Marxist Modernism and the Crisis of Social Enlightenment: Gillian Rose, the Frankfurt School, and the Dialectic of Culture and Emancipation

Nigel Tubbs on Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory

Charles Demuth, Figure 5 in Gold (1923) | Metropolitan Museum of Art

Gillian Rose is an English philosopher whose academic work has the reputation of being very difficult. She received popular attention later in her life with the autobiography called Love’s Work (1995), written while she was dying of ovarian cancer. A great deal has been written about this part of her life, but relatively less attention is given to her earlier sociological work that engaged some of the most pressing concerns of her time.

Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory, collected and published now for the first time, were given at Sussex University in 1979. The lectures were about a group of German intellectuals from the Frankfurt School in the first half of the 20th century. (At the time she was giving the lectures, she had completed her first book on Adorno, and she was two years away from the publication of her second book, Hegel Contra Sociology.) The members of the Frankfurt School were deeply interested in why social enlightenment failed in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, and Rose’s 1979 lectures offer some insights into its continuing failure in the twenty-first century.

What is Social Enlightenment?

As a sociologist, Rose’s overriding interest was in the idea of contingency. At its most simple, an experience of contingency is an enlightening experience of being dependent upon something, perhaps by being already within it. Sociologists used to talk about contingency as our “social determination.” They pointed out that we are all shaped by the society we are born into. It tells us how to behave, how to speak, how to dress, how to relate to others, how to earn a living, how to love, how to entertain ourselves, and how to die. It gives us the meanings that hold (and at times do not hold) our lives together in ways that makes sense to us.

It is a short journey from this enlightenment about our contingency to seeking further enlightenment regarding the character of the society that we are contingent upon. This requires forensic sociological (also sometimes called philosophical, political and economic) examination of our social conditions. Moreover, if these social conditions are found to be unjust, then, because they are man-made, they are not set in stone and can be changed. This second social enlightenment opened young minds in particular up to the possibilities for social reform: identify the source of the contingency that dominates and carries injustice and seek to overthrow it. The accompanying belief, or hope, here has often been that human nature is also contingent upon the conditions that form it, and that just as one kind of human being is shaped by capitalism in its own image, a different kind of human is also possible under different conditions.

But ever since Plato’s time (5 – 4th century BCE), social enlightenment about contingency has cast two perpetual shadows: the shadow of scepticism and the shadow of power. First, if values, authority, and even truth itself are also contingent upon their social conditions, then they are not absolute and certain, but relative and uncertain. It was deemed respectable in Antiquity, even clever, to see that enlightenment about contingency could and perhaps should become scepticism. Nothing can be known for sure. One relative truth is as good as any other because, as Pascal later recorded, truth on one side of the Pyrenees is error on the other. Second, what if the conditions of our contingency were deliberately shaped by some in their own interests and against the collective interest, and what if, in addition, these powerful interests had found ways to prevent social enlightenment in order to protect their privileges? And what if, as happened in Europe in the 1930s and perhaps again today, the powerful found ways to use scepticism as a weapon against social enlightenment? Presenting the shadows of social enlightenment in this way takes us directly to Rose’s 1979 lectures.

Rose looked to the Frankfurt School sociologists (associated with the Institute for Social Research founded in 1923; Max Horkheimer became director in 1930) because they shared her own need to critically examine the character of social relations, or society, through the lens of contingency. Their own time and place meant that they were unavoidably having to explore how contingency was expressing itself in the culture and politics of fascism. Included in the success of fascism was its use of scepticism against the truths and values of the establishment. In today’s terms, we might characterize such a culture as claiming that “everything they tell you is fake news. Everything we tell you is true – at least today, but not necessarily tomorrow. This makes us more honest than them. It also means that we cannot be accused of being inconsistent or self-contradictory. It is those with the [liberal] universal truths who are the hypocrites.”

Modernism

The Frankfurt School set up two parallel strands of enquiry. What was society using to prevent social enlightenment, and were there ways in which this could be resisted? The answers, as Rose shows in her lectures, were philosophically rich in terms of diagnosis, but rather less so in terms of remedy. Both were rehearsed in the Frankfurt School and again in Rose’s lectures, where she introduced her students to the key thinkers, through the culture of Modernism in art.

Why art? Because Frankfurt School sociology believed that capitalism had become personal. Commodification had found its way out of the marketplace of objects that are bought and sold, and into the soul, the psyche, the personality, the identity of each individual. So, if art expresses subjectivity, one should be able to see this cultural domination at work there. Why Modernism in particular? Because it hoped to develop practices that while resisting its own commodification in the marketplace, also contributed to social enlightenment.  

For Georg Lukács (1885-1971), all cultural products were commodities. Modernism was part of this decay. Art needed to achieve its autonomy from capitalism and could do so as realism, in which real people would be portrayed in real struggles with their environment, and not as patronising characters abstracted from concrete existence. Ernst Bloch (1885-1997) saw fascism gaining hold over the grievances held by the young and giving them utopian anti-capitalist visions of a future. Modernism could offer new artistic forms for new kinds of experience that would explode present contradictions and open up possibilities and hopes for a non-authoritarian, perhaps even a revolutionary future. For Lukacs art was unavoidably collusion. For Bloch it was oppositional.

Walter Benjamin (1892 – 1940) argued that art enjoyed an autonomy only because it is commodified, but he thought that new technology, especially mechanical reproduction, would destroy this autonomy and make art amenable as a potential political weapon. Slightly against the grain, here, Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) and Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) questioned claims that new art could create any kind of new enlightenment. The culture industry, whether avant-garde or for mass popular consumption, dissolved any potential enlightenment by a reduction to the simple in the case of popular music, and by a removal from intelligibility in the case of new music. The implication here was that art forms could not escape becoming commodities in the marketplace and became nugatory as forms of resistance and radical political change.

Rose argued that Lukacs and Bloch, for example, ignored the distortion of a work of art on its journey from production to reception. Berthold Brecht (1898-1956) also sought to create new forms that would escape the illusions of capitalism. For her, the question of such distortion becomes central. What is the point of telling people about the new if they can only receive this and assimilate it by means of the old?

The real impact of her lectures centres around extending this insight into domination beyond works of art and into the very possibility of critical consciousness or social enlightenment at all. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, even social enlightenment and its critique of ideology was being distorted by its contingency upon and within the very conditions that it was being critical of. Enlightenment not only uncovered contingency and ideology, it also reproduced it.

Critical consciousness was now perpetuating and reinforcing the society it was trying to overcome. This was given its fullest and most dramatic expression by Horkheimer and Adorno in their idea of the “dialectic of enlightenment.” This carries the melancholic, perhaps tragic insight, that the ideals of enlightenment, rather than being a means of liberation, have become a new form of domination or even of enslavement in people’s lives. Enlightenment had created the opposite of what it had promised.

Gillian Rose,  Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Verso, 2024. 176 pp. $24.50 (paperback)

The Enlightenment of Modernity

Of course, it comes as no surprise to many cultures around the world that Western enlightenment and Modernity brought with it new forms of, at times, unspeakable domination, enslavement and horror. Equally, it comes as no surprise to many women or minority cultures in Western democracies that enlightenment modernity carried prejudices and persecutions that contradicted the ideals it espoused. But here is the rub – or the dialectic of enlightenment. The means at Modernity’s disposal to overcome such horror and prejudice – social enlightenment – is not fit for purpose. It colludes with existing conditions by cancelling (commodifying) every radical idea. Every enlightenment becomes assimilated into the system it opposes, because every such idea carries and repeats the conditions that make it possible. Enlightenment is granted no immunity from its collusion with the myth it seeks to overcome. As such, as a tool for change on any grand scale, social enlightenment is futile. It promised freedom, yet reinforced domination.

While it may not be the most widely discussed idea, the experience of the self-defeating dialectic of enlightenment has nevertheless become a dominant culture in Western democracies in forms that are completely familiar to people. Perhaps the most well-known academic form is that of postmodernity. In her later work, Rose argued that it represents enlightenment resigning itself to a despairing rationality which, having tried (unsuccessfully) to abandon reason, survives only as a dialectic of nihilism. However, of much more immediate relevance to people’s lives is ‘authoritarian populism’, which feeds on the scepticism and cynicism created when the progressive claims of social enlightenment are experienced as failing or, worse, as the double-standards of a self-interested elite.

This is not new. After World War I in Germany the ‘frontline generation’ turned against the establishment which represented and repeated the flawed promises of enlightened progress. Failed by assertions of rational truth, people were instead receptive to something that felt true. And what felt true in Germany in particular was the national comradeship of the troops returning from the battlefields of World War I, a comradeship forged in death and destruction. The leader who could tap into this cynicism towards the old guard and offer instead a visceral truth of blood and soil, would win the hearts and minds of the people. Then, and now, the self-defeating dialectic of enlightenment fuels these cultures of blood and soil in the wake of its own failures.

If in America, one of the explanations of the Democrats’ defeat in 2024 concerns the gap between college and non-college educated people, then Rose’s lectures add an insight of enormous significance. It is becoming clear that critical education itself, or social enlightenment, no longer convinces people in the way it once did, with its progressive claim that it will improve their lives and those of their children. Seen as the path to this illusion, or lie, education becomes the problem, but not the solution. Here, remarkably, the dialectic of enlightenment shapes the experience of the everyday economic reality of ordinary people’s lives. And so, it seems, voters in the United States rejected the progressive altogether, including the whole of the virtue tradition and its liberal values.

Rose’s lectures, then, open us up to the idea that the despair issuing from the failure of social enlightenment has expressed itself in the vote for populist authoritarian government. What is happening is the result of people concluding that social enlightenment is a busted flush. This damning indictment might be the tolling bell, at least for a while, for almost every kind of progressive political vision that bases itself, in different ways, on some kind of social enlightenment.

Rose’s Most Difficult Point: The Illusions that We Life With

What self-defeating enlightenment has never taken seriously enough about itself in this regard is spelled out by Rose in her lectures. But this is also her most difficult point: the illusions that we live with, and the illusions that we live as, are not wrong. The illusions are true because they are our lives. To think that educating people about illusions so that the scales fall from their eyes and a new true world appears—perhaps a new kind of collective consciousness, for example, or a new kind of human association—is precisely to miss Rose’s point. She notes that this misunderstanding could be said of the thinkers that she explores.

Lukács, for example, believed that change, or education/enlightenment comes from relating individual facts to the totality to which they belong. If you become enlightened about those conditions, then you dissolve the apparent fixity of those relations and they cease to dominate you. For Bloch, social enlightenment is not a gradual education but an explosion, a qualitative leap that would detach the working classes from the past leaving them able to find a future in this moment. This idea of change is still based on the methodology of enlightenment, that is, one of overcoming ignorance through new knowledge. Benjamin also grounded enlightenment in a rupture that he hoped a new art could achieve. All three of them shared the presupposition that enlightenment about contingency, be it sudden or gradual, was itself a form of social change.

But for Rose, in art, as in all social enlightenment, this must not simply be taken for granted. The message—the intended education—is distorted on its journey from production to reception. Because it is changed in its work, so, its work is also changed. It is brought face to face, each time, with the limitations that frustrate it. The hardest lesson here is that education about illusion, for Rose, is also an illusion. Like all such illusions, it is not wrong either. But it does not simply overcome itself through knowing about itself. It changes us, but it is change within a totality that absorbs such change. It is change without change. Such is the totality of illusion, and of self-defeating enlightenment, and of the reproduction of social injustice, that Adorno in particular, and then Rose, are wrestling with.

Become Style

What, then, is left to say that is not simply more of the same? Are Rose’s lectures an exercise in futility, seeking once again to enlighten us about the social conditions we live in, but knowing that this methodology, this enlightenment, is not fit for the purpose of social change?

Rose’s final lecture is on Adorno and she treats him differently. She says that he is the most consistent of her thinkers, he is the one who is most honest about the contradictions of living within the illusions of contingency that he is critiquing.

More than the others, she suggests that he understands the need to avoid any fantasies of an art that eluded, or thought itself able to gain immunity from, the conditions which made it possible. He didn’t think that an undistorted reception of art was possible, nor did he believe that some kind of pure enlightenment was possible. His work is painfully honest about the fact that enlightenment, or social critique, is self-defeating. Like the music he studied, his work both criticises and legitimises that which it opposes. But Rose is drawn to him because she thinks he finds the positive in this contradiction by means of the question of style rather than content. Style is a form of subjectivity; it is therefore a way of living differently with contingency rather than just resigning to one’s complete assimilation. She says that this a radically sociological position. Content has no relation to its own illusion or appearance. Style, on the other hand, lives that relation. And so, the conclusion to her lectures is this: while the others do not concede the necessity of illusion and therefore are assimilated into it, Adorno is able to arm himself against that assimilation by conceding its necessity. 

Some interpret Rose’s work as the last cry of pain from those who lament the impossibility of radical change from within the tradition. Others have seen it as refusing to move into the new post-dialectical thinking that rejects the privilege that thinking gives to itself and the tools that maintain its supremacy. Some find a “turn” in her work from politics to religion, citing her deathbed conversion to Christianity. Very few find the unfolding of a relentless and vigilant sociological contingency that, while refusing to grant itself immunity from being self-defeating, absolutely finds truth in the refusal.

What lies beyond the scope of this review, now, is to explore how Rose’s thinking works with and against this insight in the rest of her work. If you wished for a spoiler, however, then it might be the phrase with which she opened her autobiography: “keep your mind in hell and despair not.” But of course, that would not tell the whole story. The implications of this for social enlightenment, and perhaps for the recovery of some kind of universality that can inspire social enlightenment once again, remain a work in progress.

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Nigel Tubbs is Professor Emeritus at the University of Winchester, UK. He ran a Liberal Arts degree program (2010-2024) and has published nine books. His most recent book, Socrates On Trial (Bloomsbury, 2021), was a New Statesman book of the year 2021.