The Frankfurt School Critique of Capitalist Culture by Ronald Jeremiah Schindler

Author:Ronald Jeremiah Schindler [Schindler, Ronald Jeremiah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General
ISBN: 9780429798801
Google: 6gGaDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 51845161
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

The theory that general paralysis is a variety of hysteria attributable to social conditions would be dialectical in character, but false. Lukács himself distinguishes false consciousness from objective error or false evaluation. This distinction means that science retains its potential for objectivity even in the context of a reificational structure. Gabel illustrates this point with an anecdote: Marx contended that Darwinian theory reflected the historical contingencies of British society of that day, yet he esteemed it so much for its scientific contribution that he wanted to dedicate Capital to Darwin in gratitude. Conversely, a dialectical theory may well turn out to be false when examined experimentally. There are no grounds for sectarian identification of dialectic and truth. Any form of knowledge can plummet into false consciousness, especially when applied to fields far removed in structure.

Here is why Gabel is compelled to appraise his speculative dialectical assumption of socio-psychological parallelism against the findings of psychologists. Manifestly, the anti-dialectical assumptions of Piaget’s theory do not immediately confer a judgment on its objectivity; the validity of the theory is a practical question to be appraised by the weight of the evidence. The relativity of the theorist as situated in certain socio-political and historical conditions needs to be distinguished from the relativity of the theoretical objects to which the theory can be applied (for Piaget, the ‘stages’ of cognitive development).

Although ideology is a form of rationality, criticism of it not attended by a de-reifying reworking of the socio-historical sources of alienation will be limited in its range for measuring conflicting interests. As Merleau-Ponty often said, it is not the human critical faculty but the structure of human space that safeguards us from derangement. The relation between ideological self-deception and classical defense mechanisms has yet to be investigated in depth. This gap is partly attributable to the suppression in humanistic, neo-Freudian ego-psychology of the dialectic of sacred and profane, at the expense of the profane. As Foucault reflects on the matter, however, the activity of defenses exhibits an essentially iterative structure, which already shows a nexus with spatialized ideological thought. In terms of these classical factors, the transition from socio-political to clinical alienation is first made by considering how useful it is to characterize ideological thought as schizophrenic, that is, to suggest in an anti-conformist spirit that the ‘social fact’ of reified living conditions may be unacceptable as such, without a gnoseo-pathogenic excursus, since the ‘social fact’ has become deranged.

Gabel’s intention here is not to point to a facsimile but to identify the logic of ideology with morbid rationalism, and to show this state of affairs scientifically rather than by analogy. The task is to execute this tour de force persuasively, without succumbing in the process either to a false consciousness which exploits the parallel for the purposes of stigmatizing ideology or society at large as ‘insane’ (and claiming a privileged, non-ideological status for one’s own perspectives) or to the conceptual anarchism of castigating all forms of classification as degrading ‘labeling’. The task also calls for sensitivity because ‘schizophrenia’ is widely disputed as a diagnostic unity.

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