I. The Dialectic of Enlightenment

A. The Project of Enlightenment

The self-proclaimed project of Enlightenment is the subjectification of the individual - the overcoming of all those elements which militate against the autonomous ego’s establishment of itself as a free and self-determining agent, an agent unencumbered by the mystical forces which, in pre-enlightened times, penetrate its consciousness and degrade its worldly existence. A definition of myth: that other-worldly realm in which the contradictions of this world are resolved in an illusory totality at the level of consciousness. For the individual to establish herself as an autonomous subject is clearly to rid herself of mythic thought, to take back the actual conditions of her life and confront the world as that which it really is - the individual must know the world, for only in knowing, only in rational and informed comprehension, is agency possible. To be free is to not only act, but to act according to the dictates of your own will, a pure will free from constraint, a will able to recognize and interpret the concrete situations of its existence as they are, shrouded not in superstition nor myth. To Enlightenment myth is anthropomorphism[]; it anticipates Feuerbach in viewing myth as nothing more than the projection of individuals’ fears onto a fictitious sphere. By understanding nature, by analyzing and comprehending its movements, by recognizing that it is not propelled by mysterious forces beyond human comprehension, we are capable of banishing fear, thereby erecting the base which will allow for the future flourishing of truly free human faculties. Autonomy and freedom lay hidden in knowledge; by positing knowledge, by overcoming superstition, we can come to govern a now disenchanted nature, a nature no longer conceived of as a tyrannical embodiment of opposing mystical forces which exist only to repress us.[] The individual imagines that she is free from fear when there is nothing left to know; nothing can remain outside of human consciousness, for externality is the source of all anxiety. This, then, is the task which Enlightenment sets itself out on: the rational comprehension of the natural world.

"In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant."[] The project of Enlightenment has gone horribly wrong; yet reason has failed us not because it has gone too far, but rather because it has not gone far enough. Myth is anything beyond reason; Enlightenment goes beyond reason in abstracting one particular moment of rationality and substituting it as the concept’s sole totality, thereby reverting to myth. Mythic elements are those which allow not for the possibility of their self-negation; myth posits itself as that absolutely singular universal entrusted with the task of total comprehension, blind to its own particularity. The one partiality which Enlightenment believes is the sole guarantor of logical comprehension, but which in actuality is that which drives Enlightenment toward disaster, is instrumental rationality.

B. The Method of Enlightenment

Enlightenment "is the philosophy which equates the truth with scientific schematization".[] Technological advancements utilized in the study of the natural sciences present themselves (in their totality) immediately to the enlightened mind as the ideal technique for the deconstruction of the world. The technical starting point is that of rational classification. Modern Western culture above all prides itself on its capacity for logical organization. The project of Western science is a project of ordering, of systematic organization and categorization. But, of course, in order for an object to be classified it must in some way be definable; it must be reduced to a set of common elements which allow it to be compared and contrasted with other objects, the objects being defined as similar or dissimilar on the basis of these shared or unshared elements. These elements, however, must be fixed; if they are conceived of as having the potential for fluidity or mutation the entire system of classification breaks down, for now all objects, by virtue of their elements’ circumvention of fixity, are potentially all other elements. If one wishes to hierarchize objects A, B, and C, then the first premise one must adopt is that which proclaims that A always equals A and never equals not-A, i.e. B or C. If A is potentially B a system of fixed classification becomes logically impossible, as all categories collapse in on each other by virtue of their objective instability. Enlightenment thought, then, is the systematization of knowledge under a single guiding principle: the identification of a thing which that form in which it immediately presents itself, and the relation of this thing to all other things by means of the development of an abstract equivalence. Unity resides in agreement; the task of science is to comprehend the particulars from the universal - "Knowledge consists of subsumption under principles. Any other than systematically directed thinking is unoriented or authoritarian."[]

The essence of this new quantitative knowledge of nature is technology; "It does not work by concepts and images, by the fortunate insight, but refers to method".[] Nature becomes that which can be comprehended mathematically. Even those external elements which are by their nature the most distinct and mutually exclusive can be made to conform which each other through their subjection to the mode of universal quantification employed by Enlightenment thought: "even what cannot be made to agree, indissolubility and irrationality, is converted by means of mathematical theorems."[] All quality, all emotions and representations of it, in for example religion, philosophy, and art, are pushed to the background, if not totally liquidated, in favor of the new ‘cool reason’. Immediate living is entirely displaced: "Under the cover of this enmity, emotion and finally all human expression, even culture as a whole, are withdrawn from thought; thereby, however, they are transformed into a neutralized element of the comprehensive ratio of the economic system - itself irrationalized long ago."[] Enlightenment thought has no place for that which naturally defies quantitative representation - including human subjectivity - and it is here that the former’s main contradiction becomes explicit. Myth is the projected power of humanity. Enlightenment wants to eliminate myth in order to reinject the individual with her own humanity, but it is able to do so only by totally annihilating all of the latter’s positive content, including human subjectivity and self-consciousness, themselves formerly preserved within mythic elements in a latent and congealed form.

Despite the mystifying and distorted nature of myth, it is nevertheless a proprietor of meaning. There is in superstition a direct and specific representation absent in science. Liberal science contains no such representation, preferring instead pure interchangeability. "On the road to modern science men renounce any claim to meaning. They substitute formula for concept, rule and probability for cause and motive."[] The object of inquiry is afforded meaning only through the action of the subject; the external world itself is inherently empty - it is nothing but an abstract assemblage of potential quantities.[] As meaning is extracted from all objects, every thing becomes identified with every other thing, while at the same time every thing finds it impossible to be identified with itself. All qualities are uniformly dissolved as the equivalence which rules enlightened bourgeois thought expands beyond the merely empirical world to permeate all aspects of social life. These qualities are liquidated as the dissimilar are made to appear similar through their reduction to abstract quantities. Any phenomenon which attempts to resist such quantitative reduction is dismissed as illusion. "Unity is the slogan from Parmenides to Russell. The destruction of Gods and qualities alike is insisted upon."[] As mentioned, religious remnants are not the only fatalities: the culture industry is explicitly highlighted, as it has been typically theorized by various members of the Western Marxist tradition that art represented the last refuge of human creativity and spontaneity. When the aesthetic sphere is conquered by the ratio we realize that we have reached the pinnacle of the schematization of fixed quantities. The work of art has much in common with mythic enchantment: "it posits its own, self-enclosed area which is withdrawn from the context of profane existence, and in which special laws apply."[] The wave of Enlightenment equivalence wipes away these special laws as easily as it does those of superstitious magic.

C. Capitalism and Enlightenment

The mode of economic and social organization which corresponds with Enlightenment thought is commodity capitalism. Bourgeois justice and commodity exchange follow precisely the same logic as the scientific method; as Bacon asks, "is there not a true coincidence between commutative and distributive justice, and arithmetical and geometrical proportion"?[] The language of the economy is derived from the logic of scientific investigation; value, exchange, productivity: what all of these categories have in common is an essence which resides in the quantitative and equivalent; they have no positive content outside of their abstract relations with that which is made through a leveling reduction to be the same. The true nature of schematism - domination - is revealed in modern science as corresponding with the interests of industrial production and consumption. Being becomes that which is manufactured and administrated. "Everything - even the human individual, not to speak of the animal - is converted into the repeatable, replaceable process, into a mere example for the conceptual models of the system."[] The essence of human practice becomes concentrated in the practice itself; what matters is coordination and organization, or, the technical process, as opposed to some conception of a just human end. Bourgeois reason is a reason which no longer posits any substantial or affirmative goals; it "is the organ of calculation, of planning, it is neutral in regards to ends; its element is coordination."[] The social individual who has been integrated into the economy of Enlightenment acts or produces not according to the dictates of her own will, in a free, creative, and spontaneous fashion, but acts or produces in such a way so as to merely reproduce the system of domination. In their discussion of Sade, Adorno and Horkheimer link the sexual activity of Juliette and her acquaintances to the conditions of sport and the reproduction of the system of production: "The teams of modern sport, whose interaction is so precisely regulated that no member has any doubt about his role, and which provide a reserve for every player, have their exact counterpart in the sexual teams of Juliette, which employ every useful moment, neglect no human orifice, and carry out every function."[] What is witnessed is a form of social organization completely devoid of any concrete positive goal; "the arrangements amount not so much to pleasure as to its regimented pursuit".[]

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Work relations become no longer essentially related to the potentialities of collective individuals; the belief that an organization of existing things could achieve their essence in future changes is no longer a possibility. We already saw how the first principle of Enlightenment thought is that of rational identity and bodily fixity: in order to comprehend a thing we must know what a thing is, and in order to know what a thing is we must assign a strictly defined value or essence to it which is incapable of evading immutation. The world of things becomes hypostasized in that immediate form ...

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