“What has not been lost is, of course, the critical approach: the process of analysis, retaining the good and rejecting the bad, the need to accuse, the indictment of all that exists . . . , but without explicit hopes. What has occurred is not a retreat into skepticism or cynicism, but sadness. The utopian motif has been suspended.” These remarks by Leo Lowenthal may have the ring of resignation, and not surprisingly so. At the beginning of the war, according to an anecdote told by Hanns Eisler, some members of the Institute of Social Research were standing on the shore of the Pacific when suddenly Adorno, seized by melancholy, said: “We should throw out a message in a bottle.” Eisler remarked dryly that he already knew how the message should read: “I feel so lousy.” This kind of resignation, however, is not at all characteristic of Lowenthal. His sentences are marked by sober objectivity: they aim to destroy possible illusions in order to promote political action. To be sure, Lowenthal’s thinking is deeply rooted in the framework of Critical Theory, which he helped establish and develop; however, pragmatic tendencies are also evident, as well as an inclination to redirect speculative flights of intellectual fancy back to the path of existing conditions. For him, thinking the possible has always meant thinking within the bounds of present conditions, without, of course, reducing it to that alone. Perhaps his humor also plays a role in this. For the first issue of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Lowenthal wrote the programmatic essay “On the Social Situation of Literature,” an essay that is now recognized as a milestone in the history of the sociology of literature. His attempt in this essay to develop a social conception of literature necessarily takes issue with the objections that were raised against a materialistic theory. “By no means,” Lowenthal points out, “does every causal question demand an infinite regression.” For example, he continues, “An investigation into the causes that led Goethe to Weimar hardly requires a study of the medieval origins of German cities.” In his eighties, Leo Lowenthal has lost neither his vitality nor his quickness—and certainly not his sense of humor. He remains a scholar of the old school, in the positive sense of the term, who has nonetheless retained a touch of roguishness. Herbert Marcuse had a similar disposition, though he was perhaps a bit more sarcastic. Coping with these two, who spent much time together over several decades, must have been a trying experience for humorless erudite scholarly experts. Today Lowenthal still lives in the middle of town, close to the Berkeley campus of the University of California. He has an open house, open for both visitors and students. When one sits in the living room, gazing at the well-kept yet exuberantly lush garden, all semblance of utopia is destroyed by the constant ringing of the telephone: a German student not long in California who wants to locate a certain book, students who want to discuss their work with him, colleagues, friends, and, day in, day out, members of the families of those colleagues from the Institute who remained in the United States after the war. Now, following Marcuse’s death, Lowenthal is the last survivor from the inner circle of the founders of the Frankfurt School (a designation, incidentally, that he strictly rejects). The methodology of the critique of ideologies, that is, the determination of the “socially necessary illusion,” a central motif of Critical Theory, also occupies a position of central importance for Lowenthal’s work in the sociology of literature. To be sure, his studies never follow a simplistic base-superstructure schema; they never aim to reduce literature to ideology but, on the contrary, always attempt to describe the “authentic element” in “false consciousness.” Now as much as ever, Lowenthal insists on the need for.. ..Read more ow.ly/nsDAL
Posted on: Tue, 30 Jul 2013 15:01:52 +0000
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