Neg(oti)ations: Learning from Three Frankfurt Schools.

Neg[oti]ations: Learning from Three Frankfurt Schools.

David Kettler, Bard College

full version: Datei:Negotiations2.pdf

In a posthumous book, written in exile by Siegfried Kracauer, perhaps the greatest writer of the old Frankfurter Zeitung, we find: “The ancient historians used to preface their histories by a short autobiographical statement – as if they wanted immediately to inform the reader of their location in time and society, that Archimedean point from which they would subsequently set out to roam the past.”1 I am of course tempted to use this as an apology for the exercise to come, especially since Kracauer was a correspondent of both Mannheim and Horkheimer, and a disciple of neither, but I move forward also under the caution light ignited by Robert D. Cumming, who brilliantly used John Stuart Mill’s oddly falsified “Autobiography” as a cautionary lesson for the deceptions of “intellectual history,” notably its use as cover-up for unresolved philosophical problems.2 Accordingly, I offer the following less in the spirit of an ancient historian than in that of a perpetual and perennially hopeful student.

My one-word title is an indirect confession that I have not been a very faithful graduate of the best known of the “Frankfurt Schools,” since it plays off the English title of one of Herbert Marcuse’s most brilliant essay collections, “Negations,” and points in a direction that almost all members of the Horkheimer group excoriated. Their angrily pursued target as unprincipled compromiser was Karl Mannheim, who shared the building of the Institut für Sozialforschung between 1930 and 1933, and who has been the subject of much of my scholarship More remote for all but one or two of the group was the workshop of Hugo Sinzheimer, the prime theorist of the collective-bargaining-centered Weimar labor law, based in the Akademie der Arbeit, and whose work had a special fascination for me during the 1980s and 1990s. At the risk of laboring the wordplay, let me say that the concept of negotiations that I adapted over the years from the other two Frankfurt-based “schools” is as far as I have ever been able to go with a negation of negations. I shall try to persuade you that my course has been something more and better than impressionable eclecticism, although it cannot be denied that I share these multiple connections with my teacher, Franz L. Neumann. I begin with “my road to Frankfurt” and continue with my maneuverings around the Frankfurter Kreuz, where I am still not rarely nailed down im Stau.