By GILLIAN ROSE*
The use that Frankfurt School theorists made of three thinkers: Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud
Karl Marx
Although the concept of different forms of culture succeeding each other in history is central to GWF Hegel, its place is taken in Karl Marx's thought by different social forms, determined by successive modes of production. Marx did not have a theory of culture as such. As he said, Hegel had it, and it was the basis of his philosophy of history. By the end of the 19th century, Marx's perspective had become rigid in static, mechanistic, and deterministic distinctions between the economic base and the ideological, legal, and political superstructure.
The Frankfurt School returned to a dynamic distinction between social processes and resulting social forms, taking as its model of culture and ideology not a distinction between base and superstructure, but Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, and this theory received its classical statement in volume 1, chapter 1 of The capital, and throughout the floorplans.
Now I will try to roughly sketch what Marx's theory of commodity fetishism is. If you don't know, then I recommend you take a look at those few pages of The capital, volume 1. Commodities, according to Marx, are produced in a society in which labor power is sold for a wage, and surplus value is realized when the product of that labor is sold, not by the worker, but by the entrepreneur or employer for a profit.
This contrasts with a pre-capitalist society or a non-capitalist society in which the direct producer or worker would consume or sell the product of his labor himself. He would not be selling his labor force and would directly realize the value embodied in the product. Thus, a commodity, that is, a product produced under capitalist conditions, consists of two components: its use value and its exchange value.
Its use value, which Marx also calls value in use, means its specific qualities. For example, the taste of an apple, or the warmth of the coat you wear. Exchange value, on the other hand, is what a commodity is equivalent to in terms of another commodity, usually expressed in money. So, one is a reason, and the other is the concrete qualities of a product.
One result of this divorce between use and exchange is that exchange value appears to be a characteristic of the product itself – that is, its price. People think that value is inherent to the product itself, and do not understand that it is actually the expression of social relationships and specific activities between people.
Karl Marx says: “The social character of the activity, as well as the social form of the product and the participation of individuals in production, here appear in the commodity as something strange and objective.” “A defined social relationship between men takes on the ghostly form of a relationship between things.” That's the crucial phrase. This is what Marx calls fetishism – that is, when you treat something as a thing in itself, when in fact it is the expression of determined social relations between people.
The Frankfurt School believed that this idea that real social relations between people are transformed and misunderstood as relations between things provided a model for the relationship between social processes, social institutions, and consciousness.
This model, unlike the distinction between economic base and ideological superstructure, would not reduce institutional and ideological formations to mere epiphenomena or simple reflections of a base. This would provide a sociological explanation for the social determination and relative autonomy of other social forms such as culture. He established a way of saying that something is socially determined and yet partially autonomous.
Marx is not saying, for example, that the illusions that arise from commodity fetishism are wrong; he is saying that these illusions are necessary and real, but they are illusions nonetheless. This is what the Frankfurt School, from Georg Lukács onwards, called “reification” – a term that Marx himself did not use, although for various reasons it became associated with Marx himself.
In fact, his adoption of this notion of reification gave different members of the Frankfurt School enormous freedom to interpret Marx differently. Even the theory of commodity fetishism came to support quite different philosophies of history and quite different political positions and theories of culture.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It is a commonplace that Nietzsche's ideas were relentlessly used by right-wing social and political theorists of the 20th century. For example, you may have heard of Oswald Spengler or Ernst Jünger. But it is not as widely known that Nietzsche had an enormous influence on left-wing theorists of the 20th century.
Among those we have analyzed particularly, this is especially true of Bloch, Horkheimer, Benjamin, and Adorno. Why were they interested in Friedrich Nietzsche? For a number of reasons, which I will briefly list:
Friedrich Nietzsche rejected a philosophy of history based on the Hegelian idea of a telos or ultimate goal in history, of an ideal society in the future, or of the reconciliation of all contradictions. Nietzsche rejected this position. He applied the notion of contradiction to the optimistic philosophy of history itself, for example, that the process of historical change can become the opposite of all ideals. This is what Horkheimer and Adorno would later call “the dialectic of the Enlightenment.”
They were interested in Friedrich Nietzsche for his critique of the traditional philosophical concept of the subject. This traditional philosophical concept of the subject, which has also been adopted by certain forms of Marxism, for example the existentialist interpretation of Marxism, is that the unity of consciousness is the basis of all reality.
The Frankfurt School, on the contrary, believed that social reality could not be reduced to the sum of facts of consciousness. She used this point to emphasize that social reality cannot be reduced to people's awareness of it, but also that the analysis of the social determination of forms of subjectivity is essential: that subjectivity is a social category.
A third reason they were interested in Nietzsche is that Friedrich Nietzsche's thought is based on the idea of “will to power”. The Frankfurt School was also interested in analyzing new forms of anonymous and universal political and cultural domination that affect everyone equally and that impede the formation of classical liberating proletarian class consciousness.
Fourth, they were interested in Friedrich Nietzsche because Nietzsche launched an attack on the bourgeois culture of his time. Like Marx, he referred to “bourgeois philistinism”. The Frankfurt School also wanted to demonstrate the resurgence of social contradictions in both so-called popular culture and so-called serious culture. She was equally critical of both high and popular culture, if you will. In fact, she rejected this distinction.
The final reason why the Frankfurt School was interested in Friedrich Nietzsche is that Nietzsche produced an analysis of the birth of tragedy in Greek society that was radically sociological, and that, unlike the earlier tradition in German thought, did not idealize Greek society. This provided a model for Frankfurt School analyzes of literary genres in advanced capitalist society. The Frankfurt School placed its emphasis on literary form, not content.
Sigmund Freud
If a traditional concept of the subject was unacceptable, what would take its place? The Frankfurt School used Freudian theory to explain the social formation of subjectivity and its contradictions in advanced capitalist society. She thought that psychoanalytic theory would provide the connection between economic and political processes and the resulting cultural forms.
But he did not turn to Freud's later, more obvious and direct sociological works, such as Civilization's Discontents. He based his interpretation on an analysis of Freud's most central psychoanalytic concepts. She was particularly attracted to Freud's position that individuality was a formation, an achievement, not something absolute or given. She wished to develop a theory of the loss of autonomy or decline of the individual in advanced capitalist society that did not idealize what had been considered autonomy or individuality in the first place.
She used Freudian theory in many of her main studies: on the acceptance and reproduction of authority in late capitalist society; in his examination and attempts to explain the success of fascism; in his development of a concept of cultural industry and its influence on people's consciousness and unconsciousness; and, finally, in the general investigation into the possibility or impossibility of cultural and aesthetic experience in late capitalist society.
*Gillian Rose (1947–1995) was a British philosopher and sociologist. Author, among other books, of The melancholy science: an introduction to the thought of Theodor Adorno (To). [https://amzn.to/4dBfa8t]
Translation: Pedro Silva for the magazine Jacobin Brazil.
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