The Unethical Truth: On the Continuous Dissolution of Critical Theory

I

In the following, we will propose to understand the well-known text by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer entitled "The Culture Industry" as a work that unfolds an inner contradiction of critical theory, which leads to its necessary dissolution. This contradiction arises at a critical moment in critical theory: at the moment of affirmation. If critique, in the sense of critical theory, is in its broadest sense a critique of the current state of things, then the crisis of critique is the moment in which critique becomes part of the current state of things. Or, again, in the terminology of critical theory: crisis is the moment in which critique becomes affirmative. But this crisis unfolds not as a consequence of theoretical operations; rather, it forms the inner core of critical theory, namely, as the concealment of its own moment of affirmation, the concealment of its own reason. It is this inherent affirmation that provides the reason for the dissolution of critical theory as well as for its survival.

II

Let us start with a preliminary, schematic understanding of critical theory, an understanding that is not representative and is not intended to be so. Without pursuing the aim to criticize critical theory as such, we will rather attempt to construct one of its possible understandings in such a manner that its affirmative necessity comes to the fore. In terms of such a construction, we might begin with a very basic frame for the understanding of critical theory, such as the one that Max Horkheimer develops in his seminal essay on "Traditional and Critical Theory."¹ In this text, three classical elements of critical theory can be distinguished: Dialectics, Emancipation, and History.

Critical theory intends a suspension of the division between theory and practice, a cleavage that results out of the division of labor in bourgeois societies. Classical theory is, in itself, a pure form of this division, and critical theory intends to make this gap visible and to expose this purity as a form of disguise. The important point, however, is not an act of enlightening, but rather the implicit assumption that theory, as such, is always already a part of the society in which it dwells. Not only is classical theory, against its own conviction, a product of societal processes, but so too is critical theory itself. However, traditional theory seeks to keep apart the moments of involvement, mixing, and origins and clings to the scientific-mathematical separation of knowledge into branches. It upholds the separation between science and the knowing individual, and it works along the lines of the division between the individual and society, as well as the division between being and thought. In all its aspects, traditional theory presents the consequences of the division of labor; it is a developed and material form of it; and it installs itself in the purity of the scientific reason. For Horkheimer, traditional theory is thus linked to the mathematical-logical formalization of science, a formalization that is itself, again, grounded in the autonomous "ego of bourgeois philosophy" (TC 210), an "illusion […] under which idealism has lived since Descartes" (TC 211). Here, we have a classical Marxist approach that presents the purity and separateness of scientific reason as the ideological mask that covers the historicity of the division of labor and its inherent lines of power.

Critical thought finds its starting point, then, in the real contradictions of this conception of society. These contradictions arise out of the fact that the conditional structure upon which traditional theory relies remains uncomprehended in it. Traditional theory reproduces its objects as exterior objects that are thought to exist unaffected by the general division between object and subject, activity and passivity, theory and practice. These separated objects—when it comes to political, societal objects, to individuals and groups—become elements in a game of blind forces. In contrast, critical theory "considers the overall framework which is conditioned by the blind interaction of individual activities (that is, the existent division of labor and the class distinctions) to be a function which originates in human...