It is interesting to note that during roughly the same period that Frankfurt School scholars were debating the promise and problems of modernity against the backdrop of rising fascist senti-ment in German society, many of the same themes and preoccupations were played out through the medium of German Expressionist cinema.
The rise of cinema as a cultural artefact was intimately connected with the emergence of (modern) urban living, the growth of the city, and mass society. Early cinema (and indeed much contemporary cinema) sought to represent the collective experiences and situations of modernity such as mass transport, traffic, street lighting, the crowd – all engendered by capi-talism and industrialisation. Cinema was also dependent upon the financial and commercial structures of capitalism if it was to evolve into an institutional form, enabling the production of film as a mass-entertainment product.
The representation of the city and the kinetic, fragmentary experiences and visual excite-ment of city life often served to eulogise the modernist ideal of the city as a Utopia. Such imagining took a more material guise in the architecture of Le Corbusier and his contempor-aries, in their conception of an ideal planned city. One such film was Berlin, Symphony of a Great City, a studiously modernist work. Yet, at the time it was released the values and mores which it both represented and championed were viewed by some sections of German society as degenerate. During the 1920s this position was also explicitly tied to a critique directed FILM BOX
Frankfurt School thinkers were forced to confront these unpleasant realities and to try to explain why working people had failed to revolt against capitalism. In trying to explain the continuation of capitalism despite crisis, Frankfurt School thinkers turned to the crucial role played by the education system and the mass media in consolidating support for capitalism, as well as organisations like the police that were used to forcibly put down strikes or other open displays of revolt against authority and private property. In this way, Critical Theorists came to understand that, while the economic organisation of society was important, other social institutions played a vital role in supporting cap-italism. Through the education system and the mass media, for example, people were indoctrinated into accepting ‘received truths’ about the world which prevented them from understanding the true nature of the exploitation they suffered.
Frankfurt scholars also noted that changes associated with developments of the capitalist economy in the twentieth century had brought about schisms among workers – for example, a gulf between the regularly employed, casual labour and the unemployed. The introduction of labour-saving tech-nologies produced mass unemployment in the 1930s, and the lives of the employed were better than those of the unemployed. The unemployed had very little to lose and so were more likely to take risks. However, these groups lacked organisation and consciousness. Class consciousness also dimin-ished as tasks and knowledge became more and more fragmented, because people began to see themselves more in terms of their specialist role or job, rather than as simply ‘workers’. Disillusioned with the lack of revolutionary potential in the working class, many Frankfurt School thinkers began to look for other sources of resistance and other possible agents of wide-scale social change. For example, in the post-Second World War period there was an explosion of nationalist discontent across areas of the world previously subjected to colonial rule. Later in the 1960s and 1970s, in the wake of a new wave of political radicalism sweeping across the Western world, a number of social movements emerged which organised themselves around everything from ecological issues, racism, human rights violations, civil liberties, sexuality and gender discrimination. Contemporary Critical Theorists simi-larly look beyond the industrial working class to the ‘counter-hegemonic forces’ which frequently take the form of ‘new’ or ‘critical’ social movements, engage in struggles to resist global capitalism and are, as such, potential agents of social change.
Gramsci’s work on hegemony has also been very important in critical International Relations theory, particularly in relation to the study of world order and institutions. Gramsci highlighted the central importance of ideology in maintaining class rule and in bringing about social change.
Gramsci argued that ruling groups were able to legitimise their rule by persuading people that it was just and fair. He insisted that, in order to bring about change, it was necessary to not only win the
against the democratic government of the republic and its ‘soulless’ culture, nowhere more materially manifest than in decadent Berlin.
Indeed, many films of this period were characterised to some degree by a looking back to Germany’s Romantic literary and musical traditions such as in Murnau’s Faust (1926). These narratives praised folkish and traditional values of countryside over the city, and, in some cases, were in direct opposition to the new urban ways of life celebrated in Berlin, Symphony of a Great City. The darker inflections of modernity also found expression in films like Fritz Lang’s bleak dystopian vision of Metropolis (1929). The dominant critical appraisal of German Expressionist cinema emphasises the reaction of Germans to the First World War and the ominous slide of Weimar Germany into Fascism. Siegfried Kracauer saw the looking back towards Romantic traditions in films such as Faust, The Golem and Nosferatu as being symp-tomatic of the ‘retreat into the shell’ (Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 1947) of the German psyche in the inter-war period. See Denzin, The Cinematic City.
battle ‘on the ground’, but also in the realm of ideas. Counter-hegemony involved, therefore, not only social and political struggle against capitalism, but also the development of an alternative set of values, and, crucially, an alternative set of concepts in order to think about and describe the current social ‘reality’ and possible alternatives.
As we have seen from our brief discussion above, increasingly critical thinkers have become, if not disillusioned, then certainly more circumspect, about the possibility of working-class revolution.
Moreover, Critical Theorists have become much more sensitive to the multiple oppressions inherent in capitalism. From a critical perspective, capitalism is transforming the world radically, but in the process it is generating major forms of inequality based on class, race and gender. Capitalist enter-prises are devouring more and more of the world’s precious resources in order to promote mindless consumerism in the name of ‘freedom of choice’. Moreover, the search for markets is destroying tra-ditional societies and the way of life of many of the world’s peoples.
However, while this more nuanced analysis of the global impact of capitalism might have more explanatory power, once the analysis of capitalism moves away from a central concern with class, what happens to the project of human emancipation? How can Critical Theorists develop a concep-tion of a fair and just society, if it is no longer a quesconcep-tion of getting rid of inequalities rooted in social class? Who will be the agents of radical change? Moreover, what does it mean to be ‘emancipated’?
Jürgen Habermas has become an influential figure in critical thought because he seems to have an answer to these questions. While Habermas has not devoted much attention to international politics in his own work, IR scholars have drawn upon key concepts and ideas in his work in the service of developing a critical international relations theory and in opening up a new research agenda within IR (see the Concept Box below).
A key concern of Critical Theory has been how to develop institutions and forums in international politics that facilitate negotiation. In this way conflicts are settled by consensus rather than power, although Critical Theorists differ from, say, neo-liberals as to how this might be achieved. We might argue that the ‘fourth debate’ or the ‘next stage’ in the development of IR (discussed at greater length in chapter 7 and in the conclusion to this book) was, in part, inspired by a desire to escape from realist/neo-realist despair and to challenge the idea that international politics would always be domi-nated by the pursuit of power and the instrumental and/or strategic interests of states.
Habermas was critical of positivist approaches to the social sciences because he believed that the knowledge they generated was essentially knowledge generated in the service of social control.
Critical Theorists believe that knowledge about the social world is sought in the interests of furthering human emancipation, or at least it should be. Following a typology first developed by Frankfurt School scholars, Richard Ashley (who would later come to be identified with postmodernism/post-structuralism in IR – see the following chapter) argued that there were different kinds of knowledge:
knowledge that served a technical interest in understanding and extending control over nature and society; knowledge that arose from a practical interest in understanding how to maintain social order among communities; and knowledge born of the emancipatory interest human beings held in ident-ifying and eradicating unnecessary social confinements and constraints. Andrew Linklater (discussed at greater length in the Author Box on p. 122) has been one influential IR theorist who has drawn upon Habermas to suggest new institutional arrangements that facilitate open dialogue and allow the conduct of international relations to become more consensual and less coercive.
Note the different uses of ‘hegemony’ in Critical Theory and in neo-realist theories of ‘hegemonic sta-bility’. Neo-realists focus on dominant states whose hegemony is largely based on their military might, while for Gramscians, hegemony is the project of social forces that are able to set the parameters of public debate, mostly through other means than violent coercion.
In one crucial respect Habermas’s work represented a major departure from Marxist analysis.
Habermas argued that, hitherto, Marxist analysis had failed to pay adequate attention to the central importance of communication in shaping consciousness and developing understanding of one’s self and one’s relationship to others. Marx was correct in stressing the inherently social nature of human beings. However, Marx limited himself to analysing the particular kinds of social organisation that existed. The sociability of human beings is, of course, also expressed through language. Habermas argued that the role of language and communication had been neglected in critical thought.
According to Habermas, communication – the use of language and the manipulation of symbols – allows a sort of collective learning process to take place. Through language and communication, human beings construct intersubjective knowledge about the world.
This emphasis on the importance of communication and human understanding led Habermas to advocate a process of open dialogue and democracy in the interests of furthering human emancipa-tion. Habermas was a very modern thinker in the sense that he valued the modern achievement of being able to criticise, challenge and question authority and existing duties and obligations.
Habermas believed, however, that such criticism was only a prelude to developing a better under-standing of what it meant to live in a moral society in which people were treated justly. He argued that the formation of self-understanding, self-identity and moral judgements concerning justice were intimately linked; we become aware of our own self and our own needs and desires by entering into dialogue with others and becoming aware of the needs, interests and desires of others. Habermas also moved away from orthodox Marxist thinking by arguing that social movements promoting feminism or green issues or indigenous peoples also resisted the extension of ‘technical’ or ‘means–ends’
rationality into all spheres of social life, promoted alternative values, and so could contribute to an emancipatory politics. However, this emancipatory politics was no longer rooted in the notion of labour free from alienation. Emancipation was about extending the realm of moral understanding and justice in human life. Habermas was committed to the democratic process because it fostered dia-logue and this was necessary in order to further develop our moral codes and thinking about justice.
The problem is, of course, that a process of genuinely open dialogue is difficult to achieve in a divided society where people have different – even opposing – interests. Habermas recognised this problem, but insisted that it was, nevertheless, an ideal to be striven for. For this reason, much of his early work was concerned with the condition under which it was possible to create an ‘ideal speech situation’. In an ideal speech situation, all people would be able to participate in open dialogue, black or white, rich or poor, Christian or Muslim, male or female. In such a situation, people might be encouraged to consider the perspective of the ‘other’, rather than just their own selfish interest.
Intersubjective: intersubjective meaning is that established (or constructed) through the interaction of ‘subjects’. The idea implies that ‘meaning’ is established through interaction or dialogue between conscious subjects.