In this interview, which took place by email in the summer of 2021, Samir Gandesha engages in a discussion with Martin Jay, UC Berkeley, one of the preeminent US intellectual historians since the 1980s and author of the ground-breaking Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923–1950 (1973), which was followed by other important books on totality, ocularcentrism, experience, and lying in politics. The result is in a wide-ranging philosophical (aesthetic and political) discussion of a variety of topics, including the Frankfurt School and the trajectory of critical theory, the rise and importance of social media platforms, ensuing the digitalization and commodification of the life-world, “algorithmic populism” and “cancel culture,” as well as the role of art between theory and criticism.Samir Gandesha: It is common to speak of generational differences among those who understand themselves as working in the spirit of the Institute for Social Research. So, after the first generation—Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and so on—you have the second generation, Jürgen Habermas and Albrecht Wellmer; the third, Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser; and then, perhaps, as a fourth, Rainer Forst and Christoph Menke. One way of looking at the trajectory of Critical Theory, as Habermas himself has already pointed out, is in terms of a force field of debates over the nature of the state (Pollock versus Neumann and Kircheimer), the emancipatory role of popular culture (Adorno versus Benjamin) and the status of ego psychology (Fromm versus Marcuse). From Habermas onward, the trajectory of Critical Theory could be understood in terms of a consistent movement away from critical social theory and an apparent “negative philosophy of history” toward normative political theory, based around questions such as justice, recognition and distribution, tolerance, and so forth. Not everyone considers this to be an advance. For example, drawing upon the ideas of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, Amy Allen has recently challenged some of the key assumptions that underlie Habermas’s account of communicative action in her 2016 book The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. Growing numbers of social scientists, moreover, are looking back to the first generation’s conception of the authoritarian personality within the larger framework of the Studies on Prejudice, to try to make some sense of the global authoritarian turn. Moreover, if we exclude Habermas’s important 1962 Habilitationschrift, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which charts the rise and fall of the critical bourgeois public sphere, some of Wellmer’s essays on art and communication, and Menke’s important work on aesthetic negativity, art and mass culture seem to have been all but ignored. Arguably, however, these phenomena are more important today than ever. The increasingly pronounced role of the media, or what Guy Debord called the “spectacle,” in public life was made clear in the rise of National Socialism, as well as after the war in the famous first televised debates between Kennedy and Nixon. The role of the media becomes especially salient with the growing preponderance of the digital sphere from the early 1990s onward, in social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, in particular. The baleful implications of such platforms for democracy have been theorized by commentators such as Shoshana Zuboff, Christian Fuchs, Mackenzie Wark, and Jodi Dean, among many others. Zuboff argues that one can either have Facebook or democracy but not both at the same time. Dean has sought to understand the rise and proliferation of social media in terms of what she calls “communicative capitalism”: a form of capitalism in which the process of valorization takes place principally through the circulation of information in which the user or subscriber is both producer and consumer of content.I wonder if the concept of “communicative capitalism” doesn’t profoundly challenge a key premise of Habermas’s reconstruction of Critical Theory: that we can distinguish between social subsystems of state and economy, on the one hand, whose steering mechanisms are power and money, and symbolically mediated life-worlds, on the other? Rather, perhaps what we see is not just a colonizing incursion of the former into the latter but, rather, thorough-going digitization and commodification of the life-world? The latter, it would seem, breathes new life into the supposedly antiquated concepts of first generation of Critical Theory?Martin Jay: Let me begin what will inevitably be a partial and inadequate answer to these complex and open-ended questions on a high level of generalization, and then zoom in on a few more particular issues. Critical Theory began by emphasizing the necessity of ideas emerging from and confronting their historical contexts rather than vainly pretending to be a philosophia perennis, true for all times and in all places. Accordingly, it sought to register the changes that rendered Marxism in its more traditional and orthodox forms increasingly out of date: the loss of the working class’s revolutionary fervor, the unexpected emergence of fascism, the ability of capitalism to forestall its prophesized terminal crisis, and so on. As a result, it would come as no surprise to the initial generation of Critical Theorists that many decades later many of their own analyses would be in need of revision or even replacement by ones that better accounted for new circumstances. The fact that we can categorize the history of the Frankfurt School in terms of three or four generations—and it is clear that the vigorous international interest in applying and developing their legacy will produce others still to come—shows that they’ve not gone the way of so many other intellectual traditions, in which the founders and their seminal texts serve devoted followers as objects of uncritical veneration and endless hermeneutic disputation.Having said that, it is also important to remember that when the Critical Theorists urged us—if we can anachronistically borrow Fredric Jameson’s famous imperative—to “always historicise,” they did so with a deep suspicion of the historicist notion of history as a coherent narrative of smooth, or even dialectically uneven, development. Not only should we eschew simple notions of evolution, progress or decadence, but also avoid the reduction of ideas to mere expressions of their generative contexts, understood spatially as well as temporally. Nor should we reduce a theory’s normative foundations to the parochial worldviews, unique life experiences, or the undeclared self-interests of those who may, to be sure, have drawn on them to challenge the status quo. To think historically should be taken as a willingness to read the record of the past against the grain, to think of our present relationship to aspects of that past in new constellations, and, what is perhaps most important, to include possible futures in the longer sweep of history in which we are embedded. In other words, immanent critique needs to be supplemented by transcendent critique in a negative dialectic that never comes to rest in one or the other.With this in mind, it is best to read the generational succession to which you’ve alluded as neither a straightforward story of ascent nor one of decline, but rather as a welter of different attempts to think critically about the world, some of which may now seem more timely and persuasive than others, whose time, however, may come once again. Or, to put it in Benjaminian terms, we should think of the history of Critical Theory itself as a field of debris, the residue of exploded conventional narratives, through which we can sift for shards that can be constellated in new and fruitful combinations. Rather than choosing sides and joining team Adorno, team Marcuse, team Habermas, or team Honneth, we can read each of them profitably in a complementary manner or, if that fails, mobilize their competing arguments to sharpen our understanding of the stakes involved in still unresolved issues. For this reason, I would extend the metaphor of force fields, which you’ve associated with Habermas’s reading of certain debates among the first generation, to include those that can be fashioned by us across all the generations.Take, for example, the issue of the return of the authoritarian personality analysis to explain the rise of contemporary right-wing populism. There can be no question that the work the Institute did in the 1940s, drawing on psychological and sociological analyses of the allure of demagogues and the sinister power of racism, has become all too relevant in our own time. Löwenthal and Guterman’s Prophets of Deceit can be read as the playbook for Trump, Bolsonaro, Orban, Le Pen, and their ilk. But to avoid the trap of flattering ourselves for being “healthy” or “normal” while stigmatizing our political opponents as “pathological,” we have to take on board one of Habermas’s most important lessons: in the process of enlightenment, we are all participants. That is, rather than immediately shoving intransigent populists into that “basket of deplorables” so memorably disparaged by a certain failed presidential candidate in 2016, we have to hold out at least the hope that they—or at least a meaningful portion of them—can still function as citizens in a deliberative democracy. Otherwise we are left with the Schmittian conclusion that politics really is an existential battle between friends and foes, and the dividing line is not opinion or interest, but personality structure. If this is the case, then it is hard to understand how 13 percent of Trump voters in 2016 had voted for Obama in the previous election. It would, of course, be naïve to hope that all of them are open to persuasion by the better argument in some sort of Habermasian communicative utopia, but if we cynically abandon the belief that it is worth trying, then there is precious little left of the democratic ideal.Or to take another example, the implicit premises of Habermas’s model of moral development or the public sphere may well be Eurocentric, as Amy Allen argues, and we should be more attentive to alternatives that come from elsewhere on the globe. We need all the normative resources we can muster to confront and—if we are resolute, imaginative and a little lucky—remedy the injustices we face. But I’m not sure that returning to Adorno or Benjamin, as suggestive as their work may be, will get us out of the parochialism she deplores. Except for some early work on China by Karl August Wittfogel and Felix Weil’s Argentine Riddle (1944), there was, after all, very little engagement by the first generation of Critical Theorists with what later was called “the Third World” or, more recently, “the Global South.” I remember once asking Marcuse if he was interested in visiting Cuba, and he replied that he couldn’t speak Spanish and so would pass. “We know nothing of Asia,” Adorno confessed in the conversation he had with Horkheimer in 1956, translated as Towards a New Manifesto?But to follow up on the general point I made above, their Eurocentric (or if we include their exile experience, North Atlantico–centric) perspective did not mean that their ideas were simply reflections of their particular experiences with no relevance beyond the time and place of their coinage. This seems to be true for all the Frankfurt School generations, as shown by the lively reception of their ideas around the world, albeit often filtered through the concerns and traditions of the cultures that receive them. Thus, it does not seem to me an example of cultural imperialism to acknowledge the capacity of people anywhere on the earth to justify their arguments through logic and evidence in the hope of persuading rather than manipulating or seducing their interlocutors, or worse still, coercing them. Whether or not this capacity is realized or thwarted varies, of course, from place to place and period to period, but we have learned—to borrow yet another Habermasian trope—that no one is prevented from doing so by their allegedly innate limitations. If this is a false universalist ideology, an arrogant assumption of an alleged “we” position masking the interests of the educated elite that benefits from it, it behooves its critics to come up with an alternative that can plausibly enable emancipation, however we—or they—might define it.My stubborn hope in the ideal of deliberative democracy makes me wary of accepting the dark conclusion you’ve drawn from the notion of “communicative capitalism” that we are suffering the “thorough-going digitization and commodification of the life-world.” You and I couldn’t be having this discussion if our life-worlds were commodified all the way down or if our lives were reduced to the time we spend on line mindlessly imbibing the prefabricated prejudices of our tribe. Nor is it true that resistance to that dire depiction occurs only on the level of a life-world prior to any systemic institutionalization. That is, however much we may lament the corruption of the media, the neo-liberalization of education, the undermining of the rule of law, and the imperfections of the public sphere, the institutions that have resulted from the differentiations of function in modern life have not been entirely overwhelmed by instrumental rationality, commodification, and the like. At least not yet.SG: There’s a passage from the “Culture Industry” chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment in which Horkheimer and Adorno suggest that mass culture had displaced what Kant called “transcendental apperception” with the difference that while the latter keeps open a space for at least a modicum of subjective agency, the former does the thinking for the individual. On one level, this seems this claim seems rather ham-fisted and totalizing. Yet, on another level, it does seems to cannily anticipate digital culture which is centrally organized by intelligent machines deploying algorithms or predictive modelling systems which, through mathematical calculation, provides users with future options or choices based on previous decisions: “If subscriber ‘S’ responds favourably to content ‘X’ there is a high probability ‘S’ will also respond well to content ‘Y.’” In this way, the algorithm seems to constitute a kind of schema or the conditions for the possibility of experience and agency in important ways. The algorithm could be regarded, in other words, as constituting novel conditions for the possibility of experience as such. To put it somewhat facetiously: We might usefully update Kant in the following manner: “The (A)I think must be able to accompany all my representations . . .”MJ: The audacity of the original culture industry argument was in its unqualified claim that consumer choice was entirely manipulated from above for the maximization of corporate profit and the political pacification of the population. Although it pretended to offer pleasure and entertaining diversion, the culture industry fostered only pseudo-happiness, pseudo-individualization, and the dulling of its victims’ ability to think critically. Now, clearly this analysis was exaggerated, and it was always possible for other theorists of mass culture like Benjamin, Kracauer, and, more recently, Miriam Hansen, to qualify its extreme formulations by showing ways in which, say, the cinema could resist as well as abet conformity. But precisely because of its relentlessly hyperbolic rhetoric, it sowed the seeds of doubt about the hegemonic narrative that was prevalent at the time about the inherent virtues of a popular culture that reflected the autonomous tastes of its consumers.The same might be said about the analyses you reference by critics of contemporary internet, social media, and the sinister power of algorithmic intelligence. That is, we are just discovering the unanticipated costs of digital surveillance, data harvesting, and the biases of seemingly neutral algorithms. The tocsin has in fact been sounded by a growing number of critics—you mention Shoshana Zuboff, Christian Fuchs, Mackenzie Wark, and Jodi Dean; I would add Evgeny Morozov and Sherry Turkle—who have alerted us to dangers in the rapidly changing new cyberworld in which we are all, to one degree or another, immersed.That world, however, is too complex, unstable, and rapidly changing for any overarching analysis to do it justice. Take the phenomenon of hacking, which had no real equivalent during the heyday of the classical culture industry. Or the existence of the dark web, whose reach is far greater than any counterculture before the internet. Or the potential not only for surveillance, but also for sousveillance, in which videos can go viral and undermine the dominant narrative, as we see now with so many horrifying records of police brutality against minorities or hate crimes by ordinary citizens.I would, in fact, question the assumption that “digital culture . . . is centrally organized,” as it seems to me far more anarchic and unregulated than the culture industry, despite all of the ways in which we are victims of marketing manipulation. Ironically, the erosion of the vetting power of media elites, which was blamed by the left for excluding marginalized voices, has led to an anything-goes chaos in which conspiracy theories and wild rumors proliferate. It is easy to access dozens of nutty attacks on the Frankfurt School for destroying Western Civilization through the spread of “cultural Marxism” and “political correctness.” But by the same token, I have no trouble watching the latest Randy Rainbow or Rita Brent videos on YouTube, or following an endless number of online journals or blogs that provide progressive content and encourage responsible debate. Ironically, it is the Alt-right that is most furiously fulminating against the power of “big tech” and demanding that people banned from social media platforms like Trump be given their alleged “first amendment rights.”In short, rather than talking menacingly of a new algorithmic transcendental apperception, we might better acknowledge that we are in a technologically mediated context more appropriately described by a reference to Hume than to Kant. That is, haphazard contingency seems as much our experience on line as the manipulation of our collective consciousness by a universal mode of subliminal control. Or at least, the potential to go in either direction is still very much alive.SG: If this is true, is it possible to suggest that social media is predisposed to enabling a certain kind of populism, what I call an algorithmic populism, that divides people into Schmittian friend-foe binaries. Over time this leads to an increasing unwillingness and perhaps an inability to engage with others whose worldviews are radically different from one’s own and, indeed, which come to be perceived as deeply threatening. In Löwenthal and Guterman’s remarkably prescient 1949 book Prophets of Deceit [which you already have referred to], it is precisely these binaries that what they call the “agitator” exploits to politically nefarious ends. The immediacy of affective appeals seems to override reasoned arguments and evidence, which are based on a certain kind of self-reflection and therefore negativity through which affects can be placed under critical scrutiny. I wonder if this doesn’t subvert the very possibility of the giving and taking of reasons and therewith the basis for parliamentary democracy? You have written an equally prescient book on the role of deceit in politics entitled The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics (2012). Never, it would seem, have lying and politics been more closely intertwined than in our current digital age.MJ: There are two very troubling issues here, which should be analytically separated. What you call “algorithmic populism” is another way of describing what many commentators decry as the increasing tribalism of American politics and culture. The fact that you can map a congruence between, say, voting preferences and the wearing of masks during the pandemic shows how a constellation of beliefs has increasingly rigidified into opposing worldviews. It is doubtless true that media echo chambers have contributed to that process, leading to Manichean absolutism on both sides of the divide.Having said that, it should also be recognized that rigidity can mean brittleness. So that what may seem like a solid monolith turns out to be far more fragile than we imagine. We live in a political world now, just to speak of the American example, in which figures who were once beyond the pale for progressives—John McCain, Liz Cheney, Bill Kristol, etc.—suddenly are now treated as paragons of political courage and integrity. Although they are at the moment the losers in the battle for the soul (if it has one) of the Republican Party, they may well be harbingers of a restored conservatism after the fever of Trumpism is broken, inshallah. Interestingly, a combined initiative between the Koch and Soros camps in 2019 led to the creation of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, which is dedicated to ending the “forever war” interventionism of neoconservative and Cold War liberalism. I’m not sure how much influence they will have, but it shows that on all issues the camps are not existential Schmittian foes forever at odds. There are, after all, purple as well as blue and red states in our political geography, and places like Georgia and Arizona show that long-standing allegiances can begin to shift.On the question of lying in politics, the book I published a decade ago attempted to introduce some nuance into a discussion that often descends into simplistic moralizing or cynicism about politics in general as always hypocritical. Whenever and wherever I gave a talk on the subject, I was always greeted with the response that politics had never been as riddled with lies as it was “today.” So I am a bit resistant to the assumption that our digital age is especially prone to political mendacity. Although it is true that fabricated facts and “fake news” can go viral more rapidly than ever before, the means to vet and challenge them are no less widely available. Thus, it was possible for “fact-checkers” to respond in real time to some of the speeches made by Trump while he was giving them.Since the book appeared, however, I do think two things have changed, or rather two tendencies have intensified. The first concerns the frequency with which what is called a “big lie” has been promulgated in American politics, and probably not there alone. The argument in my book was essentially based on the well-known pharmakon analogy: in small doses and applied in certain circumstances (for example, not always confessing the truth to people in power when they demand it), obfuscation, spin, and sometimes even outright mendacity might be politically justified. But when the dose is too strong, a drug that may be useful in moderation can turn into a poison with deadly effect. Half-truths, spin, “white lies,” varnishing the truth may well be the lifeblood of a politics based on coalitions of people with somewhat different values, worldviews, and interests. When a primary campaign is over, for example, the losers normally rally around the winner and conveniently forget all the nasty things they said about him or her when the race was on. We have come to expect this reversal and rarely hold those who do it accountable for their hypocrisy. In the case of the “big lie,” however, an entire alternate reality is created which seeks to obliterate the memory of what actually happened. Trump has shown himself to be the master of this kind of poisonous deception, the most blatant example of which is his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election. When I wrote The Virtues of Mendacity, I did not envision that almost half of the country could swallow such an astoundingly fraudulently claim. Unfortunately, its success has led to further “big lies” about the January 6th insurrection, which Trump and his followers now claim didn’t really happen.The second change is what I would call the intensification of the tu quoque dynamic in political mendacity, the immediate turning around of the accusation of lying against those who make it. It is sometimes forgotten that the original charge of committing the “big lie” was leveled by Hitler in Mein Kampf against those who claimed the German army had been defeated in the First World War rather than, as he asserted was the case, “stabbed in the back” by traitors on the home front. It was the latter, as historians now agree, that was in fact false and the army’s defeat its own responsibility, but Hitler was already turning the charge of the big lie against his enemies. There has rarely been as gifted an employer of the tu quoque fallacy since that time as Donald Trump, who has earned a reputation among his followers for bluntly “telling it like it is” and being the nonsense scourge of “fake news.” One of the most troubling aspects of the current situation is that each side is so quick to damn the other as liars, and allowed a more or less benign drug [to turn] into a dangerous poison. I hasten to add I don’t think both sides are equally vulnerable to the charge, just that we are caught in a mutually reinforcing dynamic from which it will not be easy to escape.SG: Staying with the question of debate as a source of intellectual creativity, not only has Critical Theory been characterized by rich and productive inner debates including the more recent one between Honneth and Fraser on the relative importance attaching to “redistribution” versus “recognition,” as I mentioned above, but its figures also have been willing to engage with intellectual adversaries in an open, robust and public manner. Perhaps such a willingness is to be understood in the dialectical spirit of Aufhebung, that is, both cancelling and preserving elements of one’s adversary’s position. Here, it is possible to cite Adorno’s confrontations with conservative, former Nazi Arnold Gehlen, the debate with Karl Popper over the status of positivism within the sciences, as well as the Historikerstreit in the 1980s to which Habermas energetically contributed, in addition to his debate with Gadamer over the universality of hermeneutics.Today, it seems that there is an increasing reluctance of professors and intellectuals to speak across partisan lines. In contemporary North America, one can hardly imagine the kinds of exchanges that one might have witnessed on the television show Firing Line, for example, between (incredibly!) a key founder of the Black Panther Party, Huey P. Newton, on the one hand, and the show’s founding arch-conservative host, William F. Buckley Jr., on the other. Today, such a debate seems completely unimaginable. What do you make of this reluctance to engage in reasoned debate with one’s politico-philosophical adversaries? Can the university and the public sphere, more generally, survive without robust debate and discussion?MJ: It is tricky to fall back on a few anecdotes to make large generalizations of this sort, but I think you may be on to something. The civility of public life has indeed frayed, and polite public discussions between adversaries are harder and harder to come by. Perhaps the most shocking recent example of the decline of civil discourse was the first presidential debate in 2020, when Trump relentlessly interrupted and bullied Biden, refusing to let him speak and bulldozing the overwhelmed moderator. But this was the culmination of a trend that has been mounting for some time, and not only in the political arena. Campuses seem less hospitable to adversarial argumentation conducted in a civil manner. It is hard not to see responsibility on both sides, as self-righteous progressives have sometimes been quick to shout down speakers they feel should not be given a platform. In fact, civility itself became a target a few years ago as an ideological cover for repressive tolerance and the false belief that every question has two sides that equally deserve a hearing. Or in some cases—and here I’m thinking of Joan Scott’s controversial 2015 essay “The New Thought Police” in The Nation—it was attacked for being an excuse to silence leftist critics who were too aggressive in promoting transgressive ideas. Colleagues who are still teaching—I retired in 2016—tell me that there is a chilling effect in their classes, in which dissenting voices are often made to feel very uncomfortable for challenging the prevailing consensus.Among some intellectuals there is also a certain fatigue about discussion, which seems pointless, interminable, and not conducive to decisive problem solving. Carl Schmitt’s scorn for the protocols of parliamentary liberalism has found new life among critics of deliberative democracy. Last year, to take an example close to home, the British philosopher Raymond Geuss wrote a shockingly virulent dismissal of Habermas to “celebrate” his ninetieth birthday. Seyla Benhabib and I each wrote vigorous rebuttals, to which Geuss responded, and then we went through a second round. All the interventions have been republished in HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, 8 (2020). I don’t want to rehearse all the points made on both sides, but it is significant that Geuss finished his final remarks by announcing he would not engage in any more discussion of the issues because he did not believe that “unlimited discussion must necessarily result in consensus.” Why he thought this was anyone’s assumption is hard to know, but what was telling was the way he just wanted to end the tedium of giving of and listening to reasons. It is hard to know how a university or a political public sph