Čitaonica 4: Adorno vs Markuze o studentskim protestima

Letters Between Adorno and Marcuse Debate 60s Student Activism
July 26, 2013 Eugene Wolters 6 Comments

Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno were two intellectual power houses associated with the Frankfurt School. Adorno’s book with Max Horkheimer, “The Dialectics of Enlightenment,” explored the new forms of domination associated with liberal capitalism and the 20th century. Marcuse’s “One-Dimensional Man” argues that history, thought and society have become “one-dimensional” through its technological rationality and is constantly destroying the possibility for its critique.
For people unfamiliar with the history of the Frankfurt School, then, it may come as a surprise that Adorno and Marcuse were bitterly divided about the emerging student movements in the late 1960s. The eruption of student protest during May ’68 in France was met with similar movements in the US, Italy, Germany and elsewhere.
May ’68 and its associated uprisings against capitalism were not generally met with widespread support from Marxist professors, who could finally see theory put into praxis, as one might expect. In France, Marxists like Louis Althusser bitterly argued with the student movements about towing the Communist Party line, which many rejected. In Germany, Adorno and Habermas were highly critical of the student movements, alleging that they would easily collapse into a kind of left fascism.
This conflict with student movements did, however, spawn a new generation of radical thinkers who harbored a distrust for the “old guard” of Marxist academia. Jacques Ranciere wrote “Althusser’s Lesson” to criticize Althusser’s and other Marxist’s actions during the events of May ’68. Marcuse, while in America, mentored radical activists like Angela Davis and argued with with Adorno about the merits of the student movement.
Now, in this (albeit old) set of letters between Marcuse and Adorno from 1969, readers can get an inside glimpse of their argument. The PDF of the letters was found on the Trinketization blog.
They center around Adorno’s initial letter to Marcuse, where he complains about students from the SDS (Socialist German Student Union) who occupied a room at the Institute for Social Research.  Adorno had called the police, who treated the students “much more leniently” than the students allegedly treated Adorno. Marcuse responds, chastising Adorno for calling the police if his life was not in danger. Adorno later complains of getting “another dose of tear gas” in a class, related to the student activism.
In the letters,  Adorno refers to the barbaric behavior on the part of the students. Aside from drawing the hatred of many activists students during this time, Adorno was also subject to an incident that year where female students had exposed their breasts to him and showered flower petals on him after “If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease” was written on the blackboard. Though Adorno does not explicitly mention that incident in the letters, it’s likely that it was one of the many horrors he complains of to Marcuse. Adorno, in the letters, criticizes “the barbaric inhumanity of a mode of behaviour that is regressive and even confuses regression with revolution ” and notes that the word “professor” is now used condescendingly to “dismiss people” in Berlin. He says to Marcuse, “I take much more seriously than you the danger of the student movement flipping over into fascism.”

Read the letters here.

Bluberi wrote:Adornovi razlozi protiv okupacije instituta u odgovoru Markuzeu  su mi zaparali uši. Prvo se poziva na njegovu odvojenost od univerziteta, pa onda staje u odbranu interesa institucije brigom za dotacije. Policiju gleda iz ličnog iskustva, a ne kao državnu silu. Plaši se da bi optuživanjem samo Amerike protest imao i sebi nešto ideologijsko, kao da bez toga nije bio ideološki.
Inače Adornov pristup studenskom buntu je lični i konzevativan.

Bluberi wrote:Ako sam požurio ili na bilo koji način skrenuo topik, brišite post.

Furthermore, the German situation really is
different.

BERND RABEL Evropska unija je neprijatelj Nemačke

Интервју, Свет | Уредништво | oktobar 1, 2010 14:56

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Razgovarao Nikola Živković

Kada Vam neprestano neko govori da pripadate „narodu ubica“, tada ćete Vi da jednog dana kažete, „dobro, ja više ne želim da budem Nemac“, ili ćete da se pobunite protiv takve vrste ucene

Krajem septembra, u Beograd će doći – kao gost tribine Fonda Slobodan Jovanović – profesor Bernd Rabel: on će 30. septembra – na tribini Kolarčevog narodnog univerziteta – održati predavanje o manipulativnoj upotrebi medija, da bi 1. oktobra govorio na Pravnom fakultetu u Nišu. Ova zanimljiva ličnost dugo godina predstavlja izazov za različita mišljenja: neki ga smatraju za „najvažnijeg teoretičara šezdesetosmaškog studentskog pokreta u Nemačkoj“, dok je za druge „otpadnik“ koji je navodno izdao šezdesetosmaške ideje. Napisao je i veliki broj knjiga, naučnih rasprava i eseja: ne samo sa područja sociologije i filozofije, nego je mnogo pisao i o sadašnjim problemima Nemačke, kao i o važnim svetskim pitanjima. U knjizi o Dučkeu, Rabel zastupa kontroverznu tezu da je nemačko pitanje bilo jedno od glavnih preokupacija studentskog pokreta iz 1968. godine.

http://www.pecat.co.rs/2010/10/bernd-rabel-evropska-unija-je-neprijatelj-nemacke/

Jürgen Habermas is often thought of not only as Germany's leading philosopher but as quintessentially German. In the sense that few figures in American public life refer as often to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant or the principles of the Enlightenment, that is no doubt true. In fact, the figure he most resembles, both in his conception of what philosophy can do for public life and in his ideas about the role of intellectuals in a democracy, is an American -John Dewey. In 1947, Henry Steele Commager observed, "Until Professor Dewey speaks, America does not know what she thinks." He exaggerated, but it is easy to see what he meant. Dewey spent a long life thinking for his country, not so much trying to capture his countrymen's first thoughts as the thoughts they would have once they had thought things through. For four decades Jürgen Habermas has played just that role in Germany.
Like Dewey, he has led a double life: a professor of philosophy and social theory on the one hand and a political controversialist on the other. The similarities go further. Some are superficial but amusing: like Dewey, Habermas addresses his academic peers and their graduate students in clotted, impenetrable prose while writing sharp, clear, and briskly argued polemical essays for a wider public. He is no more compelling a lecturer than was the notoriously low-key Dewey; and it is a small metaphysical joke that Dewey and Habermas insistently emphasize the importance of discussion and deliberation in intellectual and political life while being themselves rather easily inclined to irritation with their critics.
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Habermas has always been closer to the center of events than Dewey. Today he is widely seen not quite as the philosopher-king of the government of Gerhard Schröder, but certainly as something like its philosophical conscience. Over the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, in particular, Habermas exercises all the influence that a much-admired mentor could. Indeed, in an argument with Fischer over the issue of European federalism a few years back, the French interior minister, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, affected to have confused Fischer with Habermas. Nobody could have mistaken Dean Acheson for John Dewey.
Such influence raises deep questions about the role of intellectuals in a democracy. Intellectuals in a democracy not only cannot be philosopher-kings, they must not want to be. All the same, they must lay claim to some authority, and it is not easy to say what it is-not political in the way the elected politician's is, but not expert authority either, as it would be if the subject at hand were narrowly "academic." There have been plenty of critics who have claimed that Habermas's polemical style-his attacks on German historians who insisted Nazism must be seen in relation to Stalinism, for example-is at odds with his own philosophical doctrines. Philosophically, he is committed to open discussion on the basis that debaters must assume one another's sincerity. Polemically, he treats his conservative opponents as creatures who have crawled out of the swamps of German irrationalism.
Indeed, Habermas detests and is detested by conservatives of all stripes: he is at odds with nationalists and social conservatives, but he is also hostile to the cultural impact of capitalism and therefore at odds with libertarian conservatives. He is at the same time suspect to many on the left both because of his past hostility to the insurrectionary fantasies of the 1968 student revolutionaries, but today also because of his support for the Gulf War and for NATO's intervention in Kosovo. Martin Beck Matustík's odd but engrossing (and mostly admiring) "philosophical-political profile" denounces the 1999 bombing of Serbia as NATO imperialism, and argues that Habermas's attempts to justify it as the kind of peace-keeping that Immanuel Kant endorsed in Perpetual Peace is bad politics and bad philosophy.
1.
The post-1945 German context in which Habermas has worked is vastly different from Dewey's early-twentieth- century America. Habermas was born in 1929; he was just old enough to be conscripted at the end of the war as a Flakhelfer, a field nurse in an anti-aircraft unit, but he was too young to carry on his own shoulders any guilt for youthful Nazi indiscretions. He is thus a member of the so-called "skeptical generation," the young people who were not implicated in Nazism, but who were old enough in the immediate postwar years to develop anxieties about the continuities between Nazi Germany and the Federal Republic.
Habermas has always been personally reticent. He once joked that he might begin to recall his past when he was seventy, but he is now seventy-three and still seems disinclined to autobiographical revelation. He distinguishes with perhaps implausible sharpness between our personal and private feelings that we have no obligation to explain to anyone else and what we are obliged to feel as citizens. His father, Habermas has said, took the Nazi regime for granted-he was head of the local chamber of commerce and a minor figure in the commercial administration in the Rhineland town of Gummersbach-but Habermas has not revealed his personal reactions to that fact. This has not stopped his critics from accusing him of wanting Germans to wallow in endless guilt about Auschwitz-"political masturbation" as the novelist Martin Walser calls it. But it is clear enough that they are just wrong.
He insists that confronting Germany's Nazi past in the sense in which it concerns him is a civic obligation, not a matter of personal purification. In the same way, when he observed that the German reaction to the Nuremberg Trials was sullen resentment at "victor's justice," this was not to complain that individual Germans did not feel badly enough about their Nazi past, but that they did not meet the duty of citizens to work through their past political mistakes and eliminate the danger of repeating them. This concept of "working through" or "working out" the past has been central to many of his recent essays, but for all the psychoanalytic resonances of such ideas, he has yet again insisted that this is a matter not of purging individual guilt but of being a good citizen. It is not obvious that we can detach personal and civic motives in quite this way, however; there surely has to be some individual, personal reason to take the duties of citizenship seriously.
Habermas is mostly known in the United States as a philosopher and political theorist. The connections between his politics and his philosophical ideas are not particularly easy to describe. Martin Beck Matustík's Jürgen Habermas is too partial in its treatment and too eccentrically organized to do the job satisfactorily. And Matustík's concern to refight the battles of 1968 distracts him from the task of explaining what Habermas has been thinking since reunification. Jan-Werner Müller's Another Country, on the other hand, provides a wonderfully lucid account, not only of Habermas's reactions to the strains of German reunification but of the relation between Habermas's views and those of his critics and allies. One can hardly complain that in the nature of the case, this leaves it to the reader to work out how the radical thirty-year-old turned into the sixty-year-old defender of constitutional, democratic government.
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It is tempting to say that the history of Habermas's ideas, both politically and philosophically, has amounted to a move away from Marxism and toward American constitutionalism; but it is a temptation to be kept under control. For one thing, Habermas's first philosophical interests were existentialist rather than Marxist; for another the Marx in whom Habermas was interested was the radical philosopher of the early 1840s, and not the older Marx who thought he had found the "iron law" of capitalist development. And even Habermas's American affinities are complicated; he has lately become interested in American constitutionalism and the work of John Rawls, but he has also discovered that as long ago as 1962, when he wrote The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, he was thinking along the same lines as Dewey when he wrote The Public and its Problems in 1927.
Nor is the lineage of Habermas's politics simple. He was first noticed in 1953 when he published a ferocious attack on Heidegger in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He became one of the intellectual leaders of the German student movement from the late 1950s, but decided in 1967 that the student enragés were in danger of advocating "left fascism." Those two words caused a breach in relations with his natural followers that took ten years to heal. In 1987, Habermas took up his old role as a controversialist when he set off the so-called Historikerstreit, the battle over the vexed question whether Germany could treat Nazism as largely an exaggerated reaction to Bolshevism and therefore something to be "got over."
It was the historian Ernst Nolte who had argued this, but the issue had surfaced in 1985 during President Reagan's ill-judged visit to the SS cemetery at Bitburg, when he and Chancellor Kohl gave the impression that some sort of ceremony of forgiveness was intended. German reunification set off another controversy about the ways in which the "new" Germany should and should not relate to pre-1945 Germany, and Habermas has played a very public role in defending Verfassungspatriotismus, "constitutional patriotism," as the only basis for a reunited Germany that will not fall back into old, bad habits.
To an American reader, much that Habermas says about constitutional patriotism is unsurprising. With two and a quarter centuries of continental-scale federalism, and 170 years of multi-ethnic immigration behind them, Americans find the idea of a post-ethnic state commonplace, and cannot understand why Europeans are so anxious about the prospect of a federal Europe. But, as Matustík reminds us, Prussia, the Wilhelmine Empire, and the Third Reich weigh heavily on the Berlin republic. Preaching constitutional patriotism in Germany is not preaching platitudes; it is a reminder of the disastrous German past. Habermas's insistence on "anamnestic solidarity"-on refusing as a matter of political principle to forget the victims of ethnic nationalism and its Nazi excesses-has a particular urgency in Germany.
2.
Habermas has never been wholly at ease in his own country. Almost sixty years after the end of World War II, it is hard to remember how great the contrast was in the 1950s between the wholesale physical destruction of Nazi Germany and the survival in their jobs of most of those who had taught and worked in the pre-war universities, and elsewhere. As a philosophy student in Bonn, Habermas took his first doctorate with two philosophers from the pre-war era-Ernst Rothacker and Oskar Becker; both had been active and enthusiastic Nazis. He disliked the way the Adenauer government and its American backers eroded the denazification program under the pressures of the cold war, but there was little to be done about the fact that almost the only philosophers around were those who had survived the Nazi purges.
His first public protest against attempts to sweep the past under the carpet and resume "normality" was provoked by the republication of Heidegger's lectures from 1935. Heidegger had praised the "inner greatness" of the Nazi movement, and without the least embarrassment left the phrase untouched on their republication in 1953. The idea that anyone could without apology describe Nazism in this way after Belsen and Auschwitz was outrageous, and Habermas said so. More important, perhaps, was the sharp line he thus drew between writers like Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, who hoped they could just say nothing about their Nazi past, and critics who thought that the new Federal Republic of Germany could not function as the liberal democracy it claimed to be unless there was a public reckoning with the past.
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Awarded his doctorate in philosophy in 1956, Habermas went to work with Theodor Adorno at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, where he might have expected to flourish. In the early 1930s, the institute had sheltered some particularly interesting social thinkers, led by Max Horkheimer and Adorno; they had gone into exile in the United States, but in 1950 returned to Germany where Horkheimer took up the directorship of the institute. With Herbert Marcuse and others, they had been responsible for the development of so-called Critical Theory-"critical" because it aimed not only to explain how modern mass societies work, but to show the price their operations exacted in human happiness. Critical Theory owed much to Marx in its analysis of social and economic inequality, but owed as much to psychoanalysis in its analysis of the other miseries of life in modern society. Habermas was widely seen as the great hope for a revived Critical Theory.
The combination of Marxian and Freudian themes was potent. Herbert Marcuse's claim in One-Dimensional Man and Eros and Civilization that the flourishing consumer societies of the West were sustained by novel forms of sexual repression and a diversion of our energies from the search for real human happiness fueled the radicalism of the Sixties. But Marcuse stayed in the United States, and had no great following until the 1960s. Horkheimer, on the other hand, returned from the United States to Germany thoroughly deradicalized, or to put it more kindly, very frightened that he might open the door to radicals on the right if he encouraged radicals on the left.
Habermas was well to Horkheimer's left. Although he was not tempted by the ecstatic overtones of Mar-cuse's work, he became a good friend of his and learned a great deal from him. Indeed, Habermas's most radical thoughts about the connection between philosophical speculation and social emancipation came only a few years later, in Knowledge and Human Interests. In that book he imagined a form of social inquiry whose object was neither the mastery of the world that the physical sciences sought nor the passive understanding sought by some forms of history, but freedom, or emancipation. One model for such an emancipatory science was obviously Freudian psychoanalysis and another was Marxism, suitably understood; but the implications for social science were hard to see, and Habermas never followed them up. Readers who thought Habermas had glimpsed something important but elusive have always been disappointed.
As much as Marcuse, Habermas thought that modern society was irrational. Among its irrationalities was trying to keep the peace with nuclear weapons, and Habermas became a leading figure in the anti-nuclear movement of the late 1950s. This got him into trouble with Horkheimer, who feared his radicalism would bring the institute into disrepute with the Adenauer government. Habermas went to Marburg to work with Wolfgang Abendroth, one of the few professors who had been active in the Resistance. But Habermas was already a rising star, and soon became professor of philosophy, first in Marburg and then in Heidelberg. Two years later, in 1964, Horkheimer retired, and Habermas succeeded him as professor of philosophy and sociology in Frankfurt.
3.
Habermas has been a key figure in two very different epochs-first, in the tumultuous 1960s, and then in the anxious and uncertain decade after German reunification. For five years after his return to Frankfurt, he was the leading thinker of the German student movement. This made him the leading thinker of the extraparliamentary reform movement in West Germany; for when the German Social Democrats renounced their commitment to socialism, the student wing of the party refused to go along and was expelled. It became a loose coalition of the forces of the nonparliamentary left, and the one place where socialists and opponents of a nuclear NATO could act in concert. It was also the nursery of the Red-Green coalition that has governed Germany since 1997, a fact that periodically enrages the conservative opposition and mildly embarrasses the Schröder government.
The targets of the student opposition were those of the student movement everywhere else, but with important local differences-anti-nuclear protests were more urgent in Germany than elsewhere, for obvious reasons; the Vietnam War seemed self-evidently part of an obnoxious American imperialism-but it was the death of Benni Ohnesorg, a student shot by the police during a 1967 demonstration against the Shah of Iran, that lit the fuse of student protest in West Germany. The West German government was no more capable of responding calmly to protest than the Gaullist government in France was, and had already built up a good deal of resentment by its heavy-handed attempts at manipulating news. In German universities a further issue was the students' sense that their teachers had been acting in bad faith-that their professors knew that the world was the inhuman and oppressive mess that Marx and his successors had described, but were determined not to allow their students to act on that knowledge.
An all-too-familiar sequence of events unfolded. The extremists took over from the radicals, and things got out of hand. Debates turned into sit-ins and occupations, and in the end liberal professors called the police to end student takeovers of university buildings. Habermas took part in the students' protests against the Vietnam War during 1966, while Horkheimer and Adorno dismissed the protests as mere anti-Americanism. By 1967, the two leading figures among the students were Rudi Dutschke at the Free University of Berlin and Hans-Jürgen Krahl at Frankfurt, and they began to turn the universities into bastions of political protest. Krahl was the student of both Adorno and Habermas. The increasingly fraught relationship between Krahl and his teachers culminated in the occupation of the institute in January 1969, and the clearing of the building by the police.
Whatever it was, it was not a generational conflict. Marcuse was of the same generation as Horkheimer and Adorno; they and he had worked together before the war. Now he sided unhesitatingly with the student enragés. Matustík wonders whether it was Marcuse's Jewishness that made the difference; having seen how murderous a society could become, he was readier to believe that America and the West more generally were committing something close to genocide in the third world. This suggestion begs too many questions in Marcuse's favor. One might think, and Marcuse himself later came to think, that protecting universities as places of relatively open discussion was more important than turning every place and every situation into the scene of political confrontation. In that case, one might think his political judgment was as bad as the leaders of the student movement, and that he sided with them for exactly that reason.
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There was a real political crux here. Marcuse never-or never quite-said that he was in favor of violent insurrection, let alone that he thought violent insurrection might succeed, in 1968. He said, as anyone might, that there was a great difference between violent resistance to oppression and violent aggression. But he pressed that thought in an unnerving direction when he suggested that the liberal defense of free speech and toleration could itself be oppressive, and drew the inference that silencing the critics of the left was simply resistance to oppression. This was talk that might frighten any teacher; it plainly frightened both Horkheimer and Adorno, and it frightened Habermas.
The crisis in Habermas's relations with his student followers came early, immediately after the killing of Benni Ohnesorg in June 1967. Ohnesorg was shot in the back as he was running away from a demonstration against the Shah of Iran. The Berlin police tried to cover up what had happened; students erupted in Berlin and Frankfurt. At a conference in Hannover on June 9 Ha-bermas reacted against Rudi Dutschke's enthusiastic support for a policy of continuous confrontation with all and every manifestation of authority. Habermas said, not especially woundingly, that Dutschke had developed "a voluntarist ideology which in 1848 one would have called utopian socialism," but fatally added that in 1967 its proper name was "left fascism."
Whether or not "left fascism" is a contradiction in terms-Marcuse's view-it was a terminal insult. In Germany, it seemed more unforgivable than elsewhere. It put a lasting chill on Habermas's relations with the students who had thought of him as their intellectual and political leader. It is, however, impossible to imagine Habermas sharing Marcuse's view. Habermas was always a defender of Enlightenment ideals of open discussion and constitutional democracy; Marcuse was a revolutionary and a romantic believer in the transformative power of apparently irrational action. To Habermas, that was the first step toward what he attacked as "actionism," the belief in insurrectionary action for its own sake. To call that "left fascism" was not out of place; as Habermas pointed out, Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence-written as a manifesto of early-twentieth-century French syndicalism-was admired by both Mussolini and Lenin.