Page 28 - Cultural Theory

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••• Cultural Analysis in Marxist Humanism •••

recognizing what he called the ‘relational’ or perspective-bound character of knowledge
(Mannheim, 1925; 1929). Mannheim focused on the role of intellectuals in the produc-
tion of knowledge. In doing so, he was drawing on the cultural sociology of Alfred
Weber and the Marxism of Lukács, as both writers had sought to distinguish the knowl-
edge produced by intellectuals from the everyday knowledge of other social actors.
Intellectuals had the necessary education and training to engage in social research, and
the universities could give them a base of relative autonomy from practical interests and
concerns that allowed them to detach themselves from practical struggles and work
towards a knowledge of the larger context within which people are bound. They can
produce a knowledge that is, necessarily, ‘relational’, but which is not merely ‘relative’
to a given social location (see Scott, 1998).
Both Horkheimer and Adorno shared this assumption that the production of knowl-
edge that escapes the limited perspectives of everyday knowledge, however partially, is
a task that can be pursued only by an intellectual minority working under appropriate
social conditions. Horkheimer (1935) took a similar position to Mannheim, holding that
all truth must be recognized as limited and tentative. Social scientists, he argued, are
engaged in a critical reconstruction of the knowledge and ideas of particular historical
groups. This is a practical, progressive movement towards a view of the social whole
from within which these particular ideas originate. This view of the whole remains, nev-
ertheless, a tentative product of particular individuals and groups. While it is superior to
the unreflective partial perspectives from which it is built, it is still a partial view. At the
same time, however, the social whole is constantly changing. Change occurs through
the practical activities of the individuals and groups that compose it, which are
informed by their particular ideas. The partial knowledge possessed by social groups
informs their actions, which bring about social change in the totality that shapes their
knowledge. Social scientists who achieve a critical reconstruction of the whole are aim-
ing at a moving and constantly changing target. Horkheimer, therefore, agrees with
Mannheim that any ‘synthesis’ of partial perspectives must be a ‘dynamic’ synthesis that
is constantly moving towards a better and more adequate knowledge of the whole, but
can never be fixed as a definitive statement of absolute truth.
Adorno agreed that historically objectified knowledge is perspectival in character,
and he adds that the plurality of such knowledge in any society highlights the con-
tradictory character of social reality itself. The aim of historical understanding,
Adorno argued, is to grasp the contradictory character of the world by disclosing the
structural elements that organize it and showing how each perspective or standpoint
‘negates’ all others. These contradictions cannot be overcome or unified in the kind
of ‘synthesis’ sought by Hegel. They exist within complex social wholes that have no
overall, essential unity. Cultural analysis involves an identification of the elements
or parts of the whole and an imaginative recombination of them in such a way as to
disclose their contradictions, oppositions, non-identities, and negations. These con-
tradictions cannot simply be thought away, but must be retained as integral to the
character of the whole. 11 The model for such an analysis is Marx’s analysis of com-
modity exchange, which identified the forces and the relations of production as the
parts and recombined them into a model of a mode of production in which their

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