We see a need in THE PROGRAMME for a major investigation of the core concepts developed under the aegis of The Frankfurt School, both in pre-Nazi Frankfurt and in the US--and, later still, back in postwar Germany.
We believe that they all worked at a single task. That was to identify the underlying fault in modernism and, at their most ambitious, to offer up the approaches for correcting the fault. In both their critique of modernism and the elements of alternatives we see the germination, rich and various, of what would become identified as the postmodern.
Marcuse is an especially emblematic symbol of the relationship of The Frankfurt School with the emergence of a consciously identified postmodernism in the mid-sixties. He developed his theories of civilization and its discontents along with Horkheimer and Adorno during the protracted crisis covering much of their lives, before, during, and after WWII. In one of the grand coincidences of recent history (some might say not so coincidenatlly), his revision of the mechanics of libidinal repression as a factor in human development came along just in time to fuel the social revolution mounted by the post-WWII generation in the sixties. He thus seems to offer us a useful signpost pointing directly at the birthing time of postmodernism as a defined and conscious concept.
The longevity of The Frankfurt School helps us to avoid thinking of postmodernism as a very recent development. Horkheimer et al have their intellectual roots in the nineteenth century; it is Hegel and Marx who equip them and who challenge them. They grew up with the twentieth century; that means they enjoyed their most energetic years at a time when the modern condition, grounded in mass production, the exploitation of nature, and the "commodification" of the individual, peaked, with all its benefits and all its horrors--the latter particularly marked out for German Jewish intellectuals like them. Their life-long effort was to wring from the situation, through Critical Theory, a correct analysis of the problem of modernism; and, despite their diffidence in the face of political realities, they always seemed to be searching for an answer. In their inability or unwillingness to formulate such, they manifested, perhaps, without realizing it, the abandonment of the pretenses of modern intellectual endeavor: a comprehensive answer to the dis-ease of the condition of industrialized humanity could not be formulated.
The unwillingness or inability to ground an explanation of the current condition of humankind in a totalistic set of terms unmistakably marks the postmodern temper. We have the sense that Horkheimer and Adorno, children of the previous era, students of Marx, were predisposed to discover the remedy for the discontent of modernism. Their failure foreshadows the different objective that postmodernists would set out for themselves--something other than a satisfactory articulation of a way for human civilization to go forward in its totality.
RELATION TO FREDRIC JAMESON: Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism comments usefully on the critical position of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Habermas.
A REVIEW of this book appears in Boston Book Review.
The Critical Theory Page at the University of Texas perpetuates and extends the thought of the Frankfurt School.