WHY I HAVEN'T STUDIED
 CRITICAL THEORY  

I have a real grudge against Adorno based on what he said about jazz (presumably of the Louis Armstrong sort), which expressed standard European High Culture incomprehension -- he might as well have said something about "jungle bunnies".   It reminded me of John Phillips Sousa's statement something like  "People will pay attention to jazz until they learn to listen with their ears and minds instead of their feet".  (Odd indeed, since Sousa primarily wrote for marching bands!)

Both Sousa and Adorno missed the main point, which is that African and Afro-American (Jamaican, Brazilian, Caribbean)  music is rhythmically subtler and more complex than Western classical music -- not rhythmically more violent or cruder.  (Supposedly Schoenberg's criticism of Adorno's own compositions was that he had no sense of time.)   The demands of  large ensemble scoring, to say nothing of marching music, imposed a very rudimentary rhythmic vocabulary and limited rhythmic scope. Ravi Shankar said that western music is "all march music" -- a genre which I believe did exist in Indian music, but only as one of a large number of Indian rhythmic modes.  There's actually a precedent for the contempt for jazz -- the contempt of Germanic musicians for any music which is predominantly melodic (Verdi, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, and even Schubert).   My opinion is that during the twentieth century the music of the world crossed a threshold comparable to the ars-nova/ars antiqua divide in the Middle Ages, or the move to a tempered scale and common-practice harmony around 1600 -- 1700.

At some point I read an introduction to the "Dialectic of Enlightenment" which described Horkheimer, Adorno, and crew, sitting in Hollywood --  where they were being supported by Jewish purveyors of kitsch, soft porn Biblical epics, and  also some fantastic films -- pontificating about Kultur as if nothing had ever happened.  What I thought I saw was a kind of denial, the attempt to preserve as much as possible of the high theory of 1932, still in quasi-political form,  by jettisoning practice entirely and blaming the uncultured masses for everything that happened. It seemed ludicrous to me.  For one thing, I happen to love Mozart, but I don't really think that Mozart's music was a grand world-historical event in the way they seemed to need it to be. It really couldn't have been; I really don't think music works that way.    

This is a pretty poor reason for rejecting critical theory, of course. At a more substantive level, both the "critical" and the "theoretical" commitments of critical theory strike me as wrong, both deriving from a mistaken theory of history.  The "critical" idea I think goes back to the idea that progress is inevitable once impediments are removed -- the dialectic as a progressive force.  The role of the thinker is simply to clear the way (an idea shared by Wittgenstein, and characteristic of Holy Roman nihilism)1.  Behind that is the old idea that the future is present in the present and that both were present in the past  -- i.e., a timeless, deterministic, teleological universe. 

The "theory" part comes from the belief that reality can be known by looking at the underlying Forms, which are rational in the way that history or everyday experience just isn't. The continental approach to historical science was to preserve these perfect Forms while historicizing them, and to reduce the messiness of history to Truth by making Truth at least as complicated and messy as the history it tries to explain.  (I compare this to astrologers adding epicycles and new layers of interpretation.) Between the dialectic, the Marxist idea of false consciousness, Freudian ideas of repression, projection, and the Unconscious, and later structuralist and post-structuralist critiques, all possible common-sense, intelligible, evaluations and descriptions of the present or past (or proposals for the future) were devalued a priori and could simply be ignored.  (Combined with notions of the vanguard of the proletariat, democratic centralism, and ordinary strategic thinking,  these ideas also led to the Stalinism, which critical theorists rejected).  

Historicist ideas of an esoteric but knowable dialectical inevitability made revolution and liberation seem certain. When revolution and liberation didn't happen, and a counter-revolution of unimaginable horror took place instead, additional occult causes of a Freudian sort were invented to explain the failure of the occult progressive dialectic. It would have been better to have concluded that the original theory was fatally flawed, and in particular it would have been better to have realized that the belief in historical inevitability led to overreaching. At the beginning of 1932 the majority of Germans were either Social Democrats, Communists, or leftists of various avant-garde and schismatic sorts. Certainly when one evaluates the heritage of Weimar, we should always keep in mind that the Weimar left stands as one of the most horribly unsuccessful movements in all human history.

What is called critical theory in the colleges now day is no longer Adorno, of course, but I think that the ancestry is clear enough. Since Adorno's time structuralism, feminism, and queer theory were first added, and then the whole mess was critiqued from various postmodernist standpoints. As far as I can tell, most postmodernism rejects the scientistic claims of structuralist critical theory (and sometimes its political Marxist traces), but still privileges the Marxo-Freudo-structuralist enterprise, so that its loss puts us into a skeptical world where nothing really can be known or said. Similarly, for believing Mormons the doubts which have been recently raised about the authenticity of the Book of Mormon can have a crushing effect. But for non-Mormons, these doubts have scarcely any significance at all. Deconstructionists accept the overreaching universalistic positivist intellectual standards which critical theorists share with most of the Western tradition, and by proving that these standards cannot be met, prove to their own satisfaction that anything that anyone ever tries to say is self-defeating. Or something like that.

My real villain is Lacan, however -- the only thinker of the group who I think might be entirely fraudulent.2 By making the general idea of the unconscious / false consciousness even more abstruse, and allowing it to be claimed that the failure of revolution (the 1968 revolution this time) was because of occult psychological causes, and either that a political revolution can be made only after psychosexual changes, or else that psychosexual change is the only revolution that can ever happen. This strikes me as an utter dead end, not only as a political or social philosophy but also as a personal lifestyle option.

My own theory of all this is that history is genuinely messy and indeterminate, constrained but not determined by the forces that we are able to understand.  Theories are tools used in trying to understand things.  In the nature of things, theory cannot be completely adequate to all of reality, but this does not mean that theory is useless; it's just partial and necessarily imperfect. As tools, theories should be easier to understand than the phenomena they explain -- complicating the theory in the interest of attaining comprehensiveness, while making it too subtle for anyone to understand, puts you right back where you started and gains nothing whatever.  

Given that history is genuinely contingent (and not merely imperfectly understood), and given that theory and truth only can master carefully-defined partials of reality rather than any whole, all human life and action has essential aspects of imagination and venture and is done on the basis of imperfect knowledge. Even though the wisest of us sees the whole only dimly and the future still more dimly, ultimately social actions are governed first by the common-sense (inclusive, holistic, imperfect) understandings which the people constructed during their lives, and second by the common-sense intentions they form. ("Common sense" here does not mean the inherited truths, but the imperfect individual understanding of the individual as opposed to theorized knowledge; a prophet's common sense is vastly different from everyone else's, but because it is commonsensical in form, it's communicable to them).

The irony and darkness of history comes only in small part from the abstruse self-misunderstandings uncovered by critical theorists.  They come mostly from the fact that individuals and groups are always working toward different ends and thus often impede and sabotage one another, as well as from the fact that, by definition, most ventures fail.  The best metaphors for history are mixed games of skill and chance like poker and backgammon.  The best player can lose a given game, even to a poor player, but the ones who understand the game the best are the most likely to win in the long run.  

To me left-wing culture criticism is a necessary task, but not within the critical-theory model. I do not actually oppose psychosexual work, I just think that it is markedly less central and less important than its practitioners think it is. For what it's worth, I'm still left wing, though that club has dwindled to the point that it's pretty much impossible to kick anyone out of it any more.

So anyway, that's as much as I ever learned about critical theory. Don't tell me that I don't fully understand it, because I just told you that I'm not really trying to. Although if you can come up with a commonsense explanation of why I should care about this stuff, maybe you can change my mind.

|

NOTES

1.  The Holy Roman nature of the modern age has been touched on by Janik and Toulmin in "Wittgenstein's Vienna".  Wittgenstein, Popper and the logical positivists, Hayek and the others,  Kelsen, Schoenberg and the others, Kafka, Rilke, Trakl, Freud,  Gellner, and Adorno are some of the most important names. The convergence of conservatism, nihilism, and hopelessness on the one side, balanced by a matter-of-fact materialism on the other, make prewar Vienna the true historical model for our postmodern age.   The nihilistic technical reason of the logical positivists and the Austrian economists was denounced rather similarly, it seems to me, by Heidegger and by Adorno.  (Strange bedfellows, etc.)

2. Hostility to psychoanalysis always comes from people like me and Richard Nixon who have "something to hide". Forty years ago the thing hidden was latent homosexuality, but more recently that particular ploy has been made inoperative. I'm sure the "something to hide" meme has been successfully retrofitted, but I don't know what the actual new-and-improved version is.

A comment on this post at The Shamrockshire Eagle: http://shamrockshire.yi.org/2003/10/20031020.html# :
A_Few_Thoughts_on_Theodor_Adorno

jjmrsnx