A Fraught Enterprise
Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School
Verso, 448pp, £18.99, ISBN 9781784785680
reviewed by Stuart Walton
The Grand Hotel Abyss is not currently taking bookings. There is a two-year waiting list for its Economy rooms, its Superior Doubles are block-booked by stag weekenders, and the Executive Suites are largely given over to elderly residents and myself, whom it would be positively dangerous to move by now. For those who may never get to see it first-hand though, books about the establishment continue to proliferate. The Brazilian philosopher Vladimir Safatle's Grande Hotel Abismo (2012) appeared in English translation in 2016. In The Hotel Abyss: An Hegelian-Marxist Critique of Adorno by Robert Lanning (2013) sought to steal up on its most celebrated guest and eviscerate him once and for all while he dozed between Schönberg recitals, and now Stuart Jeffries appears with Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School, an album of occasionally blurred snapshots of the interiors, through which a cohort of dyspeptically gloomy and pathologically cheery residents pass in more or less amicable congress.
If there is anybody left alive who doesn't know, the Grand Hotel Abyss was György Lukács's not particularly witty soubriquet for the home of the Frankfurt School. It appears in the preface he wrote to a 1962 edition of his 1916 study Theory of the Novel. Lukács had incautiously participated in the short-lived alternative government in his native Hungary in 1956, and been sternly re-educated for it with a grim year of exile in Romania. By the 1960s, he was, officially at least, fully reconciled to the orthodoxies of the party state, and the Hotel Abyss was his loyal excoriation of a quiescent western Marxism, whose chief officers saw their roles as issuing despondent jeremiads about the ghastliness of everything, while deploring anybody who did anything about it as part of the problem.
Theodor Adorno, newly installed as director of the Institute for Social Research, had attacked Lukács in a 1958 essay, 'Extorted Reconciliation', a review of the latter's study of the realist novel. Adorno expressed a mixture of excruciated sympathy for Lukács's present plight and merciless contempt for his literary theory, both of which were premised on the fallacious idea that the nations of the Soviet zone had achieved a measure of social conciliation among their members, freeing them from the harsh contradictions of life under monopoly capitalism, for which happy state the appropriate literary form was a naïve photographic realism, not the gruelling contortions of a barely articulate avant-garde formalism.
A rhetorical infelicity in Jeffries' opting for this well-worn squib for his own title is that it seems to announce in advance that the author will turn out to share the vinegary cynicism of Lukács in regard to its collective subject. That impression is hardly belied by a scene-setting opener that roots the Frankfurt School in a performative paradox, quickly given the name of 'hypocrisy'. Its chiefs of staff were all from comfortable family backgrounds, their fathers successfully assimilated Jewish businessmen, which in the dispiriting British optic, makes them parasitically dependent on the very system they sought to undermine. For the first hundred pages or so, there is a relentless focus on the financial affairs of the various thinkers' families, which leads Jeffries to a series of cheap digs at the likes of Walter Benjamin, wafting unemployably around Europe in self-indulgent dependence on 'Daddy's money’.
The phrase 'armchair philosophising' is periodically deployed to scorn those who only think, unlike the Polish economist Henryk Grossman, who had been a labour movement agitator and organiser during the revolutionary turbulence that followed the Great War. Jeffries finds it deeply compromising that the money that was used to finance the foundation of the Frankfurt Institute in 1924 originated in capitalist enterprise, leaving unanswered the query as to what other capital might be available in a capitalist economy, and itemises the collective contradictions of theorists who were 'Marxists without party, socialists dependent on capitalist money, beneficiaries of a society they sniffily disdained and without which they would have had nothing to write about'.
As the book's narrative proceeds methodically through the decades, Jeffries follows the standard line that the Institute's members lapsed either into ideological compromise or elegant despair, abandoning a phantasmatic commitment to doctrinaire Marxism while excoriating mass society for its shallow consumerism and false consciousness, conditions to which they themselves, arrogantly enough, considered themselves immune. And yet, curiously, critical theory in the Frankfurtish manner won't quite die, but lives on in a kind of radioactively upbeat half-life. Its current principals have cheered up a bit since the end of the 1960s, contribute to public debates about the European Union, and have much to say about the status of ethics in an ethically conflicted world.
The bantering journalistic tone of much of this book is offset by passages of theoretical analysis that reveal Jeffries to be a more sensitive reader than he cares to admit. There is a more than serviceable extended analysis of Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (1964), and a nuanced account of the often fractious dispute between its author and Adorno over the latter's refusal to declare his solidarity with the rebellious students at Frankfurt University in the later sixties. The explanation of Jürgen Habermas' gradual disengagement from the theoretical positions of the first generation of the Institute is clearly and percipiently laid out, and where he confronts a body of work that makes greater demands on the reader than a book like this can accommodate, such as aspects of Benjamin's philosophy of history or Adorno's extravagantly complex Negative Dialectics (1966), he is honest in his demurral rather than disingenuous.
Notwithstanding that, this study remains a fraught enterprise, and a rather strange book for Verso to have commissioned. It isn't a group biography in the conventional sense, though it naturally incorporates a fair bit of material on its subjects' personal vicissitudes, but it is not capable of mustering the nicety of insight to deal with what are often abstruse and demanding theories. A case in point is the obstinate recourse, by no means absent from the work of more academic writers, to characterising the postwar Adorno in particular as an unreconcilable pessimist. Whatever else he was, Adorno was not that. A pessimist is somebody who believes that, no matter what you do, things will turn out badly. The unintentional caricature misses the fugitive redemptive note in Adorno's thought, which persisted to the final year of his life, and which led him indignantly to refute the suggestion that his work represented a collusive resignation in the face of the existent. No philosopher was ever more implacably opposed to the reign of the existent, nor more acutely aware of the immensity of the challenge of resisting it. Pessimists, by contrast, have never heard of resistance.
Other false notes, strangely obvious ones at that, are struck at regular intervals. Taking issue with Benjamin's claim that auratic traditional art is rooted in ritual, Jeffries declares flatly that going to the Louvre is hardly ritualistic, a postulate swiftly obliterated by one glance at the jostling queues paying homage before the Mona Lisa. On the unpatented Wilhelm Reich device that Woody Allen renamed the 'Orgasmatron', inside which the cream of American belles-lettres had their juices precipitated in the 1950s, even while its inventor repined into psychiatric incapacity, Jeffries offers the scoffing suggestion that 'a charlatan making money from a quack cure-all is intolerable in pretty much any polity', which must come as news to those high-street retailers whose shelves are laden with exorbitant aromatherapy products.
If the book is neither quite an absolute beginners' guide, nor possessed of the conceptual energy to be a full-blown intellectual study, that is partly reflected in the journey that Jeffries undertakes, which has something about it of the road to Damascus. For all his thoroughgoing early derision at the overstuffed bourgeois backgrounds of the Frankfurt personnel, by the end the author is struck by the obvious significance in the internet age of their cultural theory at least. Perhaps they were on to something after all. Indeed, he even wonders whether his own offering belongs with the graphic guides and very short introductions of the attention-deficit era in philosophy publishing. (It doesn't.)
The silliest notion of all, though, is that there are none so blind as those who will not see that their family histories must always determine their political affiliations. In that oddly tabloid conception, radical disaffection is the prerogative solely of the exploited and the indigent, who alone have the necessary insight into capitalism's deepest and most opaque structures. Outside the tunnel of that monocular vision, there is a world in which the opacity might be as fiercely illuminated by the son of a Frankfurt wine merchant as by the son of a Lancashire fireman.
If there is anybody left alive who doesn't know, the Grand Hotel Abyss was György Lukács's not particularly witty soubriquet for the home of the Frankfurt School. It appears in the preface he wrote to a 1962 edition of his 1916 study Theory of the Novel. Lukács had incautiously participated in the short-lived alternative government in his native Hungary in 1956, and been sternly re-educated for it with a grim year of exile in Romania. By the 1960s, he was, officially at least, fully reconciled to the orthodoxies of the party state, and the Hotel Abyss was his loyal excoriation of a quiescent western Marxism, whose chief officers saw their roles as issuing despondent jeremiads about the ghastliness of everything, while deploring anybody who did anything about it as part of the problem.
Theodor Adorno, newly installed as director of the Institute for Social Research, had attacked Lukács in a 1958 essay, 'Extorted Reconciliation', a review of the latter's study of the realist novel. Adorno expressed a mixture of excruciated sympathy for Lukács's present plight and merciless contempt for his literary theory, both of which were premised on the fallacious idea that the nations of the Soviet zone had achieved a measure of social conciliation among their members, freeing them from the harsh contradictions of life under monopoly capitalism, for which happy state the appropriate literary form was a naïve photographic realism, not the gruelling contortions of a barely articulate avant-garde formalism.
A rhetorical infelicity in Jeffries' opting for this well-worn squib for his own title is that it seems to announce in advance that the author will turn out to share the vinegary cynicism of Lukács in regard to its collective subject. That impression is hardly belied by a scene-setting opener that roots the Frankfurt School in a performative paradox, quickly given the name of 'hypocrisy'. Its chiefs of staff were all from comfortable family backgrounds, their fathers successfully assimilated Jewish businessmen, which in the dispiriting British optic, makes them parasitically dependent on the very system they sought to undermine. For the first hundred pages or so, there is a relentless focus on the financial affairs of the various thinkers' families, which leads Jeffries to a series of cheap digs at the likes of Walter Benjamin, wafting unemployably around Europe in self-indulgent dependence on 'Daddy's money’.
The phrase 'armchair philosophising' is periodically deployed to scorn those who only think, unlike the Polish economist Henryk Grossman, who had been a labour movement agitator and organiser during the revolutionary turbulence that followed the Great War. Jeffries finds it deeply compromising that the money that was used to finance the foundation of the Frankfurt Institute in 1924 originated in capitalist enterprise, leaving unanswered the query as to what other capital might be available in a capitalist economy, and itemises the collective contradictions of theorists who were 'Marxists without party, socialists dependent on capitalist money, beneficiaries of a society they sniffily disdained and without which they would have had nothing to write about'.
As the book's narrative proceeds methodically through the decades, Jeffries follows the standard line that the Institute's members lapsed either into ideological compromise or elegant despair, abandoning a phantasmatic commitment to doctrinaire Marxism while excoriating mass society for its shallow consumerism and false consciousness, conditions to which they themselves, arrogantly enough, considered themselves immune. And yet, curiously, critical theory in the Frankfurtish manner won't quite die, but lives on in a kind of radioactively upbeat half-life. Its current principals have cheered up a bit since the end of the 1960s, contribute to public debates about the European Union, and have much to say about the status of ethics in an ethically conflicted world.
The bantering journalistic tone of much of this book is offset by passages of theoretical analysis that reveal Jeffries to be a more sensitive reader than he cares to admit. There is a more than serviceable extended analysis of Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (1964), and a nuanced account of the often fractious dispute between its author and Adorno over the latter's refusal to declare his solidarity with the rebellious students at Frankfurt University in the later sixties. The explanation of Jürgen Habermas' gradual disengagement from the theoretical positions of the first generation of the Institute is clearly and percipiently laid out, and where he confronts a body of work that makes greater demands on the reader than a book like this can accommodate, such as aspects of Benjamin's philosophy of history or Adorno's extravagantly complex Negative Dialectics (1966), he is honest in his demurral rather than disingenuous.
Notwithstanding that, this study remains a fraught enterprise, and a rather strange book for Verso to have commissioned. It isn't a group biography in the conventional sense, though it naturally incorporates a fair bit of material on its subjects' personal vicissitudes, but it is not capable of mustering the nicety of insight to deal with what are often abstruse and demanding theories. A case in point is the obstinate recourse, by no means absent from the work of more academic writers, to characterising the postwar Adorno in particular as an unreconcilable pessimist. Whatever else he was, Adorno was not that. A pessimist is somebody who believes that, no matter what you do, things will turn out badly. The unintentional caricature misses the fugitive redemptive note in Adorno's thought, which persisted to the final year of his life, and which led him indignantly to refute the suggestion that his work represented a collusive resignation in the face of the existent. No philosopher was ever more implacably opposed to the reign of the existent, nor more acutely aware of the immensity of the challenge of resisting it. Pessimists, by contrast, have never heard of resistance.
Other false notes, strangely obvious ones at that, are struck at regular intervals. Taking issue with Benjamin's claim that auratic traditional art is rooted in ritual, Jeffries declares flatly that going to the Louvre is hardly ritualistic, a postulate swiftly obliterated by one glance at the jostling queues paying homage before the Mona Lisa. On the unpatented Wilhelm Reich device that Woody Allen renamed the 'Orgasmatron', inside which the cream of American belles-lettres had their juices precipitated in the 1950s, even while its inventor repined into psychiatric incapacity, Jeffries offers the scoffing suggestion that 'a charlatan making money from a quack cure-all is intolerable in pretty much any polity', which must come as news to those high-street retailers whose shelves are laden with exorbitant aromatherapy products.
If the book is neither quite an absolute beginners' guide, nor possessed of the conceptual energy to be a full-blown intellectual study, that is partly reflected in the journey that Jeffries undertakes, which has something about it of the road to Damascus. For all his thoroughgoing early derision at the overstuffed bourgeois backgrounds of the Frankfurt personnel, by the end the author is struck by the obvious significance in the internet age of their cultural theory at least. Perhaps they were on to something after all. Indeed, he even wonders whether his own offering belongs with the graphic guides and very short introductions of the attention-deficit era in philosophy publishing. (It doesn't.)
The silliest notion of all, though, is that there are none so blind as those who will not see that their family histories must always determine their political affiliations. In that oddly tabloid conception, radical disaffection is the prerogative solely of the exploited and the indigent, who alone have the necessary insight into capitalism's deepest and most opaque structures. Outside the tunnel of that monocular vision, there is a world in which the opacity might be as fiercely illuminated by the son of a Frankfurt wine merchant as by the son of a Lancashire fireman.