Índice del Archivo Corriente

It is significant that Adorno took recourse to Lenin in his critique of Benjamin, for this was to raise again the issue of spontaneity and the exact nature of the intellectual’s relationship to the practical workers’ movement, and that between the cultural and political vanguards. In his critique, Adorno drew upon Lenin’s

conception of the introduction of revolutionary-theoretical consciousness into the proletariat from “outside” of that class as expounded in What is to be D one?

(1902) (Lenin, 1988: 143-144). For Adorno too the proletariat only achieves such consciousness ‘through a theory introduced by intellectuals as dialectical subjects.’ (Adorno, 1980: 122) Lenin argued that the proletariat was incapable of anything more than a corporate, economistic consciousness, and Adorno, in accord with Horkheimer’s argument in “Traditional and Critical Theory”, adjudged the actual consciousness of workers to be “mutilated”, as bourgeois. It would thus be impossible for the working-class to make a revolution without the intervention o f an external agency - that is, revolutionary intellectuals.

However, whereas Lenin considered this intervention to be the role o f the revolutionary party - the tightly organised, highly disciplined, “Jacobin” revolutionary party -, Adorno looked elsewhere. He did not envisage the function of the theoretical subject ‘in the sense of an activist conception o f “intellectuals’” (Adorno, 1980: 125); the relationship of the intellectual to proletariat is not one of

acting on its side, as Benjamin - one might say, in Leninist fashion - argued. Instead, it is matter of maintaining solidarity with the working-class through following the “truth” of theory. It is not the party which, as Trotsky was to declare at the founding of the Fourth International, should demand the individual ‘totally and completely’ (Trotsky, 1974: 86), but theory and theoretical reflection. To the “corporate” consciousness o f the working-class would be counterposed the “universal” consciousness o f the intellectual, which would remain universal as long as it was not universalised in practical concrete forms. The “revolution” foreseen by Adorno was revolutionary precisely insofar as it remained unrealised.

The “Leninism” endorsed by Adorno (and, one might say, which characterised Critical Theory more generally) was one in which the revolutionary vanguard of the Party was displaced by the cultural vanguard of the subjects of Critical Theory. But whereas the Leninist party intellectual was grounded in the necessity of the activist, organisational tasks of enabling the proletariat to fulfil its historical role, to become conscious o f its historical subjectivity, Critical Theory saw the intellectual’s task as exactly the reverse. It became a revolutionary theory without agency. Solidarity was maintained with the proletariat precisely through maintaining the gap between the critical intellectual and the masses The “backward”, “mutilated” consciousness of the proletariat constituted exactly the reason not to act as it had for Lenin to act. Adorno’s citation of Lenin’s dictum on the insufficiency of the proletariat’s spontaneous consciousness in support of his critique of Benjamin itself represented the “tearing in half’ of Lenin’s revolutionary thesis, whereby Adorno appropriated its negative, purely theoretical

moment whilst discarding the positive, practical moment

As such, Critical Theory was not concerned first and foremost with the

changing of people and conditions but, rather, with the preservation of a critical

space at the margins of an increasingly conformist and hyper-socialised society. From this perspective, the mass revolutionary party, as Horkheimer argued, represented only another manifestation of the repressive and rigidifying rationality which had penetrated all levels of social and political practice. Faced with contemporary rigidification the intellectuals of the Institute could find ready justification for their withdrawal from practice Moreover, as Zygmunt Bauman points out, such a withdrawal (or ‘surrender’) from the point-of view of the

“philosophers” o f Frankfurt, itself could be seen as having its own practical efficacy or potency:

Even in their surrender (particularly in their surrender?) philosophers remain incessantly and painfully conscious of the practical connection of the cultural ideal. Its impotence is as much a constituting factor of their discourse as its assumed all-conquering potency was of the discourse of their Enlightenment ancestors. Impotence itself becomes now potency, the cultural ideal stays pure and worthy as long as it is not contaminated by intrinsically impure reality; it stays pure and worthy because it steers clear of practical success. And yet, in a curious twist of mind, this pure, ethereal, cultural ideal is believed to be reality’s best chance. (1992: 20) According to this account, the eventual detachment of Critical Theory from an “impure” practical reality might be seen as the preservation of an alternative form of (using Bauman’s term) “legislative” practice on the part of a group of intellectuals who had abjured the modem(ist) intellectuals’ attachment to the political realisation o f their rational ideals. It was these latter - and especially those who sought to pursue rational schemes of social and state planning - who positioned the intellectual at the very heart of the socio-political process of totalisation, in which all social phenomena were “reconciled” to existing reality within the terms o f a rational political calculus. For Critical Theorists, Mannheim had brought about just such a reconciliation, as had, in their different way, the activists of the revolutionary party who, by identifying the interests of a debased and “mutilated” working-class, fell into a “slavish dependence on the status quo”.

However, though Critical Theory sought to reject a specific conception of a totalising intellectual activity, as Bauman indicates, they did not manage to avoid

perpetuating that very mode of activity. In the process of overcoming the intellectual’s attachment to practice, Critical Theory presented itself as ‘a form of practice’ (Adorno, cited in Anderson, 1976: 73); in disavowing the modem(ist) intellectual’s conciliatory, centralising impulses, Critical Theory permitted the intellectual only the possibility of performing work at the social margins which necessarily could have no present benefit. If such a marginal intellectual was forced to forego the consolations of a “legislative” practice directed at the world beyond the boundaries of his or her coterie, he or she might yet legislate, might yet provide the foundational categories and methods from which intellectuals could derive authority within their own tradition(s) (Bauman, 1987: 5), a process which, as I argue in chapter six, has characterised contemporary conceptions of the intellectual But, these two spheres (or practices) of authority are not separable; the production o f a decontaminated Theory which would serve as a vessel for a perhaps unrealisable future was itself dependent upon the operation of particular institutional and procedural mechanisms which enabled that Theory to exert a specifically cultural and moral effectivity.