The Frankfurt School’s critique anticipated later postmodernist themes

Evidence

And yet, in certain respects, the general theoretical trajectory of at least several members of the School’s first generation can be said to have prepared the ground for the postmodern turn and thus found a new audience for its work. Most obviously, their reluctant jettisoning of a triumphalist notion of impending human emancipation, based on a single story of species-wide progress produced by class struggle, resonates with the characteristic postmodernist abandonment of any meta-narrative, especially one culminating in redemption. In fact, the temporalities of the Frankfurt School, the complex narratives they fashioned of rise, fall, and recurrence, were often as mixed and contra dictory as those adopted by many postmodernist thinkers. So too, the radical critique of the Western tradition of instrumental, technological rationality, most extensively elaborated in Dialectic of Enlightenment with its dark ruminations about the entwinement of myth and reason, can be seen as potentially consonant with post-modernist suspicion towards all versions of reason. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 22

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Habermas’s later defense of reason and the modernity-postmodernity debate the reader will encounter. — connects to: The Frankfurt School resists simple classification as a precursor to postmodernism — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 21; The Frankfurt School’s rejection of teleological progress anticipates postmodernism’s abandonment of meta-narratives; Postmodernism is a tendency within late modernism, not its successor — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 236 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• The Frankfurt School’s rejection of teleological progress anticipates postmodernism’s abandonment of meta-narratives #exemplifies (0.92)
• The Frankfurt School resists simple classification as a precursor to postmodernism #qualifies (0.78) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 21
• Postmodernism is a tendency within late modernism, not its successor #qualifies (0.75) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 236
• Postmodernism abandons ideology critique for cynical reason #complicates (0.75) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 21
• Postmodernism abolishes the inside-outside distinction that modernism still presupposed #qualifies (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 259