Rockhill dives into the history and philosophy of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to explain why the two towering figures of the Frankfurt School ultimately played the role of radical recuperators.
Something about this rubs me the wrong way. I don't know enough about their references to say anything, but the strain of "The Frankfurt School and French Philosophers are CIA plants and are a pure diversion" is kinda short sighted. Yeah they're western navel gazing academics and carry that baggage, but they do as a cannon provide useful lenses through which to analyze neoliberal capitalism. Adorno's schtick as I recall was being against positivism - i.e. hyper-rationalist thinking that ditches any kind of broader sense of the metaphysical social subject. Like hyperfocusing on the "materialism" in "dialectical materialism", missing the forrest for the trees in reading Marx.
Same here. I wonder what else can be found on a site that starts out by fedjacketing and accusing Adorno of "cultural Marxism", a common fascist dogwhistle.
Oh look, the featured article about Roe vs Wade casually slips in TERF shit like this:
Unable to define the word “woman,” the liberals have been working on a new lexicon which strips girls and women of their dignity and their personhood. Their identities are now reduced to their body parts and biological functions. They are now “bleeders” or “birthing bodies.” The new language qualifying girls and women as body parts as opposed to whole human beings in their own right, has created the perfect opportunity for conservatives to seize Roe v Wade; if she’s a body part, she’s not a person and her uterus can be turned into state legislated chattel.
I guess trans men, who can also become pregnant and may need abortions, either don't count or have to be subsumed under the TERFy "womynandgurls" umbrella. The cherry on top is that the author also publishes in the settler-colonialist, pro-Trump Jerusalem Post.
And then there's an article from a self-described "lockdown critic " about how you can be against lockdowns and still take in Ukrainian refugees, where she says about the Canadian chud truckers that "the convoy represented something deeper to me—a revolt against two years of government overreach—and I supported the right to express that".
So, i've now looked at three articles and every one of them uses an academic veneer to slip common rightwing discourse into seemingly leftist positions.
Extremely sus source.
Did you just skim the first paragraph and thought you understood the article? How is it 'fedjacketing' to point out Adorno's and Horkheimer's well-documented collaboration with CIA fronts? And how does pointing out different articles written by different authors prove anything? The Philosophical Salon is published by the LA Review of Books and publishes from different viewpoints. There's no secret intention behind every article posted from that source.
Did you just skim the first paragraph and thought you understood the article?
Nah, i unfortunately read more of it.
The author doesn't say that they are 'a pure diversion'. He wants to situate their life and work into what he calls the Global Theory Industry.
...For such a dialectical analysis, it is important to acknowledge that Adorno and Horkheimer did indeed mobilize their subjective agency in formulating significant critiques of capitalism, consumer society and the culture industry. Far from denying this, I would merely like to situate these criticisms within the objective social world, which entails asking a very simple and practical question that is rarely raised within academic circles: if capitalism is recognized as having negative effects, what is to be done about it? The deeper one mines down into their life and work, sifting through the deliberate obscurantism of their discourse, the more obvious their response becomes, and the easier it is to understand the primary social function of their shared intellectual project. For as critical as they sometimes are of capitalism, they regularly affirm that there is no alternative, and nothing can or should ultimately be done about it. What is more, as we shall see, their criticisms of capitalism pale in comparison to their uncompromising condemnation of socialism. Their brand of critical theory ultimately leads to an acceptance of the capitalist order since socialism is judged to be far worse. Not unlike most of the other fashionable discourses in the capitalist academy, they proffer a critical theory that we might call ABS Theory: Anything But Socialism.
