Splinters in Your Eye. Martin JayЧитать онлайн книгу.
of our wrangling over the title played out against the backdrop of one final episode in the story of Horkheimer’s role in the book: the writing of the preface he graciously provided. Despite my concern that having such a preface might leave the impression that the book was somehow a “court history,” I thought it worth mulling over the possibility shortly after the dissertation was completed. Horkheimer replied cautiously in a letter of July 23, 1971, asking if I would be satisfied with a two-page preface without an imminent deadline. A succession of illnesses was making it hard for him to concentrate on his work, but my positive answer had encouraged him to try. On August 31, 1971, at the end of a letter that dealt primarily with details of Paul Tillich’s role in the Institute’s early years and some uncertainty over the existence of a Psychoanalytic Institute in Frankfurt before the migration, he added, “I hope my little preface, which I intend to write at a time when I am not overburdened as during these weeks, will not disappoint you too much.”39
On December 12, 1971, I received a letter from Matthias Becker with Horkheimer’s promised preface. “During his serious illness of the past weeks,” Becker wrote, “he was greatly concerned to make the deadline he had promised. We are a bit late, but I think that you will be very satisfied with his introductory words.”40 Needless to say I was not only grateful, but also deeply moved by the gesture. I translated the text and sent it to Montagnola for any emendations Horkheimer might want to make. With a few minor changes, the preface appeared when the book was finally published in the spring of 1973. Perhaps the most meaningful change appeared in the second thoughts he had about the moving sentence from which I have taken the title of this chapter. In German, it reads, “Die Sehnsucht danach, dass die Gruel auf Erden nicht die letzte Gültigkeit besässen, ist freilich ein metaphysischer Wunsch.” Looking at my translation, Horkheimer changed “metaphysical” to “non-scientific,” but he left standing the formulation “the hope that earthly horror does not possess the last word.”41
These were not themselves the last words I received from Horkheimer. In addition to the dispute over the title, he responded generously to an essay I published in 1972 called “The Frankfurt School in Exile” and wrote of his impatience for the publication of the book, which he hoped would coincide with the imminent English translation of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Finally, on March 10, 1973, he informed me that two copies of the book had arrived and that he found them “beautiful and [was] happy with them.” The last words of that final letter, after he requested I send him the reviews, were simply ones of friendship: “How are you? Are you well in Berkeley; will you be coming any time soon back to Europe?”42
Four months later, on July 7, 1973, Horkheimer died in a hospital in Nuremberg at the age of seventy-eight and was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Bern, Switzerland. Shortly after his death, I was sent a copy of a photograph, one of the last taken of him, in which he was dressed impeccably, as always, in a three-piece suit, and reading a copy of The Dialectical Imagination. There can be few more moving images for a historian than one that shows the hero of your narrative, nearing the end of life and apparently finding some solace in your attempt to make sense of it. During the period I knew Max Horkheimer, he lost his closest friends, Adorno and Pollock, as well as his much-beloved wife, Maidon, who died in October of 1969. He was in many ways a diminished figure, beset by illness and wary of the ways in which his legacy was being read by critics on both ends of the political spectrum.
I was enormously fortunate to have had an opportunity to be the first to provide a general history of that legacy and even more fortunate to win Horkheimer’s trust in so doing. Although it was always clear that he was invested in my telling it in a way that redounded to his credit, I never felt coerced into bending the evidence to paint a rosier picture than the documents afforded. I can fully appreciate the anxieties he—and Felix Weil—felt about reducing their thought to an expression of some ill-defined Jewish spirit or even the experience of Weimar Jewry, although I would also still hope that a nonreductive analysis of that dimension of their story can prove illuminating. As for the dispute over my proposed title, the outcome was favorable for everyone. The alternative rightly emphasized their thought rather than their lives, and I ultimately got to use Permanent Exiles for a collection about a more disparate group of émigrés who did not share a common intellectual position.
What is perhaps most moving is the fact that, more than four decades after Horkheimer’s death and the publication of The Dialectical Imagination, the message bottles thrown into the sea by the Frankfurt School continue to wash up on unexpected shores, to be opened by new generations of readers who find in them inspiration for the development of a twenty-first-century critical theory. Whether metaphysical or non-scientific, the wish that such a theory may help us to diminish the cruelties of a world still a long way from the utopia yearned for by the Frankfurt School remains very much alive today.
Max Horkheimer and The Family of Man
Horkheimer’s increasing ambivalence about the militantly radical nature of prewar Critical Theory manifested, among other ways, in his reluctance to be called a “permanent exile.” “During our stay in America,” he insisted, “most us were exiles with regard to fascist Germany, but certainly not with regard to democratic states like the USA and postwar Germany.” He very clearly demonstrated his revised estimation of the value of what Marxists had traditionally denigrated as “bourgeois democracy” in 1958, when he introduced Edward Steichen’s traveling exhibition of photographs called The Family of Man to a Frankfurt audience. Horkheimer was determined to promote to the German public the liberal democratic values he had come to appreciate, if with nuanced qualification, during his years in America. Tellingly, the philosophical touchstone of his analysis was Kant rather than Marx, and he defended cosmopolitan humanism against the prioritization of cultural, class or national difference. More precisely, he saw in the concrete images of the exhibition—and here there was no trace of the Bilderverbot he so often invoked in other contexts—a happy mediation of difference and universalism.
Not surprisingly, Horkheimer’s 1958 introduction provided welcome ammunition for current art historians seeking to reverse the long-standing dismissal of Steichen’s exhibition by a wide range of critics—from Roland Barthes, Jacques Barzun and Susan Sontag to the editors of October magazine—all of whom damned it as “photographic ideology.” But when read in the context of another essay Horkheimer wrote a year earlier, “The Concept of Man,” which was far less sanguine about abstract humanism or the crisis of the modern family, his defense seems more of a tactical maneuver than a reflection of a wholesale retreat from his earlier position. Or, perhaps better put, the unresolved tension between the two pieces may be said to reflect the Frankfurt School’s postwar struggle to adapt to new circumstances in which the Marxist intransigence of their earlier years was tempered by a recognition that democratic ideals and universalist humanist values were more than mere window dressing for class domination.1
If only I knew a better term than humanity, that poor, provincial term of a half-educated European. But I don’t.
Max Horkheimer, “Humanity,” (1957–8)2
With no special fanfare or extended justification, the distinguished authors of the ambitious overview of twentieth-century art, Art since 1900, all stalwarts of the influential journal October, refer disparagingly to Edward Steichen’s “blockbuster exhibition of postwar photographic ideology, ‘The Family of Man’ at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955.”3 The context for this casual dismissal is an argument about the transfiguration of prewar avant-garde and social documentary photography into a vehicle for consumer capitalist advertising and fashion in the so-called New York School, which rose to prominence in the postwar era. Having absorbed the critiques of Steichen’s show leveled by Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Alan Sekula, John Berger, Abigail Solomon-Godeau and a host of lesser commentators, the book’s authors echo their scorn for The Family of Man as an ideological exercise in sentimental humanism in the service of Cold War propaganda and the middle-brow visual culture