Circle of Writers

Today I am going to talk about some of the prose writing of figures associated with the early Frankfurt School and some political consequences of aesthetic realism. I would like to add, from the beginning, that this is a work in progress, offering not definitive arguments but lines of further inquiry. I share it with you with the hope of thinking together, because as the legacy of the Frankfurt School shows, thought takes shape not in isolation but through friendship.

Beyond my own personal fascination with these works, my reasons for discussing them here at this conference are two-fold. One, while they are not neglected by any means, they are often unfairly relegated to secondary or incidental status within the reception of the Frankfurt School, as if they were literary flourishes to a philosophical endeavor more rigorously articulated elsewhere. I argue for an essential continuity between these early writings and what we would come to know as the mature project of critical theory.

Second, I think the experimental mode of prose writing on display here is stylistically unique and singularly potent in its powers of critical insight. I both argue for a historical reevaluation of these works and also for the contemporary significance of such prose with respect to our present-day predicament—that is, of social fragmentation, institutional delegitimization, and all-encompassing ecological and existential crisis. Writing the catastrophe as it unfolds may be one means of halting its advance.

The body of work I discuss includes several core texts. Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street (1928) inaugurates the prose tradition within critical theory. This somewhat surreal book was followed shortly by Ernst Bloch’s own mysterious Traces (1930), alongside Siegfried Kracauer’s more straightforward The Salaried Masses (1930) and other short works from the twenties and thirties later collected in The Mass Ornament (1963). Published almost twenty years later, Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia (1951) is a kind of coda of the genre, and perhaps its most refined example. An additional text for consideration, not often talked about in the context of Frankfurt School prose, would be Max Horkheimer’s dual collection Dawn & Decline (1934/1974), assembled in the twenties and the fifties respectively.

What brings these texts into a constellation is not just the personal friendships of these German-Jewish authors, nor the general alignment of philosophical and political concerns among them. It is an affinity of form. Each of these works is assembled in a fragmentary, montage-like manner. They consist of seemingly unconnected notes, aphorisms, not-quite-parables, quotations, dreams, commonplace occurrences and sayings, street scenes, and other marginal and unremarkable phenomena of modern life.

Each entry, whether consisting of a few sentences or a mighty paragraph, is titled with a short phrase plucked from life, be it a street sign, a song lyric, or a trite phrase: “This Space for Rent,” “To the Planetarium,” “Gala Dinner,” “Making a Point.” And in their exposition, they illustrate some everyday situation or experience, drawn from the common reservoir of modern life. Little more than condensed narrative, they are relatively free of commentary or explanation of why the event described is significant. The writers of the Frankfurt School intended these prose pieces as ciphers, demanding the reader actively interpret their lines in order to reveal some hidden meaning.

When I say that these prose writings are concerned with the everyday and the supposedly trivial, I am not exaggerating. They are full of prosaic things and unremarkable events, of the kind anyone would have. Benjamin recounts his dreams. Bloch tells jokes and fairy tales. Kracauer famously describes waiting in a hotel lobby. Adorno mentions not calling your ex. Horkheimer talks about the awkwardness of answering the phone in front of someone. While amusing, these passages are not amusements. As a nexus of the literary and the philosophical, they embody far-reaching insights into how life is organized by power.

From the juxtaposition of small details of ordinary life, each book draws its own critical portrait of the era. In this experimental realism, it is precisely through an interrogation of the slightest and the most inconspicuous, that the most fundamental aspects of our existence are revealed. These are books of subjective experiences tied to objective conditions that, to use Kracauer’s phrase, “illuminate each other reciprocally.” With this in mind, I want to argue that critical theory does not take place on some abstract plane of thought. It is based in our perceptions of the world and our immersion within it. The direct observation of life as it is lived imparts significance to theory as such, and theory’s insights remain forceful so long as it stays close to experience.

Rather than offer my reading of any particular work or passage here today, I am more interested in exploring the origins, idiosyncrasies, and possibilities of this form as well as highlighting some contemporary writing which bears some similarities to it. I begin with a cursory genealogy and some cultural context, before turning to these more recent examples and making a case for what I see as their destituent character. In this project, I argue explicitly for considering this prose writing not only in the register of the philosophical and aesthetic—as is usually the case when treated by scholarship, if at all—but the actual political significance of this unique form. As Adorno said of One-Way Street, this is writing “that casts a sudden light on the familiar and perhaps sets it on fire.”

Thought-Images

These are great works of literature: evocative, beautiful, damning. They attest to a sharp wit and a keen eye for observation. Scenes from Weimar streets, cafes, salons, and hotels leap off the page and into the reader’s mind even now. It’s no coincidence that Benjamin, Bloch, and Kracauer were journalists, publishing their work in newspapers like the Frankfurter Zeitung. In fact, many of the pieces collected in these works were first published in this paper. These books developed in the streets as much as in the libraries and archives.

While these writers may have fashioned short prose into cultural criticism and turned newspaper columns into public philosophy, they perhaps did not invent the form itself. In fact, it might be pretty old. Scholars including Klaus Berghanh and Karoline Kirst point out that the genre may best be understood as an emblem—an artform which spread with the printing press and was popularized in the Renaissance as emblem books. The tripartite structure of the emblem—inscriptio, pictura, subscriptio, that is, title, description, and reflection—contains an allegorical meaning which is not inherent in any of its parts, but resides in the interpretation of their subtle and perhaps contradictory relation. Meaning circulates among the three elements, inviting contemplation to a greater truth. Benjamin’s melancholy fascination with the baroque is well-known, as Kirst reminds us. Berghahn points out one crucial difference, however: what the updated emblem of the critical theorists depicts is not a natural or celestial reality, but a social construction. As such, it is subject to action, to change, to history. This modern emblem does not impart self-assured wisdom but spurs the reader to alter the social portrait placed before them. This is historical materialism condensed into literary image, a kind of narrative as praxis.

If the baroque emblem is the historical origin of the three-fold form taken up by the critical theorists, it’s certainly a modern spin on it. As Andreas Huyssen points out in his work on modernist miniatures, these texts owe much to the urban literary experiments he traces through Baudelaire, Rilke, Kafka, Döblin, and Musil. Perception is reconfigured in the experience of a modern metropolis like Berlin, with its heightened sensations of time, space, and speed, alongside cultural transformations brought by new media like photography, cinema, and radio. Benjamin and Kracauer in particular are fascinated by the street scene, one of the central motifs of all the texts listed: pedestrians, trams, shop windows, arcades, posters and signs rush by the reader. In this jumble of momentary impressions, recall too what Benjamin once said of criticism: it doesn’t have anything on the fiery reflection of a neon sign in a puddle on the street.

So too does this set of writings bear a resemblance to the feuilleton, a once ubiquitous and now almost forgotten section of the newspaper. Kracauer was, in the late twenties, the feuilleton editor at the Frankfurter Zeitung. Published ‘below the line,’ a typical feuilleton might consist of a short, impressionistic account of some topic: an urban scene, or a review of a cultural happening like a book, concert, or play. They were much read, much enjoyed, and much derided by the serious-minded. Feuilletonist was used as an insult by figures like the influential Karl Kraus, who despised the so-called “journalist” and pilloried the “empty phrase.” If the feuilleton in lesser hands proved superficial and something of a fad, the early Frankfurt School writers managed to imbue their own short prose with an enduring depth. They practiced feuilleton-esque writing not as gossip and entertainment, but as a radical indictment of a society based on consuming gossip and entertainment.

Perhaps the most conceptually generative account of these prose writings is Gerhard Richter’s work on the thought-image. Richter brings together all these strands—the emblem, the modernist experiment, and the feuilleton—in his analysis of the Denkbild. The term means, literally, the “thought image,” a phrase used by Benjamin and not coincidentally the German translation for emblem. In his argument, this circle of writers co-developed the thought-image in an ongoing dialogue composed of letters, reviews, and commentaries that began with the publication of One-Way Street. Their shared project became the interpretation of surface phenomena of cultural life as deeper indices of the historical situation. The fragmentary, elusive, and decentered thought-image was thought fit for the task, melding form and content, literal and figurative, subjective and objective. More successfully than most scholars, Richter connects this form (or non-form) with the philosophical attitude of the Frankfurt School more generally: to fashion an understanding of society which is at the same time its critique, and to illuminate the promise it contains in the negative, for the world that is not-yet.

Matters of Realism

In experimenting with this novel literary form, the writers of the early Frankfurt School waded into aesthetic debates during the Weimar period, which in turn fueled significant inner debates among members and fellow travelers. I am thinking for instance of the back-and-forth on aesthetics and politics, with Lukács, Brecht, Bloch, Benjamin, and Adorno all weighing in on matters of realism, representation, and the political function of art, and not necessarily agreeing with one another in their conclusions. I would like to suggest that the thought-image, as form, can be read as their own aesthetic response to questions raised at the time.

One debate relevant here is a familiar one to the legacy of the Frankfurt School: the devaluation of art into a commodity and a form of distraction or entertainment. This insight was already common by the time they were writing, and it existed in a variety of reactionary formulations in addition to the emancipatory ones put forward by someone like Adorno. I want to suggest the fact that, at the same time they were developing their critiques of mass society and the culture industry, the early critical theorists chose the newspaper as their venue to explore these themes, and indeed its most supposedly trivial section, the feuilleton. The thought-image encoded within its pages a riddle that could short-circuit the logic of the commodity society, and in the challenging demand to decipher it, it refused the communicability that the commodity form required of it. I see this as sabotage by thought, of the ongoing sabotage of thought itself.

Also of interest to this debate was the conflict between Expressionism and the New Objectivity—in short, whether subjective expression of reality is more truthful than matter-of-fact depiction of external appearance. There is an interesting dynamic in Kracauer worth mentioning here. At the same time that Kracaucer argued for “an analysis of… inconspicuous surface-level expressions,” he rejected the naive realism of reportage and documentary photography. To understand society you must look to its everyday expressions, but you cannot simply view them as such—reality demands an aesthetic layer of mediation in order to be properly understood. “[A] hundred views of a factory” is not its reality. I want to assert that the role of the thought-image, developed in the years leading up to this debate, was to fulfill this mediating function between surface expression and deeper significance. In writing the everyday, the thought-image would intervene between the immediacy of life as experienced and allow for an interpretation that would reveal its historical meaning. Things seen must be seen anew to be comprehended by thought.

Things Seen

To wrap up, I want to bring us into the present by mentioning two contemporary literary examples that contain, I believe, an echo of the thought-image as practiced by the critical theorists. I am not claiming direct lineage here. It is perhaps more resonance than resemblance. In these new works, old debates are still at hand regarding the relationship between subjective experience and objective meaning, between the everyday and the historical, between naturalistic depiction and political significance. Despite certain divergences, this contemporary form of unadorned, factual writing echoes the Frankfurt School’s desire to set the familiar afire. In deploying realism as social critique, they extend even more radically what Adorno called the power to shock us into thinking.

The first is two works by Annie Ernaux, Journal de Dehors (1993) and La Vie Extérieure (2000). Ernaux is known best for her deeply personal writing, feminist texts that blur the line between memoir, autofiction, and social history. These two collections stand in contrast to the rest of her work, concerned with “exterior life” as opposed to inner life. Both books are made up of selections from her journal, cataloging “things seen” during her everyday life in the Parisian suburbs of the 1990s. Ernaux describes her noticings as “an attempt to convey the reality of an epoch.” In a characteristic line worthy of the Frankfurt School, she writes: “From the baby carriage to the grave, life unfolds more and more between the shopping center and the television set.” Reminiscent of One-Way Street, Ernaux describes casual scenes from the metro and shopping malls, overheard radio ads and sales pitches. In her bare lines, she jettisons the title and reflection of the thought-image and gives us image alone, but in this case the image suffices to convey social reality. The pointed sparseness of her style attests to a society ruled by empty commercialism, lifeless architecture, media frivolity, and the wretchedness of a world where there are beggars in front of supermarkets.

The English edition of Ernaux’s La Vie Extérieure was translated as Things Seen, lifting the phrase from Victor Hugo. The great Hugo recorded his own epochal observations, including of the 1848 Revolution, in vast notebooks published as Choses Vues (“thing seen”). To extend the chain of coincidences, I would like to end by pointing to the 2020 essay “Choses Vues” (“Things Seen”) by Julien Coupat and an anonymous group of French radicals, the title again referencing Hugo.

This provocative essay is a montage of short, one-sentence descriptions drawn from observations of social life during the earliest phase of the pandemic. It is not a political manifesto nor a series of philosophical theses. Sounding like a litany, every sentence begins with “We have seen…” and goes on to note one or the other fact, revealing in what ordinary garb extraordinary transformations can be cloaked. The authors write, sparingly: “We have seen a government promulgating new customs overnight, such as the correct way to greet each other.” The piece goes on, mentioning the elderly begging to be let out of their apartments. On television officials are reduced to “spokesmen with nothing to say,” while for everyday citizens the days blur together under confinement. Public life disappears under constant shouts to “go home!” The authors are surely guilty of editorializing, but there is no argumentation needed—the chilling effect of these descriptions of real events is a direct result of what is described. “Things Seen” contracts the thought-image to its most brilliant point, where statement of reality coincides with criticism of reality, description with destitution. No more interpretation is needed, this elliptical form seems to suggest, when civilization is so completely entangled with barbarism.

This stark closeup of damaged life is equally on display in the early Frankfurt School prose writings as it is in these literary experiments corresponding to a new era of global capital. Writers like Benjamin, Bloch, Kracauer, and Adorno sought to interpret surface-level expressions for an epochal meaning behind social affairs, to write everyday life in such a way that it, at the same time, is its historical critique. In their own way, these contemporary examples take up the critical project of the thought-image while discarding its formalism. Reality is as simple, and as menacing, as its literal description. Perhaps Ernaux and Coupat are at risk of the naive realism that the Frankfurt School warned of, in their sparse statement of fact. But sometimes the facts, as Kracauer said about One-Way Street, are “full of detonations.”