Interview with Martin Jay (original) (raw)

2021, Journal of Asia-Pacific pop culture

In this interview, which took place by email in the summer of 2021, Samir Gandesha engages in a discussion with Martin Jay, UC Berkeley, one of the preeminent US intellectual historians since the 1980s and author of the groundbreaking Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950 (1973), which was followed by other important books on totality, ocularcentrism, experience, and lying in politics. The result is in a wide-ranging philosophical (aesthetic and political) discussion of a variety of topics, including the Frankfurt School and the trajectory of critical theory, the rise and importance of social media platforms, ensuing the digitalization and commodification of the life-world, "algorithmic populism" and "cancel culture," as well as the role of art between theory and criticism. Samir Gandesha: It is common to speak of generational differences among those who understand themselves as working in the spirit of the Institute for Social Research. So, after the first generation-Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and so on-you have the second generation, Jürgen Habermas and Albrecht Wellmer; the third, Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser; and then, perhaps, as a fourth, Rainer Forst and Christoph Menke. One way of looking at the trajectory of Critical Theory, as Habermas himself has already pointed out, is in terms of a force field of debates over the nature of the state (Pollock versus Neumann and Kircheimer), the emancipatory role of popular culture (Adorno versus Benjamin) and the status of ego psychology (Fromm versus Marcuse). From Habermas onward, the trajectory of Critical Theory could be understood in terms of a consistent movement away from critical social theory and an apparent "negative