Rethinking the Frankfurt School: Alternative Legacies of Cultural Critique (review)

Among the most renowned contributions to the Cultural Studies canon is Max Horkheimer's and Theodor W. Adorno's "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" chapter in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. The corrosive sharpness of their analysis targets the impact of capitalist modes of production upon all spheres of life, even the ostensibly autonomous realms of high art and social critique. The moment is upon us now to recognize the rise of an attendant "Culture Industry" industry in the proliferation of compilations devoted to the Frankfurt School in recent years. As one of the latest entries into this saturated arena, the title of Jeffrey T. Nealon's and Caren Irr's Rethinking the Frankfurt School: Alternative Legacies of Critique is indicative of the inequities that vex intellectuals forced to sell critical theory on the academic publishing market: how might this project remain effective when publication confirms our "cutting edge" preoccupations for a price, the identification of "alternative legacies" preempts their accommodation, and every thinking must already be a "rethinking" to cultivate a requisite aura of provocation?

Nealon and Irr are committed to redeeming the Frankfurt School's legacy from a commonplace stigmatization of Horkheimer's and Adorno's culture industry analysis as a "negative lesson" about the dangers of totalizing and elitist critiques. In their introduction, the editors note that the work of the Birmingham School to conceptualize the agency of working class audiences spurred an insistence among cultural critics on recognizing a potential for "resistant decodings" of dominant ideological trends and a concomitant dismissal of Horkheimer's and Adorno's culture industry concept because it purportedly neutralizes the space for creativity and resistance in public responses to mass culture. This critique is, of course, reductive: it bypasses the Frankfurt School's warnings about the dangers of affirmative critique and the School's foregrounding of critical reflection as an antidote to paranoid and xenophobic projections fomented by distorted identifications with the forces of domination.

Douglas Kellner, Imre Szeman, and Evan Watkins share the editors' investment in reassessing Horkheimer's and Adorno's dark judgment on rationalized culture. In this vein, Kellner's "The Frankfurt School and British Cultural Studies: The Missed Articulation" sifts through the intellectual lineages and methodological aims that connect Birmingham and Frankfurt. Szeman's "The Limits of Culture: The Frankfurt School and/for Cultural Studies" reevaluates the "populist" turn in cultural criticism that sometimes lends itself to a fatuous celebration of the purportedly subversive aspect of the latest fad. Szeman revisits Herbert Marcuse's definition of "affirmative culture" to redefine the Frankfurt School's contribution to the project of cultural critique as a "permanent suspicion" about reducing contemporary culture to a set of reified objects rather than looking at the socio-economic processes that produce them. Watkins' "On Doing the Adorno Two-Step" contributes a pithy metacritical standpoint on the contradictory tendency among cultural critics to chide Adorno for his patrician disgust while deploying him as a corrective to uncritical endorsements of popular culture.

The essays by Fredric Jameson, Nealon, Thomas Beebee, Andreas Huyssen, and Agnes Hellar challenge cultural critics to move beyond naïve or narrowly focused citations of the most canonical works by Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Adorno (and to a lesser extent, Marcuse and Habermas). Jameson's "The Theoretical Hesitation: Benjamin's Sociological Predecessor" encourages Frankfurt School readers to abandon a fetishistic isolation of Benjamin that acknowledges only his explicit interlocutors (Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, and Gershom Scholem) or that reads him at the expense of a socio-political intellectual milieu that included Georg Lukács and Max Weber. As Jameson notes, both were influenced by Georg Simmel, whose seminar Benjamin attended in 1912. Though Benjamin dismissed Simmel's work, Jameson makes a compelling case for recognizing the sociologist's importance for the project of conceptualizing capitalist modernity. Nealon's "Maxima Immoralia?: Speed and Slowness in Adorno" performs a savvy interpretation of the musical rhythms and theoretical implications of Adorno's dialectical syntax that is in keeping with...