Rethinking the Frankfurt School

Book excerpt: A reexamination of key Frankfurt School thinkers—Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse—in the light of contemporary theory and cultural studies across the disciplines, Rethinking the Frankfurt School asks what consequences such a rethinking might have for study of the Frankfurt School on its own terms. Ironically, contemporary theorists find themselves turning back toward the Frankfurt School precisely for the reasons it was once scorned: for a notion of subjects whose desires are less liberated and multiplied than they are produced and regulated by a far-reaching, very-nearly totalizing global culture industry. Indeed, as new questions concerning globalization and economic redistribution emerge, while analyses of identity politics and subjective transgression become less central to contemporary theory and cultural studies, the future of the Frankfurt School looks as promising and productive as its past has proven to be.