Ricardo Samaniego De La Fuente

In this chapter, we introduce the reception of the ideas of the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School in Uruguayan academia. We explore two possible routes for this reception: (i) the analysis of culture and aesthetic experience which follows the first generation of the Frankfurt School; and (ii) the attempts to normatively ground social and political critique through critical theories of social justice and the analysis of social pathologies, which follow Habermas and the newer generations of the Frankfurt School. To explore the first route, we present the works of Ángel Rama, Gustavo Remedi, and Abril Trigo and show in which senses they are inheritors of (chiefly) Adorno’s and Benjamin’s concerns. Crucially, we argue, even when these authors distance themselves from the Frankfurtian claims regarding the ‘culture industry’, they still share the Frankfurt School’s critical and emancipatory thrust. Regarding the second route, we present the works of Gustavo Pereira and Ana Fascoli, who develop a virtuous collaboration between critical theory and post-Rawlsian theories of justice. We show how, in Pereira, a critical theory of justice is informed and assessed in light of its sensitivity to detect, and to push against, social pathologies. As we argue, both routes share a context-sensitive concern for emancipation.

For Theodor W. Adorno, the relevance of art lies in its capacity to penetrate, through its formal construction, the semblance of a false reality, thereby participating in the self-transcendence of reason. This article argues that, despite the timeliness of this insight, Adorno’s negativism, his conceptualization of reconciliation, and his formalist understanding of art have made it difficult to see how this account can explain art’s relation to social change. Alexander Kluge’s work, it is then argued, can help transcend such limitations in Adorno’s aesthetics. Art, Kluge agrees with Adorno, should work toward social change through the construction of a critical consciousness. Yet, this is not to happen through their correct interpretation, as Adorno thought. Art’s emancipatory potential, instead, lies in the power to engage the spectators’ capacities, enabling them to have their own experiences. With this, Kluge contends, art participates in the reconfiguration of rationality and of the public sphere.

This thesis aims to reconstruct the work of Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, who productively integrate some political and aesthetic elements of the critical social theories of Adorno and Habermas to theorize the conditions for a radical social change. I depart from Adorno’s contention that a true historical change requires the construction of what he calls a ‘global’ subject—i.e. a collective of critical and autonomous individuals. Adorno, assuming that capitalism has virtually eliminated autonomous subjects, turns to art as a potential site from which this subject could (eventually) emanate. Given his limited understanding of art’s emancipatory potential—dependent on interpretation—however, he can, at best, account for individual resistance, but not for the construction of a ‘global subject’. I then reconstruct Negt and Kluge’s work as an attempt to move beyond Adorno’s limitations. Capitalism, they contend, cannot be as pervasive as Adorno theorises, but rather always produces the possibility to resist—a subjective counter-reaction which through aesthetic means (including popular art) can be transformed into resistance and critical thinking. According to Negt and Kluge, the reappropriation of aesthetic forms, further, can enable the collective articulation of common interests and needs, and the resignification of imposed identities. This motivates the formation of counter- public spheres, i.e., oppositional social movements. Counter-public spheres, nevertheless, are not sufficient to build a ‘global’ subject. This also requires the autonomous reconstitution of the public sphere as a whole, i.e. in the construction of what Negt and Kluge call a ‘proletarian’ public sphere. This alternative, I argue, must be understood as both as a consciousness-building process that mediates between particular interests and the totality of the social structures, and as the result of that process—a historically new social horizon of experience where individuals can consciously and collectively produce their contexts of living.