Dialectic of Enlightenment as Genealogy Critique

Roger Foster
Jrgen Habermas has argued that, in condemning rationality while using rational argument, the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment are guilty of a performative contradiction.1 Allegedly, Dialectic of Enlightenment represents a totalization of ideology critique. Reason turns back on itself, casting suspicion over the very rational criteria which had previously done the ideological unmasking. Habermas has also suggested that Horkheimer and Adorno make the critique of reification unworkable, by projecting it back behind the capitalist beginnings of the modern age into the very beginnings of hominization.2 Accordingly, Horkheimer and Adorno no longer see capitalist society as the ground of reification. It is rather instrumental reason that is the basis of reified consciousness, and this is generalized both temporally (to apply to the entire history of the species) and substantively (to apply to cognition in the service of selfpreservation and the repression of instinctual nature). Although the charge of performative contradiction can be defused while remaining within the bounds of Habermas interpretation of Dialectic of Enlightenment, the real reasons why this critique fails lie deeper. This becomes clear if Dialectic of Enlightenment is seen as
1. Jrgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, tr. by Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), pp. 106-130. For critiques which explicitly challenge the ascription of a performative contradiction to Dialectic of Enlightenment, see A. T. Nuyen, Habermas, Adorno and the Possibility of Immanent Critique, in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 3 (1992), and Martin Morris On the Logic of the Performative Contradiction, Review of Politics, Vol. 58, No. 4 (1996). 2. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, ibid., p. 366.

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genealogy critique. Genealogy is a form of critique which uses historical analysis to undermine the ideological self-understanding of dominant thought structures. Historical analysis is employed to uncover needs and interests central to the formation of thought systems, but forgotten or repressed when that system becomes dominant. Horkheimer and Adorno use genealogy to criticize a positivist variant of rational thinking that defines itself as rational thinking as such. Here cognition takes the form of a classification of facts within mathematized formulas, which serves productivity through increased control over natural processes.3 Horkheimer and Adorno understand positivism as the philosophical expression of that structure of knowledge concerned with the technically useful. By means of genealogy, they criticize the positivist version of the Enlightenment, and not reason as such. The purpose this critique is to uncover alternative possibilities of rational thinking, which are suppressed by the positivist definition of reason. Horkheimer and Adorno develop this genealogy critique by modifying the cultural anthropology deployed by Freud in Totem and Taboo. In this work, Freud constructs an interpretation of primitive thought organized around psychoanalytic categories. Animistic beliefs, Freud argues, derive from the cultural equivalent of that psychic process which, at the individual level, gives rise to obsessional neurosis. Freud is thus able to dispense with the view of early ethnologists that animism is a result of intellectual error, and also with the Durkheimian view that animism represents a hypostatization of social forces. Horkheimer and Adorno modify Freuds account by arguing that animism and mythic thought systems in general originate in a primordial fear of the unknown. The positivist Enlightenment can then be revealed by genealogy critique as a culturally sublimated expression of primordial fear. On this basis, they are able to uncover the contingent, non-rational origins of the restriction of thought to the technically useful. Before developing this argument, it is necessary to show how the genealogy critique deployed in Dialectic of Enlightenment emerged as a response to the problematic of cultural reification, which they had taken over from the early sociologists via Georg Lukcs. What was threatened by cultural reification was the capacity of symbolic forms to articulate critical experience, i.e., those experiences in which the social world shows up as structured by tensions, antagonisms, and contradictions.
3. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, tr. by John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979), p. 4. This translation has been modified where necessary.

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The Problem of Cultural Reification The Critical Theory of early Frankfurt School theorists was informed by two major critical traditions, i.e., the Marxist critique of domination, and the analysis of the pathologies stemming from capitalist modernization, as articulated by classical social theory. Critical theorists took over that defining unity of the critique of domination within Marxism, which can best be described as the conjunction of a science of domination and a logic of emancipation.4 Crudely put, the Marxian view holds that the analysis of structures of domination allows the identification of that normative perspective within the present which is brought to bear in revolutionary activity. For Marx, these components were joined by means of the concept of labor, which was both the source of alienation and reification, and the ground of that potential of self-development which was to be set free by revolutionary activity. The connection with the Marxian critique, then, meant that Frankfurt School theorists were committed to the articulation of a critical perspective that, at the same time, attempts to identify the social location for the normative perspective underlying this critique. A second major influence on Frankfurt School theorists, however, can be found in the work of the early sociologists. These thinkers, influenced more by Nietzsche than by Marx, theorized typical pathologies emerging in the transition from traditional to modern societies or what Ferdinand Tnnies described as the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft.5 Rather than focusing on domination and social struggle, they were preoccupied with the perceived loss of objective structures of moral meaning whether in Webers account of the iron cage, which theorized the loss of the religious-metaphysical background to social practice; in Durkheims account of anomie; or in Tnnies reading of the weakening of the bonds of Gemeinschaft.6 In all these cases, modern societies were seen as afflicted by problems of (moral) disintegration. Unlike the early sociologists, however, Frankfurt School theorists were not concerned with the problem of disintegration in the context of the breakdown of the binding structures of the traditional order. Rather, they saw this disintegration
4. See Axel Honneth, Domination and Moral Struggle, in his The Fragmented World of the Social (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995). 5. Ferdinand Tnnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1963). As in the case of the Marxist critique, the influence of these early sociologists was also filtered through Lukcs, whose social thought represented an exemplary synthesis of Marx and Weber. 6. Another important figure in this group is Georg Simmel, whose Philosophie des Geldes (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1989) shows a significant Nietzschean influence.

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in terms of the loss of access to the symbolic tools of critique. In order to understand this transformation, it is necessary to grasp how Frankfurt School theorists transplanted Marxian insights into the debate concerning cultural meaning. This led them to criticize the view that the frameworks of moral meaning, which the early sociologists saw as under threat, were to be theorized as expressive of social solidarity or moral consensus. Rather, they argued, the conflicts which dirempt the social body would find their counterpart at the level of meaning in the form of symbolic tensions or contradictions harboring unrealized or suppressed possibilities unfulfilled demands embodying that contexttranscendent force which makes possible a critical experience of the social order. In short, the moral meanings that the early sociologists had theorized as the guarantors of social cohesion were seen instead as allowing critical insight into the oppressive structures of the social world in which they emerged. First generation Frankfurt School theorists tended to speak of this critical potential of symbolic forms in terms of determinate negations.7 The most fundamental normative categories of the present order justice, equality, democracy, etc. contain a transcendent dimension: their fulfilment demands rejection of the existing order. Thus, contra a reductivist theory of ideology, the normative categories integral to the self-understanding of modern capitalist societies are not just pure semblance. Through their internal meaningfulness, they express the conflicts of this social order in the form of a demand for their negation. On the basis of this reading, Frankfurt School theorists are able to theorize the problem of disintegration as the rigidification of meanings, in which the ends of reason lose their capacity to function as the immanent negation of social antagonisms, and thus lose their critical, context-transcending force. This focus on the loss of a location for the critical potential of reason was not entirely foreign to the early sociologists. In fact, Webers notion of the force of the extraordinary attached to charismatic authority and Durkheims description of collective effervescence8 can both be seen as
7. See, e.g., Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum, 1974), p. 36, and Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1966), p. 230. In the latter work, bestimmt is translated as definite, thereby obscuring the Hegelian origins of the phrase bestimmte Negation. 8. Both terms refer to an extreme form of self-distanciation from ordinary experience: individuals are transported beyond themselves. See Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tbingen: Mohr, 1980), pp. 140-2; and mile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, tr. by Karen E. Fields (New York: The Free Press, 1995), pp. 218-20.

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standing for the accessibility of normative transcendence as part of social experience. The germs of a theory concerned with a suppression of the critical possibilities of meaning are already present in the Weberian account of the waning of charisma, and in Durkheims account of the dying of former gods and the call for new forms of collective creativity. The distinctive contribution of Dialectic of Enlightenment is to provide an analysis of the problem of disintegration through a genealogical critique. The task then becomes one of identifying that distinctive event within social development responsible for the pathologies of moral meaning identified by classical social theory. Genealogy sets out to uncover that turning point responsible for the experiential inaccessibility of the transcendent force attached to normative categories. As with all forms of genealogical critique, the main objective is to undermine the self-definition of the present dominant thought system (in this case, positivist Enlightenment) as the necessary and exclusive form of rational thinking. Weber and Lukcs on Cultural Reification Two factors were responsible for the transformation of early Critical Theory from an interdisciplinary research program to genealogy critique. In the first place, power was perceived as becoming ever more pervasive and mediated in 20th century capitalism. Thus, the objective of deriving these mediated forms exclusively from the economic structure was becoming increasingly problematic. Secondly, and here the influence of the early sociologists was central, cultural rationalization was seen to be eroding the accessibility of the context-transcending force of symbolic forms. Ideals such as freedom and justice were thus no longer able to provide the basis for a negative evaluation of the present social order. In terms of determinate negation, this meant that the central normative concepts identified with this social order were no longer able to identify its essence as its becoming; normative concepts became purely descriptive and no longer able to articulate the inherent tensions of present society. Normative terms, therefore, were no longer able to point beyond the present order by showing the failure of this order to realize the possibilities inherent in its ideals. Symbolic frameworks were thus ideologically constricted and incapable of identifying the present order in the context of its unrealized possibilities. This insight is the basis of Horkheimer and Adornos critique of positivist Enlightenment. The first intimation of a conjunction of these two problems, i.e., the increasing pervasiveness of power and the loss of a cultural location for

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transcendent meaning, can be found in Webers account of institutional power. He argued that bureaucratic authority was an authority in virtue of [the possession of] knowledge, a type of authority integrally linked to cultural rationalization.9 If bureaucratic domination seemed to be the rational form of administration, a rationally organized socialist society would also have to be ordered that way. This seemed to necessitate pulling the critique of domination free from an exclusive focus on economic structures. However, from the standpoint of Critical Theory, what is most significant about Webers reading of modernity is that it provides the perspective for a reading of cultural rationalization as both disenchantment, in which the illusion of a cosmological sense is extinguished, and as creating the basis for an extension of institutional coercion.10 Both ideas are united in Webers description of the waning of charismatic authority.11 Here he argues that, in the course of cultural rationalization, charismatic authority becomes objectified as cultural discipline, and thus forms the subjective basis for unquestioning obedience to bureaucratic authority. Thus, the waning of charismatic authority constitutes a decline of the extent of influence of individual action.12 The rationalization of the political and economic procurement of needs proceeds together with the unstoppable expansion of discipline as a universal appearance, and increasingly limits the significance of charisma and of individually differentiated action.13 Weber is able to theorize a new impersonal domination that arises through cultural rationalization. This is a structure of discipline, which is all that remains of the bond to innovative charismatic leaders. This is what lies behind Webers depiction of the fate of ascetic Protestantism in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The reference to modern subjects of rational discipline as specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart suggests that what is left behind after the charismatic phase of Puritanism is strict obedience.14 There is a further aspect to Webers depiction of the waning of charisma, however, which is vital for understanding why the form that cultural rationalization had taken in Western societies became a problem for
9. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, op. cit., p. 129. 10. See Jeffrey Alexander, Structure and Meaning: Rethinking Classical Sociology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 79. 11. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, op. cit., pp. 681-687. 12. Ibid, p. 681. 13. Ibid, p. 687. 14. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. by Talcott Parsons (London: Unwin, 1930), p. 182. See also Alexander, Structure and Meaning, op. cit., p. 84.

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Critical Theory. Weber distinguishes charisma from other forms of authority by contraposing the extraordinary and the ordinary. Charisma constitutes the specifically creative revolutionary force of history. Charismatic authority is capable of precipitating a radical transformation a metanoia of convictions and beliefs, and thus represents the internal subordination under what is not yet present, the absolutely unique, thus holy.15 Charisma is a type of meaning revelation that answers to those needs and hopes which cannot be adequately satisfied within everyday authority.16 This suggests that Weber reads cultural rationalization as bringing forth a rational discipline that displaces or suppresses the creative force of the extraordinary, which was maintained in the meaning revelation unique to charismatic authority. This argument was applied by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment to the positivist Enlightenment. They reinterpret the loss of the extraordinary force of charismatic authority as a suppression of the possibility of a critical experience of everyday life, due to the dominance of a positivist mentality that restricts thinking to the ordering of facts. They root this critical experience in the dialectical nature of language. For them, the positivist mentality threatens the charismatic quality attached to reason its ability to reveal an idealized future in an immanent, negative presentation of the present. Horkheimer and Adorno take up the idea of a potentially distorting process of objectification, or what Weber also refers to as the Veralltglichung (becoming ordinary), of a certain creative force in the course of cultural rationalization. Rather than seeing this from the standpoint of Webers pessimistic diagnosis, however, Horkheimer and Adorno attempt to trace the historical roots of the suppression of reasons contexttranscending force, in order to reveal both its contingency and its entwinement with dominant social interests. In Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, Lukcs attempts to join the Marxian critique of political economy with Webers sociology in such a way that the critique of capitalist society can be fused with a critique of rationalization. Lukcs essay turns Marxs economic analysis into social theory by posing the question of the consequences of the universalization of commodity exchange. How far, he asks, is commodity exchange able to influence the total inner and outer
15. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, op. cit., p. 658. 16. See Wolfgang Schluchter, Die Entstehung des modernen Rationalismus: Eine Analyse von Max Webers Entwicklungsgeschichte des Okzidents (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1998), p. 247.

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life of society?17 The deformation of rationality appears to be a process of commodification. Just as the appearance of objects in economic exchange destroys their qualitative character, i.e., their use value, so, through the rationalization of social life by modern bureaucratic institutions, all issues are subjected to an increasingly formal and standardized treatment and . . . there is an ever-increasing remoteness from the qualitative essence of the things to which bureaucratic activity pertains.18 Reification, the process by which a relation between people takes on the illusory appearance of objectivity, is the key to understanding how ideology operates in the modern world. The link between the two, however, meant that ideology could no longer be conceived of as a body of subjectively held beliefs, since reification was an aspect of the objective structure of capitalism. Ideology no longer hovers above the world as a set of subjective beliefs. Rather, the object is distorted in its objectivity through reification.19 The flip side of the objectification of ideology was its internalization. Ideology, Lukcs claims, comes to sink ever more deeply into human consciousness.20 It is evident that, shorn of its Hegelian-Marxist theory of class consciousness, Lukcs diagnosis would pose serious problems for the possibility of locating a critical, emancipatory force within society. Lukcs claim that reification is founded on a principle of rationalization, on the notion of calculation, clearly hints at that process by which the dialectical workings of language are undermined.21 Rationalization produces a false opposition between purely formal laws and irrational content, making it unlikely that a theoretical prescription, an ought, might be able to modify existence. Thus, reality appears to individuals as unchangeable. The solution to this problem is the adoption of the standpoint of praxis, which makes possible a superior understanding of subject and object as involved in a complex process of mediation, in which the critical demands thought makes of its objects appear as the structural principles and the real tendencies of the objects themselves.22 The central insight which rendered Lukcs solution problematic, and which would
17. Georg Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness, tr. by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), p. 84. 18. Ibid, p. 99. 19. Ibid, p. 93. Also the commodity structure . . . penetrate[s] society in all its aspects, p. 85. 20. Ibid, p. 93. Thus, the proletariat makes its appearance as the product of the capitalist order, sharing with the bourgoisie the reification of every aspect of its life. (p. 149). 21. Ibid, p. 88. 22. Ibid, p. 155.

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concern Critical Theory from Dialectic of Enlightenment onwards, was that there seemed to be no grounds for positing a direct link between the overcoming of economic reification the adoption of the standpoint of praxis as the conscious transformation of nature through productive activity and cultural reification. Lukcs solution rested on the thesis that the latter can be conceived of as an effect of the former. As Webers analysis implied, however, the idea that a reified rationality reduced to processes of calculation and emptied of value might recover its fundamental connection to human ends through the abolition of capitalist relations seemed suspect. Horkheimer and Adorno saw that cultural reification had effectively twisted free of its roots in the production process, and had to be analyzed as the effect of an autonomous cultural logic of abstraction. Whereas economic institutions posed the problem of injustice, the consequences of cultural reification were primarily to be seen in terms of a marginalizing or suppressing certain experiences those in which the social world is revealed negatively. In order to address cultural reification adequately, it would be necessary to break with the base-superstructure schema of orthodox Marxism. The genealogy critique developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment attempts to reconstruct the critique of reification on a new basis. This takes the form of a genealogical critique of the positivist Enlightenment because Horkheimer and Adorno see the positivist mentality as the intellectual reflection of the reification pervasive in the social world. The Turn to Genealogy Critique In Dialectic of Enlightenment, genealogy critique is used to undermine the self-understanding of the positivist Enlightenment as the totality of rational knowledge, and to reveal an alternative concept of rational thinking as a repressed historical possibility of enlightened thought. The genealogical approach enables Horkheimer and Adorno to deploy the repressed possibilities in the history of positivist Enlightenment as the critical standard with which to judge it. In uncovering the origins of positivist thinking in mythic fear, they attempt to unmask positivist Enlightenment as founded, not on a thirst for knowledge, but on a repression of critical experience in rational thinking. Once its genealogical nature is taken into account, what is wrong with the Habermasian reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment becomes clear. Horkheimer and Adorno do not mean to cast a suspicion over rational thinking as such, nor to extend reification back to the beginnings of history. Habermas clearly misreads

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Dialectic of Enlightenment as an attempt to construct an ontological thesis concerning enlightened reason. In fact, genealogy is only intelligible as a self-conscious strategic intervention seeking to write a history of the present that will undermine its self-representation. The purpose of genealogy critique is thus to provide a distanciating perspective on the present. The function of history in Dialectic of Enlightenment is to reveal the present as an object of critical experience, through the very presentation of the dominant structure of rational thinking as founded on a repression of alternative possibilities. The thesis of a domination of nature does not seek to generalize cultural reification into a philosophical anthropology. Rather, it attempts to uncover the contingent, extra-rational origins of the restriction of thought to the technically useful, through a diagnosis of the act of collective repression that founds the restricted rationality of the positivist Enlightenment. The self-definition of the positivist Enlightenment comprises a liberation from fear, and the establishment of the sovereignty of human thought. This was assumed to have become possible through the substitution of knowledge for the imaginary representation of mythic thinking.23 The fear of nature expressed in mythic representations is allegedly overcome by the technical superiority of scientistic thinking, which abolishes the anthropomorphizing of natural processes inherent in myth. It is this self-presentation of the positivist Enlightenment that the genealogy critique of Dialectic of Enlightenment seeks to undermine. The hinge of this critique is the well-known dialectical reversal, which states that Enlightenment regresses to myth in the very attempt to separate itself from the mythic. One regularly missed aspect of this argument essential to the critical intention of the whole is that Horkheimer and Adorno want to uncover a common root for positivist and mythic thinking, which will reveal the cognitive strategies of myth and positivism as only superficially different responses to the same problem. They want to undermine the positivist representation of the anthropomorphic character of mythic thinking as founded on an error. This argument is derived from a critical encounter with Freuds reading of mythic thinking in Totem and Taboo. Freud had questioned the reading of ethnologists that animistic beliefs were founded on reflection concerning certain natural processes, such as sleep and death, which allegedly provided grounds for the notion of spirits as existing independently of bodies. Primitive human beings, Freud
23. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., p. 4.

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claims, were not impelled to the creation of their first world system through a purely speculative desire to know.24 In Taboo and the Ambivalence of Feelings, he suggests that the projection which defines animism can be traced back to an original psychic conflict involving contradictory feelings of affection and aggression that becomes intense with the death of the object of those feelings.25 The conflict can only be resolved by the external projection of the desire for the death of the object. Significantly, however, Horkheimer and Adorno explicitly deny that myth originates in projection. The principle of mana, which is the origin of animistic beliefs, is no projection, but the echo of the real supremacy of nature in the weak souls of primitive men.26 The origin of a spiritual, rather than material component within natural processes does not occur through projection, but is fixed by the cry of terror which accompanies the experience of the unknown and unfamiliar. Therefore, from the beginning the animistic system of mythic thought represents the transcendence of the unknown in relation to the known. Since the unknown is experienced as a frightening superior power, the spiritual-sacred element of transcendence comes to be equated with the shudder by which it is identified.27 Horkheimer and Adorno trace the elimination of critical experience in mythic and positivist thinking to this original entwinement of the transcendent with fear of the unknown. The genealogy critique of Dialectic of Enlightenment undermines the self-understanding of positivist thinking by uncovering the repression underlying the thought structures of both myth and positivist Enlightenment.28 In order to reconstruct this argument, it is necessary to look in greater depth at the account of the origin of animism. Horkheimer and Adorno trace the origin of symbolism back to the separation of the spiritual and the material that is seen to arise from terror in the face of the unknown. In this, they are close to Weber, who emphasized the role of magic in generating symbolic forms. With the belief system of magic, Weber argues, things and processes can first appear as signs for
24. Sigmund Freud, Totem und Tabu (Frankfurt a/M: Fischer Verlag, 1940), p. 89. 25. Ibid, p. 73. 26. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., p. 15. 27. Ibid., p. 15. 28. For the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment, there is no age of mythic innocence, in relation to which Enlightenment would be a regression, but neither is the relation between the two conceivable as progress from mythic barbarism. Enlightenment, in its positivist form, is simply an intensified (i.e., culturally sublimated) form of myth. This, of course, leaves open the thought that a genuine Enlightenment, free from myth, could emerge through reflection on the possibilities discernible in the historical account of the dialectical entwinement of myth and Enlightenment.

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something else, as emanating from a world of souls, demons and gods, which can only be influenced by symbolic means.29 For Horkheimer and Adorno, however, what is revealed in this is the original dialectical nature of language; When the tree is no longer approached merely as a tree, but as evidence for an other, as the location of mana, language expresses the contradiction that something is itself and at the same time something other than itself, identical and not identical. Through the deity, language is transformed from tautology into language. The concept, which some would define as the sign-unit of whatever is comprised under it, was rather from the beginning the product of dialectical thinking, in which each thing is only what it is, in that it becomes that which it is not.30 The notion of concepts as sign-units is, of course, the defining feature of positivist thinking. Horkheimer and Adorno suggest that language originally comprised another possibility, i.e., a dialectical deployment of concepts distinct from the technical-instrumental function of cognition engaged in ordering and classifying facts. The dialectical potential of language enables it to identify existent things as possessing immanent possibilities. Each item is understood in terms of the determinations that it acquires through its being cast into an historical process. It is through the meanings and possibilities revealed in this historical process that existing things are able to acquire determinations that contradict what they appear to be. The origin of symbolism demonstrates that this potential to overshoot the object is an essential component of language. Having identified this critical possibility, Horkheimer and Adorno needed to pinpoint the grounds of the repression of dialectical thinking in mythical and positivist thought systems. The basis for this argument is the origin of the transcendent in the cry of terror. Accordingly, the pre- animistic origin of the spiritual other reveals an ur-repression of dialectical thinking, which arises from the original identification of the transcendent (i.e., the spiritual other) as a source of Angst. Thus, the potential for articulation of the non-identity of things that overshoots the existent is stifled (repressed) by a primordial fear of the unknown. The dialectic between concept and object, therefore, remains impotent to the extent that it develops from the cry of terror which is the duplication, the tautology, of terror itself.31 This argument locates the primordial structures of the dialectical and the ideological forms of language in the emergence of
29. 30. 31. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, op. cit., p. 248. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., p. 15. Ibid., pp. 15-16.

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symbolism. The opposition of the material and spiritual, fixed in the encounter with the unknown, enables items to stand for something other than themselves, to point beyond themselves, and hence to overshoot their existent forms. Mana, which is the origin of symbolism, already expresses this transcendent force of language, its capacity to articulate what transcends the confines of experience; whatever in things is more than their previously familiar existence.32 Language thus possesses an original dialectical component, in which a thing is identifiable as both itself and not itself. However, the dialectical component is corrupted from the beginning by the identification of otherness, of outsideness, as a source of Angst. The origin of ideology, therefore, lies in a primordial fear of the unknown. The origin of the transcendent in a cry of terror sets up from the beginning an ideological barrier to the dialectical deployment of language. The unknown, the otherness or non-identity of the existent, must be repressed in order to quell fear. On the basis of this interpretation, Horkheimer and Adorno are able to construct an account of both myth and positivist Enlightenment as structures founded on a repression of dialectical experience. The animism of mythic thought objectifies the fear of the unknown in the form of gods and demons. The fear attached to the constructions of animism is not, pace Freud, due to the projection of aggression toward the object. Mythical animism, in fact, presupposes this fear which originates in the preanimistic encounter with the unknown and simply objectifies it in the form of gods and demons, which are thus the reified form of a primordial fear of what lies outside ordinary experience. Hence, the gods and demons of animism enforce and execute punishment for the transgressions of the order of ordinary experience. They bear the sign of retribution for acts which rupture the order of the everyday world, and establish the unsanctioned and the extraordinary as a prohibition. This, Horkheimer and Adorno argue, is why myths represent the return to immanence. The restoring of immanence in the wake of a transgression of order is represented by myth as the workings of fate, i.e., an irresistible force that repairs the rupture of ordinary experience.33 Mythical animism, however, is unsuccessful in its attempt to quell the fear of the unknown: the gods and demons of myth bear the petrified sound of fear as their names. It is the attempt to extinguish mythic fear which then determines the Enlightenments course of demythologization,
32. 33. Ibid., pp. 15-16. Ibid., pp. 16.

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which compounds the animate with the inanimate, as myth compounds the inanimate with the animate.34 The anti-animist strategy of positivist Enlightenment cannot escape from myth because it is impelled by the mythic fear of the unknown. Positivist Enlightenment attempts to abolish mythic fear by removing all traces of animism, since animism can only objectify this fear without freeing human beings of its effects. Thus, the positivist Enlightenment is simply mythic fear turned radical: it is merely another strategy to quell the fear of the unknown that marked the primordial encounter with the transcendent by constructing a world of pure immanence. For the positivist Enlightenment as for myth, nothing at all may remain outside, because the mere representation of outsideness is the source of fear.35 This argument grounds Horkheimers and Adornos genealogically constructed diagnosis of the positivist Enlightenment. The rejection of dialectical thinking which defines the positivist mentality is seen to derive from the unconscious workings within the positivist Enlightenment of an original prohibition the imperative not to transgress the order of ordinary experience which was the origin of mythic fear. The genealogy critique reveals the positivist Enlightenment as founded on a repression of critical experience. Here, Horkheimer and Adorno attempt to apply Freuds reading of taboo as a critical thesis by identifying a type of collective repression that takes shape as a repression of critical experience. Positivism as Collective Repression In Taboo and the Ambivalence of Feelings, Freud discusses taboo as a prohibition that originates in the fear of demonic powers. In the course of time, taboo becomes detached from its origins, and remains as a source of power simply because it was such due to psychic persistence.36 Freud attempts to get beneath animistic thinking in order to ground it in a projection resulting from a prior psychic conflict. On this basis, Freud interprets taboo as originating in the ambivalence of feelings.37 In opposition to this, Horkheimer and Adorno trace the origin of animism to the fear of the unknown, which is objectified (as gods and demons) in the cry of terror. Thus, they are able to trace the origin of taboo to the fear of what lies beyond the immanence of ordinary experience. In
34. 35. 36. 37. Ibid. Ibid. Freud, Totem und Tabu, op. cit., p. 32. Ibid, p. 78.

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animistic thought representing the unknown and unfamiliar as a prohibition, this taboo is then objectified in the form of gods and demons. This reinterpretation enables Horkheimer and Adorno to reconstruct Freuds reading of the internalization of taboo as a critical thesis concerning the positivist Enlightenment. For Freud, taboo originates in an externallyimposed ancient prohibition.38 In due course, the guarantee of the prohibition is displaced from an external source to an internal psychic mechanisms, which represses the desire for transgression. According to Freud: As a result of the repression which has taken place, which is bound up with a forgetting amnesia the motivation of the prohibition which has become conscious remains unknown, and all attempts to replace it intellectually must fail, since these do not find the point at which they could get an effective purchase.39 Horkheimer and Adorno take up this thesis of the sublimation of an external prohibition into internal mechanisms of repression, and apply it to the positivist Enlightenment. Positivist thinking thus appears as a rationalized form of the repression of the unknown and unfamiliar at the basis of the mythic belief system. In positivism, the original mythic fear of unknown powers is sublimated into a rationalized repression of the transcendent in thinking. The pure immanence that results from the positivist extirpation of animism is nothing other than, so to speak, a universal taboo.40 The cry of terror accompanying fear of the unknown thus persists as a coercive mechanism in the collective consciousness of modern positivism. In order to depict the compulsive manner in which positivist thinking goes about eliminating animistic traces, the last remnants of mythic fear, Horkheimer and Adorno also apply the idea of the extension of the repressive mechanism to ever new objects.41 Enlightenment discerns the remnants of mythic fear not merely in unclarified concepts and words, as demonstrated by semantic language-criticism, but in any human assertion that has no place in the purposive context of self-preservation.42 The elimination of unclarified concepts and words, which the Vienna Circle had presented as a methodical approach to knowledge acquisition, is seen as a rationalized version of the taboo erected against the transgression of ordinary experience. Just as myth
38. 39. 40. 41. 42. Ibid, p. 42. Ibid, pp. 37-8. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., p. 16. Freud, Totem und Tabu, op. cit., p. 38. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., p. 29.

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represents the eternal return of what has always already been, so positivist thinking outlaws any kind of experience that transcends the factual. This argument had been foreshadowed in Horkheimers The End of Reason: Reason, in destroying conceptual fetishes, ultimately destroyed itself. . . . None of the categories of rationalism has survived. Modern science looks upon such of them as Mind, Will, Final Cause, Transcendental Creation, Innate Ideas, res extensa and res cogitans as spooks, despising them even more than Galileo did the cobwebs of scholasticism. Reason itself appears as a ghost that has emerged from linguistic usage. . . . The name of reason is held to be a meaningless symbol, an allegorical figure without a function, and all ideas that transcend the given reality are forced to share its disgrace.43 Therefore, positivist methodology is a repressive mechanism, whose function is to extinguish all possible constructions through which thinking could generate critical experience. In so doing, positivism extends the prohibition against the transgression of ordinary experience into the realm of thinking: For positivism, which represents the court of judgement of enlightened reason, to digress into intelligible worlds is no longer merely prohibited, but counts rather as meaningless prattle. It does not need fortunately for it to be atheistic, because objectified thinking cannot even raise the problem. . . . In both the pregnancy of the mythical image and the clarity of the scientific formula, the eternity of the factual is confirmed and mere existence pure and simple expressed as the meaning which it blocks.44 In characterizing the positivist Enlightenment as a compulsion to eliminate the unknown from rational thinking, Horkheimer and Adorno follow Webers description of scientific rationality in Science as a Vocation. Scientific rationality could be understood in terms of disenchantment, since its founding presupposition was a denial of animistic beliefs. The governing thesis of scientific rationality is that there are in principle no mysterious, incalculable powers at work, but rather that one could in principle master everything through calculation.45 On the basis
43. Max Horkheimer, The End of Reason, in Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, Vol. 19 (1941), p. 367. 44. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., pp. 25, 27, 32 and 33. Adorno makes a similar point in his discussion of the law of contradiction. This law bans all content: do not think in a dispersed manner, do not let yourself be diverted by unarticulated nature, but hold fast to the unity of what is meant as if it were a possession. See his Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1970), pp. 86-7. 45. Max Weber, Science as a Vocation, in Peter Lassman and Irving Velody, eds., Max Webers Science as a Vocation, (London: Unwin, 1989), p. 13.

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of their genealogy critique, however, Horkheimer and Adorno subvert Webers reading of this process as a movement from an enchanted to a disenchanted, from a mythic to a genuinely enlightened standpoint. This critique is ironically stated in the claim that, for scientific rationality, [t]here is to be no mystery, but also no wish for its revelation.46 This disenchantment is not genuine, since the end result of the elimination of all traces of the unknown can only be an enchantment of the present: To the scientific attitude, the separation of thought from the business of adjusting the factual, the departure from the enchanted circle of existence, is just as insane and self-destructive as, for the primitive magician, is the departure from the magic circle that he has prepared for the invocation, and in both cases the transgression of the taboo will result in the offenders ruin.47 In its attempt to repress all traces of the unknown in order to eliminate mythic fear, positivism ends up by rendering the existing as sacred and critical thought as profane: [u]nder the title of brute facts, the social injustice from which these facts arise is as assuredly sacred as a realm to which access is eternally barred, as the medicine man was sacrosanct under the protection of his gods.48 The extirpation of animistic traces, when it intensifies into a compulsion to eradicate the obscure from words and concepts, ends up eliminating all possible linguistic traces of critical experience. Positivist thinking replicates the pure immanence of myth the eternal return of what is eternally the same through its enchantment of the everyday. Hence the subjection of all reality to logical formalism, is paid for by the obedient subjection of reason to what is directly given.49 The anti-animistic strategy of the positivist Enlightenment does not result in a genuine escape from mythical enchantment. Positivism represents simply a rationalized intensification of the prohibition originating in fear of the unknown, which is objectified in mythical animism. Horkheimer and Adorno deploy this genealogy critique in order to explain the emergence of both domination and reification. The division of labor is said to derive from the division in mythic religion between magical power and obedience, which gradually came to be ascribed exclusively to different social groups. The obedience of the subordinate groups was at this stage secured by the ability of the dominant to remove fear through their intercourse with the gods. In a developed social division of labor,
46. 47. 48. 49. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., p. 5. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 26.

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however, the fear of nature which grounds mythic inequality is sublimated into social pressure. The shudder that is objectified as a fixed image in animism thereby becomes the sign of the solidified domination of the privileged.50 The fear of nature which had been the ground of mythic inequality is now sublimated into a social coercion. This is expressed in universal concepts in the same way fear was expressed in mythic images. Here, Horkheimer and Adorno prefigure a theory of symbolic power, where the specific determinations attaching to conceptual forms are revealed as embodying the symbolic sublimation of relations of domination: Even the deductive form of science reflects hierarchy and coercion. Just as the first categories represented the organized tribe and its power over the individual, so the whole logical order, dependency, connection, progression, and union of concepts is grounded in the corresponding relations of social reality, namely, the division of labor.51 The same argument underlies the critique of bourgeois justice. Horkheimer and Adorno read the principle of equivalence underlying bourgeois justice as a rationalized mythic principle of fate, which expresses the return to immanence. Just as mythic fate represents the reparation of a transgression in the natural order, so bourgeois justice represents guilt and atonement, happiness and unhappiness as the two sides of an equation.52 As a rationalized form of the principle of fate, justice continues to be determined by fear of the unknown. Hence, natural conditions continue to exercise their power, no longer immediately, however, but through the consciousness of human beings.53 As a rationalized prohibition against the unknown, the positivist Enlightenment cannot actualize the true critical potential of justice. Justice goes under in law.54 As a rationalized intensification of mythic fear, positivist thinking removes all traces of a critical charge attached to the concept of justice, which would enable it to point beyond ordinary experience. Justice becomes a kind of verdict: what would be different is made the same, which critically
50. Ibid., p. 21. 51. Ibid., p. 21. 52. Ibid., p. 16. The influence of Nietzsche is apparent here. Nietzsche had traced the concepts of guilt and retribution to the contractual relation of creditor and debtor in On The Genealogy of Morality, tr. by C. Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 43, 49. 53. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., p. 17. 54. Ibid., p. 16. The notion of Untergang is a Hegelian term for the dialectical transition, where the truth of a thing is revealed as its transition into an other.

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establishes the limits of possible experience.55 Bourgeois justice, like mythic fate, is the guarantor of the order of pure immanence. Here, Horkheimer and Adorno deploy their genealogy critique in order to theorize the reification identified by Lukcs on a different basis. Reification derives from the compulsive elimination of animistic traces in the positivist Enlightenment. In the genealogical reading, the reifying abstraction of human qualities in the work process, the transformation of the worker into a mechanical part, which Lukcs had derived from the logic of the commodity form, is seen as part of the process whereby positivist thinking sets out to eliminate all non-mathematizable features of subjectivity. The objectification of souls in modern industry derives from the rationalized intensification of the taboo concerning the unknown.56 Reification is thus traced to the rationalized repression that is a sublimation of mythic fear. The consequences of reification are interpreted in terms of an impoverishment of thought and sensuous experience: The more complicated and precise the social, economic and scientific apparatus with whose service the production system has long harmonized the body, the more impoverished the experiences which it can offer. The elimination of qualities, their conversion into functions, is translated from science by means of the rationalized modes of labor to the experiential world of nations. . . . The regression of the masses today is their inability to hear the unheard-of with their own ears, to touch the unapprehended with their own hands the new form of delusion which deposes every conquered mythic form.57 It should be clear by now why Habermas charge that Horkheimer and Adorno generalize the theory of reification into a negativist philosophy of history is mistaken. Genealogy critique unmasks reification as the result of a rationally sublimated repression of critical experience. The purpose of this account is the very opposite of what Habermas ascribes to Horkheimer and Adorno. The genealogical account of the origins of reification is meant to demonstrate the contingent nature of the reified structures of the modern world. The history of the positivist Enlightenment is meant to develop a critical perspective on the experiential distortions that had come to be associated with modern capitalist societies. The concept of self-reflection with which Horkheimer and Adorno emphasize the possibility of a conscious awareness of the historical pro55. 56. 57. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 36.

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cess that has determined the positivist Enlightenment helps clarify the critique of the present.58 The critical potential of self-reflection is organized according to the Freudian schema, in which it refers to the rendering conscious of the prohibition forgotten through its sublimation into rationalized repression. It is precisely this idea which is expressed in the wellknown reference to the mindfulness of nature in the subject.59 The fulfilment of this mindfulness reveals the unacknowledged truth of all culture. It should also be clear how Dialectic of Enlightenment deploys a genealogy critique to reinterpret the Freudian thesis concerning instinctual repression in the context of a critical social theory. Selbstbesinnung here takes the form of a critical reflection on the natural processes that have operated as unconscious determining forces in the course of enlightenment. As genealogy critique, Dialectic of Enlightenment attempts to lift the taboo on critical experience by bringing the origin of rationalized repression to collective consciousness. Horkheimer and Adorno trace the prohibition concerning critical experience to the fear accompanying the primitive encounter with the unknown. In its compulsive elimination of animistic traces, the positivist Enlightenment is driven by the unconscious workings of this original fear. Hence, the subordination to nature consists in the domination of nature.60 Genuine freedom from the blind determination of nature would only be achievable if thought could reflect on its own coercive mechanism, which is the mechanism of repression, as nature that has forgotten itself.61 In lifting the prohibition taken over from pre-history through self-reflection, enlightenment may become able to recover a critical experience of existing social forms. Genealogy Critique and Social Theory The downside to Horkheimer and Adornos reliance on a genealogy critique, of course, is that it renders problematic the possibility of a critical focus on specific historical and cultural contexts. As Herbert Schndelbach has indicated,62 by tracing cultural reification to an urrepression, Horkeimer and Adorno seem to render the analysis of social processes irrelevant to both reification and emancipation. Schndelbach,
58. Ibid., p. 40. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., p. 39. 61. Ibid., p. 39. 62. In Die Aktualitt der Dialektik der Aufklrung, in his Zur Rehabilitierung des animal rationale (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1992).

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however, wrongly characterizes Dialectic of Enlightenment as a form of totalizing social myth, which presents the truth of history in mythic form, as a narrative explication of the historical world.63 Instead, Dialectic of Enlightenment is best understood as genealogy critique, which deploys history in order to generate a distanciating perspective on the present. Its purpose is not and cannot be to present the rationalizing standardization of each and all as an unavoidable cultural fate.64 Nonetheless, genealogy critique shares some of the shortcomings of social myth, in that it cannot relate the critical history, characterized in terms of repression, to social-cultural processes and institutions which are both the bearers of reification and, potentially, constitute the conditions in which self-reflection could emerge. In order to lay the basis of a critical social theory, the genealogy of the suppression of critical experience would have to be translated into a theory capable of tracing the connection between experiential distortions and social processes. This is not to say that the genealogy critique of Dialectic of Enlightenment has failed. Horkheimer and Adorno were acutely aware that Critical Theory must adjust itself to the particular needs of the time and place in which critical activity occurs. Dialectic of Enlightenment was a strategic intervention at a time in which, with the background of the fascist threat, and the authors pessimistic assessment of mass culture, the prospect of any kind of constructive critical praxis seemed particularly bleak. In this context, Dialectic of Enlightenment seeks to serve as a placeholder for critical thought, by uncovering the false claims to necessity and totality of the dominant, ideologically-constricted thinking. For this reason, Dialectic of Enlightenment is an exemplary illustration of how Critical Theory ought to concern itself with making possible a critical reflection on the most significant conflicts of the social order in which it takes place.

63. 64.

Ibid, p. 240. Ibid, p. 245.