Interview with Martin Jay

In this interview, which took place by email in the summer of 2021, Samir Gandesha engages in a discussion with Martin Jay, UC Berkeley, one of the preeminent US intellectual historians since the 1980s and author of the ground-breaking Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923–1950 (1973), which was followed by other important books on totality, ocularcentrism, experience, and lying in politics. The result is in a wide-ranging philosophical (aesthetic and political) discussion of a variety of topics, including the Frankfurt School and the trajectory of critical theory, the rise and importance of social media platforms, ensuing the digitalization and commodification of the life-world, “algorithmic populism” and “cancel culture,” as well as the role of art between theory and criticism.Samir Gandesha: It is common to speak of generational differences among those who understand themselves as working in the spirit of the Institute for Social Research. So, after the first generation—Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and so on—you have the second generation, Jürgen Habermas and Albrecht Wellmer; the third, Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser; and then, perhaps, as a fourth, Rainer Forst and Christoph Menke. One way of looking at the trajectory of Critical Theory, as Habermas himself has already pointed out, is in terms of a force field of debates over the nature of the state (Pollock versus Neumann and Kircheimer), the emancipatory role of popular culture (Adorno versus Benjamin) and the status of ego psychology (Fromm versus Marcuse). From Habermas onward, the trajectory of Critical Theory could be understood in terms of a consistent movement away from critical social theory and an apparent “negative philosophy of history” toward normative political theory, based around questions such as justice, recognition and distribution, tolerance, and so forth. Not everyone considers this to be an advance. For example, drawing upon the ideas of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, Amy Allen has recently challenged some of the key assumptions that underlie Habermas’s account of communicative action in her 2016 book The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. Growing numbers of social scientists, moreover, are looking back to the first generation’s conception of the authoritarian personality within the larger framework of the Studies on Prejudice, to try to make some sense of the global authoritarian turn. Moreover, if we exclude Habermas’s important 1962 Habilitationschrift, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which charts the rise and fall of the critical bourgeois public sphere, some of Wellmer’s essays on art and communication, and Menke’s important work on aesthetic negativity, art and mass culture seem to have been all but ignored. Arguably, however, these phenomena are more important today than ever. The increasingly pronounced role of the media, or what Guy Debord called the “spectacle,” in public life was made clear in the rise of National Socialism, as well as after the war in the famous first televised debates between Kennedy and Nixon. The role of the media becomes especially salient with the growing preponderance of the digital sphere from the early 1990s onward, in social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, in particular. The baleful implications of such platforms for democracy have been theorized by commentators such as Shoshana Zuboff, Christian Fuchs, Mackenzie Wark, and Jodi Dean, among many others. Zuboff argues that one can either have Facebook or democracy but not both at the same time. Dean has sought to understand the rise and proliferation of social media in terms of what she calls “communicative capitalism”: a form of capitalism in which the process of valorization takes place principally through the circulation of information in which the user or subscriber is both producer and consumer of content.I wonder if the concept of “communicative capitalism” doesn’t profoundly challenge a key premise of Habermas’s reconstruction of Critical Theory: that we can distinguish between social subsystems of state and economy, on the one hand, whose steering mechanisms are power and money, and symbolically mediated life-worlds, on the other? Rather, perhaps what we see is not just a colonizing incursion of the former into the latter but, rather, thorough-going digitization and commodification of the life-world? The latter, it would seem, breathes new life into the supposedly antiquated concepts of first generation of Critical Theory?Martin Jay: Let me begin what will inevitably be a partial and inadequate answer to these complex and open-ended questions on a high level of generalization, and then zoom in on a few more particular issues. Critical Theory began by emphasizing the necessity of ideas emerging from and confronting their historical contexts rather than vainly pretending to be a philosophia perennis, true for all times and in all places. Accordingly, it sought to register the changes that rendered Marxism in its more traditional and orthodox forms increasingly out of date: the loss of the working class’s revolutionary fervor, the unexpected emergence of fascism, the ability of capitalism to forestall its prophesized terminal crisis, and so on. As a result, it would come as no surprise to the initial generation of Critical Theorists that many decades later many of their own analyses would be in need of revision or even replacement by ones that better accounted for new circumstances. The fact that we can categorize the history of the Frankfurt School in terms of three or four generations—and it is clear that the vigorous international interest in applying and developing their legacy will produce others still to come—shows that they’ve not gone the way of so many other intellectual traditions, in which the founders and their seminal texts serve devoted followers as objects of uncritical veneration and endless hermeneutic disputation.Having said that, it is also important to remember that when the Critical Theorists urged us—if we can anachronistically borrow Fredric Jameson’s famous imperative—to “always historicise,” they did so with a deep suspicion of the historicist notion of history as a coherent narrative of smooth, or even dialectically uneven, development. Not only should we eschew simple notions of evolution, progress or decadence, but also avoid the reduction of ideas to mere expressions of their generative contexts, understood spatially as well as temporally. Nor should we reduce a theory’s normative foundations to the parochial worldviews, unique life experiences, or the undeclared self-interests of those who may, to be sure, have drawn on them to challenge the status quo. To think historically should be taken as a willingness to read the record of the past against the grain, to think of to of that past in new what is perhaps to in the of history in which we are In other to be by in a that to in one or the this in it is to read the generational to which as a of one of but rather as a of to think the some of which seem more and than whose however, come to it in we should think of the history of Critical Theory as a field of the of through which we can for that can be in new and than and Adorno, Marcuse, or we can read of them in a if that their to of the in still issues. 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