Uncorking an Old Bottle Found in the Atlantic Sea—What Does Critical Theory Want from Film?

Abstract

Uncorking an Old Bottle Found in the Atlantic Sea—What Does Critical Theory Want from Film? Gertrud Koch (bio) On several occasions, Theodor W. Adorno compared the work of art to the monad. Like Leibniz's monad, the work of art lacks windows that open onto the world, while at the same time confining the whole world inside of itself. The work of art contains a blueprint of the world and was not made to bring it outside. On another occasion, Adorno found a nautical metaphor for the negative dialectic of art: the work of art is a message in a bottle, which floats in the ocean with no guarantee if or when the bottle may be uncorked and the message may find an addressee. During the last decades, one sometimes gets the impression that Critical Theory, especially the writings on mass culture, was doomed to share the fate of art: caught in between two continents. And it was Miriam Hansen's courageous task to start to decipher the message in the bottle as a tale of two continents. Starting in Frankfurt with American Studies and closing her final book on the Frankfurt School in Chicago, she shipped the transatlantic messages in both directions. Miriam Hansen's posthumously published book on the positions in and the implications of the thinkers and thoughts of the so-called "Frankfurter Schule" on film and mass culture was the sum of a lifelong dialogue with a paradigm that never was placed in the center of academic philosophy or cultural theory, nor did it enter into the [End Page 654] mainstream of film or media studies.1 Why, then, does the "Critical Theory" of the Frankfurt School still haunt our concepts and understanding of mass culture? As we know, the so-called Frankfurt School only became a brand long after its foundations were built in the city of Frankfurt. Even during its best times, the members of the club lived in different cities and parts of the world—the center was a group of persons and a growing number of texts and commentaries. Its history was linked to the practices that were inspired by those texts and performed on the part of students from around the globe and members of civil rights movements from Berlin to Berkeley and Tokyo. Do these practices extend to the present field of media studies? I would venture to say yes: we encounter a continuing preoccupation with Walter Benjamin and a growing serious interest in the rediscovery of Siegfried Kracauer, and last year has seen celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of Marcuse's book, One Dimensional Man, which took place at least at Columbia University and Brandeis University. If I am reading the signs correctly, there is also a return to one of the most strictly banned text in media studies, the chapter on the "Culture Industry" in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. This text assembles the most radical aspects and positions of the Frankfurt School: a nearby pre-Foucauldian perspective on Freud's psychoanalysis, reflecting the tension between a social technology of the self and a redemptive reading as Nietzschean culture critique; a Marxist analysis of the economy of distribution or, to quote more frequently used Marxist terminology, an analysis of the circulation and fetishization that comes with the commodity form. It addresses a fate that is at stake for all culture in capitalism—not only popular culture, but all mediated art that is sold and distributed on the market. The questioning of abandoned Marxist approaches touches upon the scars that were left after the expulsion of Marx from the Western philosophical and sociological canon, an expulsion that started early and has never fully ceased. The nostalgia that whispers its sorrows in the question, "Where Is the Frankfurt School Now?" also conjures the specter of Marx. Let me take us back to the terms themselves. When did theory become critical? When the term "Critical Theory" was first introduced as proper name for the project of the Frankfurt School, it was a replacement for the Marxist notion of "materialism" that had to be banned under [End Page 655] the conditions of the American exile. "Critical Theory" still refers to Marx's...