we were exposed to the original writers' ideas through them, it's the same strain of mind mush. when you reject the entire worldview, the differences are as significant and meaningful as those between Osho and Yod. I am optimistic that our civilization has finally got past it.
The only serious person to come out of that circle was Hannah Arendt and they hated each other because she knew what they were, imo.
Horkheimer and Habermas, especially their later stuff, are actually pretty great and I think a lot of conservatives (especially religious types) could actually get into it. I wish the New Left had gone with that side of the Frankfurt school rather than the Reich/Marcuse side. Things might not be so divided right now.
> anyone who went to school in the 90s and 00s got exposure to the frankfurt school writers, (Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, etc.)
Well, if it is your case the exposure would probably have to be homeopathic, because Frankfurt school has nothing to do with any of the 3. I highly doubt anybody but the French and the Swiss have to deal with Lacan luckily (psychoanalysis was always a pseudoscience, not that PNL is any better), and Foucault stated that Marxism was bound to the 19th century and made absolutely no sense outside of it, which makes it likely that you actually don't know about him despite citing his name. He was also an unlikeable doomer, pretentious and a whiner (the last two are clearly from his minority habitus), and wrote as such.
Of the 3 you cite, only Derrida has had any influence (on linguistics and literary criticism), and I highly doubt you read any of his thoughts, mainly because it's unreadable slop (you really have to power through it) but also because I found out 6 years ago that most USians talk about him and made him say the opposite of what he wrote. It's either very bad translation, bad reading comprehension (which would be understandable if it wasn't the literal opposite of his writing) or people talking about him without actually reading him.
In fact, I will here write the main idea of Derrida: words meanings change through time and culture. Hence you can't really judge an author book with your current understanding. You also can't understand it from what you think you know about the time it was written. The only way to judge a book is by it's intrinsic coherence. To really understand what the author means, you have to find its internal contradictions.
He isn't completely clear about what these contradictions are, but finding figures of speech instead of just reading words in school to do literary analysis is because of him. If you think we should just go back to only reading words and stop trying to find meaning through figures of speech in school, I'm not totally opposed to it, but you need arguments.
I'm pretty sure that the 'gone with the wind' netflix changes would have absolutely disgusted him and is pretty much the opposite of what he stood for.
> Frankfurt School critical theory has been—along with French theory—one of the hottest commodities of the global theory industry. Together, they serve as the common source for so many of the trend-setting forms of theoretical critique that currently dominate the academic market in the capitalist world, from postcolonial and decolonial theory to queer theory, Afro-pessimism and beyond. The Frankfurt School’s political orientation has therefore had a foundational effect on the globalized Western intelligentsia.
> The luminaries of the first generation of the Institute for Social Research—particularly Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who will be the focus of this essay—are towering figures in what is referred to as Western or cultural Marxism. For those familiar with Jürgen Habermas’s reorientation away from historical materialism in the second and then third generations of the Frankfurt School, this early work often represents a veritable golden age of critical theory, when it was still—though perhaps passive or pessimistic—dedicated in some capacity to radical politics. If there is a grain of truth in this assumption, it is only insofar as the early Frankfurt School is compared to later generations that refashioned critical theory as radical liberal—or even just blatantly liberal—ideology.[1] However, this point of comparison is setting the bar much too low, as is the case whenever one reduces politics to academic politics. After all, the first generation of the Frankfurt School lived through some of the most cataclysmic clashes in global class struggle of the 20th century, when a veritable intellectual world war was being fought over the meaning and significance of communism.
> In order to avoid being the dupes of history, or of the parochialism of the Western academy, it is therefore important to re-contextualize the Institute for Social Research’s work in relationship to international class struggle. One of the most significant features of this context was the desperate attempt, on the part of the capitalist ruling class, its state managers and ideologues, to redefine the Left—in the words of cold warrior CIA agent Thomas Braden—as the “compatible,” meaning non-communist, Left.[2] As Braden and others involved have explained in detail, one important facet of this struggle consisted in the use of foundation money and Agency front groups like the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) to promote anti-communism and lure Leftists into taking positions against actually existing socialism.
I don't disagree, but once again "French theory" takes a bullet for things they did not write or said. Or at least, postmodernism is equated with French theory when few French author actually wrote anything about those subjects.
I understand the criticism of most of Postmodernism, because they reject Marx historical materialism, because a part of it is new-age trash and unactionable, and its authors were grandiloquent, pretentious shit (even the one i like the most, Baudrillard, seems to be an insufferable human being), but the simple act of rejecting meta-narratives is such an interesting idea, it posit that all action (or social struggle) as necessarily local, limited, and partial, but nonetheless effective. A moto of postmodernism would be "act locally, and don't worry about any grand plan, even if those exist, they won't work".
The extreme recoiling and rejection of the clearly obvious idea that most left-wing movements were hilariously co-opted by the IC circa the 60s (likely continuing now) and that critical theory specifically is co-opted, is evidence of it happening. We've both posted multiple articles showing evidence of this, but folks in this thread get big mad when you bring this up.
Btw, if you want a rejection of meta-narratives without fashionable nonsense, go read STIRNER
I think one hangup for a lot of people here is that they picture the mechanics as having to be something like "the CIA groomed Frankfurt School writers as witting agents from birth" when in reality, it's more like these guys were just selected from the huge menu of takes vendors as having the correctly calibrated mix of left wing appeal and non- or anti-revolutionary compatibility.
The OP above you is literally 100% correct and the downvoting is indicative of folks who don't want to be intellectual honest about the lineage of progressive/left-wing thought.
> The OP above you is literally 100% correct and the downvoting is indicative of folks who don't want to be intellectual honest about the lineage of progressive/left-wing thought.
The endorphin system produces endogenous opioids by an ancient biological mechanism older than humanity itself. Opiates are a low-quality fake substitute that fits the same receptors.
In a similar way, a political ideology is a meme that stimulates the religious part of the brain. Ideology is one of many potential "religion-shaped objects" that fit those memetic receptors.
Articles like this get posted and yet if you use terms like “post modern neo-Marxism” to describe critical theory, Frankfurt school, continental philosophy, post modernism/post structuralism, situationalist internationale, you get described as a “right wing conspiracy theorist”. I hate Peterson so much for having ruined the ability to critique these charlatans.
I actually read a ton of shit from these groups. Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Lacan, Freud, Sartre, De Bouiver, etc. I had to both for university philosophy and Sociology classes and for competitive debate.
They’re all fashionable nonsense charlatans. All of their ideologies are intellectual bankrupt and scams. I firmly believe that the success of these movements was engineered on purpose by your local spy master to prevent leftists from doing impactful stuff.
The oedipus complex, Electra complex, object petit a, rhizomatic thinking, biopower, etc literally do not exist. Every single idea that most of these people had was so hilariously off base that their fame today is an indictment of the entire human race.
Oh and that’s not even bringing up the real heavy hitters on why these folks are disgusting:
You really should try reading them. I am not even scratching the surface. Just open up a book called “anti-oedipus” or “A Thousand Plateus” by Deleuze and Guattari.
It’s all full of shit. The moment that you start with Freud (and all of these figures implicitly assume he’s right as they do for Marx) you’ve become intellectually bankrupt.
I unfortunately cover to cover read and engaged with these authors far too much in my competitive debate career.
I repeat, they are all full of shit. Their “criticism of him” is not even close to on base. They literally advocate for “Schizoanalysis”. Everyone claims that they critique everyone else in this field. “Critique” in the sense of “your mostly right but made a few mistakes” instead of being like “I’m pretty sure that young children don’t want to fuck their mom and kill their dad” (oedipus complex, which Deleuze and Guattari think is real)
It’s telling that their attempted psychiatric hospital was an epic fail, that Deleuze famously said guattari told him to “write stupid shit”, and Deleuze ends up flinging him self out of a window in an apparent suicide later.
From what little I know, their use of schizophrenia is different from how we use it now, and when they refer to the schizophrenic they mean someone who doesn’t systematize and abstract things in order to make sense of the world like most people, so they want to try and use something like this state of mind to observe things as they are rather than reducing them into constituent parts and abstracting their function like we tend to do when analyzing, hence schizoanalysis. I think that’s a neat idea, lmk if I’m misreading.
Conflating Derrida and Sartre with Frankfurt's school is extremely weird. Especially Sartre.
Sartre's ideology is existentialism, it have close to nothing to do with the post-hagelism/neo-marxism of the Frankfurt school. The only common point is that they're continental philosophers and atheists.
Concerning Derrida, his main contribution is that the best way of criticizing a book is to make abstraction of who wrote it and when, of current ideas and laws and only judge the book for itself, finding internal contradiction,and that what he called 'deconstruction'. Yes it's the same word as Frankfurt's school 'deconstruction' but it has nothing to do with it. I get why he's classified as a post-modernist,but he is post-structuralist before everything, and post-structuralism is anti-marxism by definition, so making him a friend of Frankfurt's school is disingenuous. Also he disliked Foucault.
Also, Freud, Deleuze, Lacan and Foucault are frauds and while most post-modernism is basically wankery (if this word doesn't exist,it should), Derrida, and especially Lyotard and Baudrillard do not deserve to be put in the same basket. Lyotard because he explained Marvel 'films' 50 years before Marvel, and Baudrillard because anybody who wants to understand social media has to read him, despite the fact that he died before Facebook was a thing. And conflating all of them with hagelians is an insult to any intelligent being who read them.
And for the 'age of consent' petitions you linked at the end, the story is that the age of consent in France was 21. It was then reduced for non-homosexuals to 18, then 15. The petition (at least the one signed by Françoise d'Eaubonne) was to have the same age of consent for both homosexuals and heterosexuals, which ended up happening. The latest petition I think was to either have consent lowered to 13, or have the penal responsibility raised from 13 to the current consent age,but it was signed by like 60 people and quite weird.
P.S I checked the English version and the French version, one has a lot of facts, citations, point of view and seems quite complete, the other seems quite targeted. I wasn't exact in my description of what happened but I'm a lot closer than the English Wikipedia.
What do you mean pseudoscience? I don't think Derrida's deconstruction as ever claimed to be scientific or even the best method for literature analysis.
And while you can disagree with him that words and meanings evolve through time and culture, hence you can't rely on your current definitions to understand a book and have to understand through other means, I still think that his method of resolving that through finding internal contradictions is clearly a very good idea. If you don't think so, well, it's your opinion, but why would it be unscientific?
Also, it's not critical theory. They use the same name but it's two different things. Derrida's 'deconstruction' is largely influenced by Heidegger (ps: now I get why Sartre and Derrida were put in the same sentence), while critical theory is inspired by Marx.
I'm not saying Derrida wasn't into new-age bullshit, but he is mostly known as a linguist, grammarian, and litterature critique,and on that I think he's ok. Mostly wrong,but those were new fields at the time. And I haven't read any arguments against his deconstruction,so if you have one,I will read it.
[Edit] and to be clear, ni idea who is Langley or the other one. The most recent book I've read on an adjacent subject is Eidolon from Shoumacher, and I doubt someone who call 'hyperreality' 'pseudoscience', showing that labels do sometimes take over what they are describing originally read the same books I do :D
Langley and Fort Meade are the headquarters of the CIA and NSA respectively. He's insinuating, bizarrely, that you're a government agent posting covertly on the internet as part of a conspiracy to promote continental philosophy for... reasons?
"The image of American spies gathering in Parisian cafés to assiduously study and compare notes on the high priests of the French intelligentsia might shock those who presume this group of intellectuals to be luminaries whose otherworldly sophistication could never be caught in such a vulgar dragnet, or who assume them to be, on the contrary, charlatan peddlers of incomprehensible rhetoric with little or no impact on the real world. However, it should come as no surprise to those familiar with the CIA’s longstanding and ongoing investment in a global cultural war, including support for its most avant-garde forms, which has been well documented by researchers like Frances Stonor Saunders, Giles Scott-Smith, Hugh Wilford (and I have made my own contribution in Radical History & the Politics of Art)."
"Thomas W. Braden, the former supervisor of cultural activities at the CIA, explained the power of the Agency’s cultural assault in a frank insider’s account published in 1967: “I remember the enormous joy I got when the Boston Symphony Orchestra [which was supported by the CIA] won more acclaim for the U.S. in Paris than John Foster Dulles or Dwight D. Eisenhower could have bought with a hundred speeches.” This was by no means a small or liminal operation. In fact, as Wilford has aptly argued, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which was headquartered in Paris and later discovered to be a CIA front organization during the cultural Cold War, was among the most important patrons in world history, supporting an incredible range of artistic and intellectual activities. It had offices in 35 countries, published dozens of prestige magazines, was involved in the book industry, organized high-profile international conferences and art exhibits, coordinated performances and concerts, and contributed ample funding to various cultural awards and fellowships, as well as to front organizations like the Farfield Foundation."
"While other tentacles of the worldwide spy organization were involved in overthrowing democratically elected leaders, providing intelligence and funding to fascist dictators, and supporting right-wing death squads, the Parisian central intelligentsia squadron was collecting data on how the theoretical world’s drift to the right directly benefitted US foreign policy. The left-leaning intellectuals of the immediate postwar era had been openly critical of US imperialism. Jean-Paul Sartre’s media clout as an outspoken Marxist critic, and his notable role—as the founder of Libération—in blowing the cover of the CIA station officer in Paris and dozens of undercover operatives, was closely monitored by the Agency and considered a very serious problem.
In contrast, the anti-Soviet and anti-Marxist atmosphere of the emerging neoliberal era diverted public scrutiny and provided excellent cover for the CIA’s dirty wars by making it “very difficult for anyone to mobilize significant opposition among intellectual elites to US policies in Central America, for example.” Greg Grandin, one of the leading historians of Latin America, perfectly summarized this situation in The Last Colonial Massacre: “Aside from making visibly disastrous and deadly interventions in Guatemala in 1954, the Dominican Republic in 1965, Chile in 1973, and El Salvador and Nicaragua during the 1980s, the United States has lent quiet and steady financial, material, and moral support for murderous counterinsurgent terror states. […] But the enormity of Stalin’s crimes ensures that such sordid histories, no matter how compelling, thorough, or damning, do not disturb the foundation of a worldview committed to the exemplary role of the United States in defending what we now know as democracy.”
It is in this context that the masked mandarins commend and support the relentless critique that a new generation of anti-Marxist thinkers like Bernard-Henri Levy, André Glucksmann and Jean-François Revel unleashed on “the last clique of Communist savants” (composed, according to the anonymous agents, of Sartre, Barthes, Lacan and Louis Althusser). Given the leftwing leanings of these anti-Marxists in their youth, they provide the perfect model for constructing deceptive narratives that amalgamate purported personal political growth with the progressive march of time, as if both individual life and history were simply a matter of “growing up” and recognizing that profound egalitarian social transformation is a thing of the—personal and historical—past..."
"In 2003, the U.S. Air University published “The Role of Rhetorical Theory in Military Intelligence Analysis: A Soldier’s Guide to Rhetorical Theory” written by Air Force Major Gary H. Mills. In this essay, Mills argues that the rhetorical theory of French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault “serves as a powerful military-intelligence force multiplier.” Foucault is described by Mills as a “reluctant, unintentional military tactician.” Likening Foucault’s rhetorical theory to a weapon used by a combat force might strike rhetorical and critical scholars..."
When I accuse folks of this, I do it mostly tongue in cheekly - but I point out that the evidence for the idea of IC involvement in academic leftism is about as great as I'm going to get for someone without a clearance and who doesn't want to spend the rest of my life in a cell - or wishing I was.
Is he a fraud because it takes him two books to finally get to a fucking point (in that case I totally agree) or is he a fraud because someone who didn't read him made him say stuff he didn't write or said and you now think that his deconstruction, inspired by Heidegger's 'Destruktion', is the same as critical theory deconstruction, which it is not?
If your only issue with him is his deconstruction, I implore you to read what it means, in his main subject, linguistics and literary criticism.
If it was his weird affection for psychoanalysis and other new-age shit, you're right but it isn't really present in his most known works, and I would not understand why put him in a special bucket.
Being into "weird new-age shit" taints you to the point that you should not be listened to. It hints that their whole epistemological world-view is biased by charlatanism. I don't care if a chiropractor is right about some stuff, they're too tainted to listen to... at all...
Look at what happened to people who were almost coherent. I actually love "Mass Psychology of Fascism" by Wilhelm Reich. Great explanation of the right-wing fear of sexual pleasure. Too bad he went loony as hell right after: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgone
Or Althussuar killing his wife suddenly and without warning? (his wife was a hardcore communist woman who apparently summarily executed "collaborators" shortly after WW2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9l%C3%A8ne_Rytmann
Or Jung's literally mystical ideas of collective unconscious?
This ideology literally makes you nuts. Hence why they want you to be "Schizoanalytical" and "Rhizomatic".
I don't like to defend what he wrote once again, it's mostly unactionnable and unreadable, so useless for anyone, but he never published new age shit, the only criticism you can do on him would be that he doesn't criticize it as much as he should. His complacency with Deleuze and Garrati (or whatever his name was) is problematic, but once again, he never reference it in any published work.
Also he was clearly in the non-Lacanian branch of poststructuralism, at least in what he published, so i think you have conflated his writing with a Zizeck or someone else. In his book on Freud, while he is quite incomprehensible as always, it's also clear he tries to deconstruct and refute Psychoanalysis through freud's writing (this is a point i really disagree with Derrida, he make everything about literature and his textual deconstruction). You can criticize the fact that he does not finish, but i don't see where this taints him.
My opinion is that he was such a poor and distracted writer that it makes it easy for people to misread him on purpose and make him say shit he never did.
Also his method of literary analysis is good, even if hard to pull on really good books (bu that's why it is a really good method), and i think it is hard to disagree on this.
> you get described as a “right wing conspiracy theorist”... I firmly believe that the success of these movements was engineered on purpose by your local spy master
I think I figured out why you're called a conspiracy theorist. Academic leftism is very stupid, though.
I wouldn't label you a right wing conspiracy theorist for using this term, that's much to grandiose. Things like "underinformed", "pseudo intellectual", or "silly billy" do come to mind though. Using this term shows that you completely missed the point on what either marxism or post modernism is. It's completely oxymoronic. Post modernism is about rejecting grand narratives, and marxism is _all_ grand narrative ("history is driven by class struggle").
> It's completely oxymoronic. Post modernism is about rejecting grand narratives, and marxism is _all_ grand narrative
For some straight talk and level-headed mythbusting on this and other common misconceptions, A Postmodernism FAQ[1] is a great listen.
1:
part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmYegIGhwtc
part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4hS5NSzPxw
part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsfKrNLIwhM
