The exiles’ alienation from America both blinded and equipped the Frankfurt School’s critique.

Evidence

As refugees from Central Europe, who had been tutored in all that its rich cultural heritage had to offer, they were inevitably ill at ease in the less rarified atmosphere of their new environment. On occasion, this alienation meant an unresponsiveness to the spontaneous elements in American popular culture - Adorno’s unremitting hostility to jazz, for example, suffers from a certain a priori insensitivity. But at the same time, it provided an invaluable critical distance from the culture, which prevented the Institut from equating mass culture with true democracy. The category of “repressive desublimation,” 222 which Marcuse was to develop years later to characterize the pseudo-liberation of modern culture, existed in embryo in the personal experience of the Institut’s members. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 647

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Adorno’s jazz critique and to Marcuse’s later ‘One-Dimensional Man’ and the repressive desublimation thesis; also resonates with Said’s exile-versus-critical-distance arguments. — connects to: The Frankfurt School’s mature critique reached its peak in the American exile period — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 771; The exiled Frankfurt Institute isolated itself from American academic life while resenting its marginalization. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1045

Broader Connections

• The Frankfurt School’s mature critique reached its peak in the American exile period #expands (0.85) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 771