Martin Jay

The dialectical imagination : a history of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950

Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Franz Neumann, Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal--the impact of the Frankfurt School on the sociological, political, and cultural thought of the twentieth century has been profound. The Dialectical Imagination is a major history of this monumental cultural and intellectual enterprise during its early years in Germany and in the United States. Martin Jay has provided a substantial new preface for this edition, in which he reflects on the continuing relevance of the work of the Frankfurt School.

Cultural relativism and the visual turn

The recent explosion of interest in visual culture has often been premised on the assumption that distinct scopic regimes or visual practices are relative to the cultures out of which they emerge. Any naturalist hope of locating transcendental visual experience prior to its cultural coding is thus taken to be in vain. This article takes issue with this premise, not by returning to a discredited naturalism, but rather by putting pressure on the culture concept itself. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Bruno Latour, David McDougall and Régis Debray, it argues that visual experience presents a challenge to the belief that it is ‘culture all the way down’. Although it does not claim that arguments for relativism can be entirely refuted, it does conclude that an exploration of visuality shows that grounding them in the alleged incommensurability of cultures is unpersuasive.

Historical Explanation and the Event: Reflections on the Limits of Contextualization

Contextualization has become the reigning shibboleth of historical analysis, especially for intellectual and cultural history. Although acknowledging the achievements of the Cambridge School of historians, led by Quentin Skinner, who have done so much to promote awareness of the need to situate texts in their original illocutionary contexts, this essays explores two critical responses. The first focuses on challenges to contemporary historians to establish the relevant explanatory contexts without bringing to bear current perspectives and knowledge of developments after the original period. The second turns to the events themselves and draws on recent French theory, in particular the phenomenological work of Claude Romano, to question whether all historical phenomena can be understood by situating them in their generative contexts.

Fieldwork and theorizing in intellectual history

Accompanying the recent resurgence of interest in intellectual history has been a vigorous and increasingly sophisticated discussion of its methods and theoretical underpinnings. Absorbing lessons from philosophy, anthropology, literary criticism, sociology, and other relevant fields, historians such as Quentin Skinner, Hayden White, Dominick LaCapra, James Clifford, and Roger Chartier have become full-fledged participants in the larger cultural debates of our day. It is particularly gratifying to see Fritz Ringer join their number, for he has long been recognized as a master practitioner of the intellectual historians craft. Those who have been fortunate to study with him, as I did in the midsixties, as well as those who know him solely through his exemplary books, The Decline of the German Mandarins and Education and Society in Modern Europe, can only welcome his intervention.

Mourning a Metaphor: The Revolution is Over

‘Revolution’, it should be recalled, began its extraordinary career as a metaphor borrowed from astronomy, which had only recently revised its understanding of what in the heavens really revolved around what.1 In medieval Latin, revolutio signified a return or rolling back, often implying a cyclical revolving in time. This was its meaning, for example, in Copernicus’s famous treatise of 1543 De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. Although its earliest political uses have been detected in mid-14th century Italy, the term did not come into its own in the lexicon of politics until the upheavals of l7th-century England, when ‘reformation’, losing its power as a way to characterize the tumultuous events of the day, settled into its now conventional role as a term of art for religious changes alone. By the l650s, pamphleteers like Marchamont Nedham were using ‘revolution’ to define and defend the Cromwellian regime, while royalists like James Howell were identifying it with calamity. By l688, even moderate and bloodless regime changes could be called revolutions, and indeed glorious ones at that.

Introduction to Show and Tell

journal of visual culture [http://vcu.sagepub.com] Copyright

The Culture of Diagram (review)

lutionary and anthropological models. Their collective gestural performative mimesis that reached the point of “contagion” was both an unrestrained celebration of human bodily movement and a mockery deriving from what Darwinism and French culture allowed them to perceive as their developmental superiority. The theatrical and other perpetrators and the marginalized subjects of this mimesis formed “Les Phénomènes” and through their collaborative mimicry fashioned a precursive ethno-neurological æsthetic Gordon designates “an æsthetic of disorder nearly a half-century before the eruptions of Dada and Surrealism” (9). Her animalist taxonomies of singers, dancers, and their audiences within what she calls the “new café-concert æsthetic” (124–44) include epilepsy, hysteria, minstrelsy, hybridity, nudity, ugliness, eroticism, dissolution, vulgarity, savagery, disease, and especially the simian resemblance. She proposes, for example, “an æsthetics of ugliness” (126) and even suggests that in the fin de siècle “ugliness was a ticket to stardom” (125). She observes, “This gestural language, along with the theme of pathology, produced a novel form of spectacle where automatic gestures and dislocated bodies took center stage” (34). Among the stage performers to whom she devotes her most extensive and incisive discussion are chanteuse épileptique, voracious mouth hag, and androgyne Polaire, clown, dancer, and Moulin Rouge regular Chocolat, danseuse sauvage Josephine Baker, and avant-garde playwright Alfred Jarry; she presents also a panoply of seemingly lesser performers whose bizarreness and absurdity appear to increase in direct proportion to their obscurity. Her favored performance genres are cancan, Cake-Walk, Folies-Bergère, all kind of neurasthenic presentation, and any other performed gestural display evoking contagion, all of which she discusses with a propensity to shock again. Scrupulously researched, Dances with Darwin exploits a comprehensive database within an original and bizarre field of study. Gordon opens up la Belle Époque to a radical and provocative reconfiguration as la belle-laide époque by disclosing the profound influence Darwin had on French society, to the point that stage performers, audiences, and the populace came to imitate his subject matter, the origin of species, and the human proclivity for self-mockery, for reenacting its evolution by ostracizing its weakest members.

Martin Jay: An Encounter Between Philosophy and History

The interview took place in Santiago, Chile in November 2015 and was conducted by Gonzalo Bustamante, professor of political philosophy at Universidad Adolfo Ibanez. Martin Jay in the course of this interview addresses the links between Critical Theory, Cambridge School, and Conceptual History, giving special attention to an “event” as a limited category, critical rationality and the contextual genealogies of the different branches of historical studies mentioned before. Jay concludes that one of the possible limitations of the “in context’ work of authors such as Quentin Skinner and the socalled Cambridge School is given by the impossibility to reduce the perlocutionary effect of events to the illocutionary intentions of the authors. In line with Claude Romano, in the interpretation of Jay, an ‘event’ always has an “an-archic” condition that makes its limitation to previous networks of meaning impossible.

Martin Jay: Un encuentro entre la filosofía y la historia

The interview took place in Santiago, Chile in November 2015 and was conducted by Gonzalo Bustamante, professor of political philosophy at Universidad Adolfo Ibanez. Martin Jay in the course of this interview addresses the links between Critical Theory, Cambridge School, and Conceptual History, giving special attention to an “event” as a limited category, critical rationality and the contextual genealogies of the different branches of historical studies mentioned before. Jay concludes that one of the possible limitations of the “in context’ work of authors such as Quentin Skinner and the socalled Cambridge School is given by the impossibility to reduce the perlocutionary effect of events to the illocutionary intentions of the authors. In line with Claude Romano, in the interpretation of Jay, an ‘event’ always has an “an-archic” condition that makes its limitation to previous networks of meaning impossible.

Fin-de-Siecle Socialism and Other Essays.

1 Fin-de-siecle Socialism 2 Should Intellectual History take a Linguistic List? Reflections of the Habermas-Gadamer Debate 3 Hierarchy and the Humanities: The Radical Implications of a Conservative Ideal 4 Two Cheers for Paraphrase: The Confessions of a Synoptic Intellectual Historian 5 Vico and Western Marxism 6 Mass Culture and Aesthetic Redemption: The Debate between Max Horkheimer and Siegfried Kracauer 7 For Gouldner Reflections on an Outlaw Marxist 8 Against Fragmentation against Itself: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Gouldners Theory 9 Habermas and Modernism 10 Habermas and Postmodernism 11 Blumenberg and Modernism: A Reflection on The Legitimacy of the Modern Age 12 Concluding Unhistorical Postscript.