Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 23:02:18 -0400
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org>
Subject: Re: Translations of the Dialectic of Enlightenment


"Rationalism is the philosophy of bourgeois political economy. It is 
materialist and not idealist in so far as it combats superstition, seeks to 
expand the productive forces and increase the sum total of goods. But there 
is no such thing as a classless materialism. Rationalism conceives this 
expansion as a division of labor between the passive masses and the active 
elite. Thereby it reinstates idealism. Because it does not and cannot doubt 
that harmonious progress is inevitable by this path, the essence of 
rationalism is uncritical or vulgar materialism, and uncritical or vulgar 
idealism.

"In the springtime of capitalism this rationalistic division of labor was 
the basis of a common attempt of individual men associated in a natural 
environment to achieve control over nature. Today this division of labor is 
the control in social production of the administrative elite over the 
masses. Rationalism has reached its end in the complete divorce and 
absolute disharmony between manual and intellectual labor, between the 
socialized proletariat and the monster of centralized capital."

-- State Capitalism and World Revolution, by C.L.R. James in collaboration 
with Raya Dunayevskaya & Grace Lee, 1950.

“Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely: all my means are 
sane, my motive and my object mad.”
— Herman Melville, Moby Dick, chapter 41


Thanks for the clarifications and sharing your expertise.  I know I have 
and read Buck-Morss and Rose years ago, but my memory banks have been wiped 
clean.  I finally got a copy of Jarvis after seeing it recommended here 
some years back, but never read it.

I am aware of Adorno as a master of irony, indirection, and metaphor, but 
this is just where the problem lies, if that is what A & H are doing in 
this book and I have missed out on the stylistic factor completely.  There 
are many people, many completely independently of A & H, who have utilized 
a concept akin to that of instrumental reason.  For example, Joseph 
Weizenbaum, a scandalized pioneer of artificial intelligence,  used a 
comparable notion in his 1967 book COMPUTER POWER AND HUMAN REASON: FROM 
JUDGMENT TO CALCULATION.  The general phenomenon is a well-known 
ideological phenomenon of our time, regardless of the disparate 
intellectual trajectories involved.  My problem with this notion in many of 
its guises is that the original mystification of the technocratic ideology 
is compounded by taking it at face value.  I don't believe an ideology can 
be explained in its own terms alone, or a metaphor explained by a metaphor, 
or a myth by a myth.

The first thing that bothers me about this book, based on the first 
chapter, is that historical materialism has completely dropped out of the 
picture.  Ideology appears sui generis.  Underlying motives are postulated 
as if in a vacuum.  General references to agrarian or industrial societies 
are not particularly helpful.  Hence the motives and mechanisms behind the 
growth of certain ideological configurations of knowledge are inadequately 
explained if at all.  The second troubling dimension is that everything is 
reduced to reasoning by analogy.  Decades later Adorno was to write that 
sociology of knowledge was inadequate because ideas could not be explained 
by motive alone independently of a consideration of truth content.  But the 
truth content of the natural sciences remained a closed book to A & H their 
entire lives.  All they ever tasted was the pauper's broth of philosophy: 
hence all they could do was to equate science with positivism.  Hence we 
are treated with nonsense such as you describe:

>myth is already enlightenment because it is already an attempt at 
>explaining and controling our natural environment thereby being a tool for 
>overcoming our fear of what is unknown to us (and therefore potentially 
>dangerous). This thesis is the easiest to accept.

I don't accept this at all.  Note that the differentiation between the 
objective content of myth and science is elided by assuming an identical 
social function.  But this only proves how deeply entrapped A & H are in 
the alienated state of being of the frightened humanistic intellectual who 
knows nothing of science and only contemplates the world several times 
removed.  These people know nothing either of science or of the 'man of 
science'.  Bereft of the necessary concreteness and appropriate 
distinctions, they can only naively reproduce positivist ideology as an 
image of science.

Even the general images of Enlightenment, without specific mention of 
natural science, are mystified demystifications.  Per your description:

>However, Adorno also aligns enlightenment with myths and he tries to make 
>this plausible by appealing to the fact that enlightenment is dogmatic 
>because it relegates everything outside itself to be mere myth (which 
>should be understood as the 'projection of subjective properties onto 
>nature'). This is problematic even for enlightenment itself because being 
>nothing more than critique it depends on myths (if there were no myths 
>then there was nothing to enlighten us about) and being unable to 
>recognise this dependence it becomes sceptical with the result that it 
>devalues itself in the end because we cannot be sure if enlightenment 
>itself could not be a myth - a mere 'projection of subjective properties 
>onto nature'.

To make proper sense out of this metaphorical characterization demands a 
lot of reading in between the lines.  I can read in between the lines, but 
I can't be sure if A & H bothered to do so themselves at this stage.  All 
this sour grapes does not move me, as depressing as the Second World War 
must have been.  To decode these statements, I would make two moves: (1) 
what explains the inability of Enlightenment to explain the 
irrational?  (2) How does the suspension of pure reason in a vacuum cut it 
off from its roots and thus enable self-mystification or radical skepticism?

What was the problem of modern rationalism after all, and the scientific 
revolution?  It was hardly that Enlightenment went too far, but that, 
upsetting religion and the legitimation of existing class rule, it had to 
be contained.  Empiricism was the containment of materialism.  The emergent 
bourgeois order tailored a rationalism dividing society into the rational 
administration of people and things (first things, then people), and the 
irrational idealism of everyday life and traditional social arrangements 
and belief systems.  From this dualism one could spring in either 
direction: either assimilating the fruits of science to fideism, or 
absorbing the whole of human life into technocracy.  Empiricism itself went 
both ways: Berkeley and Hume already represent the poles.  Adorno himself 
later explained the contradictions of bourgeois society in the moral 
philosophy of Kant with far greater acumen than what A & H give us here.

The man of science and the technocrat are not necessarily the same animal 
either, any more than the artisanal ideal equals that of the factory 
manager.  The assimilation of the scientist to bureaucratic structures was 
not only not a foregone conclusion at the beginning, but is not even a 
guaranteed phenomenon today.  Institutions take a lot of trouble to create 
the type of professionals they need, disciplining the motivational 
structure and innocent scientific curiosity of future professionals to the 
needs of the marketplace and the military-industrial complex.

Judging from the first chapter alone, the one thing that prevents this work 
from being a product of reactionary lebensphilosophie is that somewhere 
down the line A & H criticize that, too. The virtue of this school is that 
they are alert to the positivism-lebensphilosophie dichotomy and attempt to 
mediate it. However, they are doing a bad job of it so far, drowning in 
their own anti-scientific idealist heritage, losing even historical 
materialism in the process.  I have analyzed some other texts of Horkheimer 
and Adorno on this list with attention to their characterization of 
science.  I have found them all far superior to D of E, which so far, is 
almost insufferable.

The equation of logic, mathematics and science to myth and magic not only 
obliterates all differentia specifica, but exhibits all the worst qualities 
of the right-wing attack on the scientific age as the "reign of quantity", 
as does all this talk about the reduction of reality to abstract, 
quantifiable, identical, interchangeable, units.  Indeed, such a 
technocratic ideology is as recognizable as its right-wing 
counter-ideology, but A & H have the chutzpah to equate the two and to 
purport to explain a myth in a mythical way.  As the Second World War was 
the nadire of western civilization, so was D of E the nadir of A & H's despair.

At 12:09 AM 7/17/2003 +0200, Claus Hansen wrote:
>Hi Ralph and the rest of the list,
>
>I don't think the new translation alone will change your view on A & H's 
>understanding of the science in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. But as I 
>am currently about DoE in my Thesis on Adorno and the list being so silent 
>recently I wouldn't mind a quick discussion about the book on this list.
>
>I'm quite sure that Adorno did not mean his statement about Enlightenment 
>reverting to mytholody literally. In fact in one of his lectures (the one 
>on Metaphysics) he states
>
>"I once said that after Auschwitz one could no longer write poetry, and 
>that gave rise to a discussion I did not anticipate when I wrote those 
>words. I did not anticipate it because it is in the nature of philosophy 
>and everything I write is, unavoidably, philosophy, even if it is not 
>concerned with so-called philosophical themes that nothing is meant quite 
>literally"
>
>This is also what Buck-Morss and Rose emphasises in their early readings 
>of Adorno, in order to understand this paradoxical claim about myth 
>being  enlightenment etc. one has to understand the style of writing 
>employed by Adorno. The question is how we are to interpret this claim. In 
>my understanding (which leans heavily on the interpretations offered by 
>J.M Bernstein, Disenchantment and Ethics and S. Jarvis, Adorno: Critical 
>Introduction) myth is already enlightenment because it is already an 
>attempt at explaining and controling our natural environment thereby being 
>a tool for overcoming our fear of what is unknown to us (and therefore 
>potentially dangerous). This thesis is the easiest to accept. However, 
>Adorno also aligns enlightenment with myths and he tries to make this 
>plausible by appealing to the fact that enlightenment is dogmatic because 
>it relegates everything outside itself to be mere myth (which should be 
>understood as the 'projection of subjective properties onto nature'). This 
>is problematic even for enlightenment itself because being nothing more 
>than critique it depends on myths (if there were no myths then there was 
>nothing to enlighten us about) and being unable to recognise this 
>dependence it becomes sceptical with the result that it devalues itself in 
>the end because we cannot be sure if enlightenment itself could not be a 
>myth - a mere 'projection of subjective properties onto nature'. While 
>this explains what Adorno means this does not defend his claim but I find 
>both Bernsteins, Jarvis' and Espen Hammer's interpretations of Adorno and 
>his critics convincing in this respect. Hammer and Bernstein tries to show 
>how for instance Habermas in fact succumbs to 'identity thinking' if one 
>interprets Adorno the way they do.
>
>But please elaborate on your claim about their knowledge of the 'man of 
>science', that would be interesting.
>
>Claus


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The C.L.R. James Institute:
      http://www.clrjamesinstitute.org
Ralph Dumain's "The Autodidact Project":
      http://www.autodidactproject.org

"Nature has no outline but imagination has."
                           -- William Blake