This week, we're going to be changing gears yet again.
Talking about some thinkers who were known as the founders of critical theory.
The the original Frankfurt School philosophers who wind up immigrating from
Germany during the Nazi period. And some working in the United States New
York, California, elsewhere. and we will be looking today at a brief
text. Brief but as you know, if you've tried to
read it dense text from Horkheimer and Adorno, and then we'll go on to the next
generation really, of critical thinkers, sometimes associated with even with
deconstruction. We'll talk about that next time with
Michel Foucault. So, we're moving quickly toward the
present of the Horkheimer and the Adorno's text was published in in 1947.
but Foucault is doing his most important work in the 1960s and in beyond.
So we're, we're getting closer to the present.
And some of the issues that they're talking about will be, I think, much more
obviously relevant to the contemporary stage than, perhaps than were some of the
issues talked about from our 18th and 19th century thinkers.
Horkheimer and Adorno and Foucault this week.
I, I, I entitled this week on the syllabus, Getting out of Totality.
Getting out of Totality and I thought. Maybe I should begin with a word about
why I've used that, that header that, that title.
at getting out of totality refers to the ways in which Horkheimer and Adorno, and
the thinkers associated with their school saw a system of enlightenment that had
become ever tighter in its organization. More global in it's reach, and more
powerful in it's sort of ability, in it's ability to control people.
They saw this really nefarious globalization as a product of the
enlightenment. They saw modernity and enlightenment
joining hands to create a new universal myth.
That entrapped us with its appeal while controlling us and diminishing our
freedom at every step. Foucault had a different take on some of
those same issues, but he too saw the growth of a kind of global accumulation
of power. A global accumulation of power from which
it is increasingly difficult to escape. And even, one can say, that the attempts
to escape that power fed the oppressive power itself.
And and, and that really is the theme of, of these thinkers.
That there, that, ironically, if I could put it that way, ironically are attempts
at liberation, wind up being steps in our own oppression.
Our attempts in liberation wind up being steps in our own oppression.
I, I, I want to just start off by, by situating Foucault in relation to some of
the other theorists you've been hearing about and philosophical tradition you
know about. and and that for me is to, is to
emphasize that Foucault is a Nietzschean thinker.
and Nietzsche was for Foucault an important instrument for getting out of
historicism. and getting out of a mode of thinking
that the generation before his had developed as an extension of Hegelian
Marxist. The age we thinkers who really emphasized
they had a formation of the self was deeply formed by or conditioned by
temporal dimensions. And that by understanding temporal
dimensions, one had a confrontation either with politics or with
authenticity, with freedom, or with struggle.
that was the generation that preceded Foucault's.
So, Horkheimer and Adorno writing in the Nazi period what problem are they trying
to address? What issue are they trying to explain?
they come out of the Hegelian Marxist tradition.
That is one where the, the path of reason, the path of the master-slave
dialectic, which we spoke about early on in the semester.
accelerates becomes evermore prominent. But Horkheimer and Adorno the, the, the
dialectic that Marx saw as the engine of eventual freedom, the dialectic actually
accelerates our oppression. How so?
well, before we get to the solution or the, the mechanism, I just want to say
one more word about the problem they see. Remember, Marx in the Communist Manifest
that talked about how the accumulation of wealth would also result in the
accumulation of of the power of the proletariat.
The power of the lower classes to free themselves from the tyranny of capitalist
wealth accumulation. According to Marx and Engels, as we
became as the proletariat became more aware of it's oppression, they would turn
against the system that created that oppression.
What Adorno and Horkheimer are trying to understand is how, when the oppression
gets even more visible, as it does with the growth of fascism.
How when the oppression gets even more visible, masses of people don't rebel
against the oppression. In other words, they're trying to
understand the attractions of fascism and Nazism.
They're trying to understand why the working classes don't rebel against their
owners of capital. Why they don't rebel against the massive
corporations or the political parties that feed them.
Horkheimer and Adorno are trying to understand why we participate in our own
control or oppression. Why we give power to the things that turn
us into less free and less capable human beings.
they are interested in the persistence of domination despite the possibilities for
freedom. And they, they traced this problem, the
persistence of domination, back to the enlightenment.
As you see in the first sentence of the reading for this week they identify
enlightenment as the problem. And I'll just remind you of that
sentence, I'll read it to you now. Enlightenment, enlightenment, understood
in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating
human beings from fear. And I've highlighted that in my, it's
like, liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters.
Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.
Enlightenment's program was the disenchantment of the world.
I want to just focus on a couple of pieces of that text.
I'll leave biographies of the thinkers and things like that for you to find on
yourself, your, your computers. But I want to focus on the text here of
Horkheimer and Adorno. Enlightenment focused on the liberating
human beings from fear and installing them as masters.
Remember that master slave dialectic is being echoed here.
Liberating human beings from fear. But, in fact, what happens in
enlightenment is they create conditions for a new kind of fear.
And then this sentence, the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with
triumphant calamity. It's a great phrase.
That is in the very triumph of technology of progress of industry of global global
reach of, of our of our tools, we have created the conditions for calamity.
and you can see this in, Horkheimer and Adorno see this in Nazism.
They see this in the weapons of mass destruction, we point today to the, the
environmental degradation or other global warming or other forms of calamity,
triumphant calamity. Calamity that is a result of the very
progress that we have been so proud of. for Adorno and Horkheimer, enlightenment
is a myth. Enlightenment starts out as a way of
getting rid of myth, remember? Voltaire says, you must squash all the,
this, the nonsense, the infamy get rid of it.
Adorno and Horkheimer's enlightenment's program,becomes so self-fulfilling,
self-justifying.It is itself a myth, and a myth that works against human beings
and comes to dominate us. Domination is a key term Horkheimer and
Adorno, and I I want you to think about what they mean by that.
This is really just from the second page of the reading they link technology and
domination. Here's what they say.
Technology is the essence of this knowledge.
That is enlightenment knowledge. It aims to produce neither concepts nor
images, nor the the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the labor of
others. What human beings, they write, seek to
learn from human nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human,
other human beings. Nothing else counts.
This is a phrase that they could've said again and again.
Nothing else counts. For Horkheimer and Adorno, knowledge
comes to mean domination of the world. It sets up the knower in a position to
dominate other things. And as knowledge gets equated with
domination, all other forms of understanding are pushed aside.
Hence, one of the roots of, of the, the problem, the problem of how our, our
methods of understanding come to actually oppress us.
What they see in this process is that quantification comes to be the only
framework for, that counts as knowledge. In other words in the 19th century, you
might have narrative. You might have philosophical explanation.
You might have other modes of qualitative experiments or qualitative investigation.
Counting is knowledge. by the middle of the 20th century,
Horkheimer and Adorno say that the only thing that really counts is knowledge.
The only thing that really will count as science is knowledge that can be
quantified, knowledge that results in the domination of the object studied.
That's key for them. That we, we come to think understanding
is grasping and dominating something. and this doubles back against us.
It's doubled back against us because it sets up the knower, what they call the
subject on pages five and six of the text.
It sets up the knower as the, as an agent who shows his or her power.
And it's usually a him, a man, shows his or her power through control of others.
Here is Horkheimer and Adorno man's likeness to God consists in sovereignty
over existence, in lordly gaze, in the command.
So, what they're trying to show here is that enlightenment pictures the human
being in his or her full capacity as someone who comes to dominate the world
through understanding. But like the master in the master-slave
dialectic, when you come to dominate the world, you actually destroy the
conditions of your own understanding.