It is likely that most readers will come to this book searching not for an introduction to Critical Theory (though it serves this purpose well) but for an introduction to the thought of its author, the famously difficult English philosopher Gillian Rose. Rose helped put Frankfurt School ideas on the curriculum of British universities, published books of remarkable subtlety and insight and inspired a generation of students (including myself) before, in 1995, her life was tragically cut short by cancer at the age of 48.
Oxford educated, Rose fitted only uncomfortably into what Theodor W. Adorno, a lasting influence on her work, called the still ‘medieval’ order there.[1] Oxford in the 1960s and ’70s was congenial neither to a fiercely intellectual woman, nor to anyone interested in Marxism, and Rose would later assert that it taught students little more than how to be ‘clever’ and ‘ignorant’, ‘supercilious’ and ‘destructive’.[2] A more fitting environment would come with her postgraduate studies at Columbia University and the Freie Universität Berlin, where the fires of 1968 still smouldered.
Rose gravitated to German philosophy, and to Adorno’s thought in particular, about which little had been written in English, and her doctoral dissertation on the topic would become her first book, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno. Readers hoping to be ‘introduced’ to Adorno, however, were ‘quickly dismayed’,[3] as Howard Caygill notes: the book made few concessions to its readers. The subjects of Rose’s subsequent works would be no less formidable, whether Hegel and neo-Kantianism (Hegel contra Sociology), post-structuralism (Dialectic of Nihilism), or Kierkegaard and theology (The Broken Middle, Judaism and Modernity). Particularly her book on Hegel was ground-breaking, and helped forge her reputation as a fiercely erudite and iconoclastic social philosopher who deftly and mercilessly wielded the weaponry of critical theory against the academic vogues of the day. The trio of books which followed, published in the knowledge of her cancer diagnosis (Mourning Becomes the Law, Love’s Work and the posthumous Paradiso) would form a philosophical-autobiographical coda to an uncompromisingly intellectual life. As Gillian’s sister Jacqueline Rose notes, ‘difficulty was one of her favourite words.’[4] Yet the autobiography, Love’s Work, would bring a degree of popular fame rare for a philosopher. This belated interest in her work would launch a field of inquiry and interpretation which has shown no signs of diminishing.
Peter Osborne has noted how ‘reductively personalized’ writing about Rose can be, perhaps an inevitable effect of the success of Love’s Work.[5] This is surely true, and it will no doubt be a reason why many come to the present book, searching for the origins of Rose’s intellectual life-path. Osborne is also right about how much the commentary on Rose has been drawn to the more theological interests of her later work, neglecting her earlier, more openly left-wing thought. For him the present book is a welcome counterweight, ‘a reminder of where it all began, when modernists could still be Marxists and theologians belonged to a previous age.’[6]
Who then is the ‘young’ Rose in these early lectures? A reader can find their way by thinking of the present work as a more exoteric version of her Adorno book. It can also be seen as a companion to a collection from Verso which had appeared two years before, Aesthetics and Politics,[7] in which several debates between Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács were made available to English readers for the first time. The relationship between aesthetics and politics is certainly at the core of these lectures, but there are also more general and thought-provoking reflections on Critical Theory (or ‘Critical Marxism’ as she sometimes calls it) that will be of wider interest.
In the first of the lectures, for instance, Rose asserts that a ‘shorthand’ definition of Critical Theory, particularly in the hands of its early practitioners Lukács and Karl Korsch, is the belief that Marxism needed ‘to resolutely subject itself to criticism in order to remain active and revolutionary, and not passive and orthodox’.[8] Marxism had become ‘deterministic, positivist, and descriptive – in short, established and orthodox’ and it was necessary ‘to recover Marx’s intention by restoring the emphasis on praxis, and on human subjectivity, so that Marxism could again become a theory of revolution’.[9] This was particularly urgent given that ‘new forms of domination’ had arisen which ‘were not only economic and political, but also cultural’.[10] Culture – and here an ambiguity in Rose’s work becomes clear – has a double meaning, not just its standard sense (where the opposition between popular culture and the avant-garde operates, for example) but also its meaning for Lukács’ teacher, Georg Simmel, of something standing over-against social relations, a structure of historically sedimented ideas and traditions.
For Rose, ‘Marx had no theory of culture as such’ [11] and Marxism no awareness that it too could become a culture (in Lukács’ and Simmel’s sense). As a result, Marx’s later thinking ‘became rigidified into static, mechanistic, and deterministic distinctions between the economic base and the ideological, legal, and political superstructure’.[12] Seeking to remedy this, the Frankfurt School ‘reverted to a dynamic distinction between social processes and resultant social forms’ derived not from base and superstructure but from Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism. Commodity fetishism had become, so the Frankfurt School believed, the ‘principle stumbling block of capitalism’,[13] the chief reason why revolution had hitherto failed. The merit of re-orienting Marxist theory around the critique of commodity fetishism, particularly around Marx’s insight that the illusions arising from the commodity are not ‘wrong’ but ‘real and necessary’,[14] is that it could avoid ‘gross simplification regarding the likelihood and inhibition of [revolutionary] change’.[15] For the Frankfurt School, ‘this idea that the real social relations between people are transformed into and misunderstood as relations between things’ provided a model ‘for the relationship between social processes and social institutions and consciousness’.[16] This ‘reification’ (Lukács’ term, drawn from Simmel, not Marx) of social relations, institutions and consciousness could help explain their inertia, their intransigence, their irrationality in the face of conditions which should by rights lead to revolution and to a rational organisation of society.
Not that culture in its more familiar sense is any less important to the debates which Rose discusses here. The debates on aesthetics between Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno, and others need to be viewed, as Rose points out, as taking place on a battleground between East and West. While popular culture in the West had, so Adorno believed, become a new means to enchant and distract the working class, in the East, film, architecture, painting and literature were being wielded as weapons of socialist instruction. The German debate is indebted to this Soviet Proletkult but is best understood as trying to forge a third, more radical path, that would do justice to Marx’s insights. The crucial examples here are Brecht’s epic theatre and Benjamin’s view of artworks in the age of their mass reproducibility. Both Brecht and Benjamin saw in these respective aesthetic techniques opportunities for liberating the spectator’s sensibilities and kindling revolutionary consciousness while avoiding the simple didactic approach of socialist realism.
Adorno’s critical response to these (and it is Adorno who gets all the best lines in Rose’s account) is not simply to decry such attempts to forge an authentically communist aesthetic but to warn of the potential political ambivalence of an ostensibly liberated spectatorship. Adorno’s warning concerns the risk of creating a new culture (a new reification) in the very attempt to overcome it. If socialist realism with its heroism of labour takes the spectator to be as passively impressionable as does capitalist popular culture, then Brecht, to his merit (so Rose’s Adorno is keen to grant) sought at least to awaken in his audiences a deeper self-reflection. At the same time, he failed to escape didacticism and militantism and so sacrificed that same self-reflecting subjectivity by instrumentalising it for political purposes, that is, mirroring the very subordination of ends to means at which capitalism excelled. Like Brecht, Benjamin was naïve, in Adorno’s view, for assuming that new forms of artistic reproduction would seize the masses in revolutionary ways. Far from new modes of technological reproducibility ‘reducing the commodity character of works’, as Benjamin hoped, these would likely be further ‘sucked into commodity relations’.[17] The danger Adorno perceived is a wider one: that ‘many forms of radical activity – whether artistic, political, social, theoretical – are fated to display “the same disastrous pattern” which they seek to combat’.[18]
Adorno’s unease at left-wing positions on aesthetics was directed not only at Brecht and Benjamin but more pointedly at Lukács’ disdain for modernist literature, in particular his distinction between laudably ‘realist’ (Balzac and Tolstoy) and deplorably ‘irrationalist’ writers (above all, Kafka and Mann). Adorno was steadfastly on Mann’s side here: Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus (a novel which Rose claimed to re-read every year), was ‘really half-written by Adorno’.[19] Lukács’ error in denigrating writers such as Mann or Kafka or Joyce was to have overlooked that it was in their style rather than simply their overt content that modernist works (of fiction but also music and art) prove oppositional. For Adorno, ‘the unresolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form’.[20] Modernist artworks show up social contradictions not through their political intention (which, however carefully crafted, has no guarantee of reaching its target) but by having a form to which the subject is obliged reflectively to react.[21] In their enigmatic, quizzical character, such artworks build self-reflection into the artistic object itself. Works of modern art or literature or music are ‘experiments with subjectivity’.[22] For Adorno, they distinguish themselves from earlier art by their heightened interrogation of the consciousness of the reader or the viewer or the listener, throwing them back upon the resources of a damaged but not-yet wholly destroyed subjectivity. In this way they resist a seemingly ubiquitous reification by their very refusal of total comprehensibility: the easy comprehensibility befitting a subject entirely stripped of their reflective powers.
Of course, in saying this, Adorno left himself wide open to the charge of elitism: the idea that avant-garde art is more socially critical and liberatory than popular culture is typically seen as condescending – understandably so. Indeed, a whole school of cultural studies arose in England to try to reverse any academic snobbery towards working class leisure pursuits. But as Rose shows, Adorno’s critical ire was directed not only at popular entertainment but against avant-garde art too. Both avant-garde and popular culture ‘bear the stigmata of capitalism’;[23] both are ‘torn halves of an integral freedom to which, however, they do not add up’.[24] The very idea that avant-garde art was in some way (as the word suggests) progressively out ahead of society was itself a function of commodity fetishism and the illusory autonomy it lent to human creations: in fact ‘abstract exchange’ marked artistic production and consumption no less than any other economic sphere.
A word of explanation is in order here, because abstract exchange can be seen as a key category in Adorno. Recent scholarship has identified Adorno’s focus on it as forming the core of his Marxism, and Rose seems to have recognised this early on. Like his friend Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Adorno believed that the abstractness of commodity exchange comes to thoroughly determine the character of social relationships under capitalism and indeed the very way we think. Abstraction is not simply an a priori capacity of consciousness but ‘really the specific form of the exchange process itself’, a process which comes to ‘universally dominate’ human beings and non-human nature.[25] This has implications for our attempts to understand capitalist society since, as Rose puts it, ‘social relations can be understood by people in societies which don’t produce commodities, but in commodity-producing societies, social relationships become unintelligible’.[26] Such unintelligibility presents a formidable challenge for critical, that is, anti-capitalist, thought and practice. Thematising rather than simply recapitulating abstraction becomes politically decisive. Arguably this was already clear to Marx: he set out not an alternative political economy but a critique of political economy; the form of presentation of Capital, when read carefully, consciously exposes the violence of the very economic abstractions it presents; these are shown to belie a concrete history of capital ‘written in letters of fire and blood’.[27]
The most famous work of the Frankfurt School is surely Dialectic of Enlightenment. Rose’s exposition of the book is illuminating and novel, geared as it is towards redressing significant ‘misunderstandings’ about the book, not least Adorno’s apparent dismissal of popular culture, and the authors’ theory of antisemitism. Rose devotes particular space to the book’s understanding of fascism, pointing out how diametrically opposed it is to a widely held but facile view that the rise of fascism in Germany had its roots in the lack of developed liberal-democratic institutions due to the country’s rapid and belated industrialisation. For Adorno and Horkheimer, these institutions provided no bulwark against fascism – quite the opposite. The capitalist ruling class would happily reach for fascist means whenever existing structures of domination (or regimes of accumulation) falter. Horkheimer and Adorno, Rose notes, ‘are implying that it is capitalist rationality itself which produces and reproduces forms of barbarism; that fascism cannot be seen as a breakdown unique to Germany due to the asymmetry of Germany’s social institutions but is itself inherent in the logic of late capitalism’.[28]
Passages such as this give a sense of the radicality of these lectures from 1979 – how much inspiration Rose clearly took from these critical Marxist views. But they thereby raise an awkward question for those who know Rose’s subsequent work. Any consideration of these lectures cannot avoid addressing the issue raised by commentators such as Peter Osborne, Tony Gorman and Martin Jay: to what extent did Rose remain a Marxist? Was the appeal that closes her Hegel book to renew a ‘critical Marxism’ and for ‘comprehension of the conditions for revolutionary practice’[29] just a rhetorical flourish or did it remain central to her work? Above all, what are we to make of her later, apparently more theological works in the light of these early Frankfurt School lectures? And what are we to make of Gillian’s own conversion, at the last, from Judaism to Christianity?
For Gorman, Rose’s early work is a ‘phenomenological account of the relation between substance (objective ethical life) and subjectivity’ which aims at overcoming ‘the continued domination of bourgeois law and private property’.[30] In the late works, this ‘objective’ treatment of subjectivity ‘is displaced by a contrary emphasis on faith, inwardness and an ethic of singularity’. Even if this ethic ‘continues to demand an engagement with the political, the terms of this engagement are no longer predicated upon a politics of revolutionary transformation.’[31] For Jay, ‘the young Rose favoured critical over speculative reason, outrage at social injustice over affirming the unending dialectic of law and violence, the promise of a different future contained in aesthetic form over believing that eternity exists in the here and now for those with faith’.[32] For Osborne, Rose ‘came progressively to distance the general project, decisively, from its initial “critical Marxist” formulation, to the point of incompatibility’.[33] In effect, each of these three critics suggests the same thing: the mature Rose renounced critical theory for philosophia perennis.[34]
I confess that, at the time, I read her late work in the same way. I saw, regrettably, a theological turn and a waning of political engagement. When political issues were raised in the late work it seemed that compromise rather than commitment had won the day. It seemed as if the attempt to sublate left and right Hegelianism placed Rose merely in the political centre. Particularly disenchanting was what she said about Rosa Luxemburg in the later work The Broken Middle: it sounded like the case was being made for some golden mean between reform and revolution – as if such a mean exists or would do justice to the urgency of overthrowing capitalism.
But on re-reading that later work I realise now how unrepentant and uncompromising its political passages are. And how I had judged what she said about Luxemburg, Bernstein and Lenin (the so-called ‘problem of organisation’) unfairly. Though separating endorsement from exposition is always hard in Rose’s case, it seems to me quite clear now that she is arguing for Luxemburg and against Bernstein. And while her antipathy to Lenin’s ‘social-democratic domination’[35] as ‘means regardless of ends’ would suggest an obverse privileging of ends over means, Rose actually finds in Luxemburg a third, more radical option: ‘a schooling of struggle where ends and means are fused’.[36] Socialist democracy – as Luxemburg famously declares and as Rose favourably quotes – is not some ‘Christmas present’ for those cadres who have meanwhile ‘loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators’. Rather, it must begin in the here and now, with the entire working class, and ‘simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule’.[37] In other words, democratic centralism (which was always a contradiction in terms) must be rejected in favour of direct democracy, if revolutionary movements are to truly count as such. These movements must start as they mean to go on if they are to avoid reinforcing precisely the domination they seek to overthrow, if they are to avoid falling into ‘the same disastrous pattern’.
Perhaps misled by Rose’s Kierkegaardian language – every ‘beginning’, she says in The Broken Middle, will inevitably be ‘anxious’ because of ‘the plasticity of aporia’[38] – I failed to see that her discussion is about the way – the most egalitarian, liberatory and sustainable way – to revolution. Here is precisely a path, an opening (póros), that seemed to be lacking (aporia). It is an undeniably difficult path that leads through democratic, horizontal decision-making rather than authoritarian diktat, but it is certainly not a way that is blocked. And all this raises a question. Why would one include such a discussion of revolutionary organisation in a work that had supposedly renounced Marx for theology? Why, moreover, when it offers a way out of the putatively endless ‘dialectic of law and violence’? Did Rose abandon Marxism? Or is it not more likely that her late work preserves traces of that Marxism, even if in a new vocabulary? True, by no means everything in that late work is still ‘predicated upon a politics of revolutionary transformation’. But then this is a criterion which, if we are honest, few philosophers could fulfil. What did remain a constant, I suggest, was Rose’s focus upon political form (whether conceptual, presentational, or here organisational, strategic), with all its radical political implications. If I am correct, we might need to start thinking of the shifts in Rose’s work as ones of interest rather than outlook.[39]
What did Rose want to tell us with her enduring attention to issues of form and style? It is interesting that one particular summary phrase is repeated twice in these lectures. It is that when, following the Frankfurt School, the theory of commodity fetishism is placed at the heart of thinking about capitalism we see that ‘we live in a society in which some things which seem to be comprehensible to us are not really, and some things which seem to be incomprehensible to us are really comprehensible’.[40] It is a paradoxical phrase, and one that I suspect could be a key to her wider thought. The first half points forward to her books on Adorno and Hegel and their emphasis on capital’s ‘necessary illusion’ that can deform and derail revolutionary consciousness.[41] The second points further forward still, to her late Judaism and Modernity and Mourning Becomes the Law with their contention that the Shoah (and by implication other genocides – Rose was against any ‘pious’ exceptionalism)[42] is not ineffable but all too understandable, above all in terms of the dynamic (by no means unique to Nazi Germany) of colonialist expansion.[43] If this interpretation rings true, continuity rather than break in outlook would once again apply.
Continuity or break aside, the thorny problem remains as to whether Gillian would have wanted these lectures to be published at all. Jay has reservations but thinks the balance tips in favour of publication. I agree, if only because it has become a norm to place such works in the public sphere. Without the notes taken by Hegel’s or Adorno’s students, for example (both of which are significantly more exoteric than their published books), our understanding of these thinkers would be poorer. In her own published books, Rose took on the performative challenge raised by those two famously difficult writers. For them the written word must do justice to the contradictions, paradoxes and inversions of a thoroughly alienated society. Only a ‘severe’ style, as Rose called it, following Hegel, one that consciously made few concessions to the reader, whose deepest assumptions about the appearance and essence of society were to be upturned, could shed critical light on our inverted world. That a reader can now encounter Rose without the severe style is of course ironic, given the very arguments she makes here about form, but the lectures nevertheless have great propaedeutic value – just as they had with Hegel and Adorno. To be praised is the work of Robert Lucas Scott and James Gordon Finlayson in transcribing and editing them: their helpful annotations and perceptive introduction, together with Jay’s afterword, now give us a fuller, more rounded picture of Rose’s intellectual development. Finally, Jay is quite right how ‘moving’[44] it is to hear Gillian’s voice so present and alive in these written words. The other side of this viva voce quality, of course, is the melancholy note it will strike for anyone who knew that voice and who cannot but lament its absence.
Adrian Wilding teaches at the Institut für Soziologie, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena and is Fellow of the Großbritannien-Zentrum, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.
[1] Theodor W. Adorno, Letter to Walter Benjamin, 6 November 1934’, in Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940, trans. Nicholas Walker, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp.52–59, here p. 55.
[2] Vincent Lloyd, ‘Interview with Gillian Rose’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 25, no. 7/8 (2008), pp. 201–18.
[3] Howard Caygill cited in Robert Lucas Scott and James Gordon Finlayson, ‘Editors’ Introduction’, in Gillian Rose, Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory, London: Verso, p. vii.
[4] Peter Osborne cited in ibid., p. viii.
[5] Peter Osborne, ‘Gillian Rose and Marxism’‚ Telos, 173 (2015), pp. 55–67, here p. 62.
[6] Peter Osborne, cited on Rose, Marxist Modernism, back cover.
[7] Ernst Bloch et al., 1977 Aesthetics and Politics, trans. R. Taylor, London: Verso.
[8] Rose, Marxist Modernism, p. 7.
[9] Ibid., p. 7.
[10] Ibid., p. 8.
[11] Ibid., p. 15. Gillian Rose, Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, p. 63.
[12] Rose, Marxist Modernism, p. 15.
[13] Scott and Finlayson, ‘Editors’ Introduction’, p. xii.
[14] Rose, Marxist Modernism, p. 17.
[15] Ibid., p. 15, n. 18.
[16] Ibid., p. 17.
[17] Ibid,, p. 87.
[18] Ibid., p. 114.
[19] Ibid., p. 124. For detail of Adorno’s friendship and collaboration with Mann during their years of exile see E. Randol Schoenberg, The Doctor Faustus Dossier, Oakland: University of California Press, 2018.
[20] Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor, London: Athlone 1997, p. 6 (my emphasis).
[21] Ibid., p. 151.
[22] Rose, Marxist Modernism, p. 120.
[23] Theodor W. Adorno, letter to Walter Benjamin, 18 March 1936, in Bloch et al. 1977, pp. 120–26, here p. 123. The clause ‘to which they do not add up’ rarely receives attention. It implies that even the residual freedom which Adorno found in art in no way exhausted for him the task of liberation.
[24] Ibid. Cf. Rose, Marxist Modernism, p. 108.
[25] Adorno et al. 1981, p. 31. See also Dirk Braunstein, 2023, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, trans. Adam Baltner, Chicago: Haymarket, 2023.
[26] Rose, Marxist Modernism, p. 110.
[27] Cf. John Holloway, ‘Read Capital: The First Sentence’, Historical Materialism, vol. 23, no. 3 (2015), 3–26.
[28] Rose, Marxist Modernism, p. 81.
[29] Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, London: Athlone, 1981, p. 220
[30] Anthony Gorman, ‘Gillian Rose and the Project of a Critical Marxism,’ Radical Philosophy, no. 105 (2001), pp. 25–36, here p. 25.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Martin Jay, ‘Afterword’, in Rose, Marxist Modernism, pp.XXX–XXX, here p. 143.
[33] Osborne, ‘Gillian Rose and Marxism’, p. 56.
[34] It is ironic that in these lectures Rose notes Jürgen Moltmann’s recuperation of Ernst Bloch’s principle of hope (Rose, Marxist Modernism, p. 42), since, if these critics are correct, her late work repeats exactly this move.
[35] Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, p. 208.
[36] Ibid., p. 208.
[37] Ibid., p. 210. Richard Gunn and I discuss this same line of Luxemburg. See Richard Gunn and Adrian Wilding, Revolutionary Recognition, London: Bloomsbury, 2021, pp. 85-88.
[38] Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 211.
[39] One piece of anecdotal evidence is worth adding. The religious debates in which Rose was engaging in her late written work hardly came up at all in lectures or seminars in her final years of teaching. Her curriculum involved courses on Critical Theory and on the Holocaust. These were the themes which she continued to feel most vital to impart to students, as if reminding us of Luxemburg’s warning: socialism or barbarism.
[40] Rose, Marxist Modernism, p. 127.
[41] Rose, Hegel contra Sociology, p. 217, for example. Cf. Rose, Marxist Modernism, p. 126.
[42] Gillian Rose, 1996, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 43.
[43] Ibid., p.p 11 and 31–34, for example. Does Rose’s work in some way anticipate the welcome anti-colonial shift in today’s academy? I note in passing that Paul Gilroy was one of her students and has acknowledged his debt to her teaching.
[44] Jay, ‘Afterword’, p. 142.