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The Surprisingly Sunny Origins of the Frankfurt School
When a group of German Marxists arrived in Naples in the nineteen-twenties, they found a way of life that made them rethink modernity.
Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Bloch, and other figures, many of whom would come to constitute the body of Continental thought known as the Frankfurt School, all felt stymied in the inflationary pressure cooker of the Weimar Republic. The child of a storied family of painters, he had requested the complete edition of Karl Marx’s “ Das Kapital ” for Christmas while a teen-ager, and proceeded to spend two monastic years in a line-by-line study of the text. He gave the example of a motorized wheel he saw, which, “liberated from the constraints of some smashed-up motorbike, and revolving around a slightly eccentric axis, whips the cream in a latteria.” It was the kind of practice that the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss would, in another context, popularize decades later as “bricolage.” The Neapolitans fixed up their cars without manuals, jerry-rigging them to go the next mile, substituting in a piece of wood where it suited, and generally shunning “technical presumptuousness.” “The violence of incorporation has to be acted out every hour in a victorious crash,” Sohn-Rethel writes.
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