Review Essay

Beyond the Message in a Bottle:

The Other Critical Theory
Max Pensky
Der nonkonformistische Intellektuelle. Die Entwicklung der Kritischen Theorie
zur Frankfurter Schule. By Alex Demirovic. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1999.)

Intellectuals are educated people whose performances of critical social reflection

manage both to pierce to the heart of social domination while simultaneously
celebrating it as the special domain where their expertise is translated into privilege. Or so was Adornos sour conclusion in Minima Moralia, where he noticed
the curious capacity of the intellectual to absorb both the last remnant of rebellious bourgeois individualism, in the ruthless resistance to the established social
order, as well as the perverted collectivist impulse that clings to community
because it is only there that the intellectuals rebellious individualism can be paid,
in the currency of resentment the insight being that resentful recognition is
preferable to no recognition at all. It is as old a component of bourgeois ideology, Adorno wrote, that each individual, in his particular interest, considers
himself better than all the others, as that he values the others, as the community
of all customers, more highly than himself.
Since the demise of the old bourgeois class, both ideas live on in the spirit of the
intellectuals, who are at once the last enemies of the bourgeois and the last bourgeois. In still permitting themselves to think at all in face of the naked reproduction
of existence, they act as a privileged group; in letting matters rest there, they declare
the nullity of their privilege.1

This lapidary formulation of a dialectical theory of the left-wing intellectual in

the context of developed capitalism, which Alex Demirovic quotes in his massive
study of Horkheimer and Adornos post-exile role as the leading intellectuals of
the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1950s and 1960s, in itself could serve as
the motto for the project as a whole, encompassing both its achievements and its
weaknesses. The figure of the intellectual attracts because of its unresolved and
productive tension between the social inside and outside. For the same reason, it
has never been quite reputable; regarding the intellectual, untrustworthiness goes
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with the dialectical territory, one could say. To be described as an intellectual is

never either a straightforward compliment or an outright insult, and it is this structural ambiguity as much as anything else that explains why, after a century and
more of effort, theories of the intellectual are still excellent intellectual business.
Horkheimer and Adorno, for their part, often give the impression of having
consciously arranged things so that posthumous interpretations of their entwined
theoretical and political works would be forced to be dialectical, and the deceptively simple claim that intellectuals are both the last bourgeois citizens and the
last enemies of the citizen in complex capitalist societies is an elegant example of
this practice of gentle booby-trapping. Formulations like this one (and there are
countless like it) can be read as justifying both the prevalent view of Critical
Theory after the war and its negation. The prevalent view call it the messagein-a-bottle interpretation sees Horkheimer and Adornos post-exile intellectual
life as a melancholy withdrawal into theoretical esotericism and political hopelessness. On this view, the left-wing intellectual is the last bourgeois or
perhaps the last citizen would translate der letzte Brger better insofar as he
has spirited off the last traces of a form of enlightened reason and an emphatic
conception of socially mediated truth into the safehouse of philosophy in order to
protect it from a totally administered society. Hypercomplex dialectical philosophy, like hyper-modernist art, carves out a repository for the last of those utopian
energies that once struggled for substantiality in the institutions and practices of
democratic life, or the early dreams of a technologically pacified relation with
nature and a release from natural compulsion. But the triumph of instrumental
rationality presents a total context of delusion that has grown impervious to
criticism.
According to the dominant strain of the message-in-a-bottle interpretation,
Horkheimer and Adornos postwar productivity is therefore to be seen under the
sign of capitulation, and it is a surrender for which they both paid a terribly high
price. Theoretically, everything from Dialectic of Enlightenment onward was
plagued by the aporias that arose from the attempt to articulate an alternative
conception of emphatic reason while simultaneously rejecting the predominant
mode of conceptual thought as complicit in structures of domination. This unsolvable problem contributed heavily to a theory in which enlightenment reason was
increasingly inseparable from its opposite, just as the critique of the progressivism of instrumental reason often yielded a negative philosophy of history that
increasingly invoked aesthetic and religious rather than theoretical language.
Politically, pessimism and capitulation led ironically to collaboration with the
same totally administered society that Horkheimer and Adorno could no longer
criticize. By 1968, First Generation Critical Theory in Germany had become an
essentially conservative force, as Horkheimer and Adornos reactions to the rebellious students confirm all too well.
This message-in-a-bottle interpretation of First Generation Critical Theory has
had a checkered and highly politically complex career in the Federal Republic of
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Germany, where it can be appropriated with a number of different inflections and

for a wide array of different purposes, highlighting just how ambiguous and how
formative Horkheimer and Adornos influence on the formation of postwar
German political culture has been. In the United States, by contrast, a straightforward version of the message-in-a-bottle view reigns virtually unchallenged, at
least amongst philosophers and social theorists. (For a wide variety of reasons
that cant be entered into here, Adornos posthumous career in Cultural Studies,
German, and English departments in the United States and the UK, free of a
comparable political reception history and aligned with a distinct set of theoretical orientations, has been far more successful.)
Jrgen Habermas has by far been the most vocal and influential exponent of
the theoretical side of the message-in-a-bottle view, ranging Horkheimer and
Adorno in a continuum with Nietzsche, Bataille, and the French dsirants as the
practitioners of totalizing critique and hence of modern anti-enlightenment. The
English translation of Rolf Wiggershauss The Frankfurt School complemented
Habermass reading with a comprehensive documentation of Horkheimer and
Adornos gradual drift into influential conservative mouthpieces of Adenauer-era
restoration.
It is in situations of evident interpretive closure like this that a dialectical
booby-trap or two becomes welcome. The claim that intellectuals are both the last
citizens and the last enemies of the citizens at once can accommodate an entirely
contradictory reading to the message-in-a-bottle view. For intellectuals supposedly pessimistically resigned to an uncriticizable and unimprovable public,
Horkheimer and Adornos decision to return to still-smoking postwar Germany,
and to engage in its political life on so many different levels institutionally,
culturally, intellectually, politically, aesthetically, even spiritually seems
downright inscrutable. If Adorno was so deeply cynical about the political
valence of new media technologies and the rational production of consent, why
did he spend so many hundreds of hours lecturing the dismal public on the radio?
Why, for that matter, did the Hessische Rundfunk let him do it, and why did an
audience bother to tune in? (Imagine comparable programming on contemporary
American television and you get the idea.) What beyond the spirit of accommodation would have motivated Horkheimer to dedicate years of energy to the
administration of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitt? Why bother churning
out the mountain of op-ed pieces, articles, public addresses, protocols, proposals,
conferences, debates, reviews, commentaries? Why the passionate involvement in
the institutional and political controversies surrounding the reconstruction of
academic sociology in Germany? Why run an institute for social research? Why,
when it comes to it, continue to generate social and philosophical theory at all,
once one has (supposedly) said all there is to say on the matter in Dialectic of
Enlightenment? Why did Horkheimer and Adorno invest themselves so intensively in both theory-production aimed at as wide a readership as possible
(through the new format of the affordable mass-market Suhrkamp paperback,
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whose development they also took an active interest in) and in academic administration and intellectual interventions everywhere (it seems) they got the chance?
These are not the actions of hermetically self-exiled and defeated men.
Demirovic s study is the first full-scale project dedicated to challenging the
message-in-a-bottle interpretation of the postwar careers of Horkheimer and
Adorno with the weight of the evidence. At 983 densely printed pages, the
evidence is awfully weighty, and not just metaphorically. Demirovic , a long-time
colleague at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, evidently made very
full use of his access to the Horkheimer and Adorno archives. There is a sharp
irony in this as well, which Demirovic himself seems either unaware of or, more
likely, disinclined to mention: the volume of documentation necessary to refute
the standard view of Horkheimer and Adornos intellectual life in postwar
Germany places such extraordinary demands on the reader that it is difficult to
imagine that the book taken itself as an intellectual-political intervention into
the public sphere will have the reception and effect that it deserves and that
Demirovic surely intends. (All the more so if we imagine the author and
Suhrkamp attempting to convince a British or American publisher to bring out the
book in an English translation for students of Critical Theory who depend on
translations, it hardly seems likely that Demirovic s untranslated work will mount
a significant challenge to Wiggershaus.)
Demirovic begins his book with a brief (by his standards) theoretical introduction that develops a working model for interpreting the functions and definitions of the modern intellectual (about which more later), and closes with a
modest conclusion that argues for his alternative to the message-in-a-bottle model
for First Generation Critical Theory. The rest of the book is devoted to an extraordinarily detailed reconstruction of the various aspects of Horkheimer and
Adornos work as public intellectuals in the Federal Republic of the 1950s and
1960s. Chapters on Horkheimer and Adornos return from American exile and
into positions of prominence in Frankfurt document the overall position of the
German university system in the years immediately following the war, and
connect this up with the competing conceptions of pedagogy afoot in the early
FRG. In fact, a range of contributions to the philosophy of education, and specifically the various debates on the relation between pedagogy and democracy, is a
highly significant and usually overlooked achievement of the supposed intellectual sterility of the Adenauer years.2 Adorno and Horkheimer stood at the very
center of this debate, and what we in the United States know of it is usually
concentrated around Adornos essays on the working-through of the collective
past and Education after Auschwitz. But these are only the most striking and, if
I can put it this way, the most easily decontextualizable contributions, and the tip
of the iceberg. It took a tremendous amount of less spectacular work in what
Demirovic accurately identifies as the quasi-public sphere of public administration curricular proposals, correspondence and negotiations with educators
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and politicians, budget drafts, and what we would now call mission statements
for Horkheimer and Adorno to succeed in bringing off an achievement whose
significance only became apparent years or even decades later. They used their
positions of influence (Horkheimer as Rektor of the Johann Wolfgang GoetheUniversitt) to shift the terms of the debate about curricular reform and pedagogy
in the Federal Republics systems of higher education; they succeeded in connecting up the notion of curriculum and pedagogy directly with the normative and
political tasks of the institutional anchoring of a democratic politics. No less
significantly, in their own way they challenged the hidebound inherited view of
the German university professor as a conservative knight-errant of deutsche
Geist, and succeeded (though only in part) in modernizing the professional expectations and to an extent even the self-understanding of the German professorate.
Perhaps most influentially of all, Horkheimer and Adornos quite explicit challenge to preconceived notions of the role of the academic in German political life
effectively undermined the traditional understanding of the antinomy between the
(politically committed) intellectual and the (politically aloof) academic mandarin.
For Demirovic , this successful pedagogical politics shows how inadequate the
message-in-a-bottle view has been, and how strongly it has hidden the concrete
political achievements of First Generation Critical Theory from retrospective
view. Rather than hermetically protecting an emphatic conception of truth from a
society that is untrue as a whole, Horkheimer and Adorno were in fact conducting what Foucault referred to as a politics of truth: operating in, below, and
between public spheres, they effectively challenged the terms and procedures
through which socially valid truths were constructed, where the rules of truthproduction were legitimated, where rhetorics or vocabularies were approved and
subjects authorized. And insofar as they did successfully prosecute a politics of
truth, Demirovic argues, Horkheimer and Adorno also succeeded in finding more
than a hermetic theoretical home for a substantial version of enlightenment
reason. The nonconformist intellectual embodied a form of theory-as-praxis:
the politics of truth is a response to the diagnosis of the crisis of reason which
proposes to re-install reason into the social structure via reasons institutionalization in quasi-public spheres, rather than to shield it hermetically from society.
Such a politics of truth surely did not regard the political public sphere of postwar Germany as especially open, or democratic, or free from overwhelming structural pressures toward instrumental closure or even delusion. But and this is
the pinion-point that separates Demirovic s reconstruction from the message-ina-bottle view neither do their practices and their achievements support the
notion that for them there was no political public sphere at all.
As intellectual-academics, however, it was the project of the construction of
the new discipline of German academic sociology that turns out to be Horkheimer
and Adornos most lasting influence, and appropriately the longest and most
exhaustively documented dimension of Demirovic s study. My sense is that we
tend to decontextualize the Positivismusstreit of the 1950s as a theoretical
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debate over the proper methodological self-understanding of sociology, and then

in a fairly straightforward manner identify the different and relatively familiar
fronts in the debate social theory versus empirically-based social research, interpretive versus explanatory models, macro-sociological versus micro-sociological
research programs, with critical social theory as a sort of trickster figure flitting
back and forth in the no-mans-land between the fronts. Likewise, it is tempting
to connect up the various fronts with political orientations in a comparably
straightforward way, as if every proponent of empirical sociology were also
pursuing a politically conservative agenda of uncritically reproducing the real.
Of course the terrain of the Positivismusstreit was far more uneven than this,
and, as Demirovic shows, virtually every possible permutation of methodological
conviction and political persuasion was represented in one way or another.
Equally important was the institutional context of the debate: Horkheimer and
Adorno were struggling for the institutional parameters for how sociology was to
be practiced in German universities. Beyond (or perhaps below) the level of disciplinary self-understanding was a debate familiar to any academic who has done
more than daydream about founding a new academic program or area: university
administrations and entrenched faculty have to be mollified and persuaded.
Curricular requirements have to meet with meaningful consensus. Funds have to
be raised, grant proposals written. State and federal education departments have
to be satisfied according to their own bureaucratic requirements. Battles over new
faculty hires have to be engaged, conferences organized, the editorial staffs of
journals contested, students placed. And so on. Demirovic uncovers the documentary history of Horkheimer and Adornos role in the battle over the emergence
of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fr Soziologie, a battle in which familiar academic
politics was in the end just as significant as the broader issues of the role of sociological understanding for a nascent democratic state.
In the United States, we know that the fronts between social theory and empirical sociology remain as sharply drawn as ever within most university sociology
departments. A third term beyond this institutional antinomy, which Horkheimer
and Adorno had already proposed in the 1930s with the very idea of a critical
theory, remains just as elusive as a real institutional option for sociologists now
as then. In Germany, where systems theory exercises a kind of benign dictatorship in social theory that has no precise counterpart in the United States, it is
perhaps easier in hindsight to see the stakes that remain in thinking beyond the
theory-research divide in sociology departments. It may appear that Horkheimer
and Adorno lost the battle over the soul of academic sociology. But without their
interventions in the 1950s and 1960s, it is difficult to imagine that even a sociological perspective as normatively chilly as systems theory could have survived
the hegemony of empirical sociology, with its numerous notable advantages in the
political public sphere as it seeks approval of its research programs, funding, and
potential students. Horkheimer and Adorno, so Demirovic argues, succeeded in a
subtler manner: they changed the very model of the modern practicing academic
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sociologist, dissolving the taboo on political engagement, on the public reflection

on the relation between sociological and political activity. In other words, they
made it permissible for sociologists to be intellectuals. This may not have met
their own ambitions, which Demirovic describes as the project of molding the
very discipline of sociology in such a critical dimension that the very process of
university training in sociology could count in itself as a form of political resistance, producing critically aware and politically mobilized, nonconformist theorists. But it may be enough that German sociology is not itself a contradictory
term, and that sociological faculties have provided an institutional toehold for
intellectuals who would have found other departments most notably philosophy
distinctly unwelcoming. On this reading, Germany has Horhkeimer and Adorno
to thank for the fact that sociology remains a discipline in which theoretical orientation can still be taken as a mode of political engagement, and vice versa. In this
sense, Demirovic is right in insisting, First Generation Critical Theory succeeded
in promulgating a version of theory-as-praxis that was far more influential, if far
less noticeable, than their postwar theories considered by themselves.
In one of the overlooked (and untranslated) essays in his Philosophische-politischen Profile, Habermas describes Adorno as a philosophierende Intellektueller.3 These terms seem to be non-reversible; Adorno was at heart an
intellectual whose engagement in the struggle over reason in society was able to
take on philosophical form, among many others. For Habermas, what distinguishes Adorno from the standard typus academicus, for all Adornos work in
shattering that old ideal type forever, remained Adornos idiosyncratic and
entirely personalized attachment to a set of cognitive and affective, individual and
cultural cues and ambitions for which the only word remains Geist. As the last of
the Geistmenschen, Adorno (and to a lesser extent Horkheimer as well) took the
intellectuals oppositional project the destruction of the accursed constellation
in which Geist stood in undialectical opposition to intellectual engagement as
itself a continuation of that same deutsche Geist: No other word than Geist,
writes Habermas with palpable affection and frustration, characterizes Adorno
better, and no other would distinguish him more sharply from his academic
colleagues. A writer among the functionaries.4 But insofar as this distinction
between the figure of the author and that of the Beamter or bureaucratic manager
hits home, it also remains itself undialectical and therefore only a half-truth.
Demirovic s book succeeds in laying out the evidence that should prevent us from
seeing this either/or as definitive for Adornos work. Ein Schriftsteller unter
Beamten: on Demirovic s reading, Habermass very ambiguous compliment,
rooted as it is in a specific conception of the way Adornos Geist depended on a
certain childish helplessness in the face of the administered world, requires a
good deal of revision in light of Adornos own not inconsiderable talents as an
administrator. Adorno did not, of course, return to Germany in 1949 in order to
avoid the Beamter; for that he would have been very well advised to stay put. If
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we move beyond platitudes and stereotypes, the politically active intellectual

virtually always bears some significant structural relationship with the organizations and practices of bureaucratic control. Gramsci had already pointed out the
need to resist the ideal type of the intellectual as pure resistance. Adorno was,
among many other things, a bureaucrat and an academic middle manager, a writer
of reports and a formidable academic politician. That he and Horkheimer mobilized their roles both as philosophers and as managers to install a mode of social
criticism within West Germanys previously most uncritical of institutions, the
university, is in the end a historical argument that makes better sense than the
standard view. Demirovic s argument that quasi-public activities, normally flying
below the radar of historical attention, were in fact crucial in establishing the
legacy of intellectual non-conformism in West Germany may slightly over-extend
its argumentative credit when it insists that even Dialectic of Enlightenment ought
to be read as theory-as-praxis, and as a consistent extension of radical enlightenment. On that score, Habermas is almost certainly right. But the argument nevertheless makes the message-in-a-bottle interpretation of Horkheimer and Adornos
lasting legacy for the political culture of postwar Germany very shaky.
Why, then, has the message-in-a-bottle interpretation managed to maintain
such dominance in the literature, when the documentation of Horkheimer and
Adornos contributions to the political scene of postwar Germany was so abundant? I think the answer lies in the intricacies of that political culture itself, which
as we know has been capable of appropriating and interpreting the legacy of First
Generation critical theorists in such extraordinary range. For the inheritors of the
tradition of Critical Theory, the view that Horkheimer and Adorno drifted into a
political quiescence that paralleled their theoretical aporias is probably preferable
both to the attacks of the 68ers that Critical Theory in the end made common
cause with the fascists over issues such as political radicalism or rearmament, and
to the neo-conservative charge (occasionally espoused by the very same 68ers,
mutatis mutandis) that Horkheimer and Adorno gave substantial aid and comfort
to home-grown German terror in the deutsche Herbst.
But this reference also implies the very real fact that the appropriation of First
Generation Critical Theory continues to be determined as much by the kaleidoscope of shifting interests, alliances, and intellectual fronts in the current Federal
Republic as by the rediscovered texts or political achievements of the critical
theorists themselves. Demirovic s book is just one of several massive studies
of Horkheimer and Adorno that attempt a redescription of Critical Theorys role
in the public culture of the Federal Republic from the Adenauer era to 1968.
Together with an enormous anthology of essays examining the impact of the
Frankfurt School for the early Federal Republic by Albrecht et al. and
Kraushaars multivolume study of the critical theorists and the student youth
movement,5 Demirovic s historical revision takes part in a larger project of
consolidating a claim to a specifically German leftist intellectual tradition that
would be secured against the dismissive claims from all sides the neoliberal as
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well as the old irrationalist-nationalist streams of right-wing political thought, the

third-way Clintonian as well as the irrationalist-nationalist left. This means that
Demirovic s work, like any of its kind, will ultimately be valued not only according to its (considerable) scholarly merits, but also by the degree to which it
succeeds in generating the effects within the political public sphere that the author
intends.
The image of the non-conformist intellectual is, at the end of the day, itself an
ideal type with a strongly normative component, as any brief survey across the
vast landscape of literature on intellectuals quickly shows. (To see what this
normative component is, simply imagine how many of your colleagues would be
pleased to be referred to as conformist intellectuals. With the very notable exception of Rortys overarching project of easing our approval of platitudes, the
numbers would be low indeed.) Guided primarily by Foucault and Gramsci,
Demirovic s very notion of the intellectual is balanced on the razors edge of
descriptive and normative claims.
And therein lie both the strengths and the weak points of Demirovic s recasting of our image of the critical theorists as non-conformist intellectuals. Unless
one attempts simply to valorize the category of political-intellectual resistance
as such, as Foucault seems to have tried on occasion, then political nonconformism preserves its political normativity only indirectly, in relation to the
functions and effects of the predominant social norms and institutions from within
which the intellectual operates. Demirovic points out that Horkheimer and
Adornos self-conscious attempt to introduce the possibility of an intellectual
non-conformism within prevailing academic institutions understood that the
subterranean ideals of emancipatory reason could only be acted upon, and could
only win an institutional life, if intellectuals learned to inhabit the tense space
between normal bureaucratic functioning and non-conformity. The same holds
true for the social institutions and practices of democratic life under the rule of
law as a whole. A descriptive account of the intellectuals function, which would
identify the various ways that educated non-specialists articulate interests, advocate moral points of view, or criticize non-transparent uses of political power
within ongoing political controversies among citizens, would have to mix conformity with non-conformity; adherence to norms of political speech with violations
of those norms; accommodation with prevailing institutions and rejections of
those institutions; embraces and rejections of conceptions of democratic inclusion, citizenship, the flows of various capitals; and so on. In this sense, talk of
non-conformism as a complete or self-explanatory normative category is simply
another way of decreeing where a dialectical analysis of the intellectuals function within a complex society should stop.
But this also means that non-conformity cannot be construed as an ideal type.
Just this view, however, lurks very close to the surface throughout Demirovic s
study and for Adorno as well. It was Adorno, after all, who wrote in Minima
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Moralia the book that established his reputation as a great postwar German
Schriftsteller that [f]or the intellectual, inviolable isolation is now the only way
of showing some measure of solidarity. All collaboration, all the human worth of
social mixing, and participation, merely masks a tacit acceptance of inhumanity.6 All methodological exaggerations notwithstanding, views like this imply
strongly that the old message-in-a-bottle interpretation, while certainly one-sided,
is very far from refuted. That interpretation connected the aporetic outcome of
critical social theory with the quietist outcome of political and institutional
engagement in the moment of totalizing critique of a totally irrational social order.
Demirovic will argue that (apparently) aporetic theory can be understood properly only in its context with ongoing institutional engagement, and for this reason
that in the case of Adorno and Horkheimer one must always speak instead of
theory-as-praxis. No doubt. All the same, it is also just possible that the First
Generation of critical theorists did not coherently resolve the relation between
their theoretical works and their roles as academic politicians, sociological
reformers, and cultural mavens because to do so would have obliged them to
recast convictions concerning the viability of progressive democratic reform,
hence of the general characteristics of the postwar social order, to which they
were so committed that alternative conceptions simply were not realistically
available to them.
However we interpret this problem, Demirovic s book (or more likely,
condensed versions of the interpretive claims that the book makes) will change
the debate over the legacy of Critical Theory for the better. And this is all the more
welcome as we take stock of the fact that this debate is also one over the present
and future character and self-understanding of German political culture. Even if
reports of the death of the message-in-a-bottle view are premature, Demirovic has
made sure that we can no longer take such a view for granted.
NOTES
1. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, tr. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 27.
2. One of the few English language studies of the contours of the postwar Institutes contributions to democratic pedagogy is found in Peter Hohendahl, Education after the Holocaust, in Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).
3. Jrgen Habermas, Theodor W. Adorno. Ein philosophierender Intellektueller, in
Philosophisch-politische Profile, 3e (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), 16066.
4. Ibid., 161.
5. Clemens Albrecht, Gnter C. Behrmann, Michael Bock, Harald Homann, and Friedrich H.
Tenbruck, eds., Die intellektuelle Grndung der Bundesrepublik. Eine Wirkungsgeschichte der
Frankfurter Schule (Frankfurt & New York: Campus, 1999); Wolfgang Kraushaar, ed., Frankfurter
Schule und Studentenbewegung, 3 vols. (Hamburg: Rogner & Bernhard, 1998).
6. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 26.

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