While I can sympathize with the sense of urgency contained in comrade Lain’s recent letter to Cosmonaut, I must agree with comrade Villarreal’s assessment of Lain’s approach as being trapped within the very constraints he seeks to overcome. However, I’d like to supplement Villarreal’s appraisal by identifying and briefly critiquing the particular form of pessimism that I believe undergirds Lain’s comments.
Lain draws on a number of theoretical texts to indict the contemporary U.S. Left. The most important for his argument, however, is his quotation of Frankfurt School stalwart Max Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason, in which the author, referring to ‘society’ as a total socio-historical infrastructure, claims that “the machine has dropped the driver.”1 The work of Horkheimer, as well as that of his longtime intellectual partner and fellow Frankfurt School member Theodor Adorno, is dominated by a pessimism derived from the theoretical consequences of this kind of assertion: that in the post-WWII period the infrastructure that makes up socio-historical reality has gained an agency of its own.
That society, as socio-historical infrastructure, has begun to operate of its own accord without the agential input of its subjects, is fundamental to Adorno’s theory of the post-WWII Euro-American “administered world” as totalitarian, as well as his conception of irrationalism, and is also the keystone of his deeply pessimistic view of history.2 Unsurprisingly, this pessimism leads both Adorno and Horkheimer to political theories of hopelessness.
In Adorno’s writings on music and aesthetics, which make up the bulk of his intellectual output, the hopelessness of the age is microcosmically represented by the twelve tone technique of musical composition. Once set in motion, the technique, as a system, begins to act autonomously, producing its own objective meaning outside of human control.3 According to Adorno, there is only one, ultimately insufficient possibility for resistance to the totalizing effect of twelve tone technique’s systematic, irrational agency, and that is the subjective imprint of the individual musician, who for Adorno is represented by famed Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg.4 Indeed, derived from the universalization of this phenomenon to the whole of contemporary society, Adorno’s political strategy boils down to ‘think for yourself’ pedagogical band-aids and a commitment to bourgeois educational uplift as the only (but always inadequate) political solution for a rapidly darkening age.5
For Marxists, the idea that society, as infrastructure, acts on its own is ridiculous. Of course, Marxists do not deny that socio-historical infrastructure works on the present. Althusser, as Villarreal identifies, is a prime example of a Marxist who was preoccupied with this question. However, this infrastructure is not seen as an agent of its own, but represents the ossified human agency of the past as inherited by humans in the present through reproduction.
Unfortunately, Lain’s orientation towards the work of Horkheimer leads him to the same pessimist political strategy as a solution to what he sees as an increasingly dim future produced by the blind forces of society rather than human beings acting as collective subjects. ‘If only you could think for yourself’; that is the limited reach of Lain’s intervention. Yes, if only we were all Arnold Schoenberg. As Villarreal correctly points out, this is a platitude, and Lain’s singular focus on a cliché inhibits his ability to give an accurate assessment of where the U.S. Left is today and where it is going.
Solidarity,
Christopher Carp
- Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (London, UK: Continuum, 2004), 87.
- The terms “administered world” and “administrated society” are regularly used by Adorno to refer to post-WWII Euro-American society at large. See: Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry (London, UK: Routledge, 1991), 130; Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London, UK: Continuum, 2004), 40.
- Adorno, Philosophy of New Music (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 2006), 53-57, 67.
- Ibid, 91-93.
- Adorno, The Culture Industry, 130-131, 158-159.