The Frankfurt School’s rejection of teleological progress anticipates postmodernism’s abandonment of meta-narratives

Evidence

It would be mistaken, of course, to reduce the legacy of Critical Theory tout court to a prolegomenon to postmodernism, however we may define that vexed term. Habermas’s spirited defense of the uncompleted project of modernity,” Lowenthal’s last warnings against “irrational and neomythological” concepts like “post-histoire,"" and Adorno’s insistence on the distinction between high and low art and partisanship for modernists such as Beckett, Kafka and Schoenberg against the leveling impact of the Culture Industry, all make it plain that in many important ways the Frankfurt School resists wholesale inclusion among the forebears of postmodernism. In fact, as Fredric Jameson has pointed out, it may well be the eclectic pastiches of Stravinsky (which Adorno despised) rather than the progressive innovations of Schoenberg (which he generally admired) that can he said to have anticipated a key feature of postmodernist culture.” — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 21 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

The defining trait of the postmodern condition, by contrast, is the loss of credibility of these meta-narratives. For Lyotard, they have been undone by the immanent development of the sciences themselves: on the one hand, by a pluralization of types of argument, with the proliferation of paradox and paralogism — anticipated within philosophy by Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Levinas; and on the other hand, by a technification of proof, in which costly apparatuses, commanded by capital or the state, reduce ‘truth’ to ‘performativity’. Science in the service of power finds a new legitimation in efficiency. But the genuine pragmatics of postmodern science lies not in the pursuit of the performative, but in the production of the paralogistic — in micro-physics, fractals, discoveries of chaos, ‘theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable and paradoxical’. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 65 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The Frankfurt School resists simple classification as a precursor to postmodernism — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 21; Postmodernity is defined by the delegitimation of metanarratives — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 65; The Frankfurt School’s positivism label covered nominalist, empirical, scientific currents — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 2148 (+1 more)

Related

• The Frankfurt School resists simple classification as a precursor to postmodernism (similarity 0.93)
• The Frankfurt School’s critique anticipated later postmodernist themes (similarity 0.89)
• Postmodernity is defined by the delegitimation of metanarratives (similarity 0.88)
• The Frankfurt School’s positivism label covered nominalist, empirical, scientific currents (similarity 0.84)
• The Frankfurt School’s roots lie in 1840s Left Hegelianism, later displaced by positivism (similarity 0.79)
• Adorno held that truth is a reflection of a transcendent theological light (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• The Frankfurt School resists simple classification as a precursor to postmodernism #qualifies (0.85) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 21
• Postmodernity is defined by the delegitimation of metanarratives #expands (0.80) — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 65