The Frankfurt School: more totalitarian than Stalin.

 

In a certain sense, the Frankfurt School was more "totalitarian" - more totalizing in its ideology - than Stalin.

One thing that's nice about Stalin is how stupid he was.  He misuses technical language, and uses it in contradictory ways, whatever happens to serve his purposes at any given time.  Like Trump.  In other words, he was a politician.  And politicians aren't very smart.  They don't have to be.  In fact, being smart in politics is usually a weakness.  

That's why Stalin opened the door to postmodernism.

The Frankfurt School was much more careful, and much more consistent, and thus more totalizing.  One thing that I admire about the Frankfurt School is that, unlike Stalin, they were not postmodernists.  

For instance, Adorno has a much more totalizing vision of capitalism than Stalin ever did.  So totalizing, in fact, that you can't see any way out of it.  For Adorno, sociology and political science and even economics are all "reifying" tendencies within capitalism.  Adorno seems like a "gnostic" here*, the way he cannot trust any human science, and closes himself off from the real.

As I've written before, Hegel's philosophy is the critique of romanticism.  When I call Adorno's work totalitarian, what I really mean is that Adorno was a romantic - his work is a night in which all sheep are black.  For him, economics is all black, all sociology is black, all political science is black, and so on.  Negative dialectics is romanticism.  It is like negative theology, "apophatic" theology, which can only tell you what God isn't.  In other words, Adorno's work abounds in abstract negation; what Adorno's work lacks is determinate negation.  Adorno cannot pick and choose between this tendency and that within economics or political science - to embrace any of them is to betray his fundamental romantic commitments.

Adorno's work reminds me of that old paradox - I don't know the origin, though I've heard, vaguely, that it's from China - that goes, "What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?"  One example of this kind of paradox is "What would happen if an unstoppable arrow hit an impenetrable shield?"  I remember first coming across this logical puzzle in Raymond Smullyan's "What Is the Name of This Book?" - a favorite from my childhood - and he gave the answer, as well: when you say "an immovable object," this implies an object that cannot be moved by anything in the universe, and when you say "an unstoppable force," this similarly implies a force that cannot be stopped by anything in the universe.  But for the purposes of this puzzle, everything else in the universe is irrelevant.  What you are really saying, in the case of the arrow and shield, then, is, "What would happen if a sword that can pierce a shield hit a shield that cannot be pierced by the arrow?"  As Smullyan pointed out, this is like saying, "Jack is taller that John, and John is taller than Jack.  Explain that!"  The answer is simply that the questioner is either lying or mistaken.

So it is with Adorno: he has constructed a word-game, a puzzle, to which there is no solution.  But there is nothing particularly profound about that.  This does not demonstrate that the puzzle is particularly deep or important.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  The only reason that there is no solution is that the puzzle's terms were constructed that way, by the person posing the problem.  

Adorno has put himself into a trap.  It's quite a fiendishly difficult trap - perhaps, from his perspective, impossible.  But, from the outside, we can see that it's perfectly possible for him to escape the trap.  He's like a raccoon who cannot get his hand out of a box because he refuses to let go.  He's trapped in there because he enjoys being trapped in there.  

There's something very masochistic and masturbatory about Adorno.  And that's fine.  I'm not complaining.  Adorno almost approaches someone whom I very much admire: Franz Kafka.  I consider myself much more of a Kafkaist than I am a Marxist.  

The Frankfurt School is totalitarianism turned up to such a high degree that it negates itself.  The Stalinist tyrant can do anything; the Frankfurtian tyrant can do nothing.  All is forbidden.

*= Of course, I am using the term "gnostic" in its popular sense, to describe dualists who reject the material world.  In fact, I don't think this is actually very true of the historical people who are labeled "gnostics," but that is the conception of "gnostics" in the popular imagination.