Seyla Benhabib, from MAPPING IDEOLOGY

Rather than reading this version which is a draft, you can download the corrected and cleaned up text of all the annotations and my introduction to them here now called, "One Possible Narrative of the Concept of Ideology since Marx". 

“The Critique of Instrumental Reason” - Seyla Benhabib

Seyla Benhabib

Benhabib’s primary interest in this text is to explore the problems which the shift in the work of the Frankfurt School toward the notion of instrumental reason causes for the critical project itself. To demonstrate the stakes, she first spends a bit of time elaborating the critical project as understood in an earlier phase of the school’s development, where critique had three primary modalities; immanent critique (of political economy); defestishizing critique; crisis diagnosis. So we first must grasp just what these are. Benhabib, quoting Adorno, offers this explanation of the transformative task of immanent critique effects “‘the concepts, which it brings, as it were, from the outside, into what the object, left to itself, seeks to be, and confront it with what it is. It must dissolve the rigidity of the temporally and spatially fixed object into a field of tension of the possible and the real’” (80). This approach is parallel to Marx’s procedure of show how the concepts by which political economy had hitherto comprehended its own functioning turn around into their opposites when scrutinized. It also maps on to Hegel’s dialectic of essence and appearance. The “dissolving” that Adorno writes of is intended to allow us to comprehend the “unity of essence and appearance as actuality” (80).  Defetishizing critique bases itself in Marx’s analysis of the commodity form and their illustration of the ways in which socio-historical processes are reified as natural. Crisis diagnosis was centered on the analysis of crises of whatever sort and tying these to political economy and the contradiction inherent in production against a backdrop of Marx’s analyses (70, 83-4).  These modalities of the critical project - circa 1937 - undergo substantial modification after Horkheimer and Adorno write Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), in which the notion of instrumental reason makes its appearance. Benhabib gives a very patient reading of this book, but for my purposes here, only a few of its central aims and contentions (per her analysis) will be detailed. Horkheimer and Adorno contend that “the promise of the Enlightenment to free man (...) cannot be attained via reason that is a mere instrument of self-preservation” (75). The reason why, in their view is that reason itself operates on the basis of the subject’s “eternally self-identical ‘I think’” which they read as entailing a “fear of the other” which can only resolve itself by “domination of the other”, an other “identified with nature” and with an internalization of the other as “victim” (75). This process is describes by a “mimesis - unto death” (76). Reason, now totally engulfed by its new designation as instrumental reason “the deep structure of Western reason” (78) has led to the domination of positivism and “the development toward total integration” - “total integration” here being roughly equivalent to the “wholly administered society” in Adorno’s other work or the Marcuse’s notion of “one-dimensionality” (77). The sole remaining note of hope in this otherwise unremitting pessimism is the “Utopian principle of non-identity logic” which the critique “must deny as soon as it would articulate it discursively” (78). [Here we might note a few parallels, 1^st to Laclau’s notion of the universal as universal only when unoccupied by any positive content (thus the need for an “empty signifier”), or Zizek’s discussion in the introduction of the “antinomy of critico-ideological reason” (17).] This “genealogy of reason” that Adorno and Horkheimer carry out has the additional effect of transforming both the object and the logic of critique in paradoxical ways. When immanent critique becomes negative dialectics Adorno thereby “undermine[s] identity of concept and object, essence and appearance, possibility and necessity” derived from Hegel and arguably still constitutive for Marx (81). Political economy is not longer the object here but instrumental reason itself (the authors recognized that there was a paradox in making use of reason incessantly in their critique of reason, but they never found any solution to this problem). What has been lost here, in spite of the aforementioned utopian principle, is any emancipatory dimension to the “immanent logic of the actual” (81) and thus, arguably, its grounding in marxism as such (though Benhabib does not draw that point out as much as one might wish). When a defetishizing critique is transformed into the critique of culture it is done because Horkheimer and Adorno have lost their faith in the continued pertinence of Marx’s analysis, they counter (in Benhabib’s words) that “the increasing rationalization of the productive sphere and the increasing integration of production and exchange, monopoly capitalism begins to develop into a social reality where all contrasts disappear and alternative to the present become inconceivable” (82) they also feel that in contrast to the past “exchange value is marketable in so far as it can present itself as the carrier of an unmediated use value, into the enjoyment of whose ‘spontaneous’ qualities the advertising industry seduces us” (83). These changes to the way that capitalism function in their view all serve to “manipulate the revolt of repressed nature into submission, oblivion, and pseudo-happiness” (83). [This shift has some interesting components, many of which are also available through Lacan’s notion of the commanded enjoyment, but Horkheimer and Adorno also insist on the “decline of the ego” as an aspect of this shift in the capital form and I find this hard to credit, if anything it seems to me that ideological capture is ever more potent to the extent that it feeds an ego and assists its denials and disavowals of subjection and of the unconscious.] Given the reversals and outright abandonment of political economy and the commodity form as the objects of critique, the whole notion of crisis diagnosis is lost. Instead we are given what Behabib calls a “Retrospective Philosophy of History with Utopian Intent” whose analysis of the present is that the “ethical substance” of the social bond is lost, which “in industrial-technological civilization dries up the cultural sources of group revolt which had hitherto been carried out in the name of the memories of past rebellions” (84). Benhabib tells how Marcuse extends this line of thinking  to propose a notion of “redemptive memory” though it “cannot be reactivated within the continuum of history, precisely because history now unfolds in such a ay as to deny its own past, its own history” (85). Another paradoxical consequence of this entire line of thinking is that critical theory itself, is in its own understanding, now “outside the historical continuum” (85). 

Horkheimer & Adorno

It would seem that with these theorizations and retheorizations that the Frankfurt school had reached a crisis of its own. Its critiques remain dependent upon ‘reason’ and yet are ostensibly against it in all such forms. It proposes a logic of non-identity which it can only delineate in the terms of that which it purportedly is meant to challenge. By its, to my mind far from conclusive, dismissal of the commodity form and the centrality of political economy as well as any hope that collective labor might have emancipatory potential that the Frankfurt school of this period hadn’t just painting itself into a corner but walled itself up in a room. There are many interesting propositions and insights to be found in these works, but used as theoretical weapons they seem almost sure to turn against the critic.