Critique of Instrumental Reason (cont) and My Critique.
13. This paradox is the core of the authors' famous idea of the dialectic of enlightenment. Horkheimer and Adorno employ the concept of enlightenment to designate not just a specific historical epoch but the whole civilisatory process. Enlightenment does not mean the process whereby mankind comes to approximate some ideal standard of reason, truth, autonomy and social progress. Enlightenment is not understood as the antithesis of myth but as the perpetuation of its innermost logic. The ancient myths were interpretative schemas that eternalised the present by making it the basis of an ideal order. They were a first version of enlightenment--they were intellectual products of man's need to subordinate the world to his own categories of order, regularity and explanation. Myth initiates a process of intellectualisation whereby the world is controlled in its cognitive appropriation. But myth eventually falls victim to this same process. Intellectualisation turns back on myth in a destructive, critical spirit. Eventually myth and other great religious explanations of the world are submitted to critique by more sophisticated--scientistic--versions of enlightenment and found wanting. From this time, enlightenment takes on the meaning it usually has for us: it is understood as the critical exposure and overcoming of all vestiges of myth--all previous worldviews which rely on superstition and faith without being able to rationally account for themselves. The program of enlightenment is thus the destruction of the rational pretensions of all previous forms of social explanation-magic, myth, and religion. However, this program of critical destruction of the past forms of rational explanation is ultimately nihilistic. It eventually annihilates precisely those concepts, for which enlightenment had stood and fought. The central values of the historical enlightenment--truth, reason, freedom and justice-- eventually succumb by not being able to meet the new standards of contemporary rigorous scientific analysis. Under stringent analysis these values are revealed as illusions and demoted to the level of magic. Whereas the enlightenment believed reason to be an anthropological constant and truth correspondence to an existing objective structure of the world, contemporary thought reveals that the former is a variable cultural construct without substantive content: the product of a contingent and idiosyncratic historical odyssey; truth is reduced to a property of sentences with no direct purchase on the world. Freedom and justice are value concepts without any legitimate place in a scientific worldview. This is the dialectic of enlightenment. Each new form of enlightenment destroys its predecessor and discards it as just another myth. However, the most modern variant of enlightenment--scientific positivism--presumes not to be subject to this dialectic. Scientific method is immune from this fate of perpetual self-critique. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the desire to avoid critical examination is symptomatic of ideological limitation and weakness. It signifies that even this most scientific version of enlightenment has its own metaphysical bias and as such is just another form of myth. Positivism presupposes the "facts" of the existing world as the natural, eternal substratum of all human experience. It ignores the self-consciousness of its own historical preconditions and invests formal rationality--devoted to the discovery of efficient means rather than ends-- and existing social powers with an absolute status. It abstracts this rationality and isolates it from its sociological underpinnings in the bourgeois totality. This is a status identical to that claimed by the old metaphysical truths and myths. This lack of self-consciousness is a perpetuation of myth at one with the complete lack of critical energies characteristic of the totally administered society. This society equates itself with science and rationality.
14. There is a real question about the theoretical intentions behind Horkheimer and Adorno critique of civilisatory reason. Clearly their argument is that the civilizatory process has ultimately produced a catastrophic imbalance between the instrumental and reflective elements of rationality that were originally thought of as constituting a unity. But they go further and in places and specific formulations seem to condemn reason in toto. Whether these statements are to be viewed as an exaggerated critical image: the result of redoubled critical energies in the face of deteriorating historical circumstances or as literal truth is open to interpretation. I only want to offer a few critical remarks on their view of modernity. If one takes the theoretical framework as a whole--the twin ideas of instrumental reason and the totally administered society--the first thing to be said is that as a theory it is far too indiscriminant and extreme. The identification of civilisatory rationality with domination is both too totalising and aporetic. The authors subsume all knowledges, irrespective of their methodological and substantive peculiarities, under the category of instrumental reason aimed at control. While the examples they draw from technical and administrative knowledge are plausible, this case is much harder to prove across the broad spectrum of knowledges. However, even if their account is accepted, this is not the end of their difficulties. If reason itself as expressed in science and philosophy is complicit with barbaric domination then what is the status of Adorno and Horkheimer's own works? To the extent that even philosophical thought is contaminated as just another manifestation of instrumental reason, no form of conceptual operation or discursive thought can be immune from being tarred with the brush of domination. In an effort for consistency, our authors retreat from any positive claims to knowledge. Especially in Adorno's latter view, philosophy is reduced to the negative function of the self-criticism of conceptual thought and autonomous art takes on a normative status as a non-conceptual approach to nature that exemplifies a sort of self surrender equivalent to real freedom and emancipation. Yet, this defensive position is clearly unsatisfactory. To conceive philosophy as negative self-criticism does not escape the horizon of conceptual thought which is indispensable for communication and determinant clarity. Furthermore the downgrading of positive scientific knowledge of society was to have disastrous consequences in the post-war period when these thinkers felt no need to adjust their theory of the totally administered society in the light of the later evolution of liberal-democratic regimes. If we view this totalising critique of rationality from the standpoint of the possibility of a self-grounded modernity, we can see that Adorno and Horkheimer have placed themselves in an almost impossible position. We have already seen how philosophical reflection on the collapse of traditional world views and their replacements has gradually eroded all potential candidates for the position of emancipatory bearers: the Kantian transcendental subject, Hegel's spirit, Feuerbach's humanity and Marx's proletariat, Tocqueville's freedom, Nietzsche's Übermensch and Weber's individual personality. Horkheimer and Adorno appear to rule out humanity, history, reason and philosophy. With them the promise of an emancipated modernity as the bearer of real cultural freedom and social emancipation cannot be addressed to any concrete addressees. Their hopes retreat to the non-conceptual domain of autonomous art and they address their negative philosophy to an audience of isolated survivors and the future.
15. If we turn more directly to the notion of state capitalism and the totally administered society, with hindsight it is obvious that Horkheimer and Adorno exaggerate trends, which appeared common to all advanced industrial societies in the late 30's and 40's. They did not pay sufficient attention to the real and very substantial differences. They took totalitarianism as their general model of late capitalism and this was ahistorical insofar as it ignored many of the specific features of the so-called liberal democratic systems. The general analysis is rooted in a radicalized version of Western Marxism tailored to account for the impasse of revolution in the West. On this account, the historical delay of revolution is explained by the integration of the proletariat into the system as a result of the inducements of bourgeois ideology. This means that their general diagnosis-- while very insightful and disturbing in many ways--is far too one-sided and pessimistic in so far as it almost ignores the potentialities for social change and social resistance to the oppressive aspects of liberal capitalism. Habermas, a second-generation critical theorist, makes the point that Horkheimer and Adorno almost overlooked the great historical contribution made by bourgeois society to the project of human emancipation. And this is quite strange given the real nostalgia for 19th century competitive capitalism that appears in their diagnosis. In other words, Habermas challenges the totally negative assessment of bourgeois rationality and science as instrumental and repressive. Aside from its enormous extension of human productive forces in terms of science and technology, bourgeois society also has an important cultural and political legacy even if it is everywhere flawed and in need of supplementation and improvement. Bourgeois society is an order that served as fertile ground for the establishment of democratic decision-making processes, individualist patterns of identity formation, autonomous aesthetic experiences and for an institutional structure founded on universalistic notions of morality and law. These survivals of bourgeois rationality in the liberal-democratic societies of late capitalism provide both an arena and a source of social struggle and contradiction within present society which offers at least the prospect of future gains for democratic and emancipatory forces.
16. Obviously, rejection of the idea of a totally administered society also has important implications for the idea of the cultural industry. It is simply untenable to defend the original simple version that viewed the culture industry as a system of domination and manipulation of the masses, as the instrument for the realisation of "false needs" which enable the continued reproduction of late capitalism. The theory of the culture industry thus overburdens contemporary culture with a sense ineradicable guilt that it has served as a sort of cement for s system of inhuman and impersonal domination and absolves the theoretician of the task of analyzing its inner diversity and differentiation. Nor was it convincing to assert that such manipulation was omnipotent. I have already mentioned the fact that Horkheimer and Adorno paid far too little attention to those other agencies contributing positively to individual socialisation beyond the allegedly weakened family. This neglect of the wider sphere of social interaction like sub-cultures and the public sphere as co-operative creations of group specific horizons of orientation and values meant that our authors were reluctant to concede that administrative manipulation was subject to limits and other potential sites of resistance. Moreover, this view of culture as a part of an "iron system" denies the complexity and autonomy of the cultural domain even in late capitalism. The idea of the totally administered mass society where all tastes, desires, views and interests are homogenised and made as uniform as the mass individual of the Frankfurt School nightmare is an exaggerated image of a short post-World War II period. From our perspective, what emerges is not only a fair degree of standardisation and uniformisation of consumption but also an enormous pluralisation of tastes, practices, enjoyments and needs. What is clear is that Horkheimer and Adorno's position not only leads to a politics of despair (lack of concrete emancipatory vision and analysis), it also cannot account for the actual struggles against advanced capitalism in the sixties. It presupposed a traditional intellectual suspicion of mass culture that was dominant before post-Second World War era of youth culture and also the maintenance of an ideological consensus that may have existed in period they are working in but which was subsequently undermined at least in part by the very agencies of mass culture. In part, this over-emphasis on culture in large measure stemmed from the absence of effective social-political options in the epoch after the victory of Fascism and the sense that “culture” seemed the sole accessible terrain of critical activity for radical intellectuals. Thus Horkheimer and Adorno probably attributed too large a role to the cultural industry as an agent of social control and underestimated the complexities of its potential effects. This simply compounded their equally significant neglect of the other typical agencies of socialisation. A more plausible view is that contemporary culture including the mass media along with other elements of the public sphere actually mediates social conflict and serves as a mechanism that helps to negotiate social change. In this constellation, contemporary culture reflects, expresses and articulates social reality in a mediated fashion. While not ignoring potential for mass culture to serve as an instrument of conformity and ideological hegemony of powerful vested interests, we must also acknowledge that contemporary culture also remains a theatre of social conflict and an instrument of social reflection and ideological diversity.
