Introduction: What Was Theory?

      Sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for arson in 1968, Andreas Baader discovered letter-writing. He described the torment of solitude, ranted about the guards, and asked his friends to supply him with essentials. Besides cured meats and tobacco, that meant, most of all, books. He had people send him the student movement’s favourite authors, Marx, Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich, which he had only known from hearsay up to then. ‘Mountains of theory, the last thing I wanted’, he wrote to the mother of his daughter. ‘I work and I suffer, without complaining of course.’ Later, in the maximum-security prison at Stammheim, it was up to his lawyers to feed his hunger for reading material. At the time of his death, there were some 400 books in his cell: a respectable library for a terrorist who was notorious among his comrades for his recklessness. Without a doubt, Baader played the part of a jailhouse intellectual, just as he had previously played the revolutionary. Yet, at the same time, there was a great deal of seriousness in his studies. His letters indicate that he felt a need to catch up¹ – after all, the struggle to which he had dedicated himself was founded on theoretical principles.² In a different time, Baader would have taken up painting perhaps, or begun writing an autobiographical novel. Instead, he plunged – almost in spite of himself – into theory.

Now that the intellectual energies of ’68 have long since decayed to a feeble smouldering, it is hard to imagine the fascination of a genre that captivated generations of readers. Theory was more than just a succession of intellectual ideas: it was a claim of truth, an article of faith and a lifestyle accessory. It spread among its adherents in cheap paperbacks; it launched new language games in seminars and reading groups. The Frankfurt School, post-structuralism and systems theory were best-selling brands. West German students discovered in Adorno’s books the poetry of concepts. As the sixties dawned, the New Left rallied under the banner of its ‘theory work’ against the pragmatism of the Social Democrats: those who would change the world, they proclaimed, must start by thinking it through. But the thinking they had in mind had nothing to do with the philosophy of professors who stuck to interpreting the classic texts or the meaning of Being. It was concerned less with eternal truth and more with critiques of the dominant conditions, and under its scrutiny even the most mundane acts took on social relevance. Jacob Taubes, professor of the philosophy of religion in Berlin, saw his students reading the works of Herbert Marcuse with an intensity reminiscent of the zeal ‘with which young Talmud scholars once interpreted the text of the Torah’.³ On campus, theory conferred upon its readers not only academic capital, but also sex appeal. Marcuse led to Marx, and Marx to Hegel: those who wanted to have a say in the discussion got themselves the twenty-volume Suhrkamp edition of Hegel’s complete works.⁴ Only after the shock of the terrorists’ debacle in Stammheim and Mogadishu did any doubts about the canon of the ’68 generation mature into open resistance. New thinking came to Germany from Paris and did away with the tonality of dialectics. The books of Deleuze and Baudrillard called for a different kind of reading from those of Marx and Hegel. They seemed to have a more important purpose than the search for truth, and in the course of the 1980s theory metamorphosed into an aesthetic experience. And when ecology laid constraints of quantities and limits on the speculative imagination of the seventies, thorny philosophy set out to infiltrate the art world.

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