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Dialectic of Enlightenment (Cultural Memory in the Present)
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  • ISBN13: 9780804736336
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Description
Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the much influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. "What we had set out to do," the authors put in writing in the Preface, "was nothing less than to give details why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism."

Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of contemporary events. Historically remote developments, indeed, the birth of Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the struggle against natural forces, as represented in myths, are connected in a wide arch to the much threatening experiences of the present.

The book consists in five chapters, at first glimpse unconnected, mutually together with a number of shorter notes. The various analyses concern such phenomena as the detachment of technology from practical life, formalized morality, the manipulative nature of entertainment culture, and a paranoid behavioral structure, expressed in aggressive anti-Semitism, this marks the limits of enlightenment. The authors perceive a common element in these phenomena, the tendency toward self-destruction of the guiding criteria inherent in enlightenment thought from the beginning. Utilizing historical analyses to elucidate the present, they show, against the background of a prehistory of subjectivity, why the National Socialist terror was not an aberration of modern history but was rooted deeply in the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization.

Adorno and Horkheimer see the self-destruction of Western reason as grounded in a historical and fateful dialectic between the domination of external nature and society. They trace enlightenment, which split these spheres apart, back to its mythical roots. Enlightenment and myth, therefore, are not irreconcilable opposites, but dialectically mediated qualities of together real and intellectual life. "Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology." This paradox is the fundamental thesis of the book.

This new translation, based on the topic in the complete edition of the works of Max Horkheimer, contains textual variants, commentary upon them, and an editorial discussion of the position of this work in the development of Critical Theory.

Customer Reviews
Customer rating is 5 of 5  Important, influential rubbish   2010-03-01
By Stephen Ferg (Arlington, VA United States)
This book is of course rubbish of the first order.

As a single, simple example, I quote from another review, which accurately summarizes chapter 4.

"The fourth chapter is called "Limits of Enlightenment", and addresses directly the subject of anti-semitism and fascism more generally. Fascism is posited as Enlightenment turned against itself (it must be noted Adorno & Horkheimer were among the first to state this, even if it is somewhat of a cliche now). Enlightenment's general instrumental reason knows only power as a measure of behavior. Therefore, it cannot tolerate the existence of groups that thrive, yet never have power, such as Jews and women. Whenever Enlightened society fails to satisfy the needs of its members, their anger is turned against such groups."

In summary: Fascist anti-semitism was the result of the Enlightenment's "instrumental reason".

But this is of course absurd. German Christianity has a long history of anti-semitism extending much farther back than the 18th century, at least to Martin Luther's well-known violent anti-semitism. Hitler attacked the Jews in the name of Christianity, not in the name (say) of Enlightenment deism. His world-view and rationale were drawn from the theories of distinct national or cultural "races", theories that sprouted and flourished as part of Romanticism's rejection of the rationality and trans-nationalism of the Enlightenment.

So Germany's (and in fact, Christianity's) long history of anti-semitism, along with the tendency of *any* society in distress to vent its anxiety by attacking a vulnerable minority, is a sufficient and historically adequate explanation for Nazi anti-semitism.

But Adorno and Horkheimer invite us to attribute Fascist anti-semitism to "Enlightenment's" inability to tolerate groups that are (paradoxically) both powerless and (despite being powerless) thriving. "Enlightenment" doesn't like powerless people because it supposedly "knows only power as a measure of behavior". Basically, "Enlightenment" wants to kill you because it doesn't like the way you part your hair.

The book is full of this kind of false, nasty nonsense, wrapped up in sweeping generalizations couched in vague terms such as "reason", "power", etc. So, as a work of philosophy or history or social analysis, it is, well, rubbish. In terms of philosophical merit, as well as authorial rage and despair, its most recent contemporary equivalent is the Unibomb Manifesto.

But it is also historically important rubbish. This book is the seminal work of (philosophical) post-modernism. If, for whatever reason, you are looking for the place where "Critical Theory" and post-modern epistemic relativism first emerged into the light of day, then this is the book you are looking for.
Customer rating is 3 of 5  Some Flaws Revealed   2010-01-23
By Martin Asiner (Jersey City, NJ)
Most educated people think of the Enlightenment as an era that ushered in a much desired trend toward rationalism and cultural progress. In "DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTEMENT," Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer counter with the startling proposition that the Enlightenment, far from advancing the cause of modernity, progress, reason, and order instead created a new age of barbarism whose basis was centered on a tyrannical manipulation of every aspect of each citizen's life, habits, and environment. Such an interpretation begins with the founding of the Frankfurt School in Germany in the 1920s with Adorno, Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Georg Lukacs as the creative Marxist core. Originally located in Germany, its creators first thought of calling their school the Institute of Marxism, but wisely concluded that such a name would render widespread acceptance of its name as unlikely. They then settled on the harmless sounding Institute for Social Research. After Hitler became Chancellor, the Institute moved to New York, and then, after 1945, back to Germany. The Institute was determined to advance Marxism as the dominant political and economic theory in the world, but its founders were wise enough to recognize that Marxism, as it was then constructed, was simply not up to the task. Classical Marxism was based solely on its undiluted appeal to workers as a marginalized class beset by a cabal of greedy capitalists. The Frankfurt School widened the net of victims by including women, gays, and assorted ethnic minorities as the newest downtrodden. To accommodate this widening net, Adorno and the other founders dreamed up what they termed "Critical Theory," which as its name implies was a criticism of nothing less than society itself. Out went capitalism as the Marxist bogeyman. In came anti-Semitism, sexism, racism and homophobia as the newest allures for converts. Thus, the Frankfurt School melded Marxism, which was originally designed solely as an economic philosophy, to a series of competing philosophies like the psychological theories of Freud, the emerging range of literary theories just then spreading, and a variety of multi-disciplinary schools, none of which shared any common ground except that their totality could be used as a club to bash western style capitalism.

When the book was published in 1944, it called into question a two thousand year tradition that reason must eventually lead the way to a golden age. Reason, they argued, did quite the opposite by encouraging the growth of a fascist mentality that was then raging in Europe. This mentality that leads to the destruction of true human freedom is based on the pairing of traditional opposites: freedom/tyranny, man/woman, urban/rural and the like. They argue that rationalists of the Enlightenment see a sharp dividing line between the left and the right pair. One must be either one or the other. Not so, say Adorno and Horkheimer. At various points, the one merges into the other to such an extant that it is only a myth that they are truly separate. Critical theorists maintain that neither side of the slash holds the preferred position. Rather the source of frustration seemingly caused by identifying with one side or the other is in actuality a result of underlying tension which emanates from an overpowering sense of dislocation and alienation, both of which are the deliberate goals of the Inner Party of the industrial/military/consumer cabal. Using Orwell's terms again, it is the Outer Party and the Proles who suffer the most while paradoxically are misled into thinking that they are not suffering at all. Adorno and Horkheimer suggest that the de-evolution of society into fascist conformity and thus into inexplicable alienation has its roots in the ability of the economic Powers That Be into seducing an entire generation of consumers into producing a false sense of individuality while at the same time masking a stifling sense of conformity.

In the book's most well-known chapter, "Enlightenment as Mass Deception," the authors take the classic Marxist view that all consumers are essentially interchangeable cogs in a multi-national machine that brags of individuality even as it ruthlessly stamps it out. The key to this stamping out of individualism is the insidious role of culture, which classifies, organizes, and labels consumers to the point that their reactions can be pinpointed as accurately as science fiction author Isaac Asimov described in his FOUNDATION series. To accomplish this Cassandra-like level of accuracy, Adorno and Horkheimer assume the legitimacy of several questionable basics. First, they see broadcast programs as "exactly the same." This must come as a surprise to ratings companies which identify quantifiable differences among them. Second, they envision a movie audience whose reactions can be precisely identified in advance. This too must come as a surprise to producers of costly films that tank at the box office. Third, they make statements about the relation of consumers to products that simply make no sense. What, for example, do they mean when they write "Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work"? Finally, they write of consumers as sheep with no power to resist blatant advertising. The advertising industry is replete with failed policies that did not foresee a fluctuating consumer response to advertising. The authors mask their leaky ideology behind some heavy paradoxes that promise much meaning but emerge as devoid of such. Such paradoxes are usually pithy fortune cookie utterances: "The perfect similarity is the absolute difference:" "Chance and planning become one and the same thing;" and "Everybody becomes an employee." Those who read this book and intone that it "made them think twice at the apparently simplistic world in which we live" are probably unaware that the complexity of this world need not be limited to the bashing of capitalism to which both Adorno and Horkheimer had long been committed.



Customer rating is 2 of 5  A fabulous book in need of a decent editor   2009-06-13
By Ezra Claverie (Saint Louis, Missouri, USA)
Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, the editor of the Stanford edition of DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT, has taken a dense, difficult book and made it more work to read. Horkheimer and Adorno's "philosophical fragments" reward the reader not only with sustained analyses of capitalist culture, but also with pithy one-liners worthy of the authors' role as the philosophical Statler and Waldorf heckling Euro-American civilization. But Noerr's pedantry constantly gets in their way and yours.

The edition has two problems: insufficient translation and worse-than-useless endnotes. First, the translation. Edmund Jephcott does what I can only assume is an admirable job translating (nearly) all of the original German into English. Unfortunately, he does not translate the French, the Latin, or the Greek (though, to his credit, he does render the latter in the Roman alphabet). That would be fine if I read those three languages, but I don't, and neither do most Anglophone readers of this book. Classicists aren't the major audience for Frankfurt School culture criticism, so you'd think that Noerr would do us a favor and get somebody to translate the dead languages with the living. Nein. When Horkheimer and Adorno quote Seneca, you're on your own.

Second, the endnotes: never have so many endnotes been of so little use to so many readers. Noerr preserves H & A's original endnotes, putting them not at the end of each fragment, but at the end of the book. Fair enough. But interlarded among these are Noerr's much more copious endnotes, with their own numbering system, notes that deal almost entirely with the publication history of variant editions of DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT. What percentage of readers wants this information? Ten? Five? Anybody writing a dissertation on this book is reading it in German anyway, and has the different editions ready to hand. To a general audience, these textual notes are clutter. Putting them in a different location within the book would at least have spared readers the labor of sorting through them.

Were these the only endnotes that Noerr provided, one could ignore them altogether (difficult, considering their ubiquity on the page). But Noerr sometimes provides content-related notes--for example, explaining the idiom "white trash" as a "derogatory expression for white workers" (267). So all that Latin, all that Greek, and all that French Noerr left for you to puzzle out on your own, but when a familiar American English idiom appears in a book published by an American university press, Noerr opens the lantern shutter and dazzles us.

A second example should convey the stunning inutility of Noerr's endnotes. On page 102 appears this sentence: "Even before Zanuck acquired her, Saint Bernadette gleamed in the eye of her writer as an advert aimed at all the relevant consortia." This is the first time either name appears in the book. Now, a great many readers of DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT are students of mass culture who will at least recognize producer Darryl F. Zanuck's last name as connected to Hollywood, if not to 20th Century Fox. But in case we don't, Noerr helpfully supplies a note saying as much. But Saint Bernadette? No endnote. Noerr does not tell us that she was 1) a 19th century Frenchwoman canonized for her visions of the Virgin Mary, or that she was 2) the subject of a now-forgotten 1942 bestseller, or that 3) 20th Century Fox produced a film adaptation of the novel in 1943, a film that netted four academy awards, despite being forgotten in subsequent decades.

My question is this: who is so steeped in Hollywood lore that he or she can follow Horkheimer and Adorno's oblique, dated reference here--to a 1940s hagiography exploited by a big-five studio into a successful but forgotten biopic--yet at the same time needs a footnote to decrypt the name of Zanuck? Nobody. Endnote both names, endnote neither, or endnote the MORE obscure of the two, but don't endnote ONLY the LESS obscure! Can an editor possibly write worse endnotes than this, short of supplying counterfactual notes? ("Zanuck": Zanuck IV, Martian conqueror of the thirty-ninth century, CE.)

So be warned: this edition is extremely labor-intensive. You'll have to look up a lot of dead words, internet-search a lot of names, and grit your teeth through Noerr's vanity-project endnotes. Let's hope Stanford puts out a more useful edition as an apology for this one.
Customer rating is 5 of 5  Learning how to juggle   2009-06-12
By Duane M. Johnson
This is a book that should change the way the average American thinks. Yes, it is not the easiest book to read and the authors' main ideas are not always readily apparent and schematically laid out. It will take you time to pry them out of the long and densely worded paragraphs that make up the sections of this work, but if you do take the time and expend the mental effort to make sense of what Adorno and Horkheimer are saying, then you will be in for a REAL intellectual adventure because the critical method on display here and the conclusions offered are nothing short of subversive in the positive sense of the word and are therefore truly thought-provoking. Their quasi-Marxist critical approach does an impressive job of standing our analytical habits on their head. It reconfigures the customary Anglo-American way of dealing with subjects and their related controversies, which is to say, when you are reading this book you can say bye-bye to our usual dichotomizing, either/or modes of analysis as you are ushered into the quickly shifting world of dialectical thinking. Make no mistake about it--these are some extremely busy pages, and when you read them you will alternate between being confused and astonished at how much is going on and how many ideas are simultaneously in play in any given paragraph or its constituent sentences.

This is apt to make us suspicious at first precisely because it is so foreign to what we as Americans regard as analysis. Our habit is to reduce problems to sets of antithetical principles and then we quietly assume each set to be real and concrete--conservative vs. liberal, traditional vs. progressive, science vs. magic, mythological vs. enlightened, intellectual vs. anti-intellectual, autocratic vs. democratic, autonomous vs. heteronomous, etc.--but our reification of these principles is what these Frankfurt School authors expose in their treatments of (so-called) enlightenment thinking and how that is intertwined with the areas of myth, morality, mass culture, and anti-Semitism.

The basic thesis of the book is that the traditional categories of bourgeois intellectual history are ideological constructs that tell us only half the story. We think of Western thought as progressing from mythological modes of thinking to an outlook that is more rational, scientific, and thus enlightened, but what their analyses seek to demonstrate is that instead of a steady linear progression from myth to enlightenment rationality what we have is a situation in which the two opposing categories are closer to each other than one might suppose. The modern bourgeois thinker assumes that all is rationality and light in his camp, but Adorno and Horkheimer argue that (a) enlightenment thinking is as inescapably 'mythological' as any of the pre-scientific worldviews to which it feels superior and (b) how that conceit has played an instrumental role in the increasing violence, domination, and deception that characterize the 'civilized barbarism' of modern industrial societies. Their analytical results, even if they are not wholly convincing to some readers, are astonishing in their subtlety and implications, and if you read these essays attentively you will never think about these subjects again in the same way as you did before.

As an example of the way in which this critical method is employed, take our lazy American habit of dividing people up into either conformists or non-conformists. We take such a seemingly neat and definite division for granted, and we assume that it is just a matter of pointing out which is the more coherent, honest, and therefore justifiable attitude to adopt. But Adorno and Horkheimer show that these two labels do not correspond to two separate and distinct realities/truths, but rather each is but an aspect or manifestation of a more fundamental human problem, i.e. that of Hegelian/Marxist alienation, an inescapable condition of separation and incompleteness that continues to twist and turn in our society at any given time. Critically speaking, it is not the case that it is better to be one or the other because the problem of alienation is not solvable either by a robust conformism or by an equally calculated non-conformist spirit. On the contrary, each is but a symptom of something wrong and unaddressed in the life of any society, namely, those deeper issues of perennial import, the traditional stuff of philosophic and religious concern that have to do with us as whole beings and not just as disembodied, rationalizing minds, totalitarian and/or fascist vitalists, bourgeois capitalists, ideological contrarians, bohemian radicals, philistine reactionaries, etc. The latter are examples of the attitudes that reflect our more fundamental human state of alienation, the social masks of ideology that we unthinkingly don and then in turn mistake for the face of reality.

Critical theory is devoted to leaving no stone unturned in the criticism of thought and culture, and it professes the ideal of never ceasing in that endeavor. In the case of a problem like social alienation it is the critical theorist's task to probe ever deeper into the social realities of our culture and to subject these to ruthless examinations which, while the efforts in themselves are never entirely free of ideological determinations, they still have as one of their own critical goals to become conscious of any underlying ideological factors in what is supposed to be a process of analytical self-emancipation. Yet it is arguable as to whether the critical theorists and their disciples have remained true to these ideals because since the 1930s we have seen the work (if not the individual life) of each of its practitioners decompose into various radical left-wing viewpoints that have remained highly influential (if not inflexible) in some academic and/or artistic circles, but conversion to its particular point of view is certainly not the point of this book. Think of these essays as a collection of 'thought experiments' in the Frankfurt school critical method, and the results as dialectical stepping stones on the way to a critical work that by its very nature can never be final.

It is a widespread but shallow opinion to write off the Frankfurt School thinkers as MERE Marxists or even as neo-Marxist revisionists, and Adorno's writings in particular, though complex and multifaceted, reveal him to be rooted firmly in the German tradition of idealist philosophy. Marxist ideas are important to him, but over and above the critical concepts they furnish for his books and essays and the role they played in the formation of his method of 'negative dialectics', the guiding figure for him is always Kant with whom he shares an inextinguishable concern for what in today's rarefying intellectual parlance might be labeled as 'metaphilosophical' issues: how human freedom and personal autonomy are inextricably bound together in a seeking that must go beyond the categories of any rationalist epistemology and the bare material facts of common history in order to illuminate and safeguard those things that make us human and which come from the directions we might least suspect.
Customer rating is 4 of 5  Brilliant but arduous   2009-03-09
By Kallionsivu Mikko (Finland)
One of the most famous pieces of Finnish prose is 'Seitsemän veljestä' by our national iconic author Aleksis Kivi. Some people even describe it as the first real novel in our literature history due to its self-reflexiness. Within 'Seitsemän veljestä' one can find a scene depicting the agrarian village-school where adult men are learning how to read and write in order to get a licence to marry. The authoritarian teacher shouts out letters one by one and the stupid lot reluctantly repeat it with loud voice. "A," says the schoolmaster. "A," bellow the tortured fellers. "B" spoken leads to a roomful of "B"'s and so forth. Eventually one of the pupils can't take it anymore and escapes through a window, breaking the glass.

Reading Adorno & Horkheimer is bit like this. Despite their brilliancy one feels sometimes that he is reduced to go trough the same irritating formula time after time - too many times. "Thesis," shouts Adorno. One replies obediently. "Antithesis", shouts Horkheimer. A reply follows. "Synthesis," bellows the schoolmasters. Again, an answer imitates the curriculum. It works for a while. But after a couple of hundred pages illustrating the philosophical alphabets of the Frankfurt school one does feel like breaking & exiting. Maybe the reader in questin is slow-witted. But then again, the frustratingly repetive teaching method in question might not be so effective, either. Tools should be used to achieve an end or another, not to be the end in themselves.


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