Ilan Gur-Ze'ev
Critical Theory As A Manifestation Of Diasporic Philosophy
From today’s
perspective, the work of the Frankfurt School thinkers can be considered the
last grand modern attempt to offer transcendence, meaning, and religiosity,
rather than "emancipation" and "truth". In the very first
stage of their work, up to the Second World War and the Holocaust Theodor W.
Adorno and Max Horkheimer interlaced the goals of Critical Theory with the
Marxian revolutionary project. The development of their thought led them to
criticize orthodox Marxism and ended with a complete break with that tradition,
as they developed a quest for a religiosity of a unique kind, connected with
the Gnostic tradition and emanating, to a certain extent, from Judaism. This
religiosity offers a reformulated negative theology within the framework
of what I call "Diasporic philosophy".
As I have tried
to explain in my recent book, Diasporic philosophy represents a nomadic,
hence "Diasporic" relation to the world, to thinking and to
existence.
Its starting point is the presence of the absence of truth, God, and
worthy hedonism. Diasporic philosophy is positioned against any secular and
theist philosophical, existential, and political projects that represent
positive utopias and reflect "home-returning" quests. While thus
rejecting all dogmas and other forms of closure and sameness, it also refuses
all versions of nihilism and relativism. In my view, later Critical Theory was
in its essence such a Diasporic philosophy, as an existential self-positioning
and counter-educational erotic endeavor that opens for us the possibility of
non-repressive creation, happiness, responsibility, and worthy suffering that
is most relevant to us today. This especially so in face of contemporary
postmodern rhetoric and fundamentalist calls for worthy homelessness and a
reestablished Garden of Eden.
The present
constitution of the "risk society" and the McWorld that is being
celebrated all over as part and parcel of the capitalist globalization, its
culture industry, its technologies and logics, also open new possibilities for
Diasporic existence and counter-education. These material conditions and their
ontological foundations enable new possibilities for counter-education in the
most concrete and specific terms and realizations. Improvisation, as one
example, becomes here part and parcel of a nomadic existence of today's
Diasporic human – and within the framework of counter-education improvisation
in its Diasporic-critical sense may be developed, thought, edified, and
implemented as a new self-positioning and de-teritorialization in the spirit of
Adorno and Horkheimer's religiosity.
Critical Theory's Anti-revolutionary End
In establishing
Critical Theory as a Diasporic philosophy, Adorno and Horkheimer articulated a
unique interpretation not only of the Enlightenment and Marxism, but also of
religion and monotheism more generally. Judaism was of special importance for
them, as a manifestation of a non-dogmatic and non-violent existential and
philosophical possibility. In this respect, they continued the interpretation
of Jewish pre-monotheistic nature as developed by thinkers such as Theodor
Lessing
and Jakob Klatzkin,
who brought into Jewish thought some of the central conceptions of Nietzsche
and Ludwig Klages.
In their later
work Adorno and Horkheimer came to regard Marx’s project as a positive utopia,
which by then both had rejected. Horkheimer explicitly declares this trend away
from the Marxian thought to that of Schopenhauer and the tradition of
philosophical pessimism.
By then, his thought was explicitly anti-revolutionary. It is the nature of the
revolutionary, every revolutionary, to become an oppressor.
In his view, every revolution, especially a "successful" one, is a
manifestation of power. And justice, when it becomes powerful, is realized only
at the cost of its transformation into oppression.
Adorno had very similar articulations: "civilization itself produces
anti-civilization and increasingly reinforces it".
Adorno understood that "moral ideas […] are directly derived from the
existence of the suppressors".
Likewise, that already the early conditions for mature independence, by which
every free society is predetermined – are set by the powers and dynamics of
the reality of the absence of freedom.
In contrast to the Marxian tradition, it is now conceived that as long as even
some remnants of freedom survive violence will flourish.
In the end, whatever hopes Marx did hold on
behalf of true society, apparently they seem to be the wrong ones, if – and
this issue is important to Critical Theory – freedom and justice are
interrelated in mutual opposition. The more justice there is, freedom will
diminish accordingly.
For both thinkers this
truth is ontologically and not historically grounded, and sometimes Adorno
articulates it in the language of the Gnostic tradition: "space is nothing
but absolute alienation".
For him this is the framework for viewing the whole historical reality of
advanced technological society, in which everything has become a commodity, and
life, with all its layers and dimensions, is nothing but “a fetish of
consumption".
In their Dialectic of Enlightenment, it does not suffice Adorno and
Horkheimer to target the capitalistic logic and its realization in itself, or
representations of totalitarianism such as National Socialism and Stalinism.
Ultimately they target the essence of culture itself:
Culture has developed with the protection of
the executioner […] All work and pleasure are protected by the hangman. To
contradict this fact is to deny all science and logic. It is impossible to
abolish […] terror and retain civilization. Even the lessening of terror
implies a beginning of the process of dissolution.
The conception of
revolution and Critical Theory within the framework of historically progressing
human emancipation is conceived here within a double-layered philosophy of
history, one linear, the other circular. From the viewpoint of the circular
conception of time there is no room for progress in the Kantian, Hegelian, or
Marxian sense, and there is no certainly room for a genuine revolution.
According to
Benjamin, there is no document of culture that is not at the same time a
document of a barbarity.
For Adorno and Horkheimer all substantive levels of "progress"
manifest an oppressive regression. In this sense
Adaptation to the power of
progress involves the regression of power. Each time anew ‘progress’ brings
about those degenerations. They manifest not the unsuccessful but successful
progress to be its contrary.
On the other level of
"progress", the explicitly historical one, unless an unpredictable
interference occurs the good intentions and progressive talents of educators
devoted to revolutionary education are of little use in halting the enhancement
and sophistication of barbarism, and, actually, they are its manifestation. In
such a reality there is no room for non-repressive "progressive",
positive, utopianism, or for an objective, justifiable, education and praxis
for resisting and overcoming the present reality.
Adorno warns us against the drive of emancipatory education to culminate in an
anti-mature human positioning
of the kind that present critical pedagogy only too often is driven into, in
the name of "emancipation", "critique", and "the
victims justified counter-violence".
Adorno and
Horkheimer gave up the Marxist conception of progress, and in this sense their
optimism as to a social revolutionary change, and even the goal, and to a
certain degree also the means of critique. But they did not abandon Utopia and
the essential imperatives of Critical Theory as a counter-education and political
emancipatory praxis. However, their definition of emancipation and the
stance of realization of intellectual autonomy as praxis changed dramatically
to become more in line with its early Jewish eschatological sources in the
Qumran sect and other Jewish and Christian adherents of the Messianic
tradition.
In Horkheimer’s
work, the change from a Marxian Critical Theory to a Diasporic philosophy is
paralleled by an articulation of Critical Theory as a new, Jewish, Negative
Theology. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics follows the same path,
attempting to present what I call "counter-education" as a worthy
addressing of the present absence of the quest for transcendence and meaning,
and as a Diasporic form of awaiting as a self-education for the human stance of
readiness to be called upon. It is a central dimension of
"counter-education"
within the framework of present-day Diasporic philosophy. This is so in the
sense that while refusing any dogma it reintroduces the exiled seriousness
towards that which is called "redemption" in Christian theology.
"'It is even part of my good fortune not to be a house-owner', Nietzsche
already wrote in the Gay Science. Today we should have to add: it is
part of morality not to be at home in one’s home".
This is where the
Diasporic dimension is so central to the mature thinking of Adorno and
Horkheimer. The refusal to dwell in peace in the present order of things, the
negation of the "facts" of the actuality, are but a manifestation of
the rejection of metaphysical violence and of all kinds of "homes",
dogmas, and self-satisfaction in a world of pain, injustice, ugliness, and
betrayed love. Since they refused a positive Utopia, their mature thought could
not promise a better world as a justification for resistance to normalizing
education and the quest for pleasure, "success", and hegemony.
Homelessness and the moral importance of suffering are here grounded
ontologically and become a religious way of life. In this, they followed
Benjamin’s lead: it is a kind of religiosity which is Messianic without a
Messiah.
As a counter-education it has no promise of salvation or of redemption. But it
might offer a Messianic moment, which will overcome the violence of the
governing "now-time"
and open the gate to an alternative way of life, an alternative thinking in
which challenging Spirit is reclaimed and the de-humanization of humans by the
manipulations of the system is resisted as part of the regeneration of Life and
its redemption from the all-celebrated triumph of "Spirit" and its
cannibalistic-oriented offspring such as Instrumental Rationality.
In this
counter-education, Love becomes possible, again, as different from the
codes, passions, and ideals which are set by the omnipotence of the ruling
culture industry. Within the framework of this counter-education the otherness
in the self is reclaimed, the otherness of the Other becomes not only
legitimate – it becomes an indispensable element in a new kind of Life, in
which nomadism is realized at the intellectual and social levels, paralleled by
infinite responsibility – with no God, dogma, or party central committee to
guide the individual towards "the good". "The totally
other" bursts in – or does not – and refutes the consensus, unveils the
accepted truths, values, passions, and the other manifestations of the
self-evidence. It is a Diasporic, ecstatic, dangerous, way of life within which
new possibilities are opened but no guarantees are available; no optimism, no
room for secured overcoming of the swelling power of the self-forgetfulness of
the human. This does not mean that the human is determined to passivity. Even
if the actuality of "the totally other" is not to be guarantied and
it is never an object of manipulation, there is still so much to do in order to
prepare one's ears to listen to the unfamiliar music of the presence of
"the totally other". Here the Diasporic philosophy of Adorno and
Horkheimer is of much relevance for this self-preparation, self edification,
self-reflection, responsibility, and creativity within the framework of a
present-day Diasporic counter-education.
Against Educational Optimism
To my mind, while the
first stage (the revolutionary-optimistic) of Critical Theory became the
foundation of today’s Critical Pedagogy, the second stage is a
brilliant manifestation of counter-education, committed not only to
criticize, but also to overcome all versions of normalizing education. Adorno’s
and Horkheimer's later work offers a framework for counter-educational praxis
whose religiosity is fertilized by the alarming recognition of the impossible
realization of the imperative of human "homecoming” to God, or domesticating
absolute Spirit or Reason; the establishment of a genuine "home" or
"homecoming” to the advancing true knowledge of genuine human interests
and realization of their potentials is here a constitutive element of
philosophy and politics. The current work of Slavoj Zizek, who writes that
"the paradox of self-consciousness is that it is possible only against the
background of its own impossibility",
is very close to this later work of Horkheimer and Adorno. In this sense the
later Critical Theory writings, which I consider essentially Diasporic in the
sense that they try to overcome the quest for "homecoming" in all its
manifestations, became prima facie counter-educational, even if the word
"education" is rarely mentioned and schooling is hardly tackled at
all.
The big challenge
for the critical mind and for humanistic education is not so much the fruit of
alienation but the disappearance of (the consciousness of) alienation within
the totality, which is governed by Instrumental Rationality. This quest for
alienation and the challenges of the exile of critical Spirit and Love of Life mark
the difference between critique of orthodox Marxist ideology and Horkheimer’s
and Adorno’s conceptions. Governing Instrumental Rationality leaves no room for
non-efficient and non-pragmatic considerations, and drives out the concepts,
ideals, and traditions that allowed speculation and critique of the
self-evident, and offered transcendence from the oppressive practices of all
master signifiers. Instrumental Rationality is responsible for the current
reality, in which the more progressive the processes of de-humanization become,
the more efficient becomes the concealment of the oppression by present Culture
Industry.
The exile of Spirit and Love of life, and the bridging of the abyss between
substance and subject, existence and meaning, creation/work and aim, Diasporic
self-positioning and quests for "homecoming" are trivialized, and
Spirit is again presented; but only as a commodity form that has lost its
connection to its use value and functions primarily as a violent symbolic
interchange, as part of what I call "the pleasure machine" that
normalizing education is so quick to celebrate as "reality".
Reified consciousness
which is fabricated with less and less antagonistic dimensions by the present
culture industry reaffirms "spirituality" and "spiritual
education" as a power of anti-love-of-life, and occultists are celebrating
their victory all over Western culture, especially when it presents itself as
the redemptive Diasporic power at the present historical moment.
According to
Adorno and Horkheimer there is no anchor or stable ground to anchor optimism or
even the very premises of Critical Theory, and a philosopher worthy of the name
must become what I call "a Diasporic human being". The seeming
political freedom, free opinion, and tolerance within present Western society
conceal and actually serve the process of totalistic de-humanization.
Not only does the mind mould itself for the
sake of its marketability, and thus reproduce the socially prevalent
categories. Rather, it grows to resemble ever more closely the status quo as
its "home" even where it subjectively refrains from making a
commodity of itself. The network of the whole is drawn ever tighter […] It
leaves the individual consciousness less and less room for evasion, performs it
more and more thoroughly, cuts it off as it were from the possibility of
differentiating itself as all difference degenerates to a nuance in the
monotony of supply.[32]
The critique of
traditional Marxist ideology cannot be of much use since culture itself
"has become ideological".
"Today", Adorno says, "ideology means society as appearance […]".
However, since ideology is no longer conceived as a socially necessary
appearance which veils the "facts", critique of ideology can no
longer offer an emancipatory deciphering of "reality" and cannot
claim to empower humanistic-oriented resistance to social oppression and to manipulative
representations of histories, identities, and realities. Adorno offers a view
that does not allow this kind of optimism, since
Ideology today is society itself in so far as
its integral power and inevitability, its overwhelming existence-in-itself,
surrogates the meaning which that existence has exterminated.
Horkheimer is on the
verge of acknowledging that there is no longer justification for a Critical
Theory. In a personal letter to Adorno he says that nowadays "reflection
[has become] senseless. Actually the world to which we saw ourselves as
belonging is destroyed".
Elsewhere he writes that serious talk itself has become senseless and that
those who refuse to listen – to the attempts to save meaning – are not totally
wrong.
Truth in this context is not absent; it is rather reviled in, and swallowed by,
the present reality. It can, however, offer only technological and scientific
advance – not meaning, direction, or responsibility to resist injustice. The
issue at stake here is not solely truth or justice but the very quest
for truth and the commitment to justice, or, in other words, the possibility of
transcendence
from meaninglessness and from "sameness"
– or what Levinas calls the Same
– from the mere thingness of Being. Addressing the absence of the foundation
for the quest for transcendence and facing its infinity as negative utopia is
an ontological sign of Diaspora that Critical Theory offers as an impetus for a
possible present day counter-education.
In the work of
later Adorno and Horkheimer, two very different conceptions of truth emerge.
One is the hegemony that is established on the existing world of facts, which
ultimately represents "power".
Here human existence in its essence is revealed at its full price: practical
involvement, within which ideals transform into oppression.
The implicit negation of any optimistic positive emancipatory educational
project of the kind that standard Critical Pedagogy is presently actualizing is
mercilessly manifested here.
Within the
framework of Critical Theory Adorno offers an alternative. He positions his
philosophy against the fundamental assumption of all positive utopias and all
"homecoming” projects: the assumption that the power of thought is
sufficient to grasp the totality of the real.
In regard to an alternative concept of truth, homelessness and Diasporic
existence are here connected to Adorno's central conceptions, among which a
special role is reserved for dialectics, non-identity, negation, and
reflection. For him
The name of dialectics says no more, to begin
with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a
reminder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy […] It
indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust
the thing conceived
In light of the
centrality to Adorno's later thought of the concept of nonidentity, it is of
vital importance to state that for him what I call "Diaspora" is not
a merely epistemological dimension. It is even much more than a way of life,
and surely it is not a temporary punishment of humans by God only to be
overcome by redemptive "homecoming” to a cosmic harmony and non-alienated
human existence. As in the Gnostic tradition, Adorno's rearticulated
"exiled good God" is present as an absence in the reality of
the evil God of historical existence and creative reality. This is why for him,
while dialectics is the consistent sense of nonidentity it also assures the
impossibility of any stable ground for "standpoint" – not only
the "wrong standpoint".
The aim of Adorno's Diasporic philosophy is Diasporic self-reflection, and
self-overcoming, which will make possible transcendence, with no ground,
ultimate end, or appeasing nihilistic pleasure, rational conclusion, totalizing
synthesis, or any other kind of "home" or redemption.
In an imaginary
conversation between the philosopher – an implicit reference to the masters of
Critical Theory themselves – and the practical man, the philosopher is the one
on the defensive, not his practical interlocutor. The genuine philosopher is
introduced by Adorno and Horkheimer not as a promising educator but as a
neurotic, who manifests his refusal to be cured when insisting on continuing
his project of curing normal, realistic-oriented, sane, people.
Facing these conclusions one should ask, what, if any, is the justification for
Critical Theory and for Critical Pedagogy as emancipatory education in action,
under conditions in which "serious philosophy has come to its end"?
One may ask if there is a secure or insecure yet worthy non-religious
"home" even for counter-education, if Adorno is right in saying:
Whatever wants nothing to do with the
trajectory of history belongs all the more truly to it. History promises no
salvation and offers the possibility of hope only to the concept whose
movements follows history's path to the very extreme.[48]
Critical Theory As A Jewish Negative Theology
The later Horkheimer
presents mature Critical Theory as a Jewish Negative Theology. This change
carries major educational implications. Following Benjamin, it was for him of
vital importance that Judaism did not present God as a positive absolute. The
negativity of this utopianism is constituted of two elements: the first is
rejection in principle of the possibility of a positive realization of any
Utopia. Horkheimer refuses to imagine a positive picture of future society
prior to its realization.
The second is his commitment to confront Critical Theory with its own
negativity and its own impossibility. This is a challenge worthy of a Diasporic
philosophy that cannot satisfy itself in a concluding synthesis, not even in
its essential homelessness or negativity. It is this challenge that opens the
gate to counter-education, and in many respects it is the gate itself. In
Adorno's words
The plain contradiction of this challenge is
that of philosophy itself, which is thereby qualified as dialectics before
getting entangled in its individual contradictions. The work of philosophical
self-reflection consists in unrevealing that paradox. Everything else is
signification, secondhand […].
As genuine Diasporic
philosophers both Adorno and Horkheimer refuse any philosophy that leads to
consensus, synthesis, and the end of dialectics and worthy suffering. Yet at the
same time they refuse to abandon the quest for the Messiah or human
emancipation. The quest, as a Messianic tension, is central here, not
its "successful" fulfillment. The messianic quest so often is
interwoven in a positive Diasporic philosophy that it makes possible the
institutionalization of religion and normalizing, repressive, religious,
education which challenges genuine religiosity and authentic Diasporic existence.
Adorno and Horkheimer are careful to position in the center of their
counter-education a different Diasporic attitude to messianism, reflection, and
transcendence. In his Minima Moralia Adorno concludes that
The only philosophy which can be responsibly
practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they
would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no
light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction,
mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the
world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted
as it will appear one day in the messianic light.
That is why Judaism
was so important for Horkheimer. He saw in it "a non-positive
religion", "a hope for the coming of the Messiah".
Judaism, within this framework, is not a reality but a symbol for – non-violent
– solidarity of the powerless.
As a Jewish Negative Theology, Critical Theory expresses, in his view, "a
refusal to recognize power as an argument for truth".
Horkheimer's contribution to the Diasporic perspective is here crystal clear
when he identifies "Judaism", as a "non-positive religion",
with Critical Theory. Adorno too understood the refusal of power,
effectiveness, and domestication in the "Same" of the world of facts
as a precondition for genuine counter-education that will challenge the present
reality.
The conception of
being in the continuum of ontological Diaspora was vital for presenting
late Critical Theory as a Jewish Negative Theology. The uniqueness of Judaism
lies in its permanent demand for justice, emerging out of a hope with no real
historical anchor: "Jewry was not a powerful state, but the hope for
justice at the end of the world".
The idea that the demand for justice essentially cannot obtain power, and that
justice can be realized only at the cost of its transformation into its
opposite – injustice, is central to the educational implications of this
version of Critical Theory.
In my mind it
implies that counter-education must not attempt to transcend negativism; it is
committed to anti-dogmatism and it must resist any manifestation of the
self-evident, even that of the oppressed and the persecuted. It must resist
popularization and political victories. At the same time its Messianism is
directed to resisting actual injustices in the present reality as the only
manifestation of the quest for truth and justice. This version of Negative
Theology as a mature Critical Theory in Horkheimer’s thought complies with
Adorno’s concept of Negative Dialectics.
It was not in
opposition to the view of the philosopher as a neurotic who refuses to be
cured, but in compliance with this vision that Adorno articulated the
"categorical imperative of philosophy".
There he concludes: "it does not hold the key to salvation, but allows
some hope only to the moment of concept followed by the intellect wherever the
path may lead".
Yet Adorno's Diasporic philosophy is not consistent enough with itself, and
actually Adorno presents Critical Theory as a path to salvation after all.
This, however, is within a negative framework that leaves no room for any positive
Utopia or actual salvation in the sense that traditional positive utopias or
optimistic-oriented Critical Pedagogy can promise its disciples. In most of his
educational texts Horkheimer too is short of consistent Diasporic philosophy
and he offers optimism on the possibility of a worthier education – at the
expense of counter-education, which if genuine must be truly Diasporic and
refuse any optimistic version of normalizing education. The explicit
philosophical texts of these thinkers in their second stage of development
represent a much more consistent Diasporic philosophy.
Regardless of its
situation, according to Adorno, philosophy has not concluded its mission.
However, it does not have any foundation, self-evidence, social strata, or pain
on which to establish its critical education: “Philosophy offers no place from
which theory as such might be concretely convicted of the anachronisms it is
suspected of, now, as before”.
Adorno, in accordance with Benjamin and Horkheimer, presents another kind of
dialectics that stands in contrast to the orthodox Marxist concept of
dialectics and its version of Ideology Critique (as an emancipatory overcoming
of alienation and false consciousness, and as a precondition for a
revolutionary praxis). As a genuine counter-educator he refuses any concept of
dialectics, which promises victory, emancipation, or peace.
According to
Adorno's ontology, human's homelessness is neither a temporary situation nor a
punishment, and ontologically it is rooted in the infinite rootlessness, in
what Deleuze calls "becoming"
or "the rhizomatic", that opens the gate to nomadic existence.
Adorno and Horkheimer are united here in refusing any manifestations of the
absolute, the totality, the truth, or a positive justice on earth.
Adorno is very
much aware of the contradictions in the heart of his project. His Diasporic
project rests here, on these contradictions precisely, as a way of overcoming
meaninglessness and self-evidence of various kinds, including the revolutionary
kind. "The work of philosophical self-reflection consists in unraveling
that paradox. Everything else is signification, secondhand construction,
pre-philosophical activity".
What then remains for philosophy to do? Is there still a mission it can devote
itself to – without transforming itself into its negative and become a new,
sophisticated, version of normalizing education?
Adorno, like
Horkheimer, constituted his utopian thought on his philosophical pessimism, and
so Negative Dialectics becomes the last way to save the struggle to challenge
the self-evident and to transcend meaninglessness.
To change this direction of conceptuality, to
give it a turn toward nonidentity, is the hinge of Negative Dialectics. Insight
into the constitutive character of the nonconceptual in the concept would end
the compulsive identification, which the concept brings unless halted by such reflection.
Reflection upon its own meaning is the way out of the concept’s seeming
being-in-itself as a unit of meaning.[62]
In this sense, and
solely in this sense, "philosophy can make it after all".
His Diasporic philosophy in this respect becomes the only way to resist the
process of destruction of the autonomy of the human subject.
It becomes the only manner of resistance to being overwhelmed by the
one-dimensional functionality and thingness of the system
and its deceiving message of freedom in accordance with the laws of the market
and the current world of facts.
As such, within its negativity, it incubates an alternative to the hegemonic
educational message propagated by the Culture Industry: it offers nomadic,
creative, religious existence and love via the possibility of refusal of the
present process of subjectification; resistance to the reality of constructing
the de-humanized agent. As such Diasporic philosophy offers a kind of thinking
which allows hope of overcoming the current educational reality
of which today's Critical Pedagogy is an important part.
Diasporic
philosophy enabled Adorno and Horkheimer to not only effect a radical critical
reconstruction of the present historical moment but to go further into offering
an existential-philosophical counter-educational refusal of all manifestations
of power in the present culture and society. The Diasporic philosophy
constructed by them was actually a non-positivistic and anti-optimistic
alternative; as in the Gnostic tradition, it was a call for the overcoming of the
omnipotence of the presence of "the evil God". Such an alternative
opened up when they insisted on transcendence, and (against the deceiving call
for relativism, nihilism, or pragmatism) on love, meaning, responsibility, and
creativity that are not a mere echo of the hegemonic power-games of the totally
administered world.
Critical Theory
here becomes an introduction to a renewal of poiesis and ecstatic religiosity
without becoming a new dogmatic religious, philosophical, or political
"home". At the same time, however, dogmatic and institutionalized
religion comes to have special relevance for the Frankfurt School thinkers:
they struggled for the very possibility of Diasporic sensitivity to the pursuit
for "the totally other". Only within this Diasporic philosophy and
its counter-educational alternatives are we to understand its refusal to
abandon the imperative of responsibility to the yet unrealized human
potentials. To this imperative, like to the presence of hope out of suffering,
they offered only one possible way: that of religious negation.
The message here
has its origins in the Jewish messianic impulse, the commitment to
transcendence from any consensus, and from any manifestation of the
self-evident and the Same; it is a call for a struggle to overcome
meaninglessness in a Godless world. In this sense, here any possible
educational "implication" should be negative, if it is to be true to
itself. At the same time, as genuine counter-education it is a manifestation of
love and a concrete realization of joy and creativity, tikun olam.
In this sense later Adorno and Horkheimer are so important in any attempt to
keep alive the quest and the actual appearance of counter-education as a
concrete Utopia of education for love in a postmodern condition.
For Adorno and Horkheimer, the transcendental
dimension and the concept of the horizon as a limit that does not have the last
word determine the frame of struggle which constitute the "genuine"
human – a position that comes close to mystic tradition. According to Adorno,
and here he is very close to Heidegger, from whom he and Horkheimer[69] were so concerned to distance
themselves[70], What is waiting in the
objects themselves needs such intervention to come to speak, with the
perspective that the forces mobilized outside […].[71]
This dimension is made especially
clear in Horkheimer's unpublished works. In every single thing, he wrote in a
private note, a higher aim dwells, which is channeled to external infinity,
which transcends it. The negative utopia of Diasporic philosophy is expressed
here, on the one hand, by the deeds of the genuine philosopher, which manifest
openness and readiness for Being called upon, geared towards a total negation
of the given reality as the actuality of "truth, beauty, and
goodness".
Horkheimer's starting point, however, includes the acknowledgement that these
dimensions reflect the absolute, which will forever remain concealed,
unreachable, and misconceived. One must clarify the status of this yearning, a
clarification that Horkheimer himself avoided and Adorno did only very little
to address. Here we come up against the limits of their mature Critical Theory
even when it becomes an implicit rich Diasporic philosophy.
With Horkheimer, as with Adorno and Benjamin, the struggle
for the possibilities of transcendence from the boundaries of the horizons of
the hegemonic reality transforms this praxis into prayer, a holy deed. Here
too, holiness is not conditioned and determined by the level of its
"success" but by openness and possibility. Also in Franz Rosenzweig’s
views on prayer
The question is not asked here whether the
prayer will be answered and fulfilled. The context of the prayer is its
fulfillment. The soul prays […] for the capability of prayer [...] this ability
to pray is the highest gift given to the soul in revelation. This gift is
nothing but the capability of prayer. But by being superior it already passes
the boundaries of the realm of capability. For, with the ability of prayer
given, the necessity for prayer is also included.
In prayer, the yearning for a dialogue between the human as
an infinite challenge to her finitude and "God" as a representation
of infinity, is realized. The central force, here, in my opinion, is not in the
establishment of an unproblematic meeting with “God” but in the Diasporic
facing of his absence and in the meeting of the existential moment where
Sisyphean overcoming of mere (pleasurable/painless/"successful")
human life is the aim of human life. A self-contained, domesticated, human
subject cannot make possible a true human, since he or she is essentially
Diasporic; the human is conditioned by transcendence and challenging the totality
of the immanence. The traditional concept of prayer
represented this idea in a manner still valid, especially in face of the
absence of God. As happens so often with love, happiness, and creativity,
prayer too, when instrumentalized and institutionalized, negates its own
essence and becomes a devoted slave of the reality it is committed to
transcend.
Even in order to realize the idea of the autonomous
subject, the human is overwhelmed by inhumanity: a desire for power – a desire
for "home" in the swallowing presence of the absolute immanence.
Unless the Diasporic counter-education is offered, no emancipation or
redemption awaits but nihilism and disintegration of human culture. Within counter-education
the Diasporic community enriches itself by the presence of the absence of the
absolute, which constitutes the longing for it. This negative presence, the
presence of the absence, might reconnect us with the essence of religiosity
that is so often misrepresented by the institutionalized religions that
constitute the false quest for Diasporic existence as a prelude to
"homecoming” to the lost Garden of Eden, nirvana, ultimate pleasure or
other positive utopian versions of human's self-forgetfulness. Counter-education
as opposed to the hegemonic Critical Pedagogy and the other manifestations of
normalizing education does not call for "effectiveness",
success", or "homecoming". It identifies and challenges the
Instrumental Rationality in Critical Pedagogy, radical feminist pedagogies and
all other critical optimisms toward emancipatory dimensions of the cyberspace,
radical democracy and post-colonial alternatives as advocated by critical
educationalists such as Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Douglas Kellner and Patti
Latter. As an alternative it can only prayer. This kind of prayer, however, is
articulated as a concrete way of Diasporic life where the eternal-improviser
actualizes her relation to the otherness of the Other in all dimensions and
levels of Life. Here counter-education makes nomadism possible and
enabled the posing of new philosophical questions, a lust which gave power to
martyrs at the stake, to monks confronting ancient parchments as absent truths,
or to women confronting the systematic oppression that was inflicted on them
by the ever-growing sophistication of Western phalocentrism.
The desire for "the totally other" as impetus of Love and authentic
creativity made possible the reality in the system while challenging it. It
also allowed transformation, transgression, and border-crossing from one system
of self-evidence and "homecoming” project to a different one. It was not
only coopted for the reproduction of the order of things – it also was a power
of change and altered systems on the existential level of every
individual as well as on the level of the rises and falls of entire cultures.
Critical Theory As A Prayer In A Godless
World
As an expression of Diasporic yearning for "the totally other",
prayer was traditionally also a gate to the infinite Other, a gate to
overcoming its quest for a positive "home", to the absolute. As such
it made possible the birth of young ears that able to respond to the wordless
invitation to Diasporic existence. Prayer, when true to itself, incubates the
religious quest, the existential readiness, for such an openness to infinity.
As such prayer also includes a type of special knowledge, and it already
represents, in this world, a genuine remnant of the moment of creation. As
Rabbi Moshe Sofer (Hatam Sofer) said: "The lamentation over the
destruction is itself the building". This knowledge with which we are
dealing is close to Gnostic knowledge – or rather the struggle for knowledge in
the Gnostic sense of the word.
Gnosis was the struggle for the knowledge of "the
good exiled God", the understanding of which was unattainable. Hence its
noble Diasporic position. Adorno and Horkheimer viewed the
"understanding" of the given reality as stipulated in connection with
the absolute; an affinity which is viewed as a certain type of knowledge, or
conditioned in a specific type of knowledge, which is different from that which
is reproduced in the hegemonic realm of self-evidence. In this manner even
they, in their Diasporic philosophy, like gnosis, sought after metaphysical
knowledge, which can be defined as the "knowledge of the secrets of the
universe". Only in this sense can a human hope to achieve salvation.
Within the framework of Critical Theory this is the quest for the secrets of
the universe, as much as it is a human universe.
Horkheimer’s Negative Utopianism as prayer and as
Diasporic existence has three aspects. The first is the advent of an ideal
Diasporic, anti-ethnocentristic-oriented community in which one can attempt to
see levels of religion, or an established cult with a special jargon, rituals
and gestures, common enemies, similar societal background, etc. within this
Diasporic philosophy. Negative Utopianism is also an invitation to the
Diasporic community as a sort of "praying congregation", present in
writings of Rosenzweig, as well as the method of establishing this community.
To a certain degree, this type of community already exists.
The second aspect is the establishment of the religious
ecstatic dimension of this Diasporic philosophy in relation to the absence of
the absolute. According to Heschel, the purpose of prayer in Jewish mysticism
is to recall God to the world and to establish in it his kingdom.
In this respect, prayer is the ladder towards the perfection over the horizon.
With Horkheimer, the resting point of this ladder is the Diasporic existence
and the awareness of the absence of the absolute. "The longing for heaven,
where he will never enter"
relies on the existence of the absolute and supersedes it – and at the same
time constitutes it. Horkheimer’s endeavor as prayer is very close to that of
the Kabbala concerning the relationship between mystical prayer and
divinity.
According to Moshe Idell, one of the kabbala texts
illustrating this belongs to Rabbi Elazar of Worms:
Let there be the sound of prayer of Israel –
for prayer travels upward towards the heavens above their heads and travels and
rests on the head of the Almighty and becomes for him a crown [...] for prayer
rests like a crown […] Human prayers are transformed by their relation that
they are transcended and become part of the divine escort: Divine Presence, a
wreath on the head of God, and ‘like the crown’.
Idell sees the composition of a “wreath” by means of prayer
as a “crowning of a king”. From this aspect he continues, "one can see the
Kabbala not only as caring for the garden but also caring for the
gardener himself".
Adorno and Horkheimer’s Diasporic projects are not very
far from the essence of kabbalistic yearning – the yearning of the homeless for
"the totally other" than the totality of the immanence of the present
reality as the manifestation of Being; the yearning for what Levinas calls
"the infinite Other", which is a condition for prayer, and at the
same time its fruits. With regards to the affinity to the absolute, the
Diasporic project itself appears as a prayer of an eternal nomad, who refuses
any positive God, refuses any of the positive utopias and all alternative kinds
of "homecoming” projects to the lost Garden of Eden or to its sub-mundane
realization. As such there is no place in it for prayer as a separate activity.
This is based on the Gnostic view of true prayer: "prayer as a type of
higher communication with supreme reality must be quietness".
The third aspect of this Diasporic philosophy is the
establishment of the “genuine individual” in the ideal Diasporic community. The
ability of the true individual (the philosopher) to send the invitation to the
critical conversation – where the possibility for the struggle for salvation of
the soul lies – is also the moral duty which Horkheimer imposes on the
Diasporic philosopher, and maybe on himself:
Both prayer and romantic love have a common
past. Today both are fading, and there is no better manifestation of it than
the propaganda taking place in their name... the praise and the condemnation,
the sanctions against the skeptic. If he remains purely negative, he
contributes to the validity of regression. To be devoted one to another as man
intended, in the past, to do with the assistance of prayer, even though the
impotence of prayer and the insignificance of man became a well known thing; to
transform into much love... to drive aside the skepticism whenever the social
and psychological conditions were exposed and understood and from awareness to
them: to drive aside the skepticism without forgetting what these skeptical
matters brought about - this is the only resistance the individual can offer in
face of the vain progress. It will not cease the decline; it will, however,
bear witness on the right thing during the period of darkness.
This responsibility of the Diasporic, religious, human, who
has no dogma, collective, pleasure, "truth", "revolution", Garden
of Eden or God to enslave himself to, is born out of an the existential
decision – similar to the Kierkegaardian "Either-Or" – which creates
dislearning and manifests Love of Life. Adorno and Horkheimer’s anthropology
understands existence as dependent on that which is beyond it, hence the erotic
commitment to transcendence above any given reality or above life as the
ecstatic aim of life.
The Diasporic Philosophy Of Adorno And
Horkheimer
When we elaborate on the religious aspects of Adorno and
Horkheimer's Diasporic philosophy it is appropriate to distinguish three terms:
religion, religiousness, and theology. The relationship between Critical Theory
and theology, especially in the later Adorno and Horkheimer, is very clear.
First, many of their foremost peers were declared theologians. Second, they
presented theology as a basis for a moral alternative and for a critique of the
present as a whole, and as dealing with historical research and philosophical
judgment of the connection to a God in different religions. Third, they use
much theological jargon: "martyr", "the rising of the
dead", "original sin", and "the burning bush". Fourth,
Horkheimer defines his Critical Theory and that of Adorno as “negative
theology”. Fifth, their work fits the theological category, at least by
definition of the members of "radical theology". And sixth, their
work became important for many theologians—those who did not consider
themselves "radicals", and those who not only enriched their
theological matters, but also saw the texts of Benjamin, Adorno, and
Horkheimer, and even of Habermas, as theological work per se.
Much more problematic is the definition of religion. It
is difficult to state if one can see Adorno and Horkheimer’s projects as
religious. A clue can be found in the comments which Horkheimer wrote for himself
one day in March 1969, and did not publish. In these writings he refers to his
project as a bona fide religious undertaking, and he is planning the last
articles of the writings with the purpose of illuminating various aspects of
new religiousness. Horkheimer wishes to express four ideas: solidarity; the
love of the Other as equal to the integration of theology and science; the
basis of fanaticism; and a non-violent solidarity.
These four ideas were supposed to be passed on via these
essays: "Our homeland – the Planet"; "He –- Like you" (a
distortion of the Hebrew usually rendered as "Love your neighbor as you
would yourself"); "On Output"; and an additional essay which was
planned, but never written, supposedly inspired by the condition of Jews in the
Diaspora. He sums up the project: "These four ideas must be formulated in
such a manner that they will lead to [the advent] of a new praxis which unifies
science and religion".
Since the concept of religion seems to us problematic
and this connection is not meant to be decided through such an intricate
problem – a problem to whose clarification neither Adorno nor Horkheimer
devoted proper attention, we shall concentrate on a different kind of
problematic: religiousness.
The Diasporic religiousness, which I credit to Adorno
and Horkheimer, is similar to the existential religiousness that I find in
Kierkegaard – something Adorno clearly states when speaking of Kierkegaard.
Adorno and Horkheimer’s religiousness is nothing but an interpretation of
reality which becomes an ecstatic way of life that not only transcends the
historical reality but even transforms the historical moment itself in the
sense that it reveals its self-negation in face of the infinite Diasporic
essence of Being itself.
As a way of life Diasporic philosophy is not
religiousness based on the fear of life but on the affirmation of life, while
facing meaninglessness, suffering, and the rejection of all other calls for
"homecoming". This refusal makes nomadism possible as a
religious way of life. It gives life justification, not through purposefulness
of the kind from which the concept of oppression is constituted. This
justification is a manifestation of love of life and is a Sisyphean one, in the
sense of the religion of the Greeks according to the Nietzschian
interpretation. The Diasporic human, then, like the Nietzschian super-human,
may be truly happy (which is in opposition to satisfaction by the furnishing of
phony needs) from this tragedy. The Greek hero, Nietzsche’s super-human, and
Horkheimer’s philosopher both affirm life not only despite their suffering and
meaninglessness but more than that out of meaninglessness, suffering, and the
absolute absence of the Other.
The Diasporic identification of the possibilities for
transcendence from the tyranny of the facts of the present reality is also
present in Nietzsche’s Dionysianism. While opposed to conventional religion,
this, nevertheless is "the road towards life", which is essentially
"religious", a tragic-"holy" struggle, an "aim"
that overcomes "God" and redeems Life and "earth".
Horkheimer, for all his criticism, sees Nietzsche as a thinker who symbolizes a
will and a way to salvation.
The Diasporic religiousness to which we refer to is not stopped by the
awareness of "death of God"; on the contrary, this is its starting
point. Of this may be said what Victor Nouvo said of radical theology: "a
new liberty is formed from the recognition of the death of man and the death of
God. It is radical theology which opens the way to this new liberty".
Adorno and Horkheimer’s Diasporic philosophy does not
lack a belief in the deity: it makes the overcoming of the belief in all forms
of "God", the absolute or the positive, into a starting point of a
re-articulated Gnostic counter-education for love. As such it sits well with
the dealings of modern critical theologians who express true religious tension,
which is dependent on "waiving the concept of God as the basis for
work", in the words of Dietrich Bonhoffer.
This disbelief is close to the religiousness of Karl Barth, who states that
today "[true] religiousness is disbelief".
Even so, the denial of belief should not be seen as a forgoing of the absolute.
It is this denial of dogmatic belief which makes possible a burst of
vital, absolute belief which wills a life of wandering upon the skeptic. The
holy deeds of the skeptic form the totality of his existence and the permanence
of his Diasporic community. Historically, this is the difference between
weak-spirited skepticism, which is pragmatic or carries the suffix
"post", and skeptical religiousness, which enriches that same major
religion – one which usually produces power and at the same time promises new
eroticism. This Diasporic skepticism is the burning bush of the kind out of
which God spoke to Moses (Exodus III, 4). This call out of the burning bush
will never be easy to identify as other than the echo of the governing
power-games and an effect of the immanence of the symbolic exchange. It will
never be totally deciphered, classified, or evaluated; it will always remain
beyond, other, an abyss, as understood by the deep religiousness of Moses,
Pascal, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Levinas. The
idea of "the bush that is never consumed” is to be understood in its connection
to Utopian tradition as well.
Adorno and Horkheimer's Diasporic religiousness is
closer to the Gnostic tradition than to atheism. In light of the loss of the
relevance of the traditional religions as a manifestation of the overcoming of
the bad God over Life, or over the primordial, exiled, God, they seeked to give
"theism a new meaning [...] from within atheism itself".
This is in order to save the "Judeo-Christian" Utopia of
"unification of truth, love and justice, as expressed in the Messianic
idea".
Central to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Diasporic philosophy is Negative
Utopianism. This is Negative utopianism geared to the human field of
struggle over the realization of its potential for being different, and in a
sense more, than being directed by the system. However, it is not the
attainment of power that is here stressed but the Diasporic acknowledgement of
the impotence of justice and of the human who challenges injustice.
Adorno and Horkheimer’s Diasporic religiousness calls for
"unification of religion and philosophy in the realm of true
solidarity".
This type of solidarity is supposed to include science as a central element and
to perceive it as a threatening enemy. This is not the concept of utopian
science which we find in Marcuse's "principle of the new reality",
whose maximal utopian version is supposed to be realized in the future society.
Within the framework of Adorno and Horkheimer's Diasporic philosophy
the given reality is not in the realm of "the absolute", nor is it
the place that one can decide in connection with this reality itself. Both
thinkers came out against "dogmatic atheism" on the one hand and
against dogmatic theism on the other.
Utopianism is vital for all versions of Diasporic philosophy and
Negative Utopianism is quintessential for Adorno and Horkheimer. They stress it
with special clarity when relating to the implicit predecessors of Diasporic
philosophy. This is why Horkheimer went so sharply against "Schopenhauer’s
dogmatic atheism", in which, in his opinion, the idea of "the
nil" is no less subjective than the idea of "God", which he
refuses to present in a positive manner, in line with the hermetic tradition,
Master Eckhart, and Nicolas of Cusa's De Docta Ignoratia and its
Negative Theology.
He made a crucial decision, and because of this refused to give up the utopian
desire. The only argument which can be found for this is a moralistic one: a
refusal to acknowledge the reality of evil, which characterizes this world. In
this context he explicitly speaks of "belief" – belief which is capable
of unifying in a moralistic manner the community that holds that the terrible
reality in the world will not have the last word. In other words, in some
respects this is a yearning for "true" reality – that meant by the
utopian tradition and the tradition of religious salvation. Thus we conclude
that ultimately, despite their important contribution to the history of
Diasporic philosophy, Horkheimer and Adorno are not consistent in their
Diasporic philosophy even in the second stage of their work.
As against this element in their thought it is important to stress
that from a consistent Diasporic point of view the Diasporic essence of Being
and human essential homelessness when true to itself is the possible arena for
dancing with the immanence of the absolute. Only when overcoming the limits of
their own work might Adorno and Horkheimer offer us such a transcending dance;
a religious counter-education that will insist on transcendence from mere
power-relations and meaninglessness. This, within the framework of Negative
Dialectics and nomadism as a way of life. A mode of existence that develops
special relations with the Jewish concept of an absent God and traditional
Jewish anti-dogmatism and the rejection of any call to establish a national,
intellectual or moral "home". This, only to ultimately overcome
Jewish Messianism and all other forms of monotheism.
This refusal of any attempts at domestication and normalization is the terra in
which the negation of the present reality is anchored. Eternal and infinite
Diaspora as the manifestation of the absolute makes possible "the grand
refusal" and empowers the overcoming of the call to reconcile with the
reality and being swallowed by the historical moment. But what is the
non-contingent framework or foundation of "the last truth" or for the
negation of its production? Horkheimer's answer is: "the religion".
Here the struggle for the salvation of religiousness appears to him synonymous
with the struggle for realizing the essence or the aim of Western culture.
Diasporic Existence, Judaism, And Counter-education
Even if only implicitly, Adorno and Horkheimer accept the Diasporic
essence of Being and human life as a starting point for their mature,
religious-oriented Critical Theory.
This enables them to insist on their critique and on their reconstruction of
the omnipotence of power and meaninglessness (namely the apparatuses that
produce meanings, values, and strives) in current life, on the one hand, while
insisting on transcendence from the present reality and insisting on creativity
and moral responsibility, on the other.
We must all be unified by the yearning, which
takes place in this world, injustice and horror will not be the final word,
what was the other... what is called religion [...] the idea of infinity, which
was developed by religion - we must need it and not give up on it. Clearly, we
must not turn it in to an example [...].
The second idea comes to light in the commandment of Jewish religion not
to present a positive description of God,
an idea diametrically opposed to the Marcusian utopia as a whole and realizes
the Jewish commandment, "Thou shall not make a statue or mask".
These are at the foundation of the Diasporic "great refusal”, which
contains the same special knowledge that is included in the criticism in the
laws of prayer; this is a privileged knowledge, an erotic response to the burst
of "the totally other".
Already, the first phase of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s contemplation
includes a Diasporic recognition that one must not base values and goals and it
is impossible to prove objective truths; already here is the decision to
believe; that only from the act of deciding to believe can the
counter-educational project spring. The criticism, which positions this
decision as an experiment to save the moral, still must explain in a rational
manner how it is possible to see the preference of this move over remaining in relativism
or subjectivism or replacing a specific belief system with one of its rivals.
The absurd in the decision of Adorno and Horkheimer is that in the lack of the
possibility for validity in a rational manner of their decision, the project
takes place in the realm of struggle for the salvation of enlightenment – which
they criticize in an extreme manner as an expression of power and oppression.
Their decision exists within the realm of their own religiousness, and only it
can be used as a systematic base, just as it provides a utopian purpose as
well. But is it a decision, an act of free choice – or the reaction to the
persuasive power of the arbitrariness of the voice of "the totally
other", that forced itself on them and made possible their free choice
to believe? An in what sense is this arbitrariness and power essentially
different from the deceiving power of present-day Sirens that counter-education
directs us to overcome?
The explicit purpose of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Diasporic
religiousness in the second phase of their thought is no longer a revolution,
but rather a struggle for "the autonomy of the individual".
In the struggle for salvation, Horkheimer’s animal symbolicum
overpowers mere reality and continues on the paved way of the Cabbalists while
he sees himself as continuing the position of Schopenhauer. According to this
position reality is essentially not absolute and Life is not governed or
reduced to “facts”, but the product of the mind, symbols and allegories,
objects for infinite creative interpretations.
Each thing which turns into a symbol has the
ability to bring us down into a gutter which cannot be described, to the aspect
of nil. In all things and every phrase in the world a concealed brilliance of
hidden life manifests itself for the Cabbalist, infinite life glows inward
[...] It is possible to say that the whole world and all acts of genesis are nothing
but style of speaking, as a symbolic expression of that layer of what the
thought cannot afford, from it a post or a corner of each building which can be
achieved by thought.
The place of Diasporic hope in Horkheimer’s thought also matches
its understanding by the theologians of salvation within genuine religiosity:
salvation is, first and foremost, a promise that “its realization might
remain no more than a hope”.
His “practical optimism” is not attuned to cosmic salvation. It is not even
expressed in response to a utopian invitation to an ideal dialogue; within the
Diasporic project, on the basis of the hope which it generates, the purpose and
the end result of counter-education. Then, and only then, is there room for
“practical” optimism in relation to the text and the Other as partners to a
responsible, creative, loving, nomadic, way of life. In other words, the
“optimism” spoken of is found in the context and expresses a dimension of its
action, and it is not a force or external condition which establishes this
religiousness, which, in the long run, is devoted to an existential decision,
which molds a way of life which, in the eyes of the believers, is moralistic.
Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Diasporic project expresses first and foremost
yearning and belief which do not require approval and cannot be negated by the
present reality and its logic.
The new Diasporic
philosophy that Adorno and Horkheimer offer us is of the kind traditionally
Judaism offered to the world – under the evil conditions set by postmodern
global capitalism which develops along new destructions and distorted creative
Eros – which is governed by the logic of Thanatos – also new possibilities for
counter-education and active cosmopolitanism. This new cosmopolitanism
transforms the Gnostic and Messianic traditions in face of postmodern and
pre-modern fundamentalist-oriented postcolonialist alternatives. This Messianic
moment, even as a potential, is normally distorted, misused, or forgotten. But
in face of cultural, economic, political, and, ultimately, existential crisis
it wakes. When and if awoken, it might become an impetus for counter-education
exactly against the exile of Spirit, the instrumentalization of reason, and the
reification of the human relations. In opposition to the optimists who
establish great hopes for "the chosen ones" or even for all humanity in
the cyberspace or on the foundations of globalizing capitalism
I am offering a dialectical reconstruction of our historical moment: it is the
same globalizing capitalism which rationally sends entire populations into a
"flexible job economy", rationalized starvation, structurally
guaranteed poor health, and loss of self-respect in the margins of world
affluent economy which also opens the door for the visibility of suffering, for
universal needs and values, and for new possibilities for counter-education and
Diasporic way of life which transcends ethnocentric solidarity, political
borders, and contextual pragmatism and cynicism.
Their work is an important manifestation of counter-education in the
Gnostic sense. As such it manifests a Diasporic Philosophy that refuses all
calls for "homecoming", to God, to the Garden of Eden, to the Patria,
to truth, or to mere-pleasure and practical nihilism. Adorno’s and Horkheimer's
negative theology, while addressing the relevance of Jewish traditional
anti-dogmatism and anti-collectivism, offers us today, more then ever, a goal,
meaning, and love – without being swallowed by any "pleasure
machine", "truth" or "we". As Diasporic humans we are
called upon by their counter-education to insist on transcendence, to actualize
love in creativity and in a kind of togetherness that is dialogic and refuses
any collectivism and all dogmas. In other words this is the moment of birth of
the eternal-improviser. Improvisation is to be thought, cultivated and
actualized in all spheres of public and individual life experiences. It is a
pre-condition as well as the manifestation of genuine creativity that
transcends the Same. Transcendence here is an ethical act of the
eternal-improviser, the Diasporic nomad. The transcendence of the eternal-improviser,
as in the case of the genuine hacker is a non-reified creativity; and even in a
post-modern arena it is an open possibility. As Levinas shows us in Totality
and Infinity the transcendence of the otherness from the continuum of the Same
is an act of self-constitution that resists even the philosophical logos. The
Diasporic philosophy should become a source of dislearning and alterity (alterite)
as well as a gate for authentic religious, creativity and Love that
counter-education will develop in the most concrete and specific ways.
Improvisation has many aspects that are to be tought, developed, edified and
actualized: breathing, reclaiming forgotten and repressed voices, responding to
changing situations while holding on to a Gnostic remembrance of (pre)history
and the responsibility to the cosmos and eternity each moment anew are vital
for today's ethical I, who opens herself to the poiesis of Godless religiosity
within troubled Life. As such, the later work of Adorno and Horkheimer makes a
genuine contribution to counter-education, which is so much needed in face of
the recent success of the violence of capitalism, postmodernism, and
postcolonialism. One of the first steps of current counter-education should be
the synthesis of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s critique of Western society and the
logic of capitalism with present day analyses of capitalist globalization
processes within the framework of "risk society" that at the same
time opens new possibilities for Diasporic existence and new realizations of
nomadism of the kind that a re-articulated Gnosis might make relevant. Such a
counter-education should not abandon the critical tradition, yet it should
insist on Love. It should develop new connections between the aesthetic and the
ethic, the intellectual and the physical, the political and the religious
dimensions of life of a non-dogmatic creator. How ironic it is that global
capitalism, while exiling human spirit and enhancing the omnipotence of the
creative "bad God", also opens new possibilities for new forms of
Gnosis and for new Diasporic individuals and communities.
