Critical social theory: Alex Demirović: “Like a stone thrown into the window”

Mr. Demirović, how did your study come to be republished? How relevant is it today – over 20 Years later?

The new edition was a grateful initiative by the publisher Martin Birkner. He thought the book was worth taking the risk of reprinting. I also believe it can have a benefit. Much of what is published about the older critical theory still feeds the idea that its representatives have resigned or become conservative. Critical theory is also literally abused in order to be able to represent the theorem of cross-class, anonymous rule. What plays a minor role today, however, are questions about reason and truth in the historical process. Given the rampant social madness, my book is perhaps the most relevant.

You describe Theodor’s return in detail W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer from exile to Frankfurt, the reconstruction of the Institute for Social Research and their role in establishing the discipline of sociology in the Federal Republic and the emergence of the new left. But the study doesn’t end there.

I wanted to contribute to a materialist analysis of Marxist theory itself, about its significance in the historical process. Specifically, this is the Federal Republic after National Socialism. The study is also an attempt to understand more precisely how socially critical knowledge is formed and was able to take on the character of a scientific discipline, how it acquired a public function and in which practices and institutions it is transmitted.

Interview

Rosa Luxemburg Foundation

Alex Demirovic is a senior fellow of the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung and on the scientific advisory board of Attac. For the winter semester 2023/24 he will hold the visiting professorship for critical social theory at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main.

Do you mean that theory develops precisely in hand-to-hand combat, in arguments?

Something like that. It is about the nature of knowledge practices and about illuminating the struggles in which theory itself is formed and intervenes. Theory is like throwing a stone into the window, says Horkheimer, and is itself a form of social struggle for emancipation. This is also the case with critical theory, which, after returning from exile, is not just an application of something that was thought in the 1940s. Adorno and Horkheimer take up the developments of welfare state capitalism, the changes in class struggles, and the consequences of the war and the Shoah.

Why is this important to highlight?

The intellectual practices, the forms of thought, must be thought into the theory of society itself. They are not outside, but are of great importance for the social process. Intellectuals work out the social forms of thought in which social groups understand their connections and their practices. That is why there are cultural struggles over such discursive practices, over the apparatus in which thoughts are generated and distributed. Marx, Gramsci, Horkheimer and Adorno were aware of the fact that bourgeois society would like to prevent, marginalize, shake off and render ineffective critical knowledge.

This is what happened to all four Marxist theorists – Marx, Gramsci, Horkheimer and Adorno.

Yes, they were persecuted and had to go into political exile or were imprisoned. This also raises the question of the existence of those who represent and develop critical knowledge: Do they find the tools to do this, the opportunities for discussion, places of publication, the transmission of knowledge, and the addressees? None of this is self-evident.

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Let’s go back to the title of your study. What defines nonconformist intellectuals?

Nonconformism means: enduring the contradictions of capitalist society; not following the prevailing habits of society designed and enforced by those in power; appreciate difference, otherness; oppose racism and anti-Semitism, as well as the forces that destroy nature; undermine commodification in all forms; fundamentally question the prevailing social division of labor and the concepts in which our capitalist societies think – including the function of intellectuals in the social division of labor itself. It was never easy. Today, the added difficulty is that neoliberal capitalism also makes a business out of diversity, deviation and flexibility and the right is non-conformist. I think the model of a transformative intellectual could help to develop authoritative concepts and accurate empirical knowledge for reasonable conditions against lies and resentment and in the face of new catastrophes.

Let’s stay with nonconformism for a moment: in the afterword you say that the term is now too vague and too ambiguous.

Like all of our concepts, that of nonconformism also has a time core. It’s still usable, but we need to think through its historical movement. Under welfare state conditions, there was a certain expectation of normality: everyone should live in a relatively standardized way. Since the 80s, life practices have become more differentiated, neoliberalism promotes this in order to reproduce consumerism on a higher scale. The new right has attached itself to the term nonconformism as well as other terms. They claim to be non-conformist and democratic; they claim to be persecuted for their supposedly critical opinions. Authoritarian orientations are thereby modernized. The right cannot tolerate ambivalence and exploits the objective contradictions by denouncing them as the hypocrisy of democratic politics or the left. Their resentments make them quite courageous, but then they turn stubbornly and violently against reason and democratic majorities – which is not the same thing. But these are reactionary movements that are concerned with a ethnic socialization in which violence reigns.

What are the central features of this regressive nonconformism?

Defense of authoritarian masculinity, misogyny and gay hatred, ignorance of the climate crisis, racism, loss of empathy, historical revisionism. Lies and violence are important features of this right-wing policy: on the one hand, the great population exchange is invoked, but on the other hand, the right itself is planning the deportation of millions of people and is once again ready for the severity of the necessary cruelty. One can imagine that this will result in a new policy of extermination. Adorno is right: What happened once can happen again if the conditions under which the disaster is hatched are not changed. Adorno is even further right when he characterizes this kind of contradictory dynamic as rebellious conformism. It is not non-conformism in the true sense.

Yet you say that “transformation intellectuals” are needed today?

Yes, I also agree with Herbert Marcuse. We have and need sensitivity to freedom in language, in gender relations, in our social natural conditions. But such a transformative practice is not a program of civic interiority. It’s about a precise understanding of the need for social change so that we are not overwhelmed but rather gain freedom to shape things. This means changing relationships between the sexes, between older and younger people, a restructuring of the production and service apparatus without exploitation, a different way of life that enables the restructuring of nutrition, mobility, work, housing, learning and knowledge relationships and makes it further conceivable. Because we already know so much based on the struggles of the past decades, a lot has been blocked by unreasonable, reactionary forces for a long time. Imagination and knowledge must come to power so that humanity can finally freely shape its relationships with itself and with nature.