the line, Joel has agreed to run for
> Senator against Al D'Amato on the NY State Green Party ticket.
Here, here! But we have to remember that Adorno was writing in 1920s-1960s, when the Greens didn't exist, Nature was something to be molested by gigantic GM-style hierarchies, and workers were ruled over by suffocating bureaucracies of various kinds. Germany in 1998 is a slick, cosmopolitan, multi-cultural society; Germany in 1955 was horribly closed, repressive, and authoritarian on both sides of the Berlin Wall. What's amazing is that anything like the F-school managed to exist in the Bundesrepublik, and even flourish.
Still, the thought that later generations of activists are, however imperfectly or unconciously, beginning to deploy Adorno's vast storehouse of theoretical tools, techniques and weapons, in a new kind of multinational class struggle, gives me the greatest pleasure imaginable.
-- Dennis