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CSUDH Habermas UWP

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: April 12, 2001
Latest update: April 12, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org

The Frankfurt School and the Imaginary

by Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata
Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata, and Individual Contributors, April 2001.
"Fair Use" encouraged.

The Imaginary

• References to dreams and social fantasy on HAB list: April 10, 2001

  The phrase, "the Father and Social Fantasy" brought to mind our discussions on the imaginary. I didn't have time to follow this through, but would like to find the Sean Homer article and do so.

  Homer, Sean. 1999 "The Frankfurt School, the Father and Social Fantasy" New Formations: Hating Tradition Properly 38: 78-90.

  new formations Website

  From Hating Tradition Properly 38 . . . Editorial by Scott McCracken and Antony Rowland

  • "In order to escape the tyranny of the 'post-isms', it is necessary to hate them properly in the Adornian sense: that is to own them and at the same time to use that knowledge to write against them." And earlier: " Neil Lazarus, in the essay that gives this edition its title, reminds us that Adorno¹s mastery of European culture was at once elitist and concerned to use his privilege against that cultural tradition - to 'hate it properly'. As Lazarus argues, one of critical theory's most powerful legacies is that it gives us the tools to question the new 'traditions': for example, the contemporary orthodoxies of postmodernist and post-structuralist approaches."

  • " . . . Sean Homer relates that in Slovenia the Frankfurt School functioned as the orthodoxy in official party circles, so that Slovenian critics like Slavoj Zizek define their critical social theory against the school."

  • " . . . Writing from the newly re-unified Berlin, this is the immediate context of Schnädelbach's historical analysis. But it has also seen the invocation of Frankfurt School thinkers as an alternative strand within Marxism by writers such as Homi Bhabha, Judith Butler, Jonathan Dollimore, Stuart Hall, and Fredric Jameson."

  • " . . . The concern of negative dialectics is always, in the last instance, to preserve a concept of the good life that provides us with the resources for hope in a forbidding climate, for a utopianism when better visions are rare indeed."

  These excerpts will give you a sense of the impact of the Frankfurt School on newer "post" theories: feminist theory, postcolonial theory, cultural theory. As Habermas has suggested, critical theory provides an analytical tool for stepping back from and assessing new theoretical approaches. This is the one "metanarrative" for which Habermas argues against Lyotard: that of critical methodology, so that we will have a generally acceptable tool for assessing validity claims.

  The new theorists value the reflexivity of the postmodern age. They speak of Adorno as an "elitist" and "Eurocentric." That is because he had so absorbed the cultural learning he received in Germany. Both he and Horkheimer eventually decried the "Enlightenment" as carrying the seeds of its own destruction within it. (Think of the Zen problem: You can't pick up the head of a coin without picking up the tail at the same time.) They turned the erudition they brought from Europe back in critical analysis of the very system that sheltered that erudition. Now, in turn, these younger theorists decry the "Eurocentrism" of Adorno's and Horkheimer's limited imaginary, based on the dominant discourse of Europe then. I think Adorno and Horkheimer might have agreed. And so, "on the shoulders of giants."

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