Unspeakable utopia: art and the return to the theological in the Marxism of Adorno and Horkheimer.

Introduction: The Problem of Culture

A spectre has haunted the Marxist tradition from its origins to the present day: the spectre of theology. Born of the quasi-theological ideas of German Romanticism and Idealism, Marxism has always contained traces of this parentage. Most obviously its philosophy of history resembles Hegel's account of world history as the philosophical outworking of the Christian hope for redemption. Yet even before Marx, in Hegel's supercession of the theological by philosophy, and then in the Young Hegelians' turning philosophy against theology, we can detect an hostility to the theological as mythic and ideological in its support for the status quo. In the Theses on Feuerbach of 1848, Marx broke with the Young Hegelians, radicalising their critique to include philosophy itself. The true motive force of history, Marx argued, is the economic material 'base'; while all cultural productions belong to the 'superstructure', which at most mirrors these economic realities, or at worst justifies them through ideology. From then on he sought to purge himself of any traces of the theological, disavowing his own earlier 'utopian naivete', and that of the Christian Socialists. From this beginning, Marx's ideas have been applied in undoubtedly cruder ways than he intended. Hence Marxism has been accused of taking a reductive, dismissive approach to cultural phenomena. Works of art, great philosophies and religious faiths were 'decoded' as expressions of class interest. Kafka was 'typically bourgeois'; Christianity the faith one would expect from former slaves and disenfranchised artisans, and so on.

The Frankfurt school--most famously Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno--is of interest in that, while standing within the Marxist tradition, it repudiated these reductionist tendencies towards cultural phenomena. (1) Inasmuch as the Marxist polemic against culture began as a critique of theology, which was then extended to all ideology as 'priestly' deception, so the Frankfurt's school's rehabilitation of the cultural can be seen as a return to the theological. If this is the case, the Frankfurt school authors certainly did not make it completely explicit, and continued to show a suspicion towards many forms of religion. (2) Nevertheless such a return can be detected in the views of Frankfurt school authors on aesthetics and on scientific rationality. In these two areas the value of the cultural and with it the theological is rediscovered as the source of political resistance and hope, although, as is particularly well illustrated by the discussion of aesthetics, this can only be a negative hope. We shall consider these two areas before discussing the more explicit references to religion, the 'Jewish' critique of Christianity, and a few abiding questions that the theologian might want to put to the Marxists.

The 'Autonomy' of Aesthetics

'Art, since it became autonomous, has preserved the utopia that evaporated from religion.' (3)

The Frankfurt school's interest in aesthetics goes back before its foundation. Horkheimer studied philosophy of art under Hans Cornelius in Frankfurt, writing his thesis on Kant's Critique of Judgment, while Adorno studied music in Vienna under Berg. It is unsurprising then, that they did not follow the 'orthodox' Soviet Marxist aesthetic tradition of Lenin and Zhdanov, which rejected the claims of modernist aesthetics. Against the 'bourgeois' idea of 'disinterestedness' in art, the Soviet tradition had encouraged the political commitment of Tendenzliteratur, of 'realistic' art, which accurately described the social relations of the people, against the 'subjectivism' of modernist art from Dostoevsky through to Joyce and Kafka. The Frankfurt school's break with even the more moderate sympathisers of this Soviet tradition can be seen in Adorno's discussions of Lukacs and Brecht. Both writers were far from simple ideologues of the Soviet system. Indeed the Lukacs of History and Class Consciousness was virtually the progenitor of the tradition of re-Hegelianised Marxism to which the Frankfurt school belonged. Yet Adorno berates him for his later submission to 'official optimism' in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism with its 'unrelieved sterility of Soviet claptrap.' (4) Against Lukacs's complaints of modernist subjectivism, Adorno responds that his 'reflection theory' (Abbildtheorie) is a 'vulgar materialist shibboleth'. (5) The truthfulness of art resides not in its reflection of empirical reality, but in its autonomy or distance, which is constituted by form rather than content. Art should have nothing to do with 'stating something', and art that seeks to do this, like the Tendenzliteratur, will fail both as art and truth. (6)

While Adorno is hostile towards didactic works of art, this does not mean art should be apolitical; on the contrary, it is more that art has become the locus of the political. Thus Adorno claims that today works of art bear 'the burden of wordlessly asserting what is barred to politics ... This is not a time for political art, but politics has migrated into autonomous art'. (7) Across the writings of the Frankfurt school there is a consistent sense that art has partially held out against the advance of disenchantment and rationalisation in modernity which has subjected the rest of our world to the utilitarian, dominating logic of instrumental reason. In so far as it is autonomous, art is a refuge where something is preserved from the spirit of Enlightenment. Art works still have 'something in common with enchantment', they are 'neutralised epiphanies'. (8) Not only the political and the sacred have taken refuge in art, but also metaphysics: 'For art is ... what metaphysics ... always wanted to be.' (9) Indeed it is 'spiritual' in the Hegelian sense, even if not pure or absolute spirit. (10) Even more basically, 'art causes people to wonder, just as Plato once demanded that philosophy do, which, however, decided for the opposite.' (11)

The real surprise here is not this association of art with the magical, spiritual and metaphysical which would be common to most Marxists; but rather the subsequent refusal to dismiss the political value of these cultural realms. Instead art, for Adorno, is in essence radical; both critical of the status quo and the basis of utopian hope for something different. "Even in the most sublimated work of art" Adorno insists, 'there is a hidden 'it should be otherwise'.' (12) The truth that art speaks is the untruth of the status quo, it is the 'antithesis of that which is the case.' (13) Art breaks the spell of actuality and enables us to see that things could be different. This longing for a better world, 'une promesse du bonheur', is linked by Horkheimer with the residually theological in the aesthetic. (14) Adorno agrees that works of art 'point to a practice from which they abstain: the creation of a just life.' (15) In this they also resemble the purposelessness of childish play. (16)

It is important however to note here that, despite this favourable account of the political power of the aesthetic, its utopian elements are, particularly for Adorno, only ever negative. There can be no positive account of this utopia, or how it should be attained, let alone the recognition of anything as the positive advent of these utopian realities. (17) This is Adorno's problem with Lukacs and Brecht's uncritical celebration of Soviet society: it presumes 'the reconciliation has been accomplished, that all is well with society, that the individual has come into his own and feels at home in his world.' (18) Whereas the truth, Adorno insists, is that 'the antagonism persists, and it is a sheer lie to assert that it has been 'overcome', as they call it, in the states of the Eastern bloc.' (19) The 'official optimism' that compels Lukacs and Brecht to see positive counter-forces and trends in the officially 'socialist' countries and in the workers' movements ignores the principle which Adorno champions that 'the negation of the negation--the 'distortion of the distortion' is the positive.' (20) Art may offer a hope of reconciliation of form and content, of subject and object, yet this utopia is properly unrepresentable because it nowhere exists, and any imaginings of it are inescapably implicated in the negative realities which produce these fantasies. Art cannot attain any genuine autonomy, because it is only produced out of the contradictions of what already is; its transcendence is a 'fractured' one: art has no other transcendence or autonomy than its contradiction of reality. Hence any art which seeks to anticipate these realities through abolishing the contradictions and dissonance is doomed to fail. Here Adorno is referring not just to the 'socialist realists', but also to the romantic, primitivist and moralist traditions, which would seek a way out of the contradictions of instrumental reason either in a return to a pre-civilised natural state, or in a subjective overcoming of these contradictions. (21) Adorno brings out this unspeakability of the utopian in a simple parable:

       'The relation to the new is modelled on a child at the piano
       searching for a chord never previously heard. This chord,
       however, was always there; the possible combinations are limited
       and actually everything that can be played on it is implicitly
       given in the keyboard ... What takes itself to be utopia remains
       the negation of what exists and is obedient to it. At the centre
       of contemporary antinomies is that art must be and wants to be
       utopia ... yet at the same time art may not be utopia in order
       not to betray it by providing semblance and consolation ... Art
       is no more able than theory to concretise utopia, not even
       negatively .. only by virtue of the absolute negativity of
       collapse does art enunciate the unspeakable: utopia.' (22)

The pessimism of this perspective is inescapable: nothing is pure; not even the most simple 'natural' joys such as eating or play are free of complicity through escapism in the evils of the whole: 'Because all happiness found in the status quo is an ersatz and false [!], art must break its promise in order to remain true to it.' (23) The importance of the dialectic to Adorno's thinking, and perhaps to a lesser degree to the other members of the Frankfurt school, should now be clear. Art's character is twofold: it is both 'autonomous' and a 'fait social'; something which seeks to rise above utility to eternal truths, yet is also unavoidably something produced, an artefact. (24) Modern art's very autonomy is a product and expression of bourgeois society, of the separation of art from other concerns such as ritual and its reduction to a commodity for exchange. Expression for Adorno has always entailed some degree of reification, yet this 'falsehood' is also the very condition of possibility of its protest and truthfulness. Thus Adorno could say: 'it is not ideology in itself which is untrue but rather its pretension to correspond to reality.' (25) Because art can never escape the circumstances of its production, as the vulgar Soviet aestheticians had recognised, its only autonomy, its only artistic and political worth, consists in its contradiction of reality, its truthful negation of the untruthfulness of the status quo, its negative utopianism.

The Critique of Positivism and Instrumental Reason

'... as [theological ideas] fade, the world of numbers is becoming the only valid one'. (26)

I have argued that the rehabilitation of the aesthetic by the Frankfurt school represented a turn away from the crude materialism of Soviet Marxists and a partial return to the repressed theological interests at the roots of Marxism, although at least in Adorno it is only at the most what Benjamin, speaking of Mallarme's philosophy of art, called a 'negative theology'. (27) The Soviet depreciation of the aesthetic is however part of a larger restriction of truth to 'scientific' knowledge, understood according to the example of the natural sciences and economics. Theology is accorded the same fate as other symbolic forms of cultural expression of being denied any cognitive or truth-bearing capacity; indeed all symbolic production is regarded as aboriginally a theological deception, founded in the reification of nature through animism. Hence the other side to the Frankfurt school's 'return to the theological' is their more critical stance towards positivism and scientific rationality. It is to this that we will now turn.

The distance between the Frankfurt school and a naive scientistic positivism can be seen through their debate with the critical philosophy of Karl Popper. (28) Here Adorno claims that the priority of formal logic is 'the core of the positivistic ... view of any science.' Positivism believes in the truthfulness of this method, yet this method--formal logic--is too simple to account for the complexity of reality, which is forced into its restrictive categorisations. Logic is incapable of grasping the contradictions of reality and is determined to reconcile everything into one harmonious system. Thus it misses the disjunction between appearances and reality, concerning itself purely with reality as empirically given and as capable of being categorised by logic. In mistaking appearances for reality it has no sense of the negativity of reality; it affirms current realities, as they appear, to be the truth. Thus positivism is reactionary in consolidating the status quo and making alternative visions impossible.

The Positivist delusion of a tidy, non-contradictory reality is linked with the idea of science as absolutely objective, free of the contradictions of the socio-historical contexts that produced it, an ideal of autonomy that is then made definitive for all knowledge. Positivism represses the truth that knowledge, like art, is always inescapably marked by the complex circumstances of its production. Knowledge, like art, has a contradictory 'dual nature': it is both 'independent and dependent'. (29) Adorno claims, following Horkheimer, that positivism, despite its pretensions to objectivity, is historically an expression of subjective reason. (30) This subjectivity can be seen both in the way that such rationality imposes categorical schemata upon the material, which is then classified according to these subjective structures rather than according to its own inherent logic. (31) More profoundly this subjectivism can be seen in the 'genealogy' of modern reason.

This genealogy of Enlightenment rationality was a central concern of the Frankfurt school and the subject of their most famous work, the 'Dialectic of Enlightenment'. Written during the height of the Nazi domination of Europe, this work sets itself the task of asking 'why mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.' (32) Whereas most commentators saw totalitarianism and anti-Semitism as a departure from Liberal Enlightened reason, Adorno and Horkheimer argued that the truth is more dialectical: while they still affirmed that 'social freedom is inseparable from enlightened thought', they also concluded that the recent descent of modernity into mythology and destruction was not just an aberration but implicit in the very logic of Enlightenment itself. (33) The same technology that had made possible rises in living standards had also driven the vast military operation of Nazi Germany and the most organised, efficient project of genocide in human history. At the heart of scientific reason lies the self-assertion of a dominating subject mythically separated from nature. Enlightened reason cannot simply be opposed to the mythologies from which it claimed to bring emancipation; the relation is more dialectical: 'myth is already Enlightenment; and Enlightenment reverts to mythology'. (34) This by no means leads Adorno and Horkheimer to reject the Enlightenment wholesale and embrace irrationalism; rather they argue that Enlightenment must become more self-critical and endeavour to liberate itself from 'blind domination'. (35)

The critique of Enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer provide is offered from four perspectives. Firstly, a reading of Homer's Odyssey presents Odysseus as the first bourgeois individual, the wandering adventurer who embodies 'homo oeconomicus'. (36) He typifies the subject's self-assertion against the objectified world through rational risk and renunciation, which serves to justify the oppression and domination necessary in his quest. (37) This quest is the only goal that matters, an end-in-itself which supersedes all other ends. Here it achieves a 'secularisation' of the world by abolishing all qualities and substantive teleology, as can be seen from the shadowy, unheroic, role given to the gods. (38) Selfpreservation, is the 'true maxim of Western civilisation', as Spinoza realised. (39) Thus, Adorno and Horkheimer argue, the foundational European sagas were already myths of Enlightenment.

The second element of the critique, a Nietzschean reading of Kant, reveals the archetypal enlightened philosopher's surprising affinities with the Marquis de Sade, in that his critical reason is the dominating spirit of science, ruthlessly rational and amoral, mythically opposing subject and object in order that the former may dominate the latter. Kant's categorical imperative, the bourgeois ideal of a man who is a law unto himself, is the forerunner of Nietzsche's superman, pure will to power. (40) Yet even Nietzsche recoils from the full horror of realising that this ideal can be fulfilled as much by the common criminal as by some noble hero. (41) Whereas Sade, in his character Juliette, is more ruthless in carrying the Enlightenment critique of reason through to its nihilistic conclusion. Here the domination of nature by the autocratic subject returns back on itself when the subject is transformed by domination into the image it projects: nature has its revenge when the rational subject is itself reduced to a blind object, bestial irrationality. The domination of nature only vindicates nature through a 'mimesis unto death'. (42) Rational scepticism can no longer be held at the door to preserve the status quo, as Kant had done. (43) The onslaught of demythologisation is relentless: in Sade's zoological sadism love is transformed into lust, pity is exposed as weakness, knowledge as violence. (44) Reason itself cannot escape this demythologising; the Enlightenment's quest for demystification becomes self-destructive, exposing its own nature as just another myth. This transformation of reason into its opposite is illustrated in the final two sections of the book, through more empirical accounts of the 'culture industry' and anti-Semitism.

Theology and Resistance

What however does this grand critique of Enlightenment have to do with the theological? At the most basic level, theology and the Frankfurt school share a common enemy in positivism, and the critique that Adorno, Horkheimer and others offer can be helpful to theology in questioning the hegemony of scientific knowledge which excludes theology. More profoundly the Frankfurt school's critique of Enlightenment represents an internal correction of the Marxist tradition's alignment with a naive positivist account of the hegemony of scientific knowledge, an alignment that led to an equally crude dismissal of theology alongside the aesthetic and other cultural realms. Yet it would be false to present the Frankfurt school simply as champions of theology against Enlightenment. Firstly the critique of Enlightenment is, as with the rehabilitation of the aesthetic, dialectical rather than entirely hostile. Equally theology, along with art, myth and other forms of symbolic expression, is not simply opposed to Enlightenment; rather they are dialectically related. Thus explicit references to the theological in Adorno and Horkheimer are mixed. Enlightenment certainly has an anti-theological secularising effect, always seeking to banish the gods. (45) Yet equally they insist that both the Homeric gods of ancient Greece and the God of Israel are already representatives of Enlightenment: the Homeric deities because they have dethroned the older gods and are no longer directly identified with things but only signify them, as Apollo is the god of the sun but not the sun itself; while the God of Israel in his creation ex nihilo rather than in an endless cycle and his banishing of all the nature deities is equally an expression of Enlightenment. (46) Similarly, while the theological, like art, is certainly capable, as the Soviet Marxists had argued, of serving the status quo through a mystification that brings false reconciliation with the contradictions of reality, yet crucially it is equally capable of providing resources for resistance and hope. Horkheimer brings out this radical element to the theological in his essays in the Critique of Instrumental Reason. Discussing threats to freedom, after a surprising profession of Jewish faith in an aside, Horkheimer makes the following extraordinary claim: 'The ideas which can relativise such experience are, in the last analysis, inseparable from theology, and as they fade, the world of numbers is becoming the only valid one'. (47) Transcendence itself is the necessary foundation for the hope that things might be otherwise: 'Does not Christianity ... stand in utter opposition to conformism, however much secular authority may have been indebted to religion in this respect? Non-conformity, freedom, self-determined obedience to Someone Other than the status quo may be regarded as typically Christian realities.' (48) Elsewhere, Horkheimer insists that theology does not share the indeterminacy of existentialist talk of 'authenticity', so that what is needed to cure this vagueness is 'a knowledge of the theological tradition, for our grasp of the inextricable meshing of human freedom and its conditionings, as well as the Kantian hope, have their historical roots in that tradition.' (49)

More specifically, while rejecting Cartesian dualism or a cheap psychologism, both of which ignore the objective material aspects of oppression, Horkheimer believes that traditional theological anthropology can preserve a radical sense of freedom neglected by the deterministic Soviet materialists, whilst also avoiding the former dangers of 'spiritualism'. Aquinas is cited with approval: 'the old principle that man is a rational animal, "a compound of soul and body," and with it the whole of traditional anthropology have not lost their validity.' (50) More explicitly:

        '"Soul" is becoming, in retrospect as it were, a pregnant
        concept, expressing all that is opposed to the indifference
        of the subject who is ruled by technology and destined to be a
        mere client. Reason divorced from feeling is now becoming the
        opposite of Anima or.soul.' (51)

Adorno is not entirely without similar claims, as when he asserts that the resurrection of the dead takes seriously the inseparability of the spiritual and physical. (52) Or when he insists:

        'The self should not be spoken of as the ontological ground, but
        at the most theologically, in the name of its likeness to God.
        He who holds fast the self and does away with theological
        concepts helps to justify the diabolical positive, naked
        interest.' (53)

Anthropology is not the only contribution theology can make to resistance; it is also implicated in the 'eschatological' questions of hope for the future and the 'ethical' question of what praxis might contribute to that hope. Thus Horkheimer links this hope with Judaism's messianism, which persists in a weaker form in Christianity's hope for the Messiah's return and the consummation of the kingdom of Heaven, the 'expectation that against all probability and despite the previous course of history paradise would one day come'. (54) As noted above, this theological hope was, according to Horkheimer, the root of Kant's utopianism, and his ideas of justice and freedom only make sense in the context of this transcendent foundation. (55) The social progressivism of Holbach and Condorcet is merely a secularised version of the old theological philosophy of history. (56)

The praxis that points towards this hope is none other than charity, love of neighbour. (57) This is the theological virtue which in secularised form remains the basis of the ideals of the French Revolution as well as Marx's philosophy. (58) The Christian 'pity' and 'compassion' that Sade had condemned as pure weakness is another form of the same awareness of the connection between the particular and the universal, between oneself and everyone else. Adorno and Horkheimer regard such pity as 'humanity in a direct form' and affirm that it is utterly opposed to that Roman virtus which, from the Medicis to the Fords, has been the 'only truly bourgeois virtue', Stoical apatheia, self-assertion unmoved by the sufferings of others. (59) That the idea of brotherly love is also found amongst secular radicals, and at times such as the eighteenth century seemed more alive amongst them than with the 'natural theologians' whose God was little more than a guarantor of the laws of nature, still does not detract from its theological origins:

       'Such selflessness, such a sublimation of self-love into love of
       others had its origin in Europe in the Judaeo-Christian idea that
       truth, love and justice were one ... The necessary connection
       between the theistic tradition and the overcoming of self-seeking
       becomes very much clearer to a reflective thinker of our time
       than it was to the critics of religion in by-gone days.' (60)

Horkheimer concludes this 1963 essay on theism and atheism with the claim that the situation of the last century has been turned on its head: the atheists now are those who are simply obedient to the status quo, while it is the believers, who cling to the 'thought of something other than the world, something over which the fixed rules of nature, the perennial source of doom, have no dominion', who might actually offer some resistance to the world of 'docile masses governed by clocks'. (61)

The 'Jewish' Critique of 'Christian' Positive Mythic Reconciliation

Such comments as the above indicate the extraordinary reappraisal of the theological that the Frankfurt school stood for within the Marxist tradition. Far from theology being simply deception complicit with the status quo, Adorno and Horkheimer bring out the historical indebtedness of Marxist resistance and hope to theology, and the contribution that theology still has to make to such practises. However as noted earlier it would be a mistake to present the Frankfurt school as simply 'pro-theology'. The dangers of theology are, for them, essentially the same as those of art discussed above, indeed they are the generic dangers of the mythical-symbolic: of providing a false premature reconciliation of the contradictions of reality. Theology then becomes consolation, ideology, justification of the status quo. The most interesting way of exploring this negative critique in the works of Adorno and Horkheimer is to see how they set up Judaism in order to criticise such tendencies in Christianity. (62)

We have already seen that the faith of Israel represents for Adorno and Horkheimer an advance of Enlightenment compared with its neighbouring nature religions. The world of Judaism is a 'disenchanted' one, where 'the idea of the patriarchate culminates in the destruction of myth'. (63) Yet, agreeing here with Weber, the Frankfurt school saw Christianity, particularly in its Catholic form, as a return to magic, a lapse from Jewish Enlightenment. The cult of angels and saints, the restoration of the feminine in the cult of the Virgin, and the belief in the analogia entis, amount to a certain re-enchantment of the world, so that Enlightenment when it reasserts itself in Calvinism is as opposed to the Catholic ordo as ancient Israel was to paganism. (64) Christianity cannot be classed purely as regression from Judaism in that both its universalising of a national religion and its stress on grace and love beyond law are an advance on Judaism (albeit latent in the latter). (65) Nevertheless the regression to magic is not merely accidental to Christianity but goes to its very heart: the belief in Christ and his cross. The belief in the incarnation absolutises the finite, Christ is 'the deified sorcerer', and this 'intellectualisation of magic' is the 'root of evil'. (66) The crucified god is, for Adorno and Horkheimer, a prematurely contrived reconciliation of civilisation and nature which is equally alien to Judaism and the Enlightenment. (67) The confession of the crucified saviour supposedly introduced torments into the Godhead itself, thus deifying suffering, with the consequence that the 'acceptance of destiny became a religion'. (68) The contrast with the Jews is made again: the Jews are 'not ascetical people as the first Christians were, they have never glorified or worshipped or sought or praised suffering but only experienced it ... According to the Jewish law men cannot become saints through suffering, as in Christianity.' (69) The 'deception' of Christianity lies in giving a positive meaning to suffering and self-denial. (70) Reconciliation is falsely declared to have arrived, so theology is transformed into theodicy, the justification of God, which is actually the justification of the status quo with all its injustices and oppression. This leads to a gross falsification of history: because the claim is made that the secret truth of history is that it is 'all to the good', the horrors of reality are redescribed as necessary sacrifices. (71)

Christianity is not unique in this crime; indeed it has bequeathed it to its children, Hegelian idealism and the Soviet Marxists. Thus Adorno and Horkheimer conclude: 'Christianity, idealism, and materialism, which in themselves contain truth, are therefore also responsible for the barbaric acts perpetrated in their name.' (72) The betrayal is most evident when these philosophies align themselves with political power. Thus the pre-Constantinian Christianity of the martyrs is more attractive to Horkheimer than Bernard of Clairvaux. Christendom is described as a betrayal of Christ and Kierkegaard is celebrated for his insistence that a Christian culture was a contradiction in terms. (73) Other theologians belonging to a more negative tradition are also approved of, including Luther, Pascal, and Barth, but not, perhaps surprisingly, the modern demythologisers, whom Horkheimer accuses of emptying faith of any content. (74)

These paradoxical or negative theologians are regarded as preserving more faithfully the negativity of Judaism into Christian faith. This Jewish negativity is marked in a number of ways: 'The Jews seem to have succeeded where Christianity failed: they defused magic by its own power--turned against itself as ritual service of God.' (75) Taboos were transformed into rational civilising principles, laws kept without any civic power to enforce them. Hope is founded on the experience of suffering without ever transforming this into a justification of the same, let alone a philosophy of world history: 'Jewish religion allows no word that would alleviate the despair of all that is mortal. It associates hope only with the prohibition against calling on what is false as God, against invoking the finite as the infinite, lies as truth.' (76) The Jews hold onto reconciliation only through the negative dimension of messianic 'expectation'. Jews have been so hated in Europe because they embody the forbidden that everyone desires: 'happiness without power, wages without work, a home without frontiers, religion without myth.' (77) The Jewish prohibition on idolatry and marginal political status has prevented them from becoming compromised by power, and has preserved an authentic negativity against all false consolations and idealisations of suffering. Horkheimer concludes: 'This element of contradiction is inherent in the Jewish tradition as it is in dialectical philosophy.' (78) The dialectical belief that transcendence and truth are only encountered in discrepancy and failure rather than in the false consolations of harmony is exactly as was noted earlier in Adorno's aesthetics. (79)

Concluding Comments

What can we in the twenty first century learn from these rebelious, difficult, Marxist intellectuals? For all those interested in social justice, in human emancipation, in the contradictions of our capitalist society, they serve as a reminder that the theological cannot simply be dismissed along with other cultural elements as distractions from material concerns. As Adorno and Horkheimer pointed out, against the crude materialism of the Soviet Marxists, these very concerns have their roots in theology and need this context as much today as ever, if they are really to imagine something other than what is. These insights have had a considerable subsequent legacy on continental thinking, where political philosophers from Derrida to Zizek and Badiou have 'returned' to theology, often negatively and via aesthetic concerns. On the other hand theologians and others already committed to culture might learn much from Adorno and Horkheimer's dialectical critique of all positive ideology. Their insistence that utopianism must be negative, cannot describe paradise now, is a healthy warning to those groups who think they can easily construct their utopia now or else that it has already arrived, whether they be the Soviet Marxists of yesterday, the worst theocrats of medieval Christendom, or, more probably in the West, those whose insidious Whiggish view of progress leads them to think that we have attained the capitalist 'end of history'. Adorno and Horkheimer recall theologians, as they do artists, to continue in their talk of another world while resisting the temptation to offer false consolations, to become resigned to the way things are, or to provide justifications of suffering, through asceticism or theodicy.

However a couple of critical questions remain about their negative critique of Christian theology. The first concerns the justice of their account of the cross as theodicy, of Christianity's glorification of suffering as necessary. While there are certainly currents of Christian thought that incline in this direction, it seems to have more to do with Hegel's philosophy which is the Frankfurt school's real target here and which they often seem to take as being identifiable with Christian theology. Thus in one curious passage Horkheimer casually speaks of St. Augustine as an ancestor of modern ideas of progress, whereas in fact the Bishop of Hippo's philosophy of history was exactly the opposite, much closer to the dialectical pessimism of the Frankfurt school. (80) Similarly Augustine's Platonic view of evil as a privation of being can be understood as insisting upon exactly the opposite of the necessity of suffering: evil is totally arbitrary and utterly unnecessary. It is Hegel, who turns the cross and resurrection into logic and then into the form of world history, so that the kingdom seems to have arrived in nineteenth century Prussia, who is responsible for the sins of historicist theodicy. Authentically Christian hope must remind itself that the cross was the work of sinful men, and that the Kingdom is still 'not yet', the scroll of world history can only be unsealed by the Lamb, not even by the philosophers.

The final question is more difficult and concerns whether the Frankfurt school are in danger of absolutising the negative and so missing its own inherent dangers. This is half acknowledged by Adorno and Horkheimer. Indeed we have already seen their critique of absolute demystification in Sade, and elsewhere they reject absolute negativity, the scepticism which sees the world as pure vanity, as equally mythic and apathetic as its pantheistic opposite. (81) However they argue that Judaism stops short of this total demystification, instead it 'conciliates magic by negating it in the idea of God', a move which seems to escape the censure of Christian 'magic' or enlightened reason. (82) It seems then one can still believe in something, just not anything in this world. Yet it is hard to see how this differs from Kant's arbitrary restraining of reason to make room for an equally unmediated faith. Indeed the vague talk of Enlightenment rescuing itself from myth seems often to look a little like Kant's utopian hope for the truly rational society, without the instrumental reason which characterises his epistemology and ethics. Once again one must ask, why should scepticism go thus far and stop before this prejudice? If explanations of the world as all or nothing are equally false, why should one refuse mediations that are not purely negative, such as the incarnation in Christianity? (83) More pointedly, it is unclear whether negative dialectics can ever deliver on its promises. If dialectic only produces negation then it remains completely determined by what it negates, because it is itself an empty method, the tool of the sophists, as Adorno himself recognises. (84) It is hard to see how this is anything other than a pseudo-transcendence that could never truly bring anything new. The dialectic has no immanent teleology. Thus for example Horkheimer's celebration of Schopenhauer for overcoming idealism by revealing the true motive of history as self-interest is problematic in exactly this direction. (85) By simply inverting idealism he repeats its paralysis but now through pessimism and useless pity. If everything is so soiled that there has never been any virtue breaking through, then it seems resistance is as futile as if there were nothing wrong. In a revealing Platonic image, Adorno and Horkheimer set up too sharp a choice:

       'The appeal to the sun is idolatry. The sight of the burning tree
       inspires a vision of the majesty of the day which lights the
       world without setting fire to it at the same time.' (86)

Yet we do not have to choose simply between man-made fires or looking at the sun; we can also see in the sun's light without looking directly at it and being blinded. For we cannot rule out the possibility that the new will come, even that it might already have been made flesh and dwelt amongst us, for those with eyes to see.

Notes

1. The Institut fur Sozialforschung was established as an affiliated institute of the University of Frankfurt in 1923. In 1931 Horkheimer succeeded Grunberg as the director, a post he held until his retirement in 1958. Although Adorno did not formerly join the Institut until 1938 he had been friends with Horkheimer since the 'twenties, and had worked alongside him throughout his directorship. In 1933 the Institut went into exile in Switzerland, before settling in New York and affiliating to Columbia University in 1934. It finally returned to Germany in 1949. Throughout Horkheimer's directorship the Institut's official journal was the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung. Cf. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). I have chosen to concentrate on the most influential figures from the Frankfurt school rather than the more obviously theological peripheral figures such as Bloch and Benjamin, to indicate how these concerns were not just peripheral to the project of the Frankfurt school.

2. See, for example, Adorno's firm censuring of attempts to reunite art with religion, in Theses upon Art and Religion Today'--hereafter 'Theses'--in The Kenyon Review VII:4, 1945, pp. 678-9.

3. Horkheimer's Art and Mass Culture, p. 292, cited in Jay p. 179.

4. Ed. Ronald Taylor, Aesthetics and Politics--hereafter A & P--(London: Verso, 1980), p. 168.

5. A & P, p. 172.

6. A & P, p. 168.

7. A & P, p. 194.

8. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment-hereafter D of E--(London: Verso, 1997), p. 19; Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Athlone Press, 1997), p. 80; cf. Theses, p. 680. This sense of art as vestigially connected to magic, ritual and the sacred resembles Walter Benjamin's account of the 'aura' of an artwork in his essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999), pp. 214-8.

9. Aesthetic Theory, p. 344.

10. Aesthetic Theory, pp. 86 f.

11. Aesthetic Theory, p. 126.

12. A & P, p. 194; cf. Theses, p. 678.

13. A & P, pp. 159.

14. Jay p. 179.

15. A & P, p. 194.

16. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 1996), p. 228.

17. Cf. Minima Moralia, pp. 155-7.

18. A & P, p. 176.

19. A & P, p. 176.

20. A & P, p. 168.

21. Cf. Theses, p. 677.

22. Aesthetic Theory, p. 32.

23. Aesthetic Theory, p. 311. Cf. D of E, p. 130 and Benjamin's famous phrase: 'There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.' Illuminations, p. 248.

24. Aesthetic Theory, p. 229; cf. Minima Moralia, pp. 225-6.

25. Cited in Jay, p. 179.

26. Max Horkheimer, Critique of Instrumental Reason--hereafter C of IR--(New York: Seabury Press, 1974), p. 157.

27. Illuminations, p. 218.

28. This controversy over the methods appropriate to the human and social sciences became a full public debate following the Tubingen meeting of the German Sociological Association in 1961 and Adorno's contributions to this debate which will be used here appeared in a volume with those of his opponents in 1969 as 'Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie', trans. G. Adey and D. Frisby, The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology--hereafter PD--(Heinemann: London, 1976).

29. PD, p. 4.

30. PD, p. 5.

31. PD, p. 7.

32. D of E, p. xi.

33. D of E, p. xiii.

34. D of E, p. xvi.

35. D of E, pp. xv-xvi.

36. D of E, p. 61.

37. D of E, p. 62.

38. Cf. D of E, pp. 55, 46, 89 and 49.

39. D of E, p. 29.

40. D of E, p. 114.

41. D of E, p. 100.

42. D of E, p. 57.

43. D of E, p. 92.

44. D of E, pp. 101 and 108.

45. D of E, pp. 90 and 92.

46. D of E, p. 8.

47. C of IR, p. 157.

48. C of IR, p. 149; cf. Ibid. p. 50.

49. C of IR, p. 7.

50. C of IR, p. 14.

51. C of IR, p. 60.

52. Minima Moralia, p. 242.

53. Minima Moralia, p. 154; cf. D of E, p. 198.

54. C of IR, p. 150. Here he was developing the ideas on the Messianic that Benjamin set forward in the Theses on the Philosophy of History.

55. C of IR, p. 71.

56. C of IR, p. 72.

57. C of IR, p. 150.

58. C of IR, p. 151.

59. D of E, p. 101.

60. C of IR, p. 50.

61. C of IR, pp. 50 and 49.

62. It is worth noting that almost all of those involved with the Frankfurt school were from assimilated uppermiddle class Jewish families. This was not something most of them chose to make much of, and in some cases it seems to have had minimal influence. Yet while there was no formal involvement with Jewish concerns such as Zionism, members of the Institute did undertake studies of anti-Semitism as we have seen that developed the work of Marx on the 'Jewish question'. More explicitly, two members of the Institute, Leo Lowenthal and Erich Fromm, had been involved in the Frankfurt Lehrhaus and the circle around Rabbi Nobel which included Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, while Benjamin's account of the messianic was clearly indebted to his reading of the Kabbalah. Cf. Jay pp. 29, 31-5, 56, 200.

63. D of E, p. 23.

64. D of E, p. 90.

65. D of E, pp. 176-7.

66. D of E, p. 177.

67. D of E, p. 114.

68. D of E, p. 122.

69. D of E, p. 123.

70. D of E, p. 178.

71. Benjamin made the same point against historicism in his biting ninth thesis on the Philosophy of History: 'There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism, Illuminations, p. 249.

72. D of E, p. 224.

73. C of IR, pp. 36-7.

74. D of E, p. 179; C of IR, pp. 46-8. Amongst the demythologisers, Horkheimer mentions Bishop John Robinson whose book Honest to God popularised the ideas of Paul Tillich. The latter was for many years a friend of Horkheimer and other members of the school. As a professor at Frankfurt he had helped in getting Horkheimer a chair, and earlier had supervised Adorno's Habilitation on Kierkegaard. Cf. Jay, pp. 24, 25, 29, 31.

75. D of E, p. 186.

76. D of E, p. 23.

77. D of E, p. 199.

78. C of IR, p. 113.

79. Cf. D of E, p. 131.

80. C of IR, p. 72.

81. D of E, p. 23.

82. D of E, p. 23.

83. D of E, p. 24.

84. Minima Moralia, pp. 244-5.

85. C of IR, pp. 63 ff.

86. D of E, p. 219.