‘It only needs all’: re-reading Dialectic of Enlightenment at 70

Horkheimer left, Adorno right, Habermas background right, running hand through hair. Max Weber-Soziologentag, Heidelberg,April,1964. Wikicommons/Jeremy J.Shapiro. Some rights reserved.How do you make an argument against social domination when the very
terms, concepts and languages at your disposal are shaped by, and in turn serve
that same social domination? Probably in the way you would light a fire in a
wooden stove. How would you write a book about the impossibility of writing
just that book? Like a poem about the pointlessness of poems. What if your
enemies’ enemies are your own worst enemies? Can you defend liberal society
from its fascist enemies when you know it is the wrong state of things? You
must, but dialectics may well ‘make cowards of us all’ and spoil our ‘native
hue of resolution’.

Dialectic of Enlightenment[1] is a very
strange book, and although it was published, in 1947, by the leading publishing
house for exiled, German-language anti-fascist literature, the Querido Verlag
in Amsterdam, alongside many of the biggest literary names of the time, no-one
will have expected that it gradually became one of the classics of modern
social philosophy.

It is a book that commits all the sins editors tend to warn against: its
chapters are about wildly differing subject matters; the writing is repetitive,
circular and fragmented; no argument ever seems exhausted or final and there
are no explicitly stated conclusions, and certainly no trace of a policy impact
trajectory. Arguments start somewhere, suddenly come to a halt and then move on
to something else. If this sounds like the script for a Soviet film from the
revolutionary period, then that is not totally coincidental: it is an avant-garde montage
film, transcribed into philosophy. It is an avant-garde montage
film, transcribed into philosophy.

Unsurprisingly, given that it was written during WW2 in American exile
and published at the beginning of the Cold War, it does not carry its Marxism
on its sleeves, but it gives clear enough hints: in the preface, Horkheimer and
Adorno state that the aim of the book is ‘to explain why humanity, instead of
entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism’. This
addresses the dialectic referenced in the title of the book. The important bit
here is the ‘instead of’: the reality of barbarism was undeniable and clearly
visible, but the originality of the formulation lies in its implication that
humanity could have been expected to enter ‘a truly human state’ sometime
earlier in the twentieth century, leaving behind its not so human state.

The promise of progress towards humanity, held by socialists (and some
liberals), blew up in their faces. It would have been easy and straightforward
then to write a book arguing against the holding of such hope, but this would
not have been a dialectical book; Dialectic of Enlightenment undertakes
to rescue this hope by looking at why progress tipped over into its opposite.

Sergei Eisenstein, the “Father of Montage” in his silent films Strike (1924), Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1927), and historical epics Alexander Nevsky (1938), Ivan the Terrible (1944, 1958). St.Petersburg 1910, Wikicommons/Source unknown. Some rights reserved.

Whose barbarism?

A number of propositions have been made, at the time and later, as to
who or what is to be blamed for the barbarism. Capitalism was an obvious
answer, but then, capitalism does not typically and all the time produce
Holocausts (and capitalists could be found among the victims). Others pointed
at ‘the Germans’ and their peculiar intellectual and social history; this, too,
is neither an entirely wrong nor a quite satisfying answer. Again others
pointed at ‘the bureaucracy’ and modern statecraft. These surely played a role
but there are plenty of state bureaucracies that do not engage in genocides and
world wars, most of the time. Horkheimer and Adorno made a much stranger, more
abstract and strangely radical proposition: the barbarism that destroyed
civilization was a product of civilization as such. It is civilization’s
self-destruction.

The attempt to formulate a theory of barbarism as the product of
civilization creates a very thorny problem, though: theorizing, the attempt to
bring about enlightenment, is very much the stuff of civilization, as it
involves thinking, language, perceptions, concepts, images, ideas, judgements,
‘spirit’ (which in the philosophical tradition Horkheimer and Adorno came from
means as much as ‘culture’). Dialectic of Enlightenment blames the
destruction of enlightenment on enlightenment, i.e. on itself. The philosopher
Jürgen Habermas some decades later cleverly pointed out that this is a bit of a
contradiction. That was exactly the point, though: the hint is in the title, in
the word ‘Dialectic’.

Title-page of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807. Wikicommons. Some rights reserved.The book’s painful starting point is described in the preface:
Horkheimer and Adorno looked for a position from which to confront fascism and
found that ‘in reflecting on its own guilt’, thought finds that it lacks a
language.

In the name of what exactly is it possible to challenge fascism
effectively? In the languages of sociology, psychology, history, philosophy?
The discourses of truth, freedom, human rights? Barbarism…
is civilization’s self-destruction.

Here is the rub: in the period in which fascism took power these sounded
hollow as they had been stripped of their authority. If this sounds familiar,
it is because, almost a century later, we are in a not so different situation.
Horkheimer and Adorno state – still in the preface – that fascist demagogues
and liberal intellectuals feed off the same (positivist) zeitgeist, marked by
the ‘self-destruction of the enlightenment’. Science and scholarship are not
potent weapons against fascism anymore, and this even affects tendencies that
are opposed to ‘official’, positivistic science.

The basic point here is that scientific, materialist, technological
rationality is a force for good only when it is linked to the idealistic notion
of general human emancipation, the goal of full rich lives for all, without
suffering, exploitation and oppression. (Using a word they had good reasons to
avoid, this is what Marx would have called ‘communism’). Only this link gives
empirical and rationalist science its truth and significance: enlightenment
needs to be ‘transcendental’, i.e. something that points beyond the actually
existing reality, not unlike metaphysics in traditional philosophy. It needs to
be critical, that is, in opposition to reality as it is.

The principal thesis of the book is that enlightenment purged itself of
this connection to society-transcending, non-empirical, critical truth, and as
early as on the second page of the preface Horkheimer and Adorno are happy to
name the thinker who exemplifies for them this fatal development: Auguste
Comte, the founder of positivist philosophy. They assert that in the hostile
and brutal conditions of the eighteenth century – the period often described as
that of ‘the Enlightenment’ – philosophy had dared to challenge the ‘infamy’
(as Voltaire called it) of the church and the society it helped maintain, while
in the aftermath of the French Revolution philosophy switched sides and put
itself at the service of the state. This was of course, by now, the modernising
state, but still the same state. They write that the Comtean school of
positivism – ‘apologists’ of the modern, capitalist society that emerged in the
nineteenth century – ‘usurped’ the succession to the genuine Enlighteners, and
reconciled philosophy with the forces it previously had opposed, such as the
Catholic church.

Leaders of the Action Française at their national Festival de Jeanne d'Arc, May 8, 1927. Charles Maurras second from left. Wikicommons/Bibliotheque nationale de France. Some rights reserved.Horkheimer and Adorno mention in this context the ultra-nationalist
organisation Action Française, whose chief ideologist Charles Maurras had been
an ardent admirer of Comte. This hint helps understand what kind of historical
developments they had on their minds: while Comte himself surely saw himself in
good faith as a protagonist of social reform meant to overcome-but-preserve the
achievements of the Revolution, and his translation of enlightenment empiricism
into the system of ‘positivist philosophy’ as a contribution to the process of
modernization, his followers in many ways contributed to the development of the
modern authoritarian state and, as in the case of Maurras, proto-fascism.

R. Fuzier cartoon depicting Daudet and Maurras on the nationalist demonstrations of 1934, among the league members of Action Francaise. Wikicommons/ Le Populaire, organe du Parti socialiste. Some rights reserved.The
elements of these subsequent developments can be found in Comte’s own writings,
which makes his ambiguities a suitable illustration of the dialectic of
enlightenment. (The Action Française is mentioned only in a version of the text
published in 1944 that was mostly circulated informally; it was not included in
the definitive publication of 1947. The authors might have assumed few people
would understand the connection to Comte without further explanation.)

Reason, data, and
the rejection of metaphysics

The two potentials of reason…As elsewhere in Horkheimer and Adorno’s writings, there is a lot of
polemic against ‘positivism’ in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Mostly the
target of their critique is the ‘logical positivism’ of their own time, but
they seem to see the latter as a logical extension or modification of the older
Comtean positivism that was a much more ambitious and comprehensive
proposition.

There is no detailed engagement with Comte but it is clear that the
principal point of attack is Comte’s rejection of metaphysics: when the
eighteenth-century enlightenment was a combination, or perhaps more often an
assemblage, of empiricism and rationalism, Comte aimed to boil it down to
strictly positivist empiricism that observes the ‘positively’ givens (in Latin:
data) and derives ‘laws’ from them that can be used to predict and adapt
to, perchance slightly tweak, whatever reality has in store for us. And that is
that.

The metaphysical ideas that had been useful in bringing down feudalism
and the old regime – the likes of freedom, individualism, emancipation – need to
be abandoned as they are the playthings of troublemakers, irritants that could
endanger the consolidation of the post-revolutionary new order. Positivism in
Comte’s sense is essentially the scientific basis of governance by experts,
while twentieth-century ‘logical positivism’ is its epistemological complement.
When Horkheimer and Adorno attack the latter, they see it as continuous with
the former. They wanted to be the troublemakers…

The attack on metaphysics was a central theme of German philosophy in the
1920s, and helped weaken the defences against fascism across the political
spectrum. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the cult of facts and probabilities
has flushed out conceptual thinking, and as humans generally have a need to
explain to themselves conceptually why they should be bothered to do anything,
or resist doing something that society expects them to do, the denunciation and
elimination of concepts as ‘metaphysical’ promotes a passive and fatalistic
going-with-the-flow. The ‘blocking of the theoretical imagination has paved the
way for political delusion’, which in the context meant fascism.

Again, many contemporaries were happy back then to argue for the
reconstruction of some kind of metaphysical system – theological, neo-Platonic,
neo-Aristotelian or whatever else. They had a relatively easy task of this in
the context of WWII as such philosophical or theological systems are something
one can hold on to: they can help one to weather the brute modernizing nihilism
of the fascist barbarians, and after their defeat provide a handy identity
narrative.

The easy option of a return to traditional metaphysics was not open,
though, to the Frankfurt School theorists who saw themselves within the
tradition of the radical strand of the Enlightenment.  Their main thrust
was to attack its domesticated version, the ‘positivism’ that puts itself and
its expertise at the service of domination. Far from writing against the
Enlightenment, they wanted to restore it to its complex form that contained
traces of the transcendental that Comte – quite correctly – saw as trouble.
They wanted to be the troublemakers whom Comte thought he had exorcised from
the Enlightenment.

Nursing unacted
desires

As Horkheimer and Adorno state, the ‘self-destruction of enlightenment’ that
frustrated the writing of the book they initially had in mind – probably a fine
scholarly tome on the role of dialectical logic in a variety of academic
disciplines – came to provide the principal subject matter of the book they did
write. The second line of the title, ‘Philosophical Fragments’, indicated that
they were then still thinking of it as a halfway house on the way towards
writing the real thing. This never happened, so it is what it is: an assertion
that ‘thinking that aims at enlightenment’ is inseparably linked to freedom in
society, but the admission that enlightenment also ‘already contains the germ
of the regression which is taking place everywhere today’. This is the project
of an enlightenment mindful of the antagonisms that drive it, as opposed to a
smug and arrogant one that feels good about itself lecturing the unenlightened.

If this sounds a bit hippy-ish, then this is because there is in fact a
sort of romantic aspect to all this. It is most evident on the very last pages
of the book, in the last of the twenty-four short pieces that make up the sixth
chapter (‘Notes and Sketches’), titled ‘On the genesis of stupidity’. This, the
final statement, begins with a very striking image: ‘The emblem of intelligence
is the antenna of the snail’. ‘The emblem of
intelligence is the antenna of the snail’.

Horkheimer and Adorno do not provide any reference in support of this
claim, but one could think for example of a famous letter by Keats that mentions
the ‘trembling and delicate snail-horn perception of beauty’. The antenna, or
horn, of the snail represents the good kind of enlightenment we should aspire
to: trembling and delicate, as in Keats.  (See also
here.)

Horkheimer and Adorno use the image, though, to make an anthropological
argument about the emergence of intelligence: ‘Meeting an obstacle, the antenna
is immediately withdrawn into the protection of the body, it becomes one with
the whole until it ventures forth again only timidly as an independent organ.
If the danger is still present, it disappears once more, and the intervals
between the attempts grow longer’.

They argue here that the development of human mental life is
precariously physical and depends on the freedom to exercise the organs of
perception. Evolution only takes place when ‘antennae were once stretched out
in new directions and not repulsed’. Stupidity, by contrast, ‘is a scar’:
‘Every partial stupidity in a human being marks a spot where the awakening play
of muscles has been inhibited instead of fostered’.

Screenshot of detail from William Blake's engraving for Gay's Fable 24,'The Butterfly and the Snail.' British Museum.Switching to a psychoanalytical argument, Horkheimer and Adorno write
that the inhibition leads to automatized repetitions of the aborted attempt,
such as in neurotic repetitions of a ‘defence reaction which has already proved
futile’, and ultimately produces a numb spot where the scar is, a deformation.
All the deformations we accumulate during individual and species evolution
translate into well-adapted, functioning ‘characters’, stupidity, impotence or
spiteful fanaticism, or any combination thereof. They are so many monuments to
arrested hope.

This is how the book ends: it is implied that the answer to stupidity,
including those of fascism and antisemitism, but also their contemporary second
cousins such as ‘post-truth’, resentment-driven politics from Hindutva to
Brexit, those myriads of irrational particularisms that gang up on particulars
and individuals, ultimately can be defeated only by more freedom of movement
for our antennas and other muscles, and the production of fewer scars on our
various tissues.

Marxism and
anthropology

One of the stupidest things is antisemitism. The fifth chapter of Dialectic
of Enlightenment, ‘Elements of antisemitism. Limits of Enlightenment’, is
easily the most complex, ambitious and challenging text ever written on this
particular subject.

The same peculiarity that characterises the entire book is what makes
reading ‘Elements’ rather hard work: the intermeshing of the critique of the
present – capitalist modernity – with the much grander theme of the critique of
human civilization.

Most of what Horkheimer and Adorno have to say on antisemitism in the perspective
of the capitalist present is contained in the first few pages of the chapter
and must have felt like a slap in the face by unsuspecting liberal readers: the
argument emphasizes the continuity between liberal and fascist governance and
the responsibility of the bourgeoisie. First of all, liberals and the
representatives of the ‘democratic-popular movements’ had always been lukewarm
at best about the equality of Jews who seemed less than totally assimilated.
Fascism is then described as the modern bourgeoisie’s move towards ‘regression
to naked domination’, whereby the liberal notion of the ‘harmony of society’
(the harmonious give-and-take of a market-based society) has morphed into a Volksgemeinschaft,
i.e. the nation that declares itself to be ‘race’.

Arbeit Macht Frei gate, KZ Sachsenhausen, Berlin. Wikicommons/Sachsenhausen Archive. Some rights reserved.

This analysis was seriously out of step with the emergent intellectual
life of a post-fascist Germany that hoped simply to return to its previous
liberal and democratic better self, as if the latter’s total collapse had just
been an unfortunate accident.   

The critique of liberalism and the bourgeoisie is only a minor point
here, though: for Marxists it is hardly shocking news that liberalism can morph
into fascism, usually fails to put up much of a defence against it, and that
the ruling class will encourage the subalterns to embrace any kind of vicious
and violent ideology if they deem it useful to maintain their grip on power. The necessary but not sufficient preconditions for the
emergence of the exterminatory antisemitism of the Nazis.

These were part of the necessary but not sufficient preconditions for
the emergence of the exterminatory antisemitism of the Nazis; they are not
enough to explain a pogrom, and certainly not the Holocaust. This is the point
at which Horkheimer and Adorno shift from ‘modern bourgeois society’ to ‘human
civilization’ as the framework of explanation: the antisemitic pogrom is
described as ‘a luxury’ (given that the material gain for the immediate
perpetrators usually was slim) and ‘a ritual of civilization’. With ‘ritual’
and ‘civilization’ we enter the territory of anthropology.

The point here is that the dynamic of contemporary capitalist society
mobilizes forces that can be described and understood only with the help of
categories of more historical depth than those of capitalist society itself.
This does not, though, mean a turning away from the language of Marxism:
‘civilization’ and ‘society’ are not alternative objects of study – the point
is that either dimension can be understood only through the other. Human
civilization exists in the present only in the form of capitalist
society; capitalist society is nothing other than human civilization in its
current form. (The relationship between these two concepts is similar to that
between capitalism and patriarchy in some forms of feminist theory: they are
not different ‘things’ but the former is the contemporary form of appearance of
the latter, and the latter is undergirding the former. Here, too, the strategic
hope of progressives is that capitalist modernity impacts and transforms its
substratum, patriarchal civilization, so thoroughly that it allows for the
emergence of the post-capitalist non-patriarchy we would like to see.)

Social inequality

The best known part of the argument, though, relates to modern society
and is derived straight from Marx’s critique of political economy: capitalist
society maintains the ‘socially necessary illusion’ that the wage-relationship
is (in principle, or potentially) ‘fair’, i.e. an exchange of equivalent
values: this much labour-power for this much money.

Nevertheless, social inequality is an only too obvious reality. To the
untrained eye inequality seems to be brought about in the sphere of circulation
(as opposed to the sphere of production), say, at the supermarket till where it
becomes manifest how much produce one’s wages will buy.

Marx argues that the apparent fairness of the wage relationship itself
presupposes exploitation that is expressed as the difference between the
‘exchange value’ of labour power (represented by the wage) and its ‘use-value’
(represented by the product that it produced): the product produced by X amount
of labour power must be higher than the wage paid for it because this is where
the profit for the capitalist comes from.

Admittedly this explanation – one of the centrepieces of Marxist theory
– flies in the face of ‘common sense’ everyday consciousness where the notion
of ‘a fair wage’ reigns supreme – not least because we tend to invoke the
ideology of ‘fairness’ when we engage in a wage struggle. (When we ask for more
than what is deemed ‘fair’ we are called ‘greedy’ and forfeit the sympathy of
‘the public’.) (When we ask for more than what is
deemed ‘fair’ we are called ‘greedy’ and forfeit the sympathy of ‘the public’.)

Capitalist common sense, including the ideology of ‘fairness’, thus
produces the need for another explanation for inequality and exploitation; and
helpfully the capitalist exploiters, ‘masquerading as producers’, shout
‘thief!’ and point at ‘the merchants’ and other representatives of the sphere
of circulation. This line of argument, up to this point, has of course nothing
in itself to do with antisemitism: in developed capitalism, the exploitative character
of the mode of production tends to be deflected onto (real or imagined) agents
of circulation, and many forms of (supposed) ‘anti-capitalism’ reflect this.

As Horkheimer and Adorno put it, ‘the merchant is the bailiff of the
whole system and takes the hatred for the other [exploiters] upon himself’.
Which category of people is cast as this particular type of scapegoat is
entirely dependent on historical context; in Christian Europe, this mechanism
of capitalist-anticapitalist ideology found in ‘the Jews’ an ideal object and
thus revived and reinvented, as modern antisemitism, pre-existing traditions of
Jew-hatred. (Modern antisemitism was exported elsewhere, then, in the hand
luggage of imperialism and on arrival sometimes became an element of the ‘anti-imperialism
of fools’, but that is another story.)

Antisemitism and self-hatred

This, the Marxist theory of antisemitism, is contained in very condensed
form on some of the first pages of ‘Elements of antisemitism’. Taken on its
own, this theory only explains antisemitism as a set of ideas, a particular
misguided way of thinking about capitalism. Insofar as these ideas are quite
fixed, they form an attitude, a mental pattern or a ‘habitus’. Ideas and
attitudes alone do not make anyone act, though, and the monstrous antisemitic
acts of the Holocaust need several more layers of explanation.

Nazi antisemitism mobilized a deep-seated force that turned this
antisemitism into an irrational obsession, even though often executed with a
rational deliberation that far surpassed the misguided social protest as which
it may have started in most individuals: the delusion of a moral duty to save
the world by identifying, chasing and killing Jews wherever they are, at
whatever price.

One of the ideas with which Horkheimer and Adorno respond to this
theoretical need is that of the pogrom as a ‘ritual of civilization’. It is as
if antisemitism as described above gave form and direction to the murderous
obsession – it pointed to who the victims should be and why they deserved what
they got – but it did not in fact cause it. Ideas can trigger, guide and
justify, but do not cause actions. Correspondingly, even the smartest rational
explanations do not usually help much with antisemites ‘because rationality as
entangled with domination is itself at the root of the malady’. If antisemitism
and other maladies are in fact phobias against rationality, rationality will
not wash. Only reflection on the entanglement itself would help: is there
perhaps good reason to be suspicious of reason? This is how ‘Elements of
antisemitism’ feeds back into the general theme of Dialectic of
Enlightenment.

In the philosophical tradition that Horkheimer and Adorno come from and
that includes Hegel and Marx, ‘reason’ is not a value-neutral concept. What is
reasonable is not simply ‘whatever works’ (efficiently, instrumentally) but
whatever serves human emancipation and autonomy. Rationality understood in this
way has an element of transcendence – some kind of going-beyond the bad reality
as it exists – that is not entirely different from that found in religion.

Indeed they write that before it was reduced to being a cultural
artefact – an aspect of a society’s way of life, something that is considered
useful for holding society together – religion contained both truth and
deception. The truth of religion was the longing for redemption, and this truth
lived on in philosophical idealism. Positivism, in turn, exorcized the longing
from philosophy and reduced truth one-dimensionally to the depiction of the
world as it actually is. (Clever positivists noticed of course that this is
never quite possible and concluded that there is no such thing as truth, then,
which is consistent with their own definition of it.) Spirit, enlightenment,
civilization became dispirited. Enlightenment minus the spirit of longing –
utopia, the ability to imagine something better – is a self-hating
enlightenment. Spirit, enlightenment, civilization
became dispirited.

Whereas civilization and enlightenment are defined as the continuous
effort of humanity to escape the dull circularity of reproduction and
self-preservation, in reality its efforts increasingly went into perfecting
humanity’s means of reproduction and self-preservation (in other words: labour;
the economy). In order to free ourselves from having to work a lot, humanity
had to work a lot in order to develop the means of production (knowledge,
experience, science, technology, social organisation) which are indeed an
important part of what we commonly call ‘civilization’.

Horkheimer and Adorno’s basic point is quite simple: far from rejecting
civilization, we have to rebalance it as it has become an end in itself. We
have developed civilization, productivity, technology, society in order to
spend more time lazing about on the beach, and after all we went through,
humanity is more than entitled now to cash in the chips. The reality of the dialectic
of enlightenment is, though, that the closer we actually come to leading the
life of Riley the further it seems out of our reach, and chances are that by
the time we sort this out beaches may be no more.

Apocalypse Now

In ‘Elements of antisemitism’, Horkheimer and Adorno focus on one
particular aspect of this dialectic: the idea that modern civilization develops
a destructive fury against the ‘anachronistic’ remnants of its own initial
stages, including mimesis and magic. Mimesis is the effort of a living creature
to mimic its natural environment as a survival strategy and is discussed by
anthropologists as one of the oldest aspects of human civilization: humans try
to pacify a dangerous animal by ‘being’ that animal in a ritual dance, for
example. Horkheimer and Adorno discuss this as the beginning of the process of
enlightenment: we mimic nature to escape its domination. Similarly, sacrificing
an animal in order to make the gods grant rainfall or success in warfare is a
form of barter, i.e. an early form of rationality, especially as the clever
humans hope the deal will have them receive something much more valuable than
what they sacrifice.

It is not difficult to recognize some of our own supposedly ‘modern’
behaviour in those supposedly ‘primitive’ practices. One of the key arguments
in ‘Elements of antisemitism’ is that every time civilization progresses from
one stage to the next, it comes to hate everything that reminds it of the
previous stage: in a very general sense, the ‘civilized’ hate (and exterminate)
the ‘savages’ because they remind us that we are just one step ahead of them
(in our own judgment, that is), and it would not take very much to regress into
the more ‘primitive’ state (witness Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now).

Poster for Apocalypse Now. Wikicommons. Fair use.Perhaps we even have a secret desire to go back to being ‘savages’:
after all, the life of a hunter-gatherer might well be preferable to your
average office job. Because the civilized paid a high price to get this far,
they fortify themselves against the threat of regression. Many aspects of
racism can be related to this.

Antisemites like to shudder in fear of supposed Jewish superiority and
secret world domination, but at the same time antisemitism shares with other
forms of racism the projection of aspects of ‘savagery’ onto ‘the Jews’. The
most obvious case is their accusation of ritual murder, but there are other
things that antisemites assert they find unpleasant or disgusting about ‘the
Jews’, and many of these are, in a sense, ‘primitive’: energetic gesticulating,
which is often seen as somehow ‘typically Jewish’, is a form of mimetic
behaviour as the physical movement paints a picture of an emotional state. The
big noses ‘the Jews’ supposedly have point to a more primitive stage of
development where the sense of smell was still more important than the other
senses (whereas in modernity smell, as well as being smelly, is tabooed; those
backward garlic-eaters still have to learn this). Horkheimer and Adorno point
to a bitter irony here: not only was the religion of Judaism in fact very much
driven by the overcoming of magic and mimesis (such as in the ban on images),
it is the antisemites who indulge in bringing back echoes of magic and mimesis
in their love of rituals, sacrifices, formulas and uniforms. The prosecution
and destruction of those accused of mimetic, primitive behaviour provides the
supposedly civilized with a splendid opportunity to indulge in lots of mimetic
and primitive behaviour.

Beyond Gewalt

The principal argument, though, is that the latest stage of the process
of civilization is marked by the destruction of the capability of thinking
itself: highly advanced stupidity. In prehistory, people’s encounters with
animals not noted for spending much time pondering the pros and cons of eating
humans required equally unhesitating decisions: shoot the poisoned arrow or run
fast. No time for dialectics here. Civilization decimated inconvenient animals
and other immediate threats and was thus free to create institutions of
mediation that slowed things down and made space for the new activities of
judging and reasoning. Late-industrial society, though, has brought about ‘a
regression to judgment without judging’: legal process is made short work of in
kangaroo courts, cognition is emptied of active reflection and likes to jump to
conclusions, and thinking as a specialized profession becomes a luxury that
‘must not be tempted … to draw any awkward conclusions’.

Nevertheless, the very last sentence of ‘Elements of antisemitism’ is
guardedly optimistic: ‘Enlightenment itself, having come into its own and
thereby turning into a force, could break through the limits of Enlightenment.’

Adorno Memorial in Frankfurt. Wikicommons/ Der Nähe der Goethe-Universität. Some rights reserved.

Late-industrial society has brought about ‘a
regression to judgment without judging’.

The grounds for this surprisingly hopeful turn are laid out in the
concluding sections of the first chapter, ‘The concept of enlightenment’. Here,
Horkheimer and Adorno assert in the purest spirit of the Enlightenment that
thinking is ‘the servant whom the master cannot control at will’. Even though
enlightenment serves domination, it is bound to turn against domination
sooner or later. The bringer of hope is here, rather unexpectedly, the very
thing that tends to figure as the devil incarnate in most forms of ‘critique of
civilization’ on the left as on the right: reification.

Domination has ‘reified’ itself (which means, made itself into a thing)
by taking on the forms of law and organisation, and in the process limited
itself. These instruments ‘mediate’ domination, that is, they moderate the
immediacy of exploitation: ‘The moment of rationality in domination also
asserts itself as something different from [domination].’ The object-like quality
of the means of domination – language, weapons, machines, thought – makes these
means universally available for everyone, including those resisting or fighting
domination.

Also this is, in Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument, part of the dialectic
of enlightenment: although in the capitalist present, thought may become
mechanical, and today’s machines mutilate their operators, ‘in the form of
machines … alienated reason moves toward a society which reconciles thought …
with the liberated living beings’. Dialectic of Enlightenment appears
here, on closer reading, to have anticipated some of the revolutionary optimism
that decades later accompanied the discussions of the internet as somehow
intrinsically communistic – think of shareware and all that – and current discussions
that the latest ongoing round of technological innovation will abolish most
capitalist labour and force humanity either to advance to a truly human society
or regress to some kind of neo-feudal or neo-caste system.

In the last paragraph of ‘The concept of Enlightenment’ Horkheimer and
Adorno are quite explicit about the source of their optimism: they state that
‘the bourgeois economy’ has multiplied Gewalt (a German word that means
violence, power, force and/or domination) ‘through the mediation of the
market’, but in the same process has also ‘multiplied its things and forces to
such an extent that their administration no longer requires kings, nor even the
bourgeois themselves: it only needs all. They learn from the power of things finally
to forgo domination.’

This sentence, written in the midst of WWII and the Holocaust, is
nothing less than astonishing, and has been largely overlooked in the reception
of Dialectic of Enlightenment: in spite of their seemingly overwhelming
darkness, we can learn from the reified forms of enlightenment – the stuff of
civilization: knowledge, science, technology, social-organisational forms –
that we can abolish the domination to which the enlightenment has been wedded
for several tens of thousands of years. This optimism does not come with any
guarantees, obviously: the learning remains for us to do, and the obstacles are
enormous.

Gedenktafel für Max Horkheimer an seinem Wohnhaus im Stadtteil Westend-Süd in Frankfurt am Main. February 1990. Wikicommons/ Bronzetafel mit Portrait, Edwin Hüller. Some rights reserved.

[1]  Horkheimer, Max; Theodor
W. Adorno, 2002, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Philosophical Fragments, edited
by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Stanford: Stanford
University Press.