The theorists of the Frankfurt School wanted to promote a critical Marxism that wasn’t hobbled by one-dimensional economic determinism. In doing so, they also drew on the thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud.
Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno photographed in 1964. (Harry Croner / ullstein bild via Getty Images)
This is an extract from Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory by Gillian Rose, edited by James Gordon Finlayson and Robert Lucas Scott, available now from Verso Books.
It is often remarked that Gillian Rose (1947–1995) is a difficult thinker. She certainly makes few concessions to her reader. Not only do her major works often engage with a prodigious range of disciplines and traditions — from philosophy to theology, legal theory, Judaica, literary modernism, political theory, sociology, even architecture — her style of writing is also variously esoteric, ironic, poetic, and characterized by an almost paradoxical tone of both levity and severity.
This commitment to difficulty is perhaps a major reason why her writing remains comparatively understudied by wider audiences. A new volume titled Marxist Modernism, however, comprises a series of introductory lectures that Rose delivered to undergraduates at the University of Sussex in 1979 on Frankfurt School critical theory. While they exhibit her commitment to the aporia of political and ethical life, they do so in a conversational and accessible pedagogic style.
Deftly explaining the positions of Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno, Rose provides a way into the difficulties they present. It is at once an introduction to Frankfurt School critical theory and also an introduction to the questions and concerns that would go on to animate her whole oeuvre.
When Rose delivered these lectures, this was cutting-edge material for an Anglophone audience. Now Frankfurt School critical theory is commonly studied in sociology, cultural studies, philosophy, and intellectual history departments throughout the world.
Critical theory as Rose construes it arises from a critique of Marxism — though this does not mean it abandons Marxism (indeed, Rose uses the terms “critical theory” and “critical Marxism” interchangeably). Rather, critical theory, for Rose, is the name for a more open and dialectical view of Marxism. In the extract that follows, she discusses the use that Frankfurt School theorists made of three thinkers: Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud.
— Robert Lucas Scott and James Gordon Finlayson
Karl Marx
Although the concept of different forms of culture succeeding each other in history is central to G. W. F. Hegel, its place is taken in Marx’s thought by different social forms, determined by the successive modes of production. Marx had no theory of culture as such. As I’ve said, Hegel did, and it was the basis of his philosophy of history. In the later nineteenth century, Marx’s perspective became rigidified into static, mechanistic, and deterministic distinctions between the economic base and the ideological, legal, and political superstructure.
The Frankfurt School reverted to a dynamic distinction between social processes and resultant social forms by taking as its model of culture and ideology not a distinction between base and superstructure but Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, and this theory received its classic statement in Capital volume 1, chapter 1, and throughout the Grundrisse.
In the later nineteenth century, Marx’s perspective became rigidified into static, mechanistic, and deterministic distinctions between the economic base and the ideological, legal, and political superstructure.
I’m now going to try and outline very roughly indeed what Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism is. If you don’t know it, then I would recommend you look at these few pages in Capital, volume 1. Commodities, according to Marx, are produced in a society in which labor power is sold for a wage, and surplus value is realized when the product of that labor is sold, not by the worker, but by the entrepreneur or the employer for a profit.
This is by contrast with a precapitalist society or a noncapitalist society in which the direct producer or worker would either consume or sell the product of his labor himself. He would not be selling his labor power, and he would be realizing directly the value incorporated in the product. Thus a commodity, that is, a product produced under capitalist conditions, consists of two components: its use value, and its exchange value.
Its use value, which Marx also calls its value in use, means its specific qualities. For example, the taste of an apple, or the warmth of the coat which you wear. The exchange value, by contrast, is what a commodity is equivalent to as a ratio of another commodity, usually expressed in money. So one is a ratio, and the other is the concrete qualities of a product.
A result of this divorce between use and exchange is that exchange value seems to be a characteristic of the product itself — that is, its price. People think that value inheres in the product itself, and they do not understand that in fact it is the expression of specific social relations and activities between people.
Marx says, “The social character of activity, as well as the social form of the product, and the share of individuals in production, here appear in the commodity as something alien and objective.” “A definite social relation between men assumes the phantasmagoric form of a relation between things.” That’s the crucial sentence. This is what Marx calls fetishism — that is, when you treat something as a thing in itself, when in fact it is the expression of determinate social relations between people.
The Frankfurt School believed that this idea that real social relations between people are transformed into and misunderstood as relations between things provided a model for the relationship between social processes and social institutions and consciousness.
This model, unlike the distinction between economic base and ideological superstructure, would not reduce institutional and ideological formations to mere epiphenomena or to simple reflections of a base. It would provide a sociological explanation for the social determination yet relative autonomy of other social forms, such as culture. It provided a way of saying that something is both socially determined and yet also partially autonomous.
Marx is not saying, for example, that the illusions that arise out of commodity fetishism are wrong; he is saying that those illusions are necessary and real, but nevertheless, they are illusions. This is what the Frankfurt School from Georg Lukács onward called “reification” — a term which Marx himself did not use, although for various reasons it has become associated with Marx himself.
In fact, their adoption of this notion of reification gave the different members of the Frankfurt School enormous liberty to interpret Marx differently. Even the theory of commodity fetishism came to support quite different philosophies of history and quite different political positions and theories of culture. That’s all I’m going to say about their general adaptation of Marx for the moment.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I’ll now say something about the Frankfurt School’s interest in Nietzsche. It is a commonplace that Nietzsche’s ideas have been abused by twentieth-century social theorists and politicians of the Right. For example, you may have heard of Oswald Spengler or Ernst Jünger. But it is not so generally known that Nietzsche had an enormous influence on twentieth-century theorists of the Left.
It is not so generally known that Nietzsche had an enormous influence on twentieth-century theorists of the Left.
Among those we are particularly concerned with, it is especially true of Bloch, Horkheimer, Benjamin, and Adorno. Why were they interested in Nietzsche? They were interested in Nietzsche for a number of reasons, and I will list them quite briefly:
Nietzsche rejected a philosophy of history based on the Hegelian idea of an ultimate telos or goal in history, of an ideal society in the future, or of the reconciliation of all contradictions. Nietzsche rejected that position. He applied the notion of contradiction to the optimistic philosophy of history itself — for example, that the process of historical change might turn into the opposite of all the ideals. This is what Horkheimer and Adorno were later to call “the dialectic of Enlightenment.”
They were interested in Nietzsche because Nietzsche criticized the traditional philosophical concept of the subject. This traditional philosophical concept of the subject, which had also been adopted by certain forms of Marxism, for example the existentialist interpretation of Marxism, is that the unity of consciousness is the basis of all reality. The Frankfurt School, on the contrary, believed that social reality could not be reduced to the sum of facts of consciousness. It used this point to emphasize both that social reality cannot be reduced to people’s consciousness of it, but also that the analysis of social determination of forms of subjectivity is essential: that subjectivity is a social category.
A third reason why they were interested in Nietzsche is that Nietzsche’s thought is based on the idea of “will to power.” The Frankfurt School too was interested in analyzing new forms of anonymous and universal political and cultural domination that affect everyone equally, and which prevent the formation of classic liberating proletarian class consciousness.
Fourth, they were interested in Nietzsche because Nietzsche launched an attack on the bourgeois culture of his day. Like Marx, he referred to “bourgeois philistinism.” The Frankfurt School too wanted to demonstrate the reemergence of social contradictions in both so-called popular and so-called serious culture. It was equally critical of both highbrow and lowbrow, if you like. In fact, it rejected that distinction.
The final reason the Frankfurt School was interested in Nietzsche is that Nietzsche produced an analysis of the birth of tragedy in Greek society, which was radically sociological, and which, unlike the earlier tradition in German thought, did not idealize Greek society. This provided a model for the Frankfurt School’s analyses of literary genres in advanced capitalist society. The Frankfurt School put its emphasis on literary form, not content.
Sigmund Freud
Finally, I’d just like to say a few words about the Frankfurt School’s interest in Freud. If a traditional concept of the subject was unacceptable, what was to take its place? The Frankfurt School used Freudian theory to explicate the social formation of subjectivity and its contradictions in advanced capitalist society. It thought that psychoanalytic theory would provide the connection between economic and political processes and resultant cultural forms.
The Frankfurt School used Freudian theory to explicate the social formation of subjectivity and its contradictions in advanced capitalist society.
But it did not turn to Freud’s later, more obviously and directly sociological works, such as Civilization and Its Discontents. It based its interpretation on an analysis of Freud’s most central psychoanalytic concepts. It was particularly attracted to Freud’s position that individuality was a formation, an achievement, not an absolute or a given. It wished to develop a theory of the loss of autonomy or decline of the individual in advanced capitalist society that would not idealize what had counted as autonomy or individuality in the first place.
It used Freudian theory in many of its major studies: in its studies of the acceptance and reproduction of authority in late-capitalist society; in its examination and attempts to account for the success of fascism; in its development of a concept of the culture industry, and its influence on people’s consciousness and unconsciousness; and finally, in the general inquiry into the possibility or impossibility of cultural and aesthetic experience in late-capitalist society.