The Discourse of Domination: From the Frankfurt School to Postmodernism

12. On Happiness and the Damaged Life

12 On Happiness and the Damaged Life C ritical theory is either a museum piece in the hands of its modern inheritors or a living medium of political self-expression. Myargument in this final section is that critical theory can be renewed, as Marx would have hoped, only by refusing to concentrate on its philosophical inheritance and instead writing the theory in a direct and unmediated way. The conviction that to be a Marxist surpasses Marx is just as true for critical theory: Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse blazed the trail for a theory of late capitalism, yet now they can be suitably remembered only by new formulations of theory responsive to the altered nature of the sociocultural world. This is the project that I have set for myself here. In the four chapters comstituting this section, I work toward a lifeworld-grounded critical theory, drawing from original critical theory, Habermas's (1984, 1987b) system-lifeworld argument, critical phenomenology (Paci 1972; O'Neill 1972c), postmodernism (see chap. 15) and feminist theory (Fraser 1989; Agger 1989a, 1989c). This version of critical theory attempts to identify resistances and transformations already taking place in the quotidian worlds in which all of us live. Although I appreciate the direness of the political context in which Adorno's type of critical theory was formulated, that political context has changed dra219 220 BEYOND THE END OF IDEOLOGY matically. Whereas it is legitimate to talk about the disciplinary society (Foucault 1977; O'Neill 1986; Agger 1989c), there are crucial differences between Adorno's metaphor of society as a concentration camp and Foucault's metaphor of society as a prison that occasion different versions of critical theory as a response. This is not to exaggerate hope; the 1990s may well be a decade of unprecedented regression. Nevertheless , simply to repeat Adorno's (1973b) negative dialectics is a lazy exercise -and quite contrary to his own injunction to think and think and think anew. The central motif in this task of reinvigoration is that of language or what is fashionably called discourse (see Agger 1990). Critical theory self-consciously employs a vocabulary of political hope and defeat. Marx's great contribution to critical theory was his notion of theory as a stimulant to political action, if not as action's mere reflection. The rhetoric of critical theory emerges from the theorist's sense of the possibility of social change and itself contributes to fostering or deflecting emancipatory activity. In this sense, Adorno's almost unmitigated pessimism contrasts with Marcuse's guarded optimism about cracking open the one-dimensional totality. Although Eros and Civilization states that only the "surplus" of ego-constitutive repression can be purposefully eliminated , Marcuse remains hopeful about the prospect oflessening this surplus , as I argued in the preceding section. Similarly, O'Neill's (1974) "wild sociology" defends the commonplaces of everyday life as the inalienable basis of any community, from which all radicalism must inevitably proceed. For Adorno, there was an equivalency between basic and surplus repression and thus few opportunities for social change. In the preceding two chapters I focused on Marcuse's differences with Habermas; here I examine Marcuse's relationship to Adorno inasmuch as it reflects modalities of tone and temperament available to critical theorists today. (It is also important to repeat my observation in chapter 9 that Marcuse [e.g., 1978] had moved closer to Adorno's [1973b] negative dialectics by the end of his career.) The language of critical theory is its own metalanguage. Objective description already contains a vision of Aufhebung, a transcended, reconstructed world. The dialectic is captured in the capacity of objective knowledge for political enlightenment. Critique in Marx meant the imagination and analysis of a world without exploitation, a human world. This must be embodied in the forms of critical expression such as social thought, art, music, and philosophy. A dialectical language both describes the dissonant world and bespeaks the possibility of redemption. As such, theory is political in its own right, as are all public discourses. 221 ON HAPPINESS AND THE DAMAGED LIFE The new sensibility and the new consciousness which are to project and guide such reconstruction demand a new language to define and communicate the new "values" (language in the wider sense which includes words, images, gestures, tones). It has been said that the degree to which a revolution is developing qualitatively different social conditions and relationships may perhaps be indicated by the...