Persistent Enlightenment

Habermas on Publicity II (Re: Arendt, Koselleck, and Schmitt)

Posted on April 7, 2013 by James Schmidt

It is hardly surprising that Immanuel Kant plays a prominent role in Habermas’s discussion of the vicissitudes of what — for reasons that I’ve discussed in a previous post — might best be termed “bourgeois publicity.” As Habermas notes at the outset of the section on Kant in Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, Kant’s elaboration of the “principle of Publizität” represented the elevation of the “idea of bourgeois publicity” to “its theoretically mature form.”^[1]

The discussion of Kant plays a pivotal role in Habermas’s exploration of the way in which bourgeois publicity functions both as “ideology and more than ideology.” Perhaps that is why the discussion begins with a stock-taking of Habermas’s position vis a vis a few rival accounts. What I’d like to do in this post is to focus on a series of statements that unfold over the course of the second paragraph of the section.^[2] Quite a bit happens in a rather short space.

The paragraph begins with a quick summary of the process that Kant was attempting to comprehend:

The critical process that private people engaged in rational-political debate brought to bear on absolutist rule interpreted itself as unpolitical: public opinion aimed at rationalizing politics in the name of morality.

From here, Habermas goes on to offer a brief characterization of the transformation that he sees as having taken place in eighteenth-century discussions of political philosophy:

In the eighteenth century the Aristotelian tradition of a philosophy of politics was reduced in a telling matter to moral philosophy, whereby the “moral” (in any event thought as one with “nature” and “reason”) also encompassed the emerging sphere of the “social,” its connotation overlapping those of the word “social” given such peculiar emphasis at the time.

The paragraph closes with a brief summary of Kant’s argument in Perpetual Peace:

The juridical relationships, their authority grown absolute, originated in practical reason and were conceived as the possibility of a mutual constraint that, on the basis of general laws, harmonized with the freedom of every single person — the most extreme counterposition to the principle auctoritas non veritas facit legem.

Though it may not be immediately clear to the reader, besides offering a sketch of where the argument of Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit stands, each of these statements carries an echo of the work of other thinkers.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, let’s spell out where these arguments are originating. The first quote is a rather straightforward summary of the basic argument of Reinhart Koselleck’s Critique and Crisis. The second alludes, first of all, to Wilhelm Hennis’s exploration (noted at the Habermas’s Preface to Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit) of the status of the “traditional science of ‘politics’” within the broader domain of “practical philosophy.” But, looking beyond the immediate context of Hennis’s work, Habermas is concerned, in particular, with the challenge posed to this tradition with the “emergence” of the category of “society” over the course of the eighteenth century. And this, of course, was a concern that loomed large in Hannah Arendt’s Human Condition, a work whose importance for the argument Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit has yet to be fully explored. Finally, the last extract closes with a passage from the Latin translation of what is probably the greatest piece of political philosophy written in English: Hobbes’s Leviathan. But, more importantly for the matter at hand, this phrase had long served as a sort of talisman for the evil genius behind Critique and Crisis: Carl Schmitt.

Arendt and the Concept of Society

The influence of Arendt’s Human Condition on the argument of Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit is pervasive, but also somewhat elusive. Taken as whole, it is hard to read Habermas’s project as anything other than a critique of Arendt’s account of the implications of the triumph of “society” for the traditional understanding of politics. For Arendt, the concept of “society” served as a marker for the intrusion of concerns that the tradition descending from Aristotle had regarded as affairs of the household into what Arendt understood as the “public sphere.” The result was a blurring of “the old borderline between private and political” that altered the meaning of the distinction between the private and the political “almost beyond recognition.”

In The Human Condition, “society” marked the domain in which “the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance.” For Arendt, the entry of such concerns into the public sphere marked a fundamental break: the activities that had once been the concern of the household now flooded into a domain that — in her idealized account of the Greek public sphere — had previously been the site of activities that transcended the household’s concern with the production and preservation of physical life. In the wake of the invasion of the public realm by “the social,” the classical understanding of the meaning of politics had been lost and, with it, the distinction between “action” — which, following Aristotle, she saw as possible only within a public space that was free from those concerns that now constituted “the social” — and what she termed “behavior.” Because she held that “action” was distinguished by its unique capacity to bring something novel into the world, the displacement of “action” by “behavior” had far-reaching implications. Among other things, it meant that any success that the social sciences might have in framing generalizations that satisfied the standards of the natural science represented a confirmation of the degree to which authentic (political) “action” had been replaced by predictable patterns of (social) “behavior.”^[3]

It is possible that a Verfallgeschichte of this sort might have had a lingering appeal to Habermas. After all, as he later observed, he had begun his philosophical career as a “thoroughgoing Heideggerian”.^[4] But it is hard to see how a history of this sort could have been accepted by the author of Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. This, however, is not to say that it is an argument that Habermas seems to have had much interest in criticizing: the closest he came to a critique occurs in initial reference to Arendt’s work, which describes it as the most recent example of a tradition, reaching back to the Renaissance, that interpreted ancient forms of publicity through a “stylized Greek self-interpretation.” He observes (somewhat laconically) that, like “everything else considered ‘classical’,” this model of publicity has retained “a peculiarly normative power” (4). But it is not the intent of Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit to use the image of the polis as the norm against which later manifestations of the public life were to be measured. At this point in his career, such a norm would have to be extracted from the unfulfilled promise of bourgeois publicity, which — as he tells us time and again — was both “ideology and more than ideology.”

Habermas was considerably more attracted to the idea that something had been lost with the demise of what he would call “the classical doctrine of politics” in the lecture that he delivered in December 1961 as the final step in his protracted Habilitation process. But, in contrast Hennis, Arendt, Gadamer, and any number of others for whom Aristotelean practical philosophy seemed to offer an alternative to modern political science, he disavowed any interest in recovering a lost science of politics: the approaches on which “social philosophy” relied were, of necessity, broader than those of the traditional humanities. Habermas’s attempt to clarify the peculiar relationship of critical social theory to the “hermeneutic” disciplines on the one hand and the “empirical analytic” sciences on the other would remain a sort of work in progress for the next several decades.

Koselleck and the Hypocritical Enlightenment

If the relationship of Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit to The Human Condition is somewhat ambiguous, its stance towards Reinhart Koselleck’s Critique and Crisis is, at least at first glance, much simpler: Koselleck’s argument divereged markedly from Habermas. But, as had been the case with its treatment of Arendt, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit went about its business with little in the way of an acknowledgement that the account it was developing stood in starkest possible contrast to the one provided in Critique and Crises. The book’s explicit discussions of Koselleck are few and far between. Habermas began with a footnote expressing his indebtedness to Koselleck’s “exceptional investigation” for “many references” (see p. 267, footnote 2). A few footnotes later he noted a “characteristic passage” from Turgot that Koselleck had cited (p. 269, footnote 25). And finally, a few pages later, in the course of an account of the way in which Kant sought to bring about the reconciliation of politics and morality in the absence of the achievement of a “juridical condition” [Rechtszustand], Habermas observes that Kant

did not believe that he should expect any other beginning of the juridical condition than one achieved by political force. The indirect assumption of power by private individuals assembled to constitute a public, however, was not seen as itself political; …. (108).

At the end of this passage Habermas places a footnote directing readers to the discussion of Kant in the section of Critique and Crisis that discusses “The Process of Critique.”^[5] It may be worth noting that the German — “Prozess der Kritik” — has juridical overtones (recall Kafka) that Koselleck cashes in by the end of the discussion:

With this the pro and con of criticism, which had followed its non-political course within the Republic of Letters, turned into a trial between the Règne de la Critique and the rule of the State. In this trial the critic was simultaneously prosecutor, supreme judge and interested party (113).

Passages like this remind the reader that, whatever faults Koslleck’s book may have, a lack of style was not one of them — it is packed with zingers that must have made Carl Schmitt smile.

The way in which Habermas defined bourgeois publicity allowed him to follow Koselleck at least part of the way. The concise definition of “bourgeois publicity” that opened Habermas’s “sketch” of its social structure characterized it as “ the sphere of private people come together as a public” [als die Sphäre der zum Publikum versammelten Privatleute].^[6] The designation “private people” meant, first of all, that those who constituted this new public did not hold public offices and, further, that they were individuals whose concerns were with such previously “private” matters as “commodity exchange and social labor,” matters that had now become a matter for public deliberation. To the extent that this deliberation was taking place in venues that were not the normal location for “political” discussions — e.g., in coffee houses, at the stock exchange, etc. — it was possible to describe it in the ways that Koselleck (following his mentor Carl Schmitt) would habitually describe it: as “non-political” or as “indirectly political.” But this is the step that Habermas could not take: enforcing such a definition of what constitutes “the political” cuts against the broader trajectory of Habermas’s argument.^[7]

Koselleck’s argument requires that he employ a distinction between “political” and “nonpolitical” that sticks, relentlessly, to an understanding of politics that, like Schmitt before him, he traced back to Hobbes. This means that Koselleck has to regard those who assembled in coffee houses in precisely the same way as they were viewed during the time when the epithet “coffee-house politician” denoted an unjustified meddling of “private individuals” in what was properly the business of the state. Remaining true to Hobbes means that he is also compelled to view any disavowal of “politics” — e.g., the statement in the Constitutions of the Freemasons that Mason are “Resolved against All Politics” — as a hypocritical rejection of “the political” that sets the stage for a duplicitous pursuit of politics by other means.

Reading such disavowals of “politics” (which, as Margaret Jacob has argued, may amount to less than Koselleck would like us to think) as rejections of “the political” tout court enables Koselleck to see those who engage in such disavowals as guilty of a fundamental hypocrisy: they say they are not engaged in politics while, in fact, they are engaged in “indirect politics” — a power grab that dare not speak the truth about what it is doing. As with Masons, so with the “process of criticism”:

Initially, criticism based itself on this dualism in order to launch its own political process of pro and con against religion. Later, it increasingly involved the state in this process, but at the same time intensified the dualism so as, ostensibly non-politically, to turn into political criticism. Finally, its reach was extended to the State and the legal difference between its own authority of judging and that of the State was negated. … Criticism, via counter-criticism, arrived at super-criticism, before finally declining into hypocrisy. Hypocrisy was the veil which the Enlightenment continued to weave and carry and which it never managed to tear apart. (122)

It is hardly accidental (as they used to say in old German Democratic Republic and in points further east) that Koselleck’s account devotes considerable attention to the Illuminati: their attempt at a long march through the institutions of the Absolutist state serves as a sort of model for what he sees at work everywhere during in the Enlightenment. But if we take away the notion of “indirect politics,” the charge of “hypocrisy” collapses. And if we take away the charge of hypocrisy, Koselleck’s account of the “dialectic of enlightenment” (his choice for the title for his dissertation before he discovered it had been already taken) collapses as well.^[8]

In contrast, Habermas’s discussion gave pride of place to coffee houses rather than the Illuminati. In place of secret forces engaged in an indirect power grab we see the bourgeoisie, fueled by caffeine and newspapers, chattering away about public affairs, embodying a sort of rough draft of what in later versions of Habermas’s theory will become the regulative ideal of the ideal speech situation. But though almost everything about the argument of Strukturwandel der Öffenlichkeit pointed in a rather different direction from Critique and Crisis, Habermas was not inclined to point this out, at least not in the formal context of his Habilitation. The settling of accounts would be reserved for a review article in Merkur entitled “Verrufener Fortschritt —Verkanntes Jahrhundert [Disreputable Progress — Misunderstood Century.]^[9]

The review included a discussion of both Critique and Crisis and Geschichtsphilosophie und Weltbürgertum, a book written by Koselleck’s friend Hanno Kesting that (as their mutual friend Nichlaus Sombart would later note) articulated, in less guarded form, most of the same concerns that animated Critique and Crisis.^[10] (It also dealt, though much more briefly, with Peter Drucker’s Landmarks of Tomorrow (1957), a work that provided Habermas with his first encounter with the notion of “post-modernism”). The review focused on what Habermas had avoided pointing out in Strukturwandel der Öffenlichkeit: the argument of Critique and Crisis presupposed a “political anthropology” that regarded “civil war” [Bürgerkrieg] — rather than international conflict — as the supreme evil that must, at all price, be avoided. It was this assumption, Habermas noted, that had led Koselleck to insist that all efforts to engage in a critique of princely authority inevitably carried with it the “terror of civil war.” But, in the absence of such an anthropology, Koselleck’s thesis that “the power of indirectly political critique necessary culminates in crisis” remains “not entirely convincing,”

Schmitt on Authority and Truth

The anthropology Koselleck required could be found in Hobbes’ Leviathan, especially as was read by Carl Schmitt. This brings us to the third of the passages I quoted at the start of this discussion. In reading Kant as “the most extreme counter-position to the principle auctoritas non veritas facit legem,” Habermas was doing nothing more than reading Kant in the same way as Koselleck, following in the footsteps of Carl Schmitt, had read him. The crucial difference was that Critique and Crisis took Hobbes’ principle as the fixed point of reference from which to trace the collapse of Europe in the catastrophe of the French Revolution and the “global civil war” that would rage on into the twentieth century. while Strukturwandel der Öffenlichkeit took its bearings from Kant.

Koselleck cited the Hobbes quote in the course of his opening sketch of Hobbes’ solution to the problem of how to put an end to religious conflict:

The public interest, about which the sovereign alone has the right to decide, no longer lies in the jurisdiction of conscience. Conscience, which becomes alienated from the State, turns into private morality. Auctoritas, non veritas facit legem — laws are made by authority, not by truth. The prince is above the law and at the same time its source; he is both law-maker and judge. This law, as constitutional law, is no longer substantially tied to social interests and religious hopes; instead, it designates a formal domain of political decisions beyond any Church, estate, or party. This domain can be occupied by this or that power, only providing it has the authority required to protect the various individuals, irrespective of their interest and expectations. The ruler’s political decision takes effect by virtue of that decision. (Critique and Crisis 31)

The line from Hobbes that Koselleck was quoting seems to have had a peculiar hold on Schmitt, who kept returning to it, again and again. In Political Theology (1922) his discussion of it went as follows:

We can perhaps distinguish two types of juristic scientific thought according to whether an awareness of the normative character of the legal decision is or is not present. The classical representative of the decisionist type (if I may be permitted to coin this word) is Thomas Hobbes. The peculiar nature of this type explains why it, and not the other type, discovered the classic formulation of the antithesis: autoritas, non veritas facit legem (33).

In the Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy he explained it this way:

If only those regulations which have come into effect with the cooperation and participation of the popular assembly are called laws, then it is because the popular assembly, that is, the parliament, has taken its decisions according to a parliamentary method, considering arguments and counterarguments. As a consequence its decisions have a logically different character from that of commands which are only based on authority. This is expressed in the biting antitheses of Hobbes’s defInition of law: “Every man seem, that some lawes are addressed to all the subjects in generall, some to particular Provinces; some to particular Vocations; and some to particular Men.” To an absolutist it is obvious “that Law is not Counsell, but Command,” essentially authority and not, as in the rationalist conception of the law in Rechtstaat theories, truth and justice: Auctoritas, non Veritas facit Legem (43).

Finally, in The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (1938), he took stock of the then current state of the discussion:

Auctoritas (in the sense summa potestas), non veritas. This sentence, often cited since 1922, as expressed by Hobbes, is anything but a slogan of irrational despotism. Nor should the expression be regarded as a kind of Credo quia absurdum, as it has so often been misunderstood. What is significant in the statement is Hobbes’ conclusion that it is no longer valid to distinguish between auctoritas and potestas, making the summa potestas into summa auctoritas. The sentence thus becomes a simple, objective expression of value-and-truth-neutral, positivist-technical thinking that separates the religious and metaphysical standards of truth from standards of command and function and renders them autonomous (44-45).

What was new in the 1938 discussion was the subsequent account — in Chapter VI —of how the great leviathan was “destroyed from within.” The explanation, in brief, was the same as the one that would be offered by Koselleck: “the distinction between inner and outer became for the mortal god a sickness unto death” (65). What had once been “private” now became “social” and

From the duality of state and state-free society arose a social pluralism in which ‘indirect powers’ could celebrate effortless triumphs. ‘Indirect’ used here means not at its own risk but —to cite the pertinent term of Jacob Burkhardt —‘by previously ill-treated and humiliated temporal powers (73-74).

In this context,

the appeal to justice and truth does not produce peace but instead leads to war ….Everyone claims, of course, that right and truth is on his side. But the assertion of being in the right does not lead to peace. Instead, it is designed to contravene the decisions of a well-functioning legal force that was created to end strife (45).

Here, in short, was the sketch that Koselleck proceeded to fill out — a task that, to be sure, was not a simple one and one which he executed with considerable flair. But there was, as Habermas noted in the Merkur review but had avoided mentioning in Strukturwandel der Öffenlichkeit, something a bit strange — no matter how well it was done —about such an exercise.

The “grandiose project” in which Koselleck, Kesting, and (at least according to his account) an increasingly skeptical Sombart were engaged was the construction of an Archiv für Weltbürgerkrieg und Raumordnung — an attempt to trace the history of the world-wide civil war had broken out at the close of the eighteenth century in the final death spasms of Hobbes’ mortal god. As conquered Germans they could see themselves as occupying a privileged spot from which to comprehend the new ordering of the world that had emerged in the wake of what they regarded as the latest fragile cease-fire in this war — a cease-fire that had left American and Soviet troops facing each other across the borders of a divided Germany. Even absent the particulars of Koselleck’s war time experiences — which avoiding the siege of Stalingrad only thanks to his foot being crushed by an artillery wagon, being captured late in the war by the Red Army and assigned the task of removing I. G. Farben equipment from Auschwitz for shipment to the Soviet Union, and avoiding the Gulag only through the intervention of a family friend — it is hardly surprising that the “apocalyptic sublime” might have had its appeal as a governing narrative trope. Depending on how one chooses to read Critique and Crisis (and in the various Prefaces he wrote, Koselleck lays out all the possible options) the book could be understood as an attempt to understand the “utopian self-exhaltation” that had given rise to the Third Reich (in other words, the ultimate origins of the “German catastrophe” could be traced to the Enlightenment) or the origins of the unfettered utopian politics that had given birth to the two super-powers (both of them, as Koselleck noted, children of the Enlightenment) that, armed to the teeth against each one another, stood face to face across a divided Europe, incapable of “simply recognizing each other as opponents” (presumably, an airdrop of copies of The Concept of the Political on both sides of the cease-fire line would not have remedied their misunderstanding). Either way, the Enlightenment functioned as “the antechamber to our present epoch” (6).

Towards a “Philosophy of History with a Practical Intent”

Habermas was aware that Kant’s project of subjecting law to the principles of moral philosophy was not without its own presuppositions. But, in contrast to the assumptions that fueled Koselleck’s argument, they were historical and social rather than anthropological. During the period that separated Hobbes from Kant, “private people had … formed themselves into a public and endowed the sphere of their reasoning [Sphäre ihres Räsonnements] — namely, publicity — with the political function of mediating state and society.” The ever-present threat of a war of all and against all had given way to a society in which the public were capable — in the words that Kant put in the mouth of Frederick the Great — of arguing, but still obeying. Tracing how the change had taken place that allowed Kant to assume that the extreme remedy that Hobbes had prescribed was no longer necessary had been the burden of the first half of Strukturwandel der Öffenlichkeit, which is why it was possible to Habermas to draw on a few of Koselleck’s sources, but read them in a radically different way. Habermas’s reading of Kant went on to trace how Kant’s writings on the philosophy of history might be seen as an attempt to grasp, as “principle,” the “structural transformation of publicity” that these opening chapters had sketched. Habermas’s reading of Kant was not without its peculiarities, but their discussion will have to wait for another time. What is perhaps of greater immediate relevance is what Habermas thought he found in Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View.”

He saw the concept of publicity as playing two different roles in Kant’s philosophy of history. In what Habermas terms the “official” version, a cosmopolitan political order emerges as a result “natural necessity alone”: it is the product of mechanisms that produce the “pathologically compelled agreement” to enter into society. Within such a society, “moral politics amounted to nothing more than legal conduct out of duty under positive laws” and the role of publicity is limited to providing a guarantee that the laws subjects are obligated to obey are ones that these subjects could have given to themselves. Of greater interest for Habermas was the “unofficial” account, which envisions a cosmopolitan order that “issued from both natural necessity and moral politics (115).” In this account, the articulation of the philosophy of history itself plays a role in reconciling natural necessity and moral politics.

As Kant explained in last proposition of his “Idea for a Universal History,” the attempt “to work out universal world history according to a plan of nature that aims at the perfect civil union of the human species” is not only “possible” but, indeed, is also capable of “furthering this aim of nature.” By showing how the vicissitudes of history have nevertheless “always left over a germ of enlightenment that developed further through each revolution and prepared for a following stage of improvement” this account not only explained the past history of the species, but also provided an incentive for carrying this progress forward into the future. For Habermas, this “remarkable self-implication of the philosophy of history” carves out a role for philosophy in facilitating the public’s critical reflections: it becomes “a part of the Enlightenment diagnosed as history’s course (115-6).”

What Habermas found in Kant — or, as more skeptical readers might see it, what he read into him — was a vision of the relationship between theory and practice that had been a sort of guiding thread since his early review essay on literature on Marx and Marxism: the concept of a “philosophy of history with a practical intent.” The pursuit of that goal would ultimately lead him far from the sort of critique of ideology that he was practicing in Strukturwandel der Öffenlichkeit. Eventually, it would lead him to question what sort of purchase a philosophy of history could have in the domain of political and moral philosophy. That it is difficult to find the author of Strukturwandel der Öffenlichkeit in the pages of Faktizität und Geltung is hardly a criticism of the latter book. But those interested in trying the fathom the peculiar ways in which the concepts that have been used to understand the world sometimes help to shape might still find something of value in this peculiar early work of an enormously talented young thinker who was still in the process of figuring out just what sort of thinker he would become.

[1] See p. 102 of the English translation for a different handling of the passage in question.

[2] See pp. 102-103 of the English translation.

[3] On this point, see Arendt, Human Condition, 40, 42-3, 45-46.

[4] Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity 147-8, 189. Habermas’s writings prior to the publication of Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit remain terra incognita for most English commentators. A notable, and extraordinarily helpful, exception is Dirk Moses’s discussion in German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

[5] Unfortunately, I am not currently in possession of the first edition of Kritik und Krise, nor do the translators of Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere provide a citation to the English translation. But what Habermas seems to have in mind is the account of Kant in Chapter III, section V of the German edition (pp. 81 ff in the Suhrkamp edition), which winds up as Chapter 8 of the English translation (pp. 98 ff).

[6] See p. 27 of the English version for a different translation.

[7] For a helpful attempt to work out the implications of Schmitt’s conception of “the political” for the Koselleck’s account, see Timo Pankakoski, “Conflict, Context, Concreteness: Koselleck and Schmitt on Concepts.” Political Theory 38:6 (2010): 749–779.

[8] For the choice of title (as well as an exhaustive exploration of the political subtext to Critique and Crisis), see the penetrating discussion in Franz Leander Fillafer, “The Enlightenment On Trial: Reinhart Kosselleck’s Interpretation of Aufklärung.” In …..Fillafer, Franz L., and Q. Edward Wang, eds., The Many Faces of Clio: Cross-Cultural Approaches to Historiography, Essays in Honor of Georg G. Iggers, 322–345. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007.

[9] “Verrufener Fortschritt-verkanntes Jahrhundert,” Merkur 14, No. 147 (1960). As I’ve suggested earlier, this is a text that would be worth having in English.

[10] For Sombart’s account of his relationship of Kesting and Koselleck in postwar Heidelbert, see Rendezvous mit Dem Weltgeist. Heidelberger Reminiszenzen 1945-1951. Fischer Frankfurt, 2000 — a heady dose of insider gossip on goings on in Heidelberg.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Arendt, Begriffsgeschichte, Habermas, History of Concepts, Koselleck, Schmitt | 2 Comments

Publicity & the Public Sphere – Reading Habermas as a Historian of Concepts

Posted on March 31, 2013 by James Schmidt

As I was getting ready for a discussion of Jürgen Habermas’ Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in a seminar that I’m teaching on Enlightenment and its Critics, I recalled an incident from the distant past. A colleague returned from a visit to Paris with the news that “Habermas has a new book out — and it’s about advertising!” This struck me as rather unlikely and, after further discussion, I realized that the book she’d seen must have been L’espace public: Archéologie de la publicité comme dimension constitutive de la société bourgeoise,” the French translation of Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. The French title is not without its charms, and not just because Archéologie de la publicité manages to make it seem like Habermas and Foucault were, indeed, engaged in a similar project. I now believe that if the English translation had opted for something along the lines of “The Structural Transformation of Publicity,“ we might have been spared many misunderstandings about what Habermas was up to in what may well be his most audacious book.

Anyone who compares the English translation with the German original will discover that there have been some bumps along the way. Fortunately, the “Translator’s Note” at the start (though, since two translators are credited, shouldn’t this have been a “Translators’ Note”?) alerts readers that Öffentlichkeit is not a term that goes easily into English. After noting that the word “may be rendered variously as ‘(the) public’, ‘public sphere,’ or ‘publicity’,” it offers the following solution: “Whenever the context makes more than one of these terms sensible, ‘public sphere’ was chosen as the preferred version.” And here the troubles begin.

As W. G. Runciman observed in a review of the German original, we once had an English word for the object of Habermas’s inquiry: “publicness.” The word, he noted, can be found in the OED, but it has passed from usage and with its passing “a useful abstract noun has been lost to the English-speaking writer.” An Ngram for “publicness” (you knew there would be an Ngram coming, right? — these damn things are a sort of catnip for intellectual historians) would seem to suggest that the rumors of term’s demise were greatly exaggerated:

But the scarcity of occurrences of “publicness” should be warning enough that what looks like a surge in usage may be less significant than it might appear. The easiest way to confirm that “publicness” is, indeed, dead (and may not ever have been all that lively) is to compare it to “public sphere”:

And, while we’re at it, let’s turn this into a threesome:

Poking among the rare nineteenth-century appearances of “publicness” turns up appearances of the word in three translation dictionaries. Supporting Runciman’s suggestion, Nathan Bailey’s English-German and German-English Dictionary (Leipzig and Jena: Friedrich Frommann, 1801) offers “publicness” as a translation for Öffentlichkeit. George J. Adler’s monumental mid-nineteenth-century dictionary does the same, but adds “publicity” and “openness” as possible options. Finally, “publicness” can be found in the French-English dictionary put together by Thomas Nugent (who is probably best known as the first English translator of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws): it is offered as a translation for the French Publicité.

The pickings in English are somewhat richer for “publicity” and a look at texts using the term in the first half of the nineteenth century turns up a fair amount of Jeremy Bentham, who used the term in ways that parallel the German Öffentlichkeit. Faced with a choice between a word we have lost (“publicness”) and a word that has taken on a different meaning (“publicity”), the decision to translate Öffentlichkeit as “public space”might seem the best choice from a bad set of options. But it comes at a cost. As Harold Mah has argued in an article that should be required reading for anyone interested in understanding (rather than merely citing) Habermas’s book, the decision to render Öffentlichkeit as “public sphere” inevitably fosters the impression that Habermas was concerned with something that functions like a physical space, “a domain that one can enter, occupy, and leave.” Now Habermas is interested in understanding the how the notion of Öffentlichkeit began to take on spatial connotations. But the decision to translate the German term as “public sphere” cannot help but deprive this crucial development of the attention it deserves by conveying the impression that the historical moment when Öffentlichkeit “presents itself as a sphere [selbst stellt sich als eine Sphäre dar]” was more or less preordained. Translating “Die Öffentlichkeit selbst stellt sich als eine Sphäre dar — dem privaten steht der öffentliche Bereich gegenüber” as “The public sphere itself appears as a specific domain — the public domain versus the private” [see Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere 2] turns what should be a novel development (i.e., just how did an attribute — namely, “publicness” — come to be associated with a distinctive social space — “the public sphere”?) into a foregone conclusion: why should we be surprised to see the “public sphere” presenting itself as a “sphere”?

The convention of translating Öffentlichkeit as “public sphere” also makes a complete nonsense of the distinction that Habermas proceeds to work out between the different dimensions in which Öffentlichkeit (see the diagram on p. 30 of the English translation). Habermas’s concise distinction between “politische Öffentlichkeit” and “literarische Öffentlichkeit” here becomes a cumbersome distinction between the “public sphere in the political realm” and “pubic sphere in the world of letters” (sphere? realm? world? huh?). One of the rules that translators would be well advised to follow is that when the text begins to bury you, stop digging. But having decided that, whenever possible, Öffentlichkeit is going to turned into “public sphere,” the translation grinds on, page after mind-numbing page, turning a book that is not without a certain flair (granted, as a writer, Habermas is no Adorno, but he’s better than this translation) into something that reads like a sociology textbook.

Sadly, clumsiness is not the least of the problems plaguing the translation. As Mah goes on to point out, once Öffentlichkeit has been “spatialized,” the stage was set for critics to fault the book for its failure to explore the mechanisms of exclusion that had been at work in the creation of the “bourgeois public sphere,” its lack of attention to the existence of other, non-bourgeois public spheres, and its tendency to overlook the less than rational features of what now came to be called “the eighteenth-century public sphere.” Such concerns would have merit if, in fact, Habermas was using the term Öffentlichkeit to denote a space into which groups moved or were barred from entering. But while bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit may “present itself” as a space, it is central to Habermas’s argument that its success in presenting itself in this way was grounded in a “fiction”: namely, the fiction that “property owners” are the same things as “the human beings pure and simple.” It is only thanks to this fiction that certain physical spaces (e.g., everyone’s favorite part of “the Enlightenment public sphere,” the coffee-house) could come to be seen as part of that more expansive network of institutions that make up “the public.”

Habermas’s lack of interest in other possible “publics” or his failure to examine the way in which certain groups or forms of political activity are excluded from the “bourgeois public sphere” are less a failing on Habermas’s part than a consequence of the way this fiction functions. Defending Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit against its critics (which now seem to include Habermas himself, who would later take this line of criticism more seriously than it deserves), Mah emphazies that it is misguided to think of Öffentlichkeit is some sort of magical “space” that automatically grants “recognition and a measure of political power” to those who succeed in entering it. Instead, the agents who participate in the fiction of inclusiveness that the concept invokes are able to do so only to the extent that they “appear in a certain form” — namely, that peculiar fusion of “bourgeois property owner” and “human being” that looms so large in Habermas’s account. The denizens of coffee houses shape themselves into a “public” only to the extent that they take on the particular demeanor and embrace the general norms associated with the concept of “bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit.” (If there is a criticism of Habermas’s treatment of institutions like the coffee house it would be that, in tending to treat Addison and Steele’s writings as descriptions of coffee house life rather than as efforts to reform the conduct of those who gathered in them, Habermas tended to downplay just how much effort was required to teach the bourgeois how to act like a “human being,” a point that has been nicely developed by Lawrence E. Klein).

At the risk of pursuing this point further than Mah might be willing to push it, what his argument suggests to me is that — despite its accounts of coffeehouses, salons, table societies, Masonic lodges, and the Tattler — Habermas’s book ought to be read as something other than a social history of the rise and fall of the “eighteenth-century public sphere.” What the book was attempting to do was to trace the fate of a concept: as the subtitle tells us, the book is an inquiry into a “category of bourgeois society” known as Öffentlichkeit. By the opening decades of the nineteenth century, this concept had been inscribed into constitutional arrangements that conceived of legislation as something that was produced through a process of public debate. As a result, law became something other than the expression of a sovereign will (pace Hobbes, it is not the case that Auctoritas, non veritas facit legem). Instead, it was seen as deriving its force from the agreement of parties who have engaged in a process of public deliberation. Once we begin to think about the book in this way it becomes clearer that Habermas was less interested in the various forms of association that defined what we — thanks, in large part, to the opening chapters of his book — have come to call “the Enlightenment public sphere,” than he was with tracing the trajectory of the concept of Öffentlichkeit. In other words, what he was doing is a odd sort of conceptual history: a history in which the concept, at a key moment, had a crucial role in structuring political life.

In this light, it might be useful to consider how Habermas’s Begriffsgeschichte of Öffentlichkeit differs from that other discussion of the “eighteenth-century public sphere” that has haunted Habermas’s book (first in German and then in English) like a sort of evil twin: Reinhart Koselleck’s Critique and Crisis. In 1954, Koselleck had submitted the manuscript, which would appear in book form in 1959, as his Habilitationsschrift. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit was Habermas’ Habilitationsschrift, begun in 1959 and completed by the summer of 1960. The second edition of Habermas’ book included a footnote that expressed his indebtedness to the Koselleck’s “exceptional [ausgezeichneten] contribution … for many references.” But while Habermas may have been indebted to the “references” he gleaned from Critique and Crisis, he had little use for its overall argument. That much should be clear from his critique of Koselleck’s book in the review that appeared in Merkur shortly before the appearance of Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (it would be good to have the review translated, preferably the original Merkur version, rather than the somewhat abbreviated version that Habermas included in his collection Kultur und Kritik).

That Habermas was troubled by the political subtext of Koselleck’s work is hardly surprising. The books come from different universes: Kritik und Krise extended Carl Schmitt’s interpretation of Hobbes’ Leviathan into the eighteenth century, while Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit drew out the political implications that Horkheimer and Adorno were never able to incorporate into their account of the dialectic of enlightenment. A fuller discussion of the ideological chasm separating these two books will have to wait for a later post. For now, it might be enough to contrast the way in which Koselleck and Habermas think about the relationship of concepts and history.

One of the least convincing features of Koselleck’s account is the book’s assumption that Hobbes’ account of absolutism has some sort of purchase on the actual structures of political life in late seventeenth-century Europe. Taking Leviathan as a sociological sketch of the relationship between the public and the private in early modern Europe turns Hobbes’ theory of sovereignty from an aspirational project to an empirical description. In their dreams, monarchs may well have imagined themselves as powerful as Moby Dick; but the more realistic ones were probably more concerned with avoiding the fate of Ahab. In contrast, Habermas’ account was on somewhat firmer ground in that, insofar as Öffentlichkeit became an actual constitutional principle, it could play a role in structuring the nineteenth-century liberal state. His point, repeated again and again throughout the book, was that Öffentlichkeit was “both ideology and more than ideology.”

That phrase might be read in two ways. First, and perhaps most obviously, though Öffentlichkeit might ultimately rest on a fiction (i.e., the male property holder is not identical with the human being as such), it nevertheless expressed an ideal that transcended the divisions of class society: a form of rule based on a rational consensus achieved through free and open discussion. In other words, it was both ideology and utopia. Second, and perhaps more central to the immediate concerns of Habermas’ study, while the concept of Öffentlichkeit was a “category of bourgeois society,” it would nevertheless become something “more and other than a mere scrap of liberal ideology that social democracy could discard without harm” (4). It came to perform a constitutional function whose significance cannot be underestimated. There two connotations of the phrase merge in the succinct statement of the general argument of the book that can be found at the midpoint of the book (a fact that, I suppose, would delight a hard-core, line-counting disciple of Leo Strauss — in the unlikely event that one of these odd creatures happened to read Habermas’s book). Here’s the German:

Öffentlichkeit scheint in dem Masse Kraft ihres Prinzips, kritische Publizität, zu verlieren, in dem sie sich als Sphäre ausdehnt und noch den privaten Bereich aushöhlt.

While the argument is straightforward enough in German, the English is somewhat more opaque:

The principle of the public sphere, that is, critical publicity, seemed to lose its strength in the measure that it expanded as a sphere and even undermined the private realm.

Once again we see the price of a translation binds itself to the mast of translating every possible appearance of Öffentlichkeit as “public sphere,” even at the price of producing a sentence where a “sphere” somehow gets to have a “principle”. So, let’s unpack what the German text is saying:

The fullest development of the “principle” of Öffentlichkeit can be found in the notion of “critical Publizität” that Habermas discusses in §13 (”Publicity as the Principle of Mediation of Politics and Morality”), which deals with the role played by the concept in Kant’s writings of enlightenment, law, and history.
To the extent that, at the start of the nineteenth century, the concept of Öffentlichkeit came to be applied not simply to the bourgeois property owner (who in the fiction on which the concept rests, is identified with human beings in general) but to other human beings who lacked the economic and the educational resources on which the property owner can draw, we now have a “public” that includes more than just the bourgeoisie.
But, as Öffentlichkeit expands as a sphere to include previously excluded groups, the principle on which it had rested (i.e., that process of critical deliberation that Kant associated with the “public use of reason”) must be supplanted with procedures that do not measure up to the rigorous standards of critical deliberation (e.g., political bargaining and compromises replace critical deliberation) .
Pushed far enough, this process not only undercut the utopian hopes that Kant and others had once associated with the “public realm,” but also undermines the “private sphere” associated with the bourgeois family.

What Habermas is saying here might well be bad history (caveat: I’m not a nineteenth-century political historian), but getting rid of the infelicities of the English translation at least provides us with a coherent and perhaps suggestive way of thinking about what is taking place in early nineteenth-century Europe. The burden of the second half of the book (which is a part that most of us who work in the area of eighteenth-century studies rarely read and almost never remember) winds up deploying a fair number of the arguments that the earlier generation of Frankfurt School theorists had developed in the 1930s and 1940s (e.g., the interpretation of the transition from “liberal” to “monopoly” forms of capitalism, the replacement of the indirect form of socialization of children via the mechanism of the Oedipal crisis with direct socialization via mass media, and the growing importance of the “culture industry’). To bring their work up to date, Habermas drew on more recent work by American sociologists and cultural critics (e.g., William H. Whyte and David Riesman). But above all else looms the figure of Theodor Adorno.

Nowhere is Habermas’s debt to Adorno clearer than in a rather dense discussion of the ways in which the products of the culture industry (a term that Habermas explicitly invokes) deaden the capacities of those who consume them, a discussion that also manages to work in a reference to Kant’s answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?”:

They draw the public as listeners and viewers under their spell, taking away the distance of ‘autonomy’ [Mündigkeit], namely the chance to be able to speak and to disagree” [“Sie ziehen das publikum als Hörende und Sehende in ihren Bann, nehmen ihm aber zugleich die Distanz der »Mündigkeit«, die Chance namlich, sprechen und widersprechen zu konnen.” — see p. 171 of the English translation for a different take on the passage].

Like his mentor, Habermas had an ear for the violence that had been inflicted on words. There is a striking passage (inevitably blunted in translation) on p. 213 of the German edition in which the English term “publicity” begins to crop up, like an unwelcome weed, choking off whatever meaning once adhered to the Kantian notion of Publizität:

“Publizität once meant the exposure of political domination before the public use of reason; publicity [English in original] now adds up the reactions of an uncommitted friendly disposition. In the measure that bourgeois Öffentlichkeit is shaped by public relations [English in original], it again takes on feudal features. The “suppliers” display a showy pomp before customers ready to follow. Publizität imitates the kind of aura proper to the personal prestige and supernatural authority once bestowed by representative Öffentlichkeit” [cf. English translation 195].

In the face of a paragraph like this, a translator can only despair: its impact rests on the way it which it enacts a washing away of meaning, a replacement of terms that once held the promise of something better with terms that serve the aims of the bad present.

Passages like this make me wonder whether the best strategy for translating Öffentlichkeit might involve resigning ourselves to using a word that is all too current — “publicity” — rather than attempting to breathe new life into the word we have lost — “publicness.” Readers might well be discomforted by the sight of a word now associated with the deceptive trade of advertising in a discussion of a period that hoped, through the public use of reason, to make a better world. But perhaps a reminder that “publicity” harbored loftier aims might not be the worst way of remaining loyal to the hopes of past.

To be continued ….

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Begriffsgeschichte, Habermas, History of Concepts | 11 Comments

Deeper into the “Shallow Enlightenment” (Ludwig Tieck, George J. Adler, and Herman Meville)

Posted on March 24, 2013 by James Schmidt

Before resuming last week’s exploration of the “shallow Enlightenment,” we should take stock of where things stand.

What we saw last week was that “shallow” was but one of a number of pejoratives that have been marshaled against the Enlightenment. It bears remembering that, when viewed in the context of the other terms that could be used, “shallow” is probably one of the gentler characterizations of the Enlightenment’s failings. After all, a “shallow enlightenment” is not an enlightenment that is likely to set the world on fire. It is not something that inevitably inaugurates an era of revolutions, nor does it threaten to culminate in a nihilism that eradicates all values. Indeed, friends of enlightenment are quite capable of accusing each other of periodic lapses into “shallowness” or “superficiality.” One of the many things that the notion that there was something called “the counter-Enlightenment” tends to obscure is that criticisms of what we now call “the Enlightenment” came in a number of forms and from a variety of parties. In order to make sense of the history of the concept of “enlightenment,” we need to recover the language used to criticize it.

My point of departure last week had been the assumption that, as Ernst Cassirer implied in the Preface to his Philosophy of the Enlightenment, this particular pejorative was a term that could be traced back to the Romantic tradition. This origin might help explain why this phrase turns up both in German critiques of the Enlightenment and in a number of English criticisms, including James Hutchison Stirling’s The Secret Of Hegel, which served as one of the source quotes used by the Oxford English Dictionary in its lamentable, but now happily revised, definition of the Enlightenment. There is, however, one problem with the OED’s quote from Stirling: when he spoke of a “shallow enlightenment” he was referring to the limited degree of enlightenment achieved by an individual — namely, Thomas Buckle — rather than the failings of an historical period.

On Errors, Forced and Unforced

In my article on the OED’s definition I was inclined to view this misreading simply as the sort of mistake that was inevitable in producing a complex lexicon like the OED at a time when the resources on which we can now draw were not available. But in doing this, I may have overlooked an interesting question: just why would an editor, looking at a slip of paper containing a quotation from a mid-nineteenth century book, be inclined to read the phrase “shallow enlightenment” as referring to the shallowness of an historical period, rather than the shallowness of an individual? In sports (and in politics, assuming there’s a difference) we talk about “forced” and “unforced errors.” Perhaps as historians of concepts and ideas, we might want to do the same. If the OED’s error was “forced,” just what was doing the forcing? In other words, what might have lead those who were inserting these source quotes into the OED to assume that there was nothing peculiar about a passage that described an entire tradition of thought as “shallow”?

One conjecture might go like this: by the close of the nineteenth century, when the entry was being edited, the convention of seeing “enlightenment thought” as “shallow” had become so well-established that it was only natural for an editor to read Stirling’s characterization of the shallowness of an individual as a description of the shallowness of an epoch. And, if Cassirer was right in viewing the German pejorative “flachen Aufklärung” as the verdict of the “romantic tradition,” then the explanation for the OED’s forced error might go like this: by the close of the nineteenth century, the convention of viewing “enlightenment” as “shallow” had completed its migration from German romanticism into English literature. Since an explanation of this sort is consistent with the Ngram that I posted last week, it would make sense to take a look at some of the examples that Google provides and see just how this transmission might have taken place.

English Romantics with Germans Weapons

In a study dating from 1887 Alois Brandl observed that Coleridge and Carlyle “fought against shallow enlightenment, conscious calculations and narrow-minded materialism, and both fetched their weapons by preference from Germany” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the English Romantic School 370). It is not clear, however, that the phrase “shallow enlightenment” itself was one of the “weapons” that Coleridge and Carlyle picked up in Germany. A quick search for the phrase “shallow enlightenment” in texts by Coleridge and Carlyle available online turns up nothing. But, searching beyond the works of Coleridge and Carlyle, the phrase can be found in a number of nineteenth-century Anglophone accounts of German Romanticism, including discussions of a German romantic whose path had crossed that of both Coleridge and Carlyle: Ludwig Tieck.

Coleridge met Tieck in Rome in 1806 and the two men met again during Tieck’s visit to England in the spring and summer of 1817. But Edwin Hermann Zeydel’s Ludwig Tieck and England (1931) maintains that their contacts were, at best, “casual” (91). He grants that Carlyle’s involvement with Tieck might have gone a bit further. Carlyle translated a collection of Tieck’s shorter works in 1825, but does not seem to have been much impressed by them. Zeydel argues that Carlyle was “out of sympathy with the undertaking” (he regarded it, at best, as a way to make some money) and sees his introduction to the volume as betraying “a poorly disguised indifference to Tieck’s work and no unusual liking for his fiction” (116). But Carlyle later provided a somewhat more sympathetic account of Tieck’s longer works in his 1827 German Romance (a collection of translations with introductions), which offered some measured praise for Tieck’s fairy tales, particularly his dramatized version of Puss in Boots, Der gestiefelte Kater. In this work Carlyle maintains that Tieck

laughed with his whole heart, in the true Aristophonic vein, at the actual aspect of literature; and without mingling his satire with personalities, or any other false ingredient, and drained it like a quiet shower of volcanic ashes on the cant of Illumination, the cant of Sensibility, the cant of Criticism, and the many other cants of that shallow time, till the gumflower products of the poetic garden hung draggled and black under their unkindly coating.

In seeing Tieck as taking aim at the “cant of Illumination,” Carlyle was employing the favored term that English critics used in speaking of the movement we call “the Enlightenment.” But, while we are close to our quarry, we still haven’t found a use of the phrase “shallow enlightenment.”

George J. Adler, Lexicographer

There is, however, another English discussion of Tieck’s Puss and Boots and it contains the phrase “shallow enlightenment” along with a good deal more. The text in question is the Handbook of German Literature, an anthology of German texts with English introductions compiled by George J. Adler (New York, D. Appleton & Co. 1854). The collection includes, in addition to Tieck, not only the expected texts from Schiller and Goethe, but also extracts from Johann Georg Hamann (though one can only guess at what a student of German might have made of them). The introduction to Puss and Boots (or, as Adler would have it, The Booted Puss), explains that Tieck was born in Berlin and that

A certain tone of omniscience, which according to the author’s account was at that time particularly prevalent in the city, was as offensive to him as it was odious to foreigners. A certain shallow enlightenment, which pronounced a sentence of condemnation on everything, that would not submit to the metewand of its artificial standard, had become the fashion of the day.

Unable and unwilling itself to comprehend the profounder verities of art, of philosophy and of religion it yet arrainged them all before the forum of its superficial common sense. This jejune illuminatism, while it successfully exposed to merited ridicule and contempt many a remaining vestige of superstition or of obscurantisitic abuses, assumed itself the intolerant attitude of the parties supplanted and condescended even to inquisitorial heretifications and to a malignant persecution of all, who ventured to dissent from its infallible decisions.” (321–322)

The “Berlin Monthly magazine,” Adler goes on to note, “was the oracle and organ” of this general attitude.

Here, as long last, we find the phrase “shallow enlightenment” used in the context of a discussion of a German romantic. It occurs not in a text written by an English romantic but rather in the work of what would appear to be an unknown American. But Adler was, in fact, neither American nor entirely unknown.

An article in the November 1934 issue of The German Quarterly informs us that Adler was born in Leipzig in 1821, came to America in 1833, and graduated as valedictorian from Columbia University (then known as the University of the City of New York) in 1840. He completed his most significant contribution at the tender age of 28: his massive Dictionary of the German and English Languages, published in 1849. The dictionary is available online and the epigram from Coleridge that stands at the outset suggests that Adler’s approach shares some of the concerns of today’s historians of concepts: “Language is the armory of the human mind, containing at once the trophies of its past, and the weapons for its future conquests.”

Adler’s definition of Aufklärung rounds up a fair number of the weapons that had been deployed against the Enlightenment:

Here, in sum, was a man who seemed to know a great deal about the intellectual life of Berlin in the mid–1780s and about the terms that had been used to criticize the Enlightenment. How did he know this?

His account of Tieck’s life drew rather heavily on Tieck’s own Preface to the republication of his early epistolary novel William Lovell. While Tieck’s description resembles what we see in Adler’s summary (for instance, it characterizes the Berlinische Monatsschrift as the “main carrier and advocate” of the general attitude he associated with the Aufklärung) the word that Tieck uses to describe the failings of this Aufklärung was “Seichtigkeit” rather than “flache.” But since both words can be translated into English as “shallow,” this is a distinction without difference. The adjective flache seems to be used a bit more often than the adjectival form of Seichtigkeit:

But occurrences of flache Aufklärung are somewhat more common than references to seichte Aufklärung (though neither of these terms is all that popular, especially when compared with the other alternatives):

Like his familiarity with eighteenth-century Berlin, Adler’s grasp of German pejoratives for Aufklärung has a simple explanation: anyone working on a German-English dictionary would likely have consulted the relevant German dictionaries. We need only compare the entry for Aufklärung in Campe’s 1806 dictionary to Adler’s in order to see what he might have taken from earlier German ventures:

And this, perhaps, sheds some light on what the German term Aufklärerei is doing in the OED’s old definition: is it unreasonable to think that, when dealing with a term whose provenance —according to the source quotes that they were using —would have appeared to be German, the editors might have consulted the leading German-English dictionary of the day (even if it was written by a German-American)?

Adler at Sea

Adler’s crowning scholarly achievement came at a terrible personal cost. Among the works by him that can be found online is a self-published text entitled “Letters of a Lunatic: A Brief Exposition of My University Life During the Years 1853–54” (1854). This sad little book consists of letters and documents he assembled in an effort to respond to the various conspiracies that he saw as having been mounted against him by his immediate superiors at New York University. He reports on voices that he has heard outside his office, taunting him. He includes the letter that his Dean wrote to Adler’s friends and colleagues advising them of Adler’s difficulties and goes on to couple it with own lengthy response, disputing various points (but usually in a form that leaves one wondering whether his Dean’s assessment of his state might have been correct). And he provides his readers with a copy of the letter that he wrote to the mayor of New York, protesting his confinement in the Bloomingdale Asylum, a place where he would reside, off and on, until his death in 1868. The book closes with a brief summary of “The Law of Intellectual Freedom” — extracted from Spinoza — to which Adler added a note explaining what he felt was at stake:

I emphasize this important clause for the particular benefit of those who in my personal history have had the absurd expectation that I should continue to entertain a respectful deference to a certain phase of religionism, which upon a careful and rational examination I found to be worthless and which is repugnant to my taste and better judgment, and of others who with equal absurdity are in the habit of exacting ecclesiastical tests (I will not say religious, for such men show by their very conduct that their enlightenment in matters of the religion of the heart is very imperfect) for academic appointments;—as if the science and the culture of the nineteenth century were still to be the handmaid of the church, as they were in the Middle Ages; as if Philosophy and the Liberal Arts could ever thrive and flourish in the suffocating atmosphere of the idols of the cave, the idols of the tribe, and the idols of the marketplace!

It appears that Adler’s difficulties date from the fall of 1849 and began while he labored to complete his great dictionary. Seeking respite from the demons that were troubling him, he boarded a ship for England and during the voyage spent quite a bit of time with a shipmate whose most famous novel (still, at this point, unwritten) would begin with some reflections on the curative effects of sea voyages on troubled spirits: Herman Melville. While Adler may be unknown in most parts of the academy, he looms large in the Melville literature.

It is clear from his journals that Melville was impressed by Adler. His journal entry for October 12 reports:

He is the author of a formidable lexicon, (German & English); in compiling which he almost ruined his health. He was almost crazy, he tells me, for a time. He is full of the German metaphysics, & discourses of Kant, Swedenborg & c. He has been my principal companion thus far.

The next day he wrote:

Last evening was very pleasant. Walked the deck with the German, Mr. Adler to a late hour, talking of “Fixed Fate, Free-will, foreknowledge absolute” &c. His philosophy is Coleredegian: he accepts the Scriptures as divine, & yet leaves himself free to inquire into Nature.

The entry for October 22 reports that, over “whiskey punches,” Melville and another companion had a discussion with Adler that lasted “until two in the morning”:

We talked metaphysics continually, & Hegel, Schlegel, Kant &c were discussed under the influence of the whiskey. I shall not forget Adler’s look when he quoted La Place the French astronomer—“It is not necessary, gentlemen, to account for these worlds by the hypothesis” &c.

Five days later, shifting from whiskey punches to mulled wine, the three voyagers were “riding on the German horse” until around three in the morning. After landing in London, Melville and Adler kept in contact, wandering through the city and visiting museums and churches before proceeding on to Paris, where they eventually parted company. They never met again, though Melville was one of the few mourners who attended Adler’s funeral.

In the literature on Melville (I’ve appended a brief bibliography for those who might be curious as to what our colleagues in the Melville industry have turned up), Adler figures both as possible inspiration for his fellow madmen Pierre, Ahab, and Bartleby and as Melville’s guide into the world of German idealism. The latter role may have been more important than the former. For madness was something with which Melville was all too familiar before setting off on his voyage to England. But it is easy to see how his contact with this troubled lexicographer could have served as the catalyst for a book that included both a chapter on the “etymology” of whales — allegedly supplied by a “late consumptive usher to a grammar school” who “loved to dust his old grammars” as a way to remind himself (“mildly”) “of his mortality” — and a chapter on the attribute of “whiteness” that sails fearlessly into the heavy seas of metaphysics.

The quotation from Coleridge on words as weapons was but the first of the three epigrams that launched Adler’s dictionary. The third, and no less significant epigram, came from Jean Paul Richter:

It seems to me that — just as the speechless animal swims in the outer world as in a dark benumbing sea —man would likewise lose himself in the star-filled heaven of outer phenomena if he did not through language divide the confused shining lights into star-maps and, by means of these, break the whole into parts for his consciousness. Only language illuminates the broad single-colored world-map.

This struggle to overcome the confusion of the world by means of the light that language provides is surely one of the things at stake in the project of enlightenment.

A Short Bibliography on Adler and Melville

Bradley, Lyman R. “George J. Adler, 1821-1868.” The German Quarterly 7, no. 4 (November 1, 1934): 152–156. [A survey of his career, including a discussion of his contact with Melville]

Lee, Dwight A., Lee Ash, Lawrence S. Thompson, and Rigby Graham. “Melville and George J. Adler.” American Notes & Queries 12, no. 9/10 (May 1974): 138 [an early mapping of the relationship].

Marovitz, Sanford E. “More Chartless Voyaging: Melville and Adler at Sea.” Studies in the American Renaissance (January 1, 1986): 373–384 [this article, along with its sequel from two decades later, provide the most thorough discussion of the impact of Adler on Melville’s work].

Marovitz, Sanford E. “Correspondences: Paranoiac Lexicographers and Melvillean Heroes.” In Ungraspable Phantom: Essays on Moby-Dick, 100–113. Kent State University Press, 2006.

Parker, Hershel, Herman Melville : A Biography. 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, [Vol 1: 661-687, provides a detailed account of Melville’s journey to England and the Continent and his contact with Adler].

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Begriffsgeschichte, George Adler, History of Concepts, Melville, OED, philosophy, romanticism | 1 Comment

Pursuing the “Shallow Enlightenment” (Part I: Nineteenth-Century Trash-Talk)

Posted on March 17, 2013 by James Schmidt

In my efforts to make sense of the various pejoratives hurled at the Enlightenment, the one whose depths I’ve yet to plumb is (oddly enough) “shallow.” The term surfaces in a number of places and there’s a lot to be untangled here. But I thought it might be time to make a first stab at tracing the history of the term’s usage, if only because we will wind up encountering some interesting characters and stumbling into an area of research that is far removed from the normal concerns of this blog. So, let’s cast off for the deep waters.

Professor Stirling, Meet Professor Cassirer

One of the more infamous appearances of “shallow Enlightenment” occurs in the flawed source quote from Stirling’s Secret of Hegel that the OED used as an example of its now-revised definition of “Enlightenment”:

Shallow Enlightenment, supported on such semi-information, on such weak personal vanity, etc.

As I argued in my article on the problems with the OED’s definition, the broader context from which the quote was extracted makes it clear that Stirling was criticizing the shallowness of the “enlightenment” achieved by Henry Thomas Buckle, rather than the shallowness of the historical period known as “the Enlightenment.” This means that what the OED presented as an example of second sense of the term (i.e., a reference to the views of certain French philosophers of the eighteenth-century) was, in fact, yet another example of the first sense (i.e., “imparting or receiving mental or spiritual light”).

But the phrase turns up in another important place: the translation of Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of the Enlightenment. It can be found towards the close of the Preface to the work, which dates from October 1932 (i.e., a few months before Hitler’s seizure of power). There Cassirer calls for a revision of the “verdict of the Romantic Movement on the Enlightenment.” The 1952 translation renders the passage as follows:

This verdict is still accepted by many without criticism, and the slogan of the “shallow Enlightenment” [flachen Aufklärung] is still in vogue. A major objective of this study would be achieved if it succeeded in silencing that slogan.

Now, of course, the slogan Cassirer saw himself as battling was “flachen Aufklärung”, not “shallow Enlightenment;” but the fact that his translators opted for “shallow” rather than one or another of the possible options (e.g., my big Langenscheidt suggests “superficial” or “vapid”) raises the possibility that the “flachen Aufklärung” Cassirer was hoping to silence may have had something to do with the usage of the phrase “shallow Enlightenment” that the OED (wrongly) thought it had discovered in Stirling’s 1865 study of Hegel. This would suggest that, though the OED might have been wrong about the particular citation from Stirling, the catch-phrase “shallow Enlightenment” might have been employed by other nineteenth-century English writers who had taken it over from the same place where Cassirer thought it had originated: in the “verdict of the Romantic Movement on the Enlightenment.” Were this the case, it might also help to explain why the OED’s old definition offered, as precedents for the use of “Enlightenment” to refer to an historical period, not only the normal German term Aufklärung but also the pejorative Aufklärerei.

Running a few Ngrams and then looking at a few of the sources suggests that there might, indeed, be something more connecting Cassirer’s “flachen Aufklärung” and the OED’s “shallow Enlightenment” than the obvious fact that “shallow” is not that bad translation for “flachen.” From what I’ve been able to work out — and I hasten to add that all of this is rather tentative — (1) both “shallow Enlightenment” and “flachen Aufklärung” enjoy a modest currency in the nineteenth century, (2) the terms seems to have migrated from German into English, and (3) the vehicle for this transmission consisted of Anglophone admirers of German Romantics. Making things even more interesting is that fact that there is also a madman in the mix, along with an ocean voyage that left its mark on American literature. We’ll get to the really interesting stuff next week; today’s assignment is to look at some of the nineteenth-century trash-talk that was used to refer to the Enlightenment.

Some Bad Words for the Enlightenment

Let’s start by comparing the German and English terms:

The first thing to notice is that we are dealing with pathetically small numbers of occurrences (so I’ve turned off the smoothing entirely). But the results do lend some support to the suspicion that the phrase “shallow enlightenment” originated in German and then migrated over to English and that its heyday was the period between 1830 and 1900. A quick look at the samples suggests that most of the action in German after 1945 consists of quotations from nineteenth century texts or characterizations of how critics of the Enlightenment allegedly talked about it. The lack of appearances of flache Aufklärung before 1830 is, however, somewhat puzzling: if the term is something that the Romantics were using, Google should be picking it up. But there’s nothing there.

It is always difficult to explain why something isn’t occurring, but it is possible that the absence of appearances of flache Aufklärung may have something to do with the presence of other, more popular pejoratives that were deployed against the Enlightenment. So, let’s see how the phrase fares against some competing terms.

This Ngram presents a rogues’ gallery of pejoratives: false enlightenment, shallow enlightenment, and the untranslatable Aufklärerei, which was an attempt to create a word for enlightenment that is modeled on the word that enlighteners use to characterize certain forms of religious fanaticism (Schwärmerei). There are probably a few other terms that could be thrown into the mix (suggestions anyone?), but this will do for now.

We can safely ignore just about everything after 1900: appearances of these terms (with the possible exception of flache Aufklärung) will likely be occurring in new editions of earlier texts, quotations from earlier texts, and discussions of the way in which Aufklärung was treated in the previous century (for example, if the Ngram is doing its job, it should pick up Cassirer’s use of flachen Aufklärung in 1932). It’s possible that some of the usages of these terms between 1932 and 1945 come from National Socialist denunciations of Aufklärung, but a quick poking around in the examples from that period didn’t bear out that suspicion and, in any case, it is unlikely that there would be many National Socialist texts in American libraries for Google to scan (and with this we stumble into a broader bias in the corpus that I’m working from: what’s being searched here aren’t “German texts” but, instead, a particular subset of German texts: the ones that Google managed to scan). And, finally, don’t trust the flat line before 1790: the terms are there, but Google isn’t turning them up either because the books are not sitting on the shelves to be scanned (for an explanation of where they might be, consult this discussion) or the OCR software is having difficulties with old German fonts.

The Waning of the Trash-Talk

But, if we are willing to live with these reservations about what the Ngram is showing us, what, if anything, does it suggest about the transformation of arguments over the concept of enlightenment during century between 1790 and 1890? When I look at the Ngram (caveat: your mileage may vary), I don’t see anything here that raises problems for my general take on the conceptual history of Aufklärung during this period: falsche Aufklärung (false enlightenment) can survive only as long as there is a wahre Aufklärung (true enlightenment) that can be marshaled against it. It is the creature of a world in which all parties want to defend what they take to be “enlightenment,” but the notion of “enlightenment” is still capacious enough to encompass much of what will later be slotted (anachronistically and unhelpfully) into the misleading concept of “counter-enlightenment” (in a subsequent post I will try to explain it is a very bad concept that needs to be sent to its room without dinner). The appearance of Aufklärerei marks a stepping up in the intensity of the debate: it’s a term of ridicule that, at least initially, still functions as part of an opposition to Aufklärung, properly understood, but which eventually functioned as an abusive term for Aufklärung in general. Hence, it has a longer tail than “false enlightenment.” It stretches into the last decades of the century when, at long last, the term Aufklärung will be employed, sometimes pejoratively, sometimes affirmatively, and sometime neutrally: everyone is now generally clear on what “the Enlightenment” designates, even though they differ on how it is to be evaluated. What’s a bit puzzling here is how few instances of “shallow enlightenment” are turning up. Looking at the samples, a fair number of them seem to be in the context of the loss of religious sentiments during the eighteenth century, but there’s the risk of reading too much into the limited sample I’ve looked at (after all, this is a blog post, not an article — it’s a preliminary formulation to be scrutinized and criticized).

We are still no clearer on two points than we were before we started this voyage: (1) why the OED (or, more specifically, the extractor of the quote from Stirling) was so eager to read Stirling’s critique of Buckle’s “shallow enlightenment” as an accusation that the Enlightenment itself was shallow and (2) what the German pejorative Aufklärerei was doing in the OED’s definition. The answers to those questions turn out to be lurking down in the troubled waters of Google’s samples. We will descend further into those depths in next week’s post and, when we plumb them, we will encounter an American writer, a very disturbed college professor, and the whitest of all white things.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Begriffsgeschichte, Cassirer, History of Concepts, Ngrams, OED, romanticism | 1 Comment

If Adorno had an Ngram

Posted on March 10, 2013 by James Schmidt

I’ve never been good at speculating on what earlier thinkers would have said about later developments. This was driven home to me several years ago when someone who’d bought an audio book on the Enlightenment that I’d been recruited to record sent me a letter with a series of questions (one of the side benefits of making an audio book is that you reach a new audience; mine included long-distance truck drivers, commuters, and gym rats, a few of whom were nice enough to write). Among the questions was one that stumped me: “What would have happened if the Enlightenment had taken place in the 1980s rather than the 1780s?” All that I could think of was that Mozart, before dying of a drug overdose at the age of thirty-five, would probably have wound up fronting a Krautrock band (and writing some really interesting rock operas) and that Diderot would have been writing exactly the same works that he was writing in the 1770s and early 1780s and that his readers would be just as delighted and puzzled.

It should come as no surprise then that when, shortly after finishing last week’s post, I asked myself, “What would Adorno have done with an Ngram?,” I quickly answered, “He wouldn’t have been able to do anything with it, since his office didn’t have internet access” (and then I added, “I really need to stop talking to myself. It’s creepy.”)

What sparked the question was one of the passages from the chapter on the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment that I didn’t get around to discussing last week. It is concerned with what happens to language.

During the 1930s, Horkheimer wrote some unjustly neglected — and, as a result, untranslated — texts exploring the changing function of language in the authoritarian state (I discussed them briefly in an article in Social Research) and the opening chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment went on to offer a wildly speculative account of the transformation of language from a mimetic activity that sought to picture the world to a tool that referred to things. That discussion returns with a vengeance in the chapter on the culture industry, climaxing in a discussion of how the onward march of rationalization brings with it a puzzling reappearance of archaic elements:

If, before its rationalization, the word had set free not only longing but lies, in its rationalized form it has become a straightjacket more for longing than for lies. The blindness and muteness of the data to which positivism reduces the world passes over into language itself, which is limited to registering those data. Thus relationships themselves become impenetrable, taking on an impact, a power of adhesion and repulsion which makes them resemble their extreme antithesis, spells. They act once more like the practices of a kind of sorcery …. The name, to which magic most readily attaches, is today undergoing a chemical change. It is being transformed into arbitrary, manipulable designations, the power of which, although calculable, is for that reason as willful as that of archaic names. … Signification, the only function of the word admitted by semantics, is consummated in the sign. Its character as a sign is reinforced by the speed with which linguistic models are put into circulation from above. … If the German fascists launch a word like “intolerable” [Untragbar] over the loudspeakers one day, the whole nation is saying “intolerable” the next. … The blind and rapidly spreading repetition of designated words links advertising to the totalitarian slogan [Jephcott translation 133-135].

Sounding for all the world like the reactionary cranks that they are often taken to be, Horkheimer and Adorno go on to assure us that as late as the nineteenth century there was still a “bond between sedimented experience and language.” But this bond has now been broken. And, once again, the culture industry is there on the spot, ready to fill the gap.

Countless people use words and expressions which they have either ceased to understand at all or use only according to behavioral functions, just as trademarks adhere all the more compulsively to their objects the less their linguistic meaning is apprehended.

It would not be entirely crazy to suggest that the specter that was haunting Horkheimer and Adorno as they labored away on D’Este Drive was not that distant from the one that was haunting George Orwell as he scribbled away in the grip of the “unendurable winter” that settled over the island of Jura. For Orwell as for Adorno and Horkheimer what was happening to language mattered immensely (I doubt that there is a counter-factual historian equal of the task of imagining what might have happened if Orwell had sense enough to sell his damned farm and move into the other half of Adorno’s two-family on Kentor Avenue). For Newspeak to accomplish its task,

… what was required, above all for political purposes, were short clipped words of unmistakable meaning which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the speaker’s mind. … The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness.

But what does any of this have to do with Ngrams?

Our stock image of Adorno suggests that he would have regarded them as further testimony to the Fall of the Word: rather than digging down into those sedimented layers of experience that the Word allegedly carries, the nGram simply counts and tallies. Plug “Ngram” and “Word” into a random Adorno aphorism generator and what would likely emerge would be something like: “The Ngram treats the Word like a dictator treats men: it is totalitarian.” But when words have been reduced to things, it may not be entirely misguided simply to count them. Adorno, after all, recognized that what was wrong with empirical approaches in the social sciences was not (as the warm-hearted humanists like to believe) that such means are incapable of grasping the rich complexity of human life. And it is worth recalling that Adorno’s “empirical” research — e.g., his study of “The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses,” his article on the Los Angeles Times astrology column, and “Schuld und Abwehr,” the “qualitative analysis” he contributed to Gruppenexperiment, the most ambitious (and most deceptively titled) of the postwar Institute’s studies — involved a considerable effort at plowing through texts and transcripts in an effort to find patterns that might help make sense of the material. The problem, in other words, is not that Ngrams fail to treat words with proper respect, but rather that they might not be up to the task of capturing just how bad things are. Not the least of the concerns of Dialectic of Enlightenment and, especially, Minima Moralia was that language was losing the capacity to comprehend the damage that has been done to it.

As an example, take the word “impactful” (… please).

A few years ago. I started noticing that “impacted” (almost always in the passive voice) had become the verb of choice in student papers. Every possible relationship — from “cause” to “influence” to “suggestion” to “implication” — between A and B had become “A was impacted by B” (e.g., “The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima has definitely impacted the way people think about technology”). I’d circle the word, put a question mark in the margin, say something to the class, and try not to sound too much like a curmudgeon (having reached the point where I am eligible for a curmudgeon card, it’s important to know when to play it and when to hold it). For the most part, I was content to write off my visceral reaction to the word as having something to do with my having had some terrible experiences with the extraction of impacted wisdom teeth (one of them somehow wound up in my sinus cavity — I still have the x-ray).

Then, a few months ago, I received a memorandum from somewhere up the administrative food chain praising the faculty for its production of “impactful research.” Curious about the sudden appearance of this peculiar little bigram (I lead a sheltered life; this was the first time I’d seen this formulation), I made an Ngram:

I took some solace that things were not quite as bad as I feared: these percentages are not that different from what I’m used to seeing when I go searching for early nineteenth century pejoratives for “the Enlightenment” (fear not, fans of odd words for “the Enlightenment,” more of them will be arriving soon). Then I made the mistake of looking at the examples.

To pick one at random, consider Yvonne Farrell, Impactful Presentations: Best Practice Skills (2008), which bills itself as “A practical book, packed with insights and invaluable tips. It covers preparing and structuring presentations to engaging [sic] your audience through your personal delivery skills and professional use of visual aids.” It is easy to play the outraged defender of the English language, but what can be said about a book whose title includes not only the awful “impactful” in its title, but also the clichéd phrase “best practice” (believe me, you don’t want to see what the Ngram for “best practices” looks like — if my retirement account was doing half as well, I’d have moved into a château in Nice by now). And what about that blurb, which — in a slip that released a geyser of Schadenfreude — fumbles the infinitive? All in all, this strikes is one impactful performance, for sure.

But back to Adorno: words like “impactful” are the sort of things that deserve Ngrams — because they aren’t really words, but rather things masquerading as words. They have no meaning beyond the void they create by choking out all the other possible words that might have been used had the author taken a moment to pause, to weigh, to ponder, to taste, and then to commit. “Impactful” could be described as a sort of myriophyllum spicatum of words except that the Eurasian milfoil — while wreaking havoc on ponds — is mildly attractive. In contrast, “impactful” is simply ugly — a big, slimy slug of a word. I’ve seen lots of impactful presentations: there was a time when every job candidate for a position in one of my departments showed up with a PowerPoint presentation (whether they needed it or not) that, because the crummy projector we had could only project the images on the screen from too low an angle, wound up looking like the opening crawl of Star Wars. Fortunately, once I was able to banish what John Williams cribbed from Erich Wolfgang Korngold from my head and listen to what the candidates were saying, it turned out that some of these accidentally impactful presentations managed to be insightful, thoughtful, perplexing but provocative, etc.

Orwell’s first rule for avoiding slovenly writing was “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” Given the odds we are up against, remedies like this probably aren’t worth much: the forces that drove an otherwise sensible administrator to speak of “impactful research” rather than any of the other, more precise, alternatives have more to do with the dog eat dog world in which “neo-liberal universities” (if I am permitted to violate Orwell’s rule and use a figure of speech that I am growing accustomed to seeing on my screen) now fight it out than with a lack of finesse in producing decent English sentences on the part of the memo’s author. Ours is a world where, as Horkheimer explained, the concern for truth is increasingly being replaced by a concern for success. A world in which things smash into each other and the things that make the biggest bang garner the biggest bucks is a world where “impactful” fits right in.

We need to make Ngram for things like “impactful” for some the same reason that we need to keep track of the spread of myriophyllyum spicatum. And it would be good if we could find something that will eat it, before it eats us.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Adorno, Culture Industry, Ngrams, rants | Leave a comment

Dreyfus, Dieterle, and Vienna Philharmonic (a Postscript to the Culture Industry)

Posted on March 7, 2013 by James Schmidt

My plan has been to limit posts on this blog to one a week (and schedule it for Sunday), but two recent articles in the New York Times have a certain relevance for my recent discussion of Horkheimer and Adorno’s account of the culture industry and to broader questions about letting light shine into previously closed archives.

Today’s Times carries the news that, 119 years after the conviction of Captain Albert Dreyfus, the extensive files relating to the affair have been been made available to the public by the historical department of the Ministry of Defense. A quick look suggest there is a wealth of material here. But, I’m no expert. I am ashamed to say that most of what I know about the Dreyfus Affair I learned from The Life of Emile Zola (1937), the film directed by Max Horkheimer’s next door neighbor William Dieterle. The film was the second installment in a trio of historical dramas that Dieterle made for Warner Brothers on either side of the outbreak of World War II that, taken together, might be seen as a sort of homage to the spirit of enlightenment. The previous year he’d made The Story of Louis Pasteur (which, like his Zola film, starred Paul Muni — née Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund — who had come to Hollywood in the late 1920s after learning his trade in the Yiddish theater in New York). The Zola film was followed, in 1940, by what may be the weakest of the three, Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, with Edward G. Robinson starring as Paul Ehrlich, whose research led to the discovery of a treatment for syphilis and, more generally, laid the groundwork for chemotherapy. Pasteur, Zola, and Ehrlich appear on the screen as fearless defenders of truth against power, insight against superstition, reason against prejudice. The enlightenment they champion has none of the shadows that haunt the enlightenment whose dialectic Dieterle’s next door neighbor was tracing.

Horkheimer’s letters indicate that he was a regular visitor at Dieterle’s home and that there was, perhaps, a genuine affection between the two men. It probably also mattered that Dieterle’s wife Charlotte was deeply involved in efforts to find German émigrés positions in the film industry. Dieterle’s film about Ehrlich was followed, in 1941, by The Devil and Daniel Webster, which was made not for Warners, but rather by Dieterle’s own production company (it was the only film “William Dieterle Productions” ever made). Stylistically, it is worlds apart from his historical dramas. As the helpful commentary by Bruce Eder and Steven C. Smith on the DVD release notes, Dieterle made the film on the RKO lot and it was one of the first to be made after Citizen Kane. Dieterle had been a master of simple camera set ups — Zola’s great speech consists, if I recall it correctly, of one long shot, interrupted only once, when the camera moves closer. In contrast, the camera in Daniel Webster is moving constantly. Perhaps as a gesture of friendship, Dieterle passed a copy of the screenplay (which at that point still carried the title All That Money Can Buy) over to Horkheimer for comments, which Horkheimer provided in a letter that is available in this Gesammelte Schriften. I’m afraid it has little of interest to say about the film.

I was intrigued enough by the Dieterle-Horkheimer connection to spend an afternoon at the Feuchtwanger collection at USC a few years ago looking in the Dieterle papers that they hold (his professional material is at UCLA archives). There wasn’t much there about Horkheimer, but there was a chilling reminder that the Dreyfus Affair had later echoes. The FBI had been keeping a file on Dieterle (a redacted copy is in the collection at USC) and they resemble almost every other set of FBI files from this period: endless pages with blacked out passages (“protecting” long-dead informants), lists of associations with other “suspects,” records of contributions to “suspect” organizations, reports on the individual’s questionable views on various matters (e.g., Dieterle had good things to say about Soviet cinema), etc. By the time the investigations of the film industry were moving into high gear (1947 saw not only the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment, but also the first hearings on communists in the film industry), Dieterle already seems to have been contemplating a return to Germany (as was Horkheimer).

After Dieterle returned to Europe, the FBI lost interest in him., but not in a woman he had employed since 1941. She had filed papers to become a naturalized citizen and was required to state that she had never been a member of the Communist Party or any communist front organization. But the problem remained that she had been employed by an individual who made his home open to various unemployed artists, actors, and émigrés including one named “Hans Eisler.” And because she had, for fifteen years, been engaged in work that aided “communist organizations,” her petition to become a citizen was denied.

Looking back over my notes this morning I felt a bit ashamed not to have done anything with them. Having found nothing of interest about Horkheimer in Dieterle’s papers, the fate of his employee amounted to little more than a footnote in a larger story — a story that wasn’t going to say anything much about Dieterle and Horkheimer because there was nothing much to stay. Still, the papers are there at USC for anyone who cares to follow up on it. And the fact that they are open to researchers and tended by archivists who make it possible for wandering scholars to read what they have preserved matters greatly.

Which brings us to that most morally challenged of the world’s major artistic institutions, the Vienna Philharmonic. The orchestra is making its annual visit to New York, bringing aong its usual baggage and prompting, last week, the annual article from James R. Oestreich in the New York Times, which —again as usual — lays out all this institution’s issues and then lets readers know that there’s nothing to worry about since things are getting better. In the wake of the last big dust-up, which involved the orchestra’s journey to the site of the Mauthausen concentration camp to play the Beethoven Ninth, I wound up writing a nasty little article that pondered, among other things, what it means to treat the Ninth as a sort of all-purpose fumigant, ever at the ready to be applied in those places where awful things have happened in hopes of setting everything right. The article owed much to the wealth of material that William Osborne has written and collected over the years on the orchestra’s present day failings and poisoned past. Fortunately he, along with others, have stayed on the case.

The issues that the Vienna Philhamonic is working out in public on this tour (and, wow, does this orchestra have a history of issues) involves the “rings of honor” that the orchestra presented in 1942, as part of the orchestra’s centenary celebrations, to Baldur von Schirach (governor of Vienna for the Third Reich) and Arthur Seyss-Inquart (the Reich’s minister for Austria before he headed off to a similar post in the Netherlands). After the war, Seyss-Inquart was executed for his crimes; Schirach was sentenced to prison for twenty years for his role in deporting tens of thousands of Viennese Jews to Polish camps. Somewhere along the way, Schirach’s ring wound up being confiscated by an American soldier. And, sometime around 1966 or 1967, the orchestra made a replacement ring and presented it to him after his release from prison. For the return of this bit of the repressed history of the orchestra, we are much indebted to the coverage on the music blog Von heute auf Morgen (fear not, it’s all in English!).

The revelation of the replacement ring raised problems for the orchestra’s President and former archivist, Clement Hellsberg, whose 1992 book on the orchestra Demokratie der Könige (Democracy of Kings …. huh?) received kudos for having broached the topic of the orchestra’s purging of its Jewish members. Hellsberg attributed his ignorance of the ring replacement to the disorganization in the archives (silly me — I’d always thought that only users of archives got to complain about the disorder and that archivists were supposed to remedy it). Somewhat predictably, Oestreich’s article cites Hellsberg’s role in arranging the Mauthausen concert as evidence of his good intentions in making amends for the orchestra’s past (it’s always a treat to watch how the culture industry tries to turn sow’s ears into silk purses). As further evidence of Hellsberg’s desire to get to the bottom of the rewarding of the ring to Schirach, Oestreich points to his assigning the historian Oliver Rathkolb and two of his students to get to the bottom of the affair. And Oestreich informs us that Rathkold has made an English language summary of his “preliminary findings” available to the New York Times, right in time for the orchestra’s concerts in New York (one more sow’s ear, one more silk purse coming up!).

I have never tried to use Viennese archives so I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the account provided on Von heute auf Morgen, but a recent post on the blog raises some important questions about what has been going on. Here’s the conclusion, but the entire post (like its predecessors on the blog) is very much worth reading.

This leads to the broader consequences of the archival review, which will in all probability demonstrate that some pages on a website are no substitute for a thoroughly researched historical study. … While the New York Times reports that the orchestra has ‘reacted quickly’ to claims of obstruction, the truth is that feet have been dragged over archival access for many years, and until recently the lead historian in the current review, Oliver Rathkolb, was Clemens Hellsberg’s fiercest critic on the issue. We may have something now that would dearly love to be called a ‘Historikerkommission’, but in 2008 Hellsberg promised full access to Rathkolb’s students and yet since 2009 two senior academics have been given the runaround. We have been down this path before, and the present media circus, with its puff pieces and televised documentaries and overriding concern for self-image, is showing itself to be a diversion. All that is needed from Clemens Hellsberg now is a guarantee that no further researcher will have cause to complain that their work at the archive has been hindered.

After all, if the French Ministry of Defense can give us all the facts about the Dreyfus Case, surely this “democracy of kings” can get its act together as well (hint: try a little less Königlichkeit and a little more Öffentlichkeit?) — preferably before another 119 years have passed.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Culture Industry, rants | 1 Comment

Enlightenment as “Mass Deception”? — “Culture Industry” in the Dialectic of Enlightenment

Posted on March 3, 2013 by James Schmidt

As a sequel to last week’s post on what Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment has to do with “the Enlightenment,” I thought it might make sense to consider what, if any, rationale there might be for a discussion of the “culture industry” in a book that purports to say something about the vicissitudes of enlightenment (admittedly, an “enlightenment” that is rather broadly defined).

The account of the culture industry has become both the most influential and – for many of those in the field of “cultural studies” it helped to spawn – the most disliked part of Dialectic of Enlightenment. But though the chapter tends to get hammered for what is seen as its high-handed dismissal of popular culture, it is perhaps the one part of the book where Horkheimer’s hope for an analysis that would be (as he put in his letter to Felix Weil of March 10, 1942) “filled to the brim with historical and economic material” came closest to fulfillment. As David Jenemann demonstrated in Adorno in America (a book that is obligatory reading for anyone remotely interested in Adorno) much of what critics see as evidence of Adorno’s alleged “Mandarin sensibilities” turns out to be testimony to his deep immersion in, and faithful reproduction of, the often bizarre language employed by those who labored in the service of the culture industry. Likewise, the portrait of Hollywood as a world dominated by rackets, patronage relations, and grotesque forms of self-assertion was hardly unique to Dialectic of Enlightenment. Much the same picture can be found in the memoirs of those émigrés who found refuge in Hollywood, accounts that Horkheimer and Adorno would likely have heard at first hand. It bears remembering that Horkheimer~~’s next door neighbor on D’Este Drive in Pacific Palisades was~~ friends with William (née Wilhelm) Dieterle, the director of The Story of Louis Pasteur, The Life of Emile Zola, Juarez, and Doctor Erlich’s Magic Bullet. The Horkheimers, it turns out, spent quite a few Saturday evenings with the Dieterles. Finally, the idea that the Hollywood studio system was a vertically integrated monopoly that had succeeded in establishing an iron grip on the entire process of film-making, from production to distribution, was something more than a theory dreamed up by a couple of grumpy émigré intellectuals: it was abundantly confirmed in the extended legal struggle that would culminate (a year after the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment) in United States v. Paramount Pictures Inc. Horkheimer and Adorno could have submitted the chapter as an amicus brief. The question that concerns me here, however, has less to do with what the chapter tells us about Hollywood than with what it’s doing in a book called Dialectic of Enlightenment.

The problem of making sense of what is going on starts with the term “culture industry” itself. As Robert Hullot-Kentor has noted, it is important to remember that what we are dealing with is a single German word — Kulturindustrie — that jambs together two words that come from different semantic universes. In doing so, it produces the very model of a dialectical concept. These two words don’t belong together. There’s a tension between them that is overcome only by whatever force is smashing them into each other. In other words, it is a word that ought to sound strange, but — unfortunately — no longer does. A minor, though likely inadequate remedy, would be to get rid of the space and try using cultureindustry (after all, that’s its hash tag).

Before Horkheimer and Adorno released Kulturindustrie onto an unsuspecting world, Horkheimer had written an article that, bowing to the convention of his day, spoke of “mass culture” (see “Art and Mass Culture,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science IX:2 (1941) 290–304). If you run an nGram for “mass culture,” “culture industry,” and “popular culture,” the results are about what you’d expect (but let’s do it anyway, if only for the perverse pleasure of dropping an nGram into a discussion of Dialectic of Enlightenment):

No one should be surprised that “popular culture” — so inoffensive, so unthreatening, so affirmative, so unlikely to get anyone in any trouble or keep anyone from getting tenure, so warm and cuddly, so … so … so … popular — quickly established a commanding lead over “mass culture,” a word from the wrong side of the tracks. Predictably, Horkheimer and Adorno’s compound only begins to rise from obscurity at the moment when it turns into a sort of shibboleth by which those of us who fool ourselves into thinking that we understand Dialectic of Enlightenment recognize one another.

Horkheimer’s article was billed as having been “provoked” by Mortimer Adler’s Art and Prudence (Adler would go on to have a good run at provoking people during the decade that followed) but after a few paragraphs even Horkheimer became bored with the prospect of further engagement with Adler’s tedious tome and veered off into a series of reflections that served as a sort of dry run for the culture industry chapter. While Adorno was, as always, enthusiastic about Horkheimer’s article (boundless enthusiasm for Horkheimer’s productions was not a bad survival strategy at the cash-strapped Institute for Social Research), readers who come to the article after having wrestled with Dialectic of Enlightenment will likely be struck by the utter implausibility of what Horkheimer was arguing. If the chapter on the culture industry overwhelms the reader with an explosion of ideas that defy easy summary, “Art and Mass Culture” cobbles familiar arguments together to reach a conclusion that is all too transparent. Here’s the set up:

The omnipotence of technics, the increasing independence of production from its location, the transformation of the family, the socialization of existence, all these tendencies of modern society may enable men to create the conditions for eradicating the misery these processes have brought over the earth.

If the Marxian provenance of the argument isn’t clear enough, just keep repeating the mantra: capitalism unfetters the forces of production and lays the foundations for future human liberation. Dialectic of Enlightenment flirts with a similar argument (see the discussion on pp. 60-64 in Volume 5 of the Horkheimer Werke), though in a way that no one could possibly understand. What this means is that, when the proletariat finally wakes up to its world historical mission, it will find itself in the possession of the means to end human misery. So, the problem is to figure out why the proletariat is still slumbering.

Analyzing the “subjective” factors that had prevented the enlightenment of the proletariat had been a major concern of the Institute for Social Research ever since Horkheimer assumed the directorship. The sentence in which “Art and Mass Culture” explains what has gone awry follows on the heels of the passage just quoted:

Today, however, the substance of the individual remains locked up in himself. His intellectual acts are no longer intrinsically connected with his human essence. They take whatever course the situation may dictate. Popular judgment, whether true or false, is directed from above, like other social functions.

Stated this baldly, the argument looks just about as bad as Horkheimer and Adorno’s critics tend to think it is: the working class would appear to be cultural dopes who, instead of seizing control of the means of production, have been manipulated by their crafty masters into watching bad movies and listening to jazz (sadly, the one thing that everyone knows about Adorno is that he — or perhaps his rottweiler — wrote an article about “jazz”). Workers of the World Unite! You have nothing to lose but your Benny Goodman records!

Chapter One of Dialectic of Enlightenment closed with a similar gesture. On face value, it’s not a lot more convincing, but it is considerably more opaque:

Today, when Bacon’s utopia, in which “we should command nature in action,” has been fulfilled on a telluric scale, the essence of the compulsion which he ascribed to unmastered nature is becoming apparent. It was power itself. Knowledge, in which, for Bacon, “the sovereignty of man” unquestioningly lay hidden, can now devote itself to dissolving that power. But in the face of this possibility enlightenment, in the service of the present, is turning itself into a complete deception of the masses.

And with this, the first chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment closes. The nod to Bacon recalls the opening of the chapter, while the invocation of an enlightenment that has become “a complete deception of the masses” points ahead to the subtitle of the chapter on the culture industry: “enlightenment as mass deception.” And having wrapped things up so nicely, the boys probably took a break and strolled down D’Este Drive to see what was up with Dieterle.

D”Este Drive, Pacific Pallisades

This, then, was the hand that Horkheimer dealt Adorno when he set him to work on the culture industry chapter (as I’ve discussed elsewhere, Horkheimer’s extensive correspondence with the New York branch of the Institute opens a window on how the writing of Dialectic of Enlightenment progressed): what the chapter Adorno was writing had to do was show how the promise of enlightenment (in brief, the creation of human beings who would finally be free from fear and from the insatiable desire to dominate that this fear incited) was frustrated by a collapse of enlightenment back into mythology.

Let’s indulge in a bit of scene setting: every day after completing his work with Horkheimer, Adorno gets in his car to drive back from Horkheimer’s spacious home on D’Este Drive to his own more modest quarters on Kentor Avenue (need a map?). The sun is shining, the sky is blue, there are palm trees everywhere, Hollywood is off in the distance (need help picturing this? there’s a useful resource here). And, in the evening, he and his faithful wife Gretel —who bore the burden of scribbling down and typing up the ideas that Max and Teddy were dictating — would go to movies that, as he would explain in Minima Moralia, always left him feeling stupider than when he entered.

Adorno’s House

OK, reverie over: just what did Adorno do with the hand Horkheimer dealt him?

First, and most immediately, he had to fill out an account that had focused almost exclusively on developments in Nazi Germany with a discussion of the development of the culture industry in non-authoritarian societies (whatever difficulties Dieterle may have had with Jack Warner, even he would have conceded that it was better than working for Joseph Goebbels). Much of the material that Adorno needed was at his doorstep, which explains the chapter’s relentless name-dropping: tips of the hat to Greta Garbo, Bette Davis, Greer Garson, and Betty Boop, wags of the finger for Mickey Rooney and Victor Mature. The rest could be quarried from the pile of manuscripts that Adorno produced during his time working on Paul Lazarsfeld’s radio research project, which helps explain a chapter in which Toscanini and Guy Lombardo rub shoulders with the Budapest Quartet and Benny Goodman, with none of them coming off particularly well.

Second, Adorno introduced some new elements into the conceptual machinery that was driving the argument. While Horkheimer had long been convinced that the meditation between the individual and society was to be found in the family, Adorno tended to emphasize the role played by the commodity fetish. The working out of these two positions occupied a fair amount of the Institute’s attention during the late 1930s and early 1940s, as can be seen by the various discussion protocols collected in Volume XII of Horkheimer’s collected works (there’s fascinating stuff here — is anyone working on it?). With Adorno now in control of the chapter, “culture industry” began to play a role that went beyond the limited function assigned to “mass culture” in Horkheimer’s essay. Recall that, for Horkheimer, mass culture was a mechanism of deception that separated human beings from their “human essence.” In Adorno’s hands, “culture industry” became a mechanism for inclusion:it had something — and equally importantly — some place for everyone. In the circle in which Horkheimer and Adorno were moving, it may have seemed as if everyone was somehow employed in the culture industry — as Brecht sardonically put it — hopefully as a producer of lies, less happily as a consumer of them. That idea had, as they say, “legs.”

Which brings us to Adorno’s third innovation. The incorporation of individuals into this massive an enterprise implies something that goes well beyond the “mass deception” alluded to in the subtitle that the chapter continued to carry (and had to carry, lest the connection to the opening chapter vanish). Deception implies the possibility that those deceived might, one day, come to see that they had been deceived and, when sufficiently enlightened about their deception, seek remedies. Such hopes lie at the heart of the notion of ideology critique. But “ideology” implies, at a minimum, that there are “ideas” of some sort to criticize. What the culture industry was selling doesn’t rise to the level of “ideas” (perhaps it might be helpful to think of Harry Frankfurt’s distinction between lying and bullshitting?). The culture industry produces what conservative critics — who, at heart, tend to view ideas with suspicion — have always thought liberalism lacked: a unified style. It provides the members of a fractured society with a repertoire of gestures, a stock of catch-phrases, a set of cues about how to make it. The opening chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment — the fruit of Horkheimer and Adorno’s most intense collaboration — argued that adaptation of this sort had been the task of mimesis, which means that what Adorno wound up writing was a chapter that might better have been subtitled “enlightenment as mass mimesis.”

The Kulturindustrie chapter ends with the sort of sentence that drives translators to despair. In German it reads:

Das ist der Triumph der Reklame in der Kulturindustrie, die zwangshafte Mimesis der Konsumenten an die zugleich durchschauten Kulturwaren.

John Cumming, the first to try his hand at untangling Horkheimer and Adorno’s riddles, offered this solution:

The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.

With all respect to Cumming’s labors (without which, many of us would not have begun our struggles with this text) this doesn’t quite cut it. The phrase zwangshafte Mimesis [compulsive mimesis] — which is as essential to Adorno’s account of what enlightenment has become as selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit was to Kant’s account of what enlightenment is — drops from sight. Edmund Jephcott’s 2002 translation tries this:

That is the triumph of advertising in the culture industry: the compulsive imitation by consumers of cultural commodities which, at the same time, they recognize as false.

Jephcott gives us “compulsive imitation,” but we lose Cumming’s deft handling of durchschauten [to see through something]. To my ears, “recognizing as false” implies something different from “seeing through” something — I may be able to “see through” someone’s bullshit without ever recognizing it as false for the simple reason that the bullshitter and I inhabit a world that is situated well beyond the domain of truth and falsehood. I suppose there might be a compromise (and translation is always about compromises) that could somehow keep both phrases, but I’m not seeing it.

Adorno expanded the category of “cultural wares” far beyond movies and radio programs. The sentence that immediately precedes the closing one was concerned with the marketing of toothpaste. He was concerned with the vast domain of objects that appear before us as the constituent elements of our culture and was trying to tell us that, pace his later critics, it is not as if we are unaware that much of the stuff we consume does not do what we hope it will do for us, but rather that we see through the limitations of what we are given, but keep coming back for more. The problem may lie less with what we are consuming (e.g., Guy Lombardo) than with the way we tend to consume it: compulsively. The best of the stuff that the cultural industry serves up may — if only briefly — give us a sense of what it would be like not to want more. The closing measures of Das Lied von der Erde may lead us into imagining that the ewig is, indeed, going to go on forever, but the silence that follows does not — at least in my case — trigger a need for a consumption of more Mahler or, indeed, a desire to hear any more music at all. That final C-major chord, as Benjamin Britten wrote in a lovely letter to Henry Boys, seems to hang in the air forever — it has always been there, it will always be there. But a look at my iTunes library reminds me that I am hardly immune to the compulsive mimesis of cultural wares whose … falseness? … I have seen through. For what else explains the presence of twenty-seven different recordings of Das Lied von der Erde?

The problem is not with mimesis itself: what we have learned since 1947 about child development in general and mirror neurons in particular suggests that mimesis does indeed play a fundamental role in the process that makes us what we are. The rub lies with zwangshafte: a word that stands as a marker for whatever it is that, willy-nilly, makes sure that we keep coming back for more. The way I read it, the great, ugly, unreadable, and unfinished torso that is Dialectic of Enlightenment is a reminder that the peculiar burden of enlightenment is to find a way to lose the “nilly” and save the “willy.” This — of course — is no easy task.

In Philosophische Fragmente, the 1944 mimeograph version of Dialectic of Enlightenment, the chapter on the culture industry closed with a phrase that, in a desperate attempt to make this wreckage of a manuscript look like a finished product, was cut from the final published version:

(To be continued)

Indeed. With apologies to Andre Breton: enlightenment will be persistent or it will not be at all.

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