Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W.

Adornos Dialectic of Enlightenment exemplifies an exotic flavor of Marxism associated with the so-called Frankfurt School or Institut fr Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research). The Institute originated one of the most influential models of social criticism of the twentieth century and is still alive and kicking, having produced both second and third generations of scholars (Jrgen Habermas is the most important of the second generation, Axel Honneth of the third). The model involves supplementing the economic and historical analyses of Marx with a psychoanalytic understanding of personality and the human subject, but many other sources were put in play as well, most notably Nietzsche. The Frankfurt Schools approach to aesthetics was dominated by a concern for the fate of art in mass society, by the theme of aesthetic experience as a critical resource on the basis of which the aesthetic subject transcends ordinary social reality, and by a sense of the increasing effectiveness of quasi-artistic techniques in what, since Marshall McLuhan, we call the media, with which public and private bureaucracies manipulate the masses into embracing rather than revolutionizing oppressive social arrangements. This kind of manipulation, they thought, manifested itself in the Western liberal democracies as well as the totalitarian states. The counterforce to this all-embracing manipulation of consciousness, or what Horkheimer and Adorno came to call the totally administered society, is critical theory, which consists in the determining negation of whatever is directly at hand [Unmittelbaren] (Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 20). The term negation is used by Horkheimer and Adorno in a special sense derived from Hegel. In this special sense, negation doesnt have the logical meaning of denial. In Hegels vocabulary, to negate something means rather to transform it into something else. More precisely, it means to grasp the logic, structure, and functioning of a thing in such a way that you can describe the process by which it transforms itself into something else. Negation, then, is a way of analyzing a phenomenon that goes beyond its superficial properties, penetrates into its inner workings or logic, and understands it not as a statically given object but as something in the process of becoming other than it is. This is why the term negation is modified by determining. A mere abstract negation, for Hegel, is something like our ordinary logical sense of denial. An abstract negation of something merely contrasts or compares that something with something different. A determining (or determinate) negation, on the other hand, arrives at the negation of something by deriving or deducing it from the very thing being negated. A paradigm of negation in this sense is Marx and Engelss analysis in the Communist Manifesto of how capitalism is gradually transforming itself into communism. By understanding capitalism as a social system that manifests a process of development, Marx and Engels show how it changes the conditions under which it operates and creates conditions such as highly efficient techniques of production, extraordinary affluence, and an extremely well-educated and self-confident workforce that make possible a

 radically different form of society characterized by unprecedented freedom. Communism, in other words, derives from capitalism and only from capitalism. Communism is the determinate negation of capitalism.

Horkheimer and Adorno, however, speak of their method as the determinate negation of whatever is directly given, or immediacy [Unmittelbaren]. By immediacy, they mean anything but in particular any social phenomenon, practice, institution, belief, custom that appears to be self-evident, natural, inevitable, fixed, eternal, or merely given, such as any variable social condition that is taken as a permanent natural limit. It seems to be part of the nature of social life (at least until capitalism/communism) that the institutions and beliefs of a particular society appear to its members as immediacies in this sense. The negation of whatever is directly at hand means two things. First, it means performing an analysis showing that the apparently self-evident, natural, eternal institution or belief is not self-evident but depends rather upon a complex set of preconditions. It means, in other words, showing that some apparently fixed aspect of social reality has a history, that it did not always exist in its current form but rather that it emerged and developed in response to changing conditions and contingencies. Second, it means that any institution or belief is not merely to be described and explained, but understood and evaluated in terms of what it might become if allowed to develop freely. Horkheimer and Adornos approach to critique not only looks backward, in other words, to grasp how the prevailing social reality developed from very different initial conditions (and is therefore not a fixed eternal limit). It also looks forward to imagine and anticipate how what is only potential at the present time might be realized in the future and, importantly, it takes that potential future as a standard according to which the present is to be evaluated. The potential in question is the possibility of human freedom, a fully emancipated society, which is also the goal of the Enlightenment and of the kind of Marxism that attracts Horkheimer and Adorno. The goal of critical theory is thus to grasp existing things as such, not merely to note their abstract spatial-temporal relationships, by which they can be seized, but, on the contrary, to think of them as surface, as mediated conceptual moments which are only fulfilled by revealing their social, historical, and human meaning.1 But thats not the end of the story. For it turns out that this critique itself (the determinate negation of immediacy), which is made in the name of reason, must be negated in its turn in order to neutralize what Horkheimer and Adorno consider to be the oppressive character of a totalizing standard of free development namely, that of a thoroughly rational society, that is, a society in which each part derives its meaning only in relation to the whole and which is driven by the need to rationalize all aspects of human existence in the sense of making them efficient, functional, integrated, harmonious, etc. In this dialectic of enlightenment, as Horkheimer and Adorno characterize it, reason 1 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 20.

becomes a new, modern mythology, as society pursues efficiency for efficiencys sake in a manner that is divorced from substantive human interests. So critical theory turns on reason itself and becomes an expos of reasons entanglement in domination. In what sense is reason akin to domination? Horkheimer and Adorno quote Kant: Reason has as its sole object the understanding and its effective application. It posits a certain collective unity as the goal of the activities of the understanding, and this unity is the system [of thought organized according to its own internal logic].2 Reason, according to Kant (who, Horkheimer and Adorno say, speaks for the Enlightenment), is the spontaneous tendency to organize knowledge of the world by means of the ascent to higher and ever higher principles. The idea that each individual bit of cognition should be subsumed under principles, they seem to feel, means that reason (which supplies the principles) has a creepy affinity with top-down organization. The idea that individual parts are subordinate to the larger wholes of which they are members is creepy because that image is eerily like the vision of a totalitarian or authoritarian society. To put the point with somewhat greater rigor, reason for the Enlightenment is a purely formal affair: Reason contributes nothing but the idea of systematic unity, the formal elements of fixed conceptual relationships. Any substantial objective which might be put forward as a rational objective is, according to the Enlightenment in its strict sense, delusion, falsehood, rationalization.3 There is a fatal complicity between reason and domination, borne of a purely formal conception of reason that restricts the latter to something like calculation, the optimization of a system of categories and principles in which everything has a place and there is a place for everything. Excluded from this understanding is the idea that reason includes reflection on ends, purposes, and goals, or what Horkheimer and Adorno call substantial objectives. They sometimes call reason so understood instrumental reason, meaning reasoning about the most efficient means to ends rather than reasoning about ends themselves. Put differently, efficiency, control, organization, and administration are taken for granted as ends in themselves, so that the implicit goal becomes the eradication of spontaneity, difference, individuality, unpredictability in a word, freedom. Horkheimer and Adorno claim that the culture industry, where culture is produced in accordance with formulae, illustrates the triumph of instrumental reason over traditional ideas about the nature and significance of art. According to the Enlightenment, art should be a realm of freedom, free to develop in accordance with its own logic (if that is the right term) without being subordinated to the imperatives of church or state. But in fact, 2 Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 63. 3Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 64.

 according to Horkheimer and Adorno, the logic of art now reflects the instrumentalization of reason. More specifically, this is seen in the culture industry, where aesthetic products are fabricated to satisfy the need for entertainment and which lack the implicitly critical and utopian content that the artwork had formerly displayed and which made art politically significant:

In every work of art, style is a promise. In being absorbed through art into the dominant form of universality, into the current musical, pictorial, or verbal idiom, what is expressed seeks to be reconciled with the idea of the true universal. This promise of the work of art to create truth by impressing its unique contours on the socially transmitted forms is as necessary as it is hypocritical. By claiming to anticipate fulfillment through their aesthetic derivatives, it posits the real forms of the existing order as absolute. To this extent the claims of art are always also ideology. Yet it is only in its struggle with tradition, a struggle precipitated in style, that art can find expression for suffering. The moment in the work of art by which it transcends reality cannot, indeed, be severed from style; that moment, however, does not consist in achieved harmony, in the questionable unity of form and content, inner and outer, individual and society, but in those traits in which the discrepancy emerges, in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity. Instead of exposing itself to this failure, in which the style of the great work has always negated itself, the inferior work has relied on its similarity to others, the surrogate of identity. The culture industry has finally posited this imitation as absolute.4 There has always been an ideological dimension to art, namely the illusion it offers of reconciliation or unity between, for example, individual and society, which is expressed as the unity of form and content, or the works style, by means of which an individuated viewpoint is expressed in a vocabulary that is accessible to others. But the culture industry takes up and preserves only the ideological dimension: style becomes the standardized production of reliable effects. Horkheimer and Adorno stress how the greatest works of art resisted this ideological servitude by incorporating a tragic dimension that drew attention to their own insufficiency. The so-called products of the culture industry, on the other hand, eliminate the utopian character of art by fusing it with the everyday and reducing it to sheer entertainment. What is there to say in response to this thesis? A refutation, I take it, would involve showing that the culture of modernity is richer than can be characterized in terms of the dominance of a one-sided instrumental reason that grounds a totally administered world and its culture industry. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno are primarily concerned with three spheres of activity and inquiry in modernity: science, morality (or justice and politics), and art. So one line of thought would be to review reflection on the nature of science, morality, and art in the twentieth century, and it seems obvious that one could offer an argument to the effect that ideas and practices in 4 Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 103.

these three fields are anything but purely calculative. The results might be equivocal, but I presume we can agree that a look at the philosophy of science, political and moral theory, painting, sculpture, music, theater, the novel, and poetry (not to mention cinema) would turn up a great deal of prima facie evidence of ideas and practices that go beyond the merely calculative. In another sense, though, there certainly is something to be said for the thesis about the formal character of reason in the twentieth century: I mean the achievements in formal logic following upon Bertrand Russells demonstration, in 1902, that the most basic logical intuitions are self-contradictory.5 This led mathematicians and logicians to develop formulas of transformation whose validity does not depend on content. The procedure was to establish a set of simple formulas (axioms) from which could be derived, by the application of rules of proof, mathematical theorems such as those for arithmetic or geometry. The salient features of such a system are consistency (the axioms and rules must be such that contradictory theorems cannot be derived) and completeness (all true statement expressible within the system must be derivable from the axioms). The transformation rules that apply to the axioms are purely syntactical that is, they manipulate the theorems without relying on any semantic content whatsoever. For Frege, for example, a number is simply the answer to the question: How many? This definition is all that is required to give a formal account of arithmetic, but, of course, it doesnt say anything about what (if anything) these mathematical entities refer to. The establishment of this kind of model-making as the dominant paradigm of scientific achievement may be the main cultural event of the twentieth century.6 Henceforth, the hallmarks of scientific sophistication are form, proof, and syntax, while content, truth, and semantics fall by the wayside. It isnt difficult to see the attraction of this model at work in formalist painting and sculpture, the involuted or self-reflexive novel, modern linguistics, and methodological approaches in the humanities such as structuralism and semiotics. 5 From Aristotle on, it seemed self-evident that any given property determined the class or set of things that have that property. Thus, the property of redness determines the class of all things that are red, the property of extension determines the class of all things that are extended, and so on. But Russell discovered that the concept of class itself does not straightforwardly determine the class of all things that are classes. First, he distinguished between classes that are members of themselves and classes that are not. The class of horses, for example, being not a horse but a concept, is not a member of itself. He then asked: Is the class of all classes that are not members of themselves, a member of itself? This question, it seems, is undecidable: if it is a member of itself, then it is not, but if it is not a member of itself, then it is. This result violates the basic principle of Aristotelian logic known as the Law of the Excluded Middle: for any given x, x either is or is not x. But if x is the class of all classes that are not members of themselves, then it both is and is not a member of itself. 6 Formalism was refuted at more or less the same time that it was invented, by Kurt Gdels Incompleteness Theorem, which showed that no purely formal system can be both complete and consistent. But that didnt diminish the attractiveness of formalism.

On the other hand, its not at all clear that this is attributable to a dialectic of enlightenment (it seems, rather, to have been an accident of intellectual history) or that there is any necessary connection between formalization in this sense, and authoritarian or totalitarian social tendencies. If the thesis of the dominance of instrumental reason is so extreme as to render almost unrecognizable the career of Western modernity, why did Horkheimer and Adorno adopt it? One reason, I think, is their commitment to the Marxist idea that societies are to be understood in terms of a single principle that determines every aspect of the larger social whole. In a Weberian rather than a Marxist understanding of modernity, what we should expect is increasing specialization of various spheres of society, each of which develops its own logic, its own decision-making procedures, its own way of making judgments. From Horkheimer and Adornos perspective in Dialectic of Enlightenment, this specialization is what destroys the substantive reason that is required for authentic, thorough-going critique. Reason is reduced from the attempt to interpret a given activity or institution from the perspective of the widest and deepest possible conception of human potential, to a mere instrument for ordering and classifying material in ways that make it easier to manipulate. From a Weberian point of view, almost the opposite is actually taking place: with increasing specialization come distinctive and differentiated ways of doing things, so that, for example, it is no longer considered appropriate that art and morality should conform to the same overarching imperatives, as was the case in premodern civilizations. Weberian modernity gives us a picture of how reason works in the modern world that is pluralistic and decentered. The question then arises as to whether there is a place for the kind of all-encompassing, total critique of society that went along with the idea of society as a unified sphere. Horkheimer and Adorno had advocated a critique of ideology whose purpose was to unmask domination. Although their point of departure included Marx, they saw Marxism as an aspect of the Enlightenment, in other words, as a higher-order reason that unmasked the institutions of bourgeois society as still mythological, not yet fully enlightened. The problem emerges when this critical rationality is no longer able to expose domination. That happens because reason itself emerges as a force for domination, which Horkheimer and Adorno then, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trace back to the basic entanglement of reason with self-preservation. Unmasking now means unmasking the very process of criticism that had devoted itself to unmasking, showing even it to be complicit in domination. But this new project of unmasking has no foundation on which to rely the picture of a fully- and freely-developing humanity on which it relied before having now been exposed as fatally tainted with the will to domination in the form of the will to selfpreservation. Instead, critique has to proceed as an enterprise of endless negation that celebrates its own powerlessness that all its assertions are made only to be negated as an aspect of its critical stance.