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Martin Jay, a professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley, and his book Dialectical Imagination are published in English and Chinese
After the pioneering intellectual history work Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Studies, 1923-1950 (Chinese edition of The History of the Frankfurt School, Guangdong People's Publishing House, 1986), Martin E. Jay gradually shifted his focus from critical theory to visual culture, "from Germany to France". Why? "Fundamentally, I'm an intellectual fox rather than a hedgehog, interested in many different and sometimes unrelated questions."
However, the study of visual culture and his early studies of Western Marxism are still intrinsically linked. "Like The Low-Hanging Eyes (1993), the origins of the book are many. I want to sort out the creative mess of contemporary French philosophical theory, which has been influenced by the American side over the years. It also stems from my early studies of the general concept of Western Marxism. I have noticed that some critics of the concept of totality are very skeptical of the 'God-like vision', that is, the omniscient and omnipotent vision from above, and appreciate a relationship that is closer to and immersed in the world. So I think the visual metaphors in our language, and the actual visual experiences, have political implications. This led me to explore how thinkers, such as film theorists and feminist thinkers, outside of my book Marxism and Totality (1984), viewed the dominance of vision in modern Western culture. ”
Martin Jay's most recent research explores the continuing influence of nominalism tendencies in contemporary thought—a philosophical, theological movement that began in the 14th century, arguing that people give universal names to individual things only to better relate to a less intrinsically rational world. "The historical concept of 'event', for example, cannot be reduced to any grand principle, to any coherent narrative, or even to its historical context. I was also interested in 'musical nominalism', which is an important concept in Adorno's aesthetic theory. 'Image nominalism' – The term was first coined by Duchamp and is well suited to photography. I chose a similar literary term , 'magic realism' to argue that there is a kind of 'magic nominalism' that helps photography re-mystify the world. ”
This spring, Martin Jay will publish a co-edited collection of essays on the overlapping of imperialism and visuality. He also has a book in writing called After the Bleak—to borrow the title of Horkheimer's The Bleakness of Reason (1947). The book focuses on Habermas's attempt to develop a workable communicative concept of reason, describing the fate of reason in critical theory in recent years. "So you see, I'm still so interested in the legacy of the Frankfurt School."
Martin Jay received his Ph.D. in history from Harvard University in 1971, and his dissertation was the later publication of Dialectical Imagination. During his thesis, he developed correspondence and friendships with many members of the Frankfurt School. The work has been translated into 12 Chinese so far, and the work of the Frankfurt School has been introduced to the international public. Recently, Professor Martin Jie gave a guest lecture on simian humanities at East China Normal University to interpret the "neoliberal imagination and rational space", during which he was interviewed by this reporter.
The Frankfurt School did not cling to declining orthodoxy, but developed with the times
Wen Wei Po: What are the main schools of Western Marxism that can be divided into? Is it still an active theoretical current?
Martin Jay: As a well-organized, evolving intellectual and political movement, Western Marxism is now basically a historical phenomenon. It no longer has the innovative drive of the 1970s and 1980s, can no longer generate new ideas and inspire people to act. Figures like Gramsci, Lukács, and Sartre are no longer as important to students and other young people as they once were.
Nevertheless, the Frankfurt School has survived as an active force in all Western Marxist traditions, because it has always kept pace with the times. The Frankfurt School has formed three generations so far, each with its own concerns and methods. After the first generation, after the retirement of the most famous Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Lovental, etc., Habermas and Vermeer developed his own critical theory. Among the latest generation of critical theorists, there are many talented and creative thinkers such as Axel Hornet, Martin Zell and Christopher Menk in Germany, as well as Sierra Ben Habi, Nancy Fraser, Thomas McCarthy, Susan Buck-Morse, Robert Hulot-Kento and others in the United States. Therefore, critical theory is not stuck in the declining orthodoxy, but develops with the times. In addition, many of the earlier texts, especially those of Adorno and Benjamin, still inspire new responses to this day.
Another great advantage of critical theory is that it is not just a school within Marxism in the narrow sense. From the very beginning, it was open to external currents, whether psychoanalysis, moral philosophy, linguistic theory, systems theory, and so on. It does not resist the infiltration of the so-called "bourgeois" mode of thinking, nor does it assume that one doctrine alone can obtain answers to all questions. As a result, it was able to respond in a creative, not entirely defensive, way to the challenges of a series of subsequent intellectual currents such as post-structuralism.
Wen Wei Po: What are the specific challenges?
Martin Jay: The biggest challenge was the changes that took place in capitalism after the 1970s, when the accumulation of post-Fordism, globalization (including the inability of local governments to cope with environmental problems), the information revolution, and the collapse of the welfare state were the main features of capitalism during this period. Moreover, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War led to a renewed emphasis on the issue of democratization and cultural pluralism, which became particularly urgent at a time when the world became increasingly dependent on an outdated authoritarian system. Can we avoid a single model of democratic government, one that assumes that the world is better off being single than pluralistic? Can we avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and instead move beyond the destructive dialectics of enlightenment to what Habermas calls "evolutionary learning" and allow error-prone humans to work realistically to meet these challenges? While anger at injustices is in many cases a powerful weapon, we remain less optimistic about a utopian solution to totalitarianism.
One of the legacies of the Frankfurt School is to recognize that what has already been achieved is the need to preserve, rather than always jump into an uncertain future. In many parts of the world there is a tradition of support for the rule of law, for equal citizenship and human rights for all people who are actively involved in politics, which means that these values cannot be reduced to merely "Eurocentric" ideologies.
Another major learning process, which is more open-ended, is an openness to ideas and practices outside the West. For example, the American philosopher Thomas McCarthy, Habermas's foremost interpreter and translator, has recently published a new book, The Idea of Race, Empire, and Human Development, which explores imperialism and racial inequality in a different way than earlier critical theorists. There are also many scholars from the non-Western world who have made vivid and critical evaluations of the Frankfurt School tradition, pointing out its blind spots and extending their insights.
Wen Wei Po: Your Dialectical Imagination depicts the period when the Frankfurt School was at its most creative. After the 1950s, it was the most influential period in the United States. Now, does the Frankfurt School still have influence?
Martin Jay: I wrote this book more than 40 years ago, when Marcuse was the most important leftist theorist in the United States, but after all these years, his influence declined dramatically. Many of his books now seem superficial and outdated, no longer provoking critical thinking among his students. Benjamin and Adorno, on the other hand, always had great influence. Adorno, in particular, has been valued not only in philosophy and sociology over the past 15-20 years, but also in the fields of musicology, literary criticism and cultural theory. Habermas is in many ways seen as a substitute for Adorno and the critical theory tradition, having a great influence in political theory, jurisprudence, and even history, and his concept of the "public sphere" spurs further study. Horkheimer, though somewhat obscured and forgotten, one of my students, John Abromet, recently published a long biography of Hawkheimer's early life, which I believe will surely spark new interest. Other figures in the history of the Institute of Social Studies, such as Franz Neumann, whose political and legal theories now also have some influence, but now Adorno is undoubtedly the most important representative of the Frankfurt School.
An interesting story can illustrate Adornoge in recent years: his last book, The Theory of Aesthetics, published anonymously, was first translated into English in 1984, but this translation is not very good. Robert Hulot-Kento wrote a long critical essay that even led to the withdrawal of copyright by German publishers. 15 years later, he published a new translation that gained great influence in English-speaking intellectual circles. Subsequently, Adorno's other works, such as Dialectics of Enlightenment and The Philosophy of New Music, were quickly retranslated. It is very rare for such a difficult academic text to be retranslated so quickly, which is a testament to Adorno's international influence.
Thought has a historical character, not an eternity
Wen Wei Po: As a historian, you study a large part of philosophers, sociologists, and their ideas and contacts. What is the biggest difference between writing the history of ideas and writing other histories?
Martin Jay: There are of course many kinds of intellectual history, and this field is now experiencing a very active renaissance. In general, the history of ideas has three main tasks. The first is to recognize that ideas are historical, not eternal, and that we should always understand them in the context of the environmental conditions in which they can appear, be accepted, and spread. Because ideas are likely to be creatively misread or mixed with other ideas, their context cannot be reduced to the original intention of the initiators. Therefore, the first premise of the history of ideas is that ideas are always collecting new and sometimes relative meanings and functions in an unexpected way, and continue to develop over time.
Second, it is the responsibility of intellectual historians to be repositories of outdated ideas that no longer represent the frontiers of their fields. In the case of the Frankfurt School, for example, in the 1960s, when I first began to study its history, few people in the philosophy department in the United States were interested in the intellectual tradition represented by Hegel's left. At that time, analytic philosophy was mainstream. Today, the situation has changed somewhat, in part because the history of ideas has made it possible to rediscover these ideas after the changes of the times. Or rather, the history of ideas preserves philosophically "endangered species," hopefully one day surviving "in the wild." In the case of psychoanalysis, no one in contemporary psychology studies Freud anymore, but he remains a source of endless imagination for intellectual historians. Intellectual historians have allowed his revolutionary insights to be remembered and to unabashedly expose the historical flaws of his vision.
The third task of the history of ideas, perhaps, should be said to rationally reconstruct our present position and to trace the lineage of contemporary thought. The goal here is not simply to reawaken our sense of the undetermined past, the openness that follows, which is an important goal for any historical narrative, but to give the present narrative coherence—the culmination of a meaningful process of a series of questions and answers. Even if it appears now that a certain answer from the past was "wrong," it is worth pondering as a step in the coherent course of history and helps us understand the problem now.
Wen Wei Po: Can the New Left movements that took place in Britain and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s also be attributed to some extent to the influence of the Frankfurt School?
Martin Jay: There are many different sources of the New Left in the United States, some shared with international New Left movements, some unique to our history – most of these parts are non-theoretical, so I don't want to exaggerate the importance of Western Marxism, especially the Frankfurt School. Of course, Marcuse, who was still in the United States at the time, was also an outspoken critic of bourgeois society, including its repression of sexual gratification. His analysis of the idea and culture of "one-dimensionality" has won the approval of many students. This convinces them, and those who have not really suffered from obvious material deprivation or social injustice, that they are also oppressed in the same way as minorities and exploited workers. Other members of the Frankfurt School are less well-known, in large part because their writings had to be translated into English until the 1970s. But many American left-wing intellectuals—Paul Goodman, James Baldwin, C. Wright Mills, Norman Brown, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and many others—have criticized America's role in the world and the persistent problems that prevent us from living in an ideal world of democracy and justice. Countercultural heroes such as the poet Alan Ginsburg and folk musicians Joan Baez and Bob Dylan also had a very big influence in mobilizing people against traditional middle-class culture and Cold War political attitudes.
But whatever the importance of theorists or cultural icons, the New Left is the most important source of its opposition to the Vietnam War, the recruitment of young people to fight, and protests against civil rights issues. Intergenerational antagonisms are exacerbated not only by different attitudes toward sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but also by the anger of young people being sent to war by ruthless elders.
If the Frankfurt School really had any influence, it was to allow intellectuals and students to express that popular culture, which seemed to allow the entertained to choose freely, was actually a "culture industry" manipulated by the upper echelons to profit and suppress real dissent. The Frankfurt School offers a vocabulary that challenges the superficial pleasures offered by commodity culture and its paralysis of suffering.
In the SAME PERIOD IN ENGLAND, the theoretical emphasis is different. Althusser's scientific Marxism or structuralist Marxism had a greater following, while the Frankfurt School in exile had little substantial history in Britain and was less well-known, even though some interpreted Benjamin as a resource for radical cultural politics, such as Terry Eagleton. The most important magazine of this period was the New Left Review, edited by historian Perry Anderson, whose editors and authors were more interested in continental philosophy and politically inclined to Trotskyism, which were not mainstream in the United States. There are also strong indigenous traditions in Britain, from F.R. Leves and the circle of literary critics around Perusal magazine, extolling local working-class traditions and trying to link them to literary traditions against capitalism, as explored by Raymond Williams in his pioneering study Culture and Society. In Britain, the most important proponent of critical theory was the philosopher Gillian Ross, who unfortunately died young.
In addition, in Britain, there is a strong tradition of Marxist historiography – E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm and many more. This is something that the United States does not have. This tradition places greater emphasis on the struggle of workers, insisting that the workers, as Marx put it, are the subjects of history.
Wen Wei Po: After the 1990s, the tide of China's commodity economy swept in, mass culture began to rise, and the subsequent globalization further aggravated the mass production of culture. Many people at this point cite the critical theory of "travel" as a resource for their discourse—and of course many other discourses are competing with it, criticizing this tendency to commodify everything. This kind of "hybridization," or creative misreading, is something you'd love to see?
Martin Jay: I hope that China's acceptance is a creative misreading, not just passive acceptance. These ideas have traveled a lot — from Germany to the United States and back to Germany — and now to the rest of the world. They are always modified by local intellectual traditions, by the different experiences of the researchers. A new set of meanings is created, new questions are answered, and previously unexplored weaknesses are exposed and addressed. What Saeed calls the "theory of travel" is that you can never go home, or at least you can't go home without undergoing drastic changes. So, I hope and expect that China's acceptance will be a new chapter in the creative development of this tradition, making european and American colleagues realize the potential of this tradition.
I have already seen some of these acceptances during my visit to East China Normal University, such as my invitee Professor Tong Shijun, who shared with me a recent article from Habermas on the concept of communicative rationality and the traditional Chinese idea of rationality, especially the similarities and differences with Liang Shuming's thought. This article will be included in the collection of essays on De-regionalizing Habermas. There is no doubt that the acceptance of critical theory in the United States is in itself a de-regionalization, and now it is looking forward wholeheartedly to a new form in today's world.
An important task for us is to re-embed the economic sphere in the larger context of moral, social and cultural values
Wen Wei Po: Is our criticism of the current neoliberal discourse-led capitalism more on the cultural level than on the economic and political level?
Martin Jay: One of the lessons learned is to avoid thinking that these levels are isolated and developed separately. Of course, a distinction must be made in the process of modernization, and a certain internal logic does drive the value field in its unique direction. But there is always a reverse pressure to reintegrate them, allowing cultures, politics, religions, social relations, and economies to intertwine in complex ways. An important task for us is to re-embed the economic sphere in the larger context of moral, social and cultural values. Although the internal logic of the economy itself is towards never-ending growth, unchecked maximization of profits, and the commodification of all aspects of life, the economy has never been completely isolated from the larger context in which other human needs are taken into account. If you look at the environmental problems we face now, we must integrate them into a larger context, no matter how the economy seems to have its own "logic" to follow.
Wen Wei Po: At the end of your speech, you called for an effort to "build a divergent new generation of public space on a global scale, through which communication rationality runs through it, in order to meet the challenges of the world economic system" efforts. Where should we start?
Martin Jay: First of all, we have to admit that there is no single public space, even at the national level. In reality, despite all kinds of inclusive efforts, there are only local or departmental public spaces where people with common interests and common issues come together, face to face or through various means of communication. The best-case scenario is that its members can be persuaded by clear arguments, rather than being subordinated to an unequal authority or the power of the participants.
Today, of course, the Internet has created many virtual public spaces that easily cross boundaries of age, gender, geography, and even language, yet it still lacks a consensus-seeking protocol that is the pursuit of an ideal public space. Many public spaces are battlefields for competing or venting anger, rather than a stage for rational debate, but at least it allows people to listen to each other's arguments, and there is a possibility of being persuaded. Since we don't know which kind of public space will be more successful in this regard, it is better to let millions of public spaces flourish than to try to discipline or limit them. Of course, there may still be some restrictions, such as unfounded slander or outrageous hate speech.
Wen Wei Po: Could Marxist criticism become a discursive resource for critique neoliberalism?
Martin Jay: Marxism is still an effective way to draw attention to the effects of commodification, the exploitation of labor, and the persistent inability of capitalism to solve its own problems. Now, without a radical solution at the socio-economic system level, we are faced with a relatively small task: to explain how capitalism can be transformed to be more "good". Overall, today, capitalism under neoliberal globalization seems too powerful to take us off target. Today's world is so deeply intertwined that no one can cut ties with the world economy. Marx, on the other hand, is the one who urges us to think systematically about the world economy.
Wen Wei Po: You once said that "intellectuals" were not a positive word at first, but had the meaning of arrogance. Hofstadt wrote a book on the anti-intellectual traditions that exist in American social life. In your opinion, how did this tradition come about?
Martin Jay: There are complex and intense interactions among educated people, they have leisure and a tendency to write, and they have access to the media. In modern times, we call them intellectuals, allowing them to develop their own secret ideas and terminology, which can sometimes be discouraging to the average reader. Thus there are intermediaries between public intellectuals and scholarship, presenting difficult and difficult ideas in a relatively amiable way. Among them are intellectual historians who place ideas in their historical context so that ordinary readers can understand what is central in complex and ongoing debates. But such efforts are not always successful. We generously allow natural scientists to conduct research in terms that we don't expect to be understood by the average reader, but we don't have the patience for humanities and social scientists, who always feel that their views should be easier to understand. As a result, there has always been hatred of the elitist, condescending counter-Enlightenment.
Although these allegations are sometimes justified, some thinkers are truly unfathomable and inaccessible because the nature of their thoughts requires them to write them. Sometimes, however, there is reason to be suspicious of intellectuals. During the Vietnam War, Chomsky famously wrote "The Responsibility of Intellectuals," arguing that intellectuals had a responsibility to represent the public interest. But many critics argue that this is an arrogant assumption, especially that its so-called neutral representation of the interests of the whole is in fact a veiled expression of its own narrow interests. I have always agreed with Gramsci that everyone is potentially an intellectual, but in our society only some people assume the function of intellectual. That is, everyone has the ability to think reflectively, everyone has the right to defend his faith, and he has the dignity to let others listen to him. As Habermas once said, in the process of enlightenment, we are all participants; outside the classroom, there is no longer a professor or a student, no one is anymore an adult or a child.
Interview (January 13, 2014) | Martin Jay, Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley: Intellectual History Preserves Philosophical "Endangered Species"
Author: Li Junyi