Totalizing analysis reveals progressive kernels inside ostensibly reactionary phenomena
Evidence
In so arguing, it might be added, Horkheimer was closer to Marx himself than the self-styled Marxists who claimed to be orthodox. When discussing the bourgeois state, for example, Marx had not interpreted it solely as the “executive committee of the ruling class,” but also as an adumbration, albeit distorted, of the reconciliation of social contradictions that the triumph of the proletariat was to bring about. Engels, likewise, when discussing Realism in literature, had shown an appreciation for the progressive elements in ostensibly reactionary writers like Balzac, because of their ability to portray the concrete totality with all its contradictions. The Institut’s extensive work on aesthetic and cultural matters was rooted in the same assumption. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 223
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the later Frankfurt School aesthetic turn in Culture Industry and ‘traditional and critical theory’; balances the crude base-superstructure reading of Marx. — connects to: Totalizing concepts prove more diagnostically productive than going without them — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 476; Reframing reveals the positive facet latent in every negative trait — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice: How to Communicate…, 407; Hybridity theory replaces totalizing narratives with contingent local petits recits — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 913
Broader Connections
- Totalizing concepts prove more diagnostically productive than going without them
#corroborates(0.95) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 476 - Reframing reveals the positive facet latent in every negative trait
#corroborates(0.85) — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 407 - Hybridity theory replaces totalizing narratives with contingent local petits recits
#complicates(0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 913