Splinters in Your Eye. Martin Jay
and the American Academy in Berlin, where the earliest of these essays was composed. Sebastian Budgen and Cian McCourt of Verso have provided excellent editorial and contractual guidance, and the final results have benefited from the copyediting of Jennifer Harris and the indexing skills of Lois Rosson. Finally, let me try to acknowledge what always exceeds my ability to express: the gratitude I feel for the love and sustenance of my family, my daughters Shana and Rebecca, their husbands Ned and Grayson, my sister, Beth, and my grandchildren, Frances, Sammy, Ryeland and the most recent arrival, Sidney. But as always, it is to my wisest reader, most constructive critic and loving wife, Catherine Gallagher, that my debt is boundless.
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“The splinter in your eye,” wrote Theodor W. Adorno, “is the best magnifying glass.”1 This provocative assertion is made in section 29, called “Dwarf Fruit,” of Minima Moralia. It appears alongside other, now canonical aphorisms, most notably: “in psychoanalysis nothing is true except the exaggerations” and “the whole is the false.” Although not immediately obvious, Adorno’s vivid if implausible image plays on the celebrated admonition against judging, lest you be judged, from the Gospel of St. Matthew (7:3–4): “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me cast out the mote out of thine eye; and lo, the beam is in thine own eye?” For what is normally translated from the original Aramaic as “mote” in English is rendered as “Splitter”2 in German, the common German word for “splinter,” which is the way E. F. N. Jephcott then retranslated it into English. Although perhaps imprecise, the word choice was fortunate. For whereas “mote” suggests a speck of dust that can seem trivial in comparison to the “beam” (or sometimes “plank”) in the eye of the hypocritical judge, a “splinter” is far more irritating, producing a pain that cannot be ignored. Adorno, moreover, turned the metaphor in an unexpected direction. Not only did he adopt the perspective of the other—the brother whose eye has the “splinter” rather than his judgmental sibling with the “beam” in his—but, more importantly, he made the irritation itself into an inadvertent virtue by claiming that only through discomfort might we more clearly glimpse the truth. Indeed, only by registering the experience of suffering—one’s own and, through empathy, that of others—is valid knowledge of society possible.3 Magnification induced by pain produces the exaggerations that grant Freudian theory—and not it alone—its insights.4
There is, however, one important limitation that follows when one magnifies details or fragments, painful or otherwise: it inhibits our ability to view the whole with a panoptic gaze. Indeed, one of the consequences of what Adorno called our “damaged lives,” where “wrong life cannot be lived rightly,”5 is that there is no privileged vantage point from which to observe the totality and even less warrant to call what we can see “true” in a normative, emphatic sense. Nor is there a coherent meta-narrative that can read “world history” as if it were a meaningful story, whether of progress or decline.6 All we have left are shards of a splintered totality and a kaleidoscope of disjointed temporalities. If there is a coherent “whole,” it can be grasped only inferentially from its effects, in particular through the pervasive force of capitalist relations in our lives. But rather than being a whole replete with positive meaning, it is an oppressive totality that thwarts our potential to enjoy lives that might be “lived rightly” and provide a vision of a different whole that could be justly called the “true.”7 That laudable alternative can only be posited, if at all, as an absent desideratum in tension with what is the case. For, as Adorno was to put it in a discussion of Schoenberg’s atonal music, “the whole, as a positive entity, cannot be antithetically extracted from an estranged and splintered reality by means of the will and power of the individual, if it is not to degenerate into deception and ideology; it must assume the form of negation.”8
But however totalizing and pervasive capital’s oppressive power might have been for Adorno and his Frankfurt School colleagues, the gap between concept and object emblemized by the epistemological value of exaggeration means that it is never so dominant as to render critique itself impossible. After all, an exaggeration that knows itself as such necessarily registers an incongruence between idea and object or word and thing, and this implies that efforts to master the contingent messiness of the world through conceptual domination—and by extension, social, economic or political domination as well—will inevitably come up short. Because there is always a remainder that stubbornly resists inclusion, always a block to total control, there is also a chance for critical theoretical distance, and some opportunity, however slim, to undermine actual oppression. The concept of a fully “one-dimensional society” producing only “one-dimensional men,” famously elaborated by Herbert Marcuse, was thus itself an exaggeration allowing some room for resistance, some space for negation, to manifest itself. But what form such a critique should take—macro- or micrological in scale, immanent or transcendent in vantage point, hypotactically or paratactically presented, written esoterically or for a general public—has never been a question easily answered. Nor, of course, were the practical political implications clear that were supposed to be drawn from that critique, which ranged from the maximalist resistance of Marcuse’s “great refusal” to what Jürgen Habermas called Horkheimer and Adorno’s more cautious “strategy of hibernation.”9
Because these questions remain open, it would be problematic to formulate a fully coherent and normative, let alone “orthodox” version of Critical Theory comparable to the “orthodox Marxism” Georg Lukács defined in methodological terms in History and Class Consciousness.10 In fact, the very concept of orthodoxy is anathema to an approach that knows the dangers of “straightening” opinions—the Greek etymology of the word “orthodox”—into a uniform doctrine requiring uncritical fidelity. What goes under the name “Critical Theory” has always been an open-ended, internally contested field of overlapping but never fully congruent assumptions, methods and arguments. If it hangs together, it is more in terms of Wittgenstein’s family resemblances than in those of a rigid system with logical consistency, impermeable boundaries and fully shared conclusions. Even in terms of styles of presentation, its adherents have embraced a wide range of strategies, ranging from impressionistic thought-images (Denkbilder) and condensed aphorisms to social scientific research reports and extensive philosophical treatises. Symptomatically, when Leo Löwenthal, the last surviving member of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, was pressed to define it by his biographical interviewer Helmut Dubiel, he playfully kicked the can down the road: “It is a perspective. For that reason I’m always a bit baffled when someone requests that I offer a seminar on Critical Theory—I never know how to deal with that.” He then added, with his usual puckish humor, “I usually call my friend Martin Jay and ask him to define the main characteristics of the so-called Critical Theory. Now I’ll ask you—after all, you wrote a book about it.” To which Dubiel replied: “It’s really impossible to come up with a few general characteristics and say: this is Critical Theory.”11
Not only, pace Löwenthal, have I long shared Dubiel’s reluctance to essentialize the tradition into easily digestible sound bites, but I am also aware that however much a historian may seek to fashion a comprehensive and unified account, narrative coherence has been no less elusive. Even with the wisdom of hindsight, it has not been easy to craft a fully intelligible, neatly packaged history of what came to be called Critical Theory. An inadvertent brand name (like “the Frankfurt School”), it has seemed to some as little more than a euphemism for Marxism, coined only to cover its exponents’ radical tracks.12 But whatever its origins and intended function, it came to designate an ongoing, still developing series of efforts by a disparate and ever-growing cast of unruly theoreticians spanning several generations and situated in more than one location. During the earliest days of Max Horkheimer’s directorship of the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt—a position he assumed in 1930 and maintained for a quarter century, through his American exile and return to Germany—efforts were made to follow an organized, interdisciplinary research program. But the inclinations of different members and