Ajay asked if liberal democracies are necessarily conformist states, and others mentioned what H & A’s argument says about democracy and political representation, but I was surprised nobody took up the issue of how their argument relates to fascism. This book was written when H & A were emigres in New York while WWII was still going on and if it can be called direct in any way, it can be perceived as a direct response to the rise of fascism. In the preface, the authors say they aim to explain why “humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.”
In this context, the issues of power and knowledge take on a concrete meaning; H & A see Enlightenment as a threat to social freedom. Nature has become an object for control, but so has the social body. The anxiety toward a homogenizing system in which all people are incorporated, their subjectivity traded for what H & A see as a myth (rationality replaces faith), is here realized. Enlightenment does not allow for thought outside the rational, individual outside of the social. On a side note, it’s interesting to note that many anarcho-situationist sorts now use this sort of ‘rationale’ to decry traditional political dissent or critique, arguing that critiques a part of a totalizing system only serves to affirm the validity of the whole. Critical theory attempts to do this, though it is seriously flawed.
Anyway, I found some similarity between the way Enlightenment is inscribed on the mind and Panopticism is inscribed on the body. Each works to mystify a social construction in order to constitute selves rather than control them. (Compare to Hitler Youth?)
Still, H & A’s argument reeks of liberalism, a fear of unquestioning masses—see Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses—that blindly accept social mechanisms as natural. For H & A, revolutionary consciousness is not possible except as an occasional paroxysm of irrationality. In fact, H & A see anti-Semitism as one of these. Critical theory seems to be the other possibility to escape the domination of Enlightenment, but it’s not exactly the solution to Lukacs' problem of the reified masses…but maybe they could get Charlton Heston to record a Dialectic of Enlightenment on tape and play it on loudspeakers in public places, or to the proles on Odysseus’ ship. Maybe it’s why Odysseus had them block their ears.
posted by Anonymous at 1:04 AM
First, let me say that “objective” is a problematic term, as I’m sure we’re all aware, one that has a variety of meanings that have morphed over time. (An “objective” illustration used to be one that depicted the essential/ideal form of a particular object, one that perhaps displayed many different stages of life at the same time. Later, a photograph became the most “objective” means of scientific illustration, etc...) That said, it is a word that is quite useful and quite often associated with scientific endeavor.
Adorno and Horkheimer discuss the way in which “myth turns into enlightenment, and nature into mere objectivity” (9). Here nature as “objectivity” connotes a nature that is subjected to distance, which turns it into an object of study/examination/domination. “Like science, magic pursues aims, but seeks to achieve them by mimesis—not by progressively distancing itself from the object.” Science cultivates a distance, an “objectivity” that magic lacks and that nature is subjected to. Adorno and Horkheimer refer again and again to this distance as a means of domination. (“The distance between subject and object, a presupposition of abstraction, is grounded in the distance from the thing itself which the master achieved through the mastered” (13)— the abstraction being something like a scientific theory/model, capable of repetition, the master the scientist, and the mastered nature, I presume.)
“Thinking objectifies itself to become an automatic, self-activating process; an impersonation of the machine that it produces itself so that ultimately the machine can replace it” (25). (By self-objectifying we are becoming drones! We will be replaced by machines!) Or maybe this is another way of saying that our subjectivity (which A and H associate with art/contemplation) might be replaced by the dogma of technoscience- that we are being alienated, our spirits objectified, and our realities subjected to unrelenting rationalism. Or something like that.
There is so much to say about this! I hope that we will discuss it in class. Also, I would like to say that there is a lot to think about with the gendered descriptions of nature and subjugation. I know that feminist literature has taken Bacon on for his misogynist metaphors, but perhaps we should think about the Siren analogy as well—what notions of gender in relation to science/rationality are subtly conveyed?
posted by Jackie at 9:28 PM
Wow, Julie, I was really hoping that someone talked about representation, as it came up in many different and provocative instances in both texts. I decided to examine the object/subject dichotomy in “The Concept of Enlightenment,” which turned out to be quite a feat. I don’t think that I will be able to encapsulate all of the ways in which “subject,” “object,” “subjugated,” and “objectified,”
are used, but here my contribution to the dialogue:
posted by Jackie at 8:50 PM 