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On The Dialectic of Enlightenment and Other Stuff I Studied in Undergrad
I actually have to give a presentation on The Dialectic in a few weeks.
*
"Myth" is a concept, a synthetic a priori construction which shapes thought, a hermeneutic lens through which phenomena can be viewed. It is thus a sign—a relation between signified (some portion of reality) and signifier (also a portion of reality, if we’re going to nitpick, but one that re-presents the former portion) which is at once arbitrary and fixed.
For Saussure, language was “organized thought” but by the time of Roland Barthes it was argued that language could organize thought. The signs we have at our disposal are the mechanisms with which we can assign names—and with them identity, ontology, ultimately normativity—to complexes found (and found is indeed the word here, for these complexes reveal themselves only to those already looking for them) in reality. Myth is the “second-order” sign-system which connects these organizations to terms—like power—which can describe them. Myth, therefore, is itself a type of myth. (Just as sign is itself a sign, and power is always an institution of power.)
The Dialectic of Enlightenment, then, is a book about myth, as are the works of Eco and Foucault and a host of others. They all demonstrate the way in which systems of signs can be discussed in ways which instruct and reveal, command and challenged. The Dialectic quite unabashedly deals with the mythology of mythologies, with myth and meta-myth and so on. Enlightenment itself is for Horkheimer and Adorno what Barthes would call a mythology. Infinite regress is always possible: just as Horkheimer and Adorno mythologize the mythology of the Enlightenment, so too does this post mythologize Horkheimer and Adorno. The undergrad essay from which this post is adapted received a grade which mythologized it in a certain—deeply normative—way as well. (There is no stance outside the system from which to critique it.)
Horkheimer and Adorno reveal the dynamics they see in Western culture, and in so doing mythologize it. Enlightenment is already what Barthes would call a metalanguage, for “it is a second language, in which one speaks about the first” (Barthes, Myth Today). And Horkheimer and Adorno are not embarrassed to use the word myth when describing the Enlightenment, in part because phenomenological accounts of religion were becoming mainstream at that point, relieving the term of its normative onus. Horkheimer and Adorno thus go on to describe the ways in which “the myths which fell victim to the Enlightenment were themselves its products.”
Horkheimer and Adorno, like Barthes, Eco, Foucault (the list goes on), are interested in the ways in which myth continues to function in contemporary culture. No phenomenon is too subtle or low-brow that it not cannot be a signified in the sign-system of myth; Horkheimer and Adorno discuss the rationalization of cartoons, with animated films which were once short and fantastic evolving into films which longer plots and greater realism, both psychological and in terms of the physical laws of the fictional universe it depicts. One can only wonder what they would think of films today, when animation is done by machines and the distinction between cartoons and live-action films has become so blurred as to be meaningless.
To return to the claim with which I opened this post, mythology is a concept, a synthetic a priori construction useful for acting as a hermeneutic lens. It can and should be turned on contemporary society; when tied to an ethical (that is to say, political) vision, it can be very forceful. The choice to interpret culture in terms of myth is an arbitrary one, however, and is empty without that political vision.
To illustrate this point, let me compare two great twentieth-century thinkers, Michel Foucault and Helene Cixous. The former's thought is fundamentally amoral; the latter's, deeply moral. Foucault's amorality is possible because he considers power relations to be an “essential trait,” and thus chooses to “show” the way in which sexuality as it is experienced is always—and must always be—the sum of a certain set of power relations. “The manifold sexualities," he writes in The History of Sexuality, "all form the correlate of exact procedures of power.” He goes on to construct, from the miscellany of historical events, a narrative of how power relations construct sexuality throughout history. He finds that events fell easily into the framework he selected, so easily he supposed that he must have discovered the truth. (If he has not, then it is not clear what he has to show for himself at all.)
Such a hermeneutic of power lends itself easily to Cixous’ feminist vision. Cixous does not intend to show, as Foucault believes that he does, with unproblematic transparency that power undergirds society. Instead, she undertakes this understanding in order to motivate her political agenda. While like Foucault she does not understand power to be rested in any particular segment of society (“[Men] have led [women] to hate women,” Cixous writes (in The Laugh of the Medusa, I believe), "for both men and women alike share in patriarchal discourse"), and does not even necessarily consider any segment to be particularly subject to it, she does believe it to have a more damaging effect on some groups than others. (Once one accepts power as a synthetic a priori this latter claim follows as an empirical fact.)
*
In retrospect, it occurs to me that it is easy to see Barthes, Foucault, Cixous, and Horkheimer and Adorno all engaged in the same project--in the wake of Wittgenstein, there is only one philosophical project and all thinkers are engaged in it--and much harder to recognize their differences. And this is in many ways the flaw in my undergrad critical theory courses, which were all arranged so that all the texts would in their own way point towards the One Big Idea (meaning/truth/knowledge is continent/fluid) that was the thesis of the course, with the idea that it would take the entire semester to indoctrinate the students in the One Big Idea. Whereas I really accepted and understood the One Big Idea from the get-go, and probably could have stood to focus on the details just a little bit more.
*
"Myth" is a concept, a synthetic a priori construction which shapes thought, a hermeneutic lens through which phenomena can be viewed. It is thus a sign—a relation between signified (some portion of reality) and signifier (also a portion of reality, if we’re going to nitpick, but one that re-presents the former portion) which is at once arbitrary and fixed.
For Saussure, language was “organized thought” but by the time of Roland Barthes it was argued that language could organize thought. The signs we have at our disposal are the mechanisms with which we can assign names—and with them identity, ontology, ultimately normativity—to complexes found (and found is indeed the word here, for these complexes reveal themselves only to those already looking for them) in reality. Myth is the “second-order” sign-system which connects these organizations to terms—like power—which can describe them. Myth, therefore, is itself a type of myth. (Just as sign is itself a sign, and power is always an institution of power.)
The Dialectic of Enlightenment, then, is a book about myth, as are the works of Eco and Foucault and a host of others. They all demonstrate the way in which systems of signs can be discussed in ways which instruct and reveal, command and challenged. The Dialectic quite unabashedly deals with the mythology of mythologies, with myth and meta-myth and so on. Enlightenment itself is for Horkheimer and Adorno what Barthes would call a mythology. Infinite regress is always possible: just as Horkheimer and Adorno mythologize the mythology of the Enlightenment, so too does this post mythologize Horkheimer and Adorno. The undergrad essay from which this post is adapted received a grade which mythologized it in a certain—deeply normative—way as well. (There is no stance outside the system from which to critique it.)
Horkheimer and Adorno reveal the dynamics they see in Western culture, and in so doing mythologize it. Enlightenment is already what Barthes would call a metalanguage, for “it is a second language, in which one speaks about the first” (Barthes, Myth Today). And Horkheimer and Adorno are not embarrassed to use the word myth when describing the Enlightenment, in part because phenomenological accounts of religion were becoming mainstream at that point, relieving the term of its normative onus. Horkheimer and Adorno thus go on to describe the ways in which “the myths which fell victim to the Enlightenment were themselves its products.”
Horkheimer and Adorno, like Barthes, Eco, Foucault (the list goes on), are interested in the ways in which myth continues to function in contemporary culture. No phenomenon is too subtle or low-brow that it not cannot be a signified in the sign-system of myth; Horkheimer and Adorno discuss the rationalization of cartoons, with animated films which were once short and fantastic evolving into films which longer plots and greater realism, both psychological and in terms of the physical laws of the fictional universe it depicts. One can only wonder what they would think of films today, when animation is done by machines and the distinction between cartoons and live-action films has become so blurred as to be meaningless.
To return to the claim with which I opened this post, mythology is a concept, a synthetic a priori construction useful for acting as a hermeneutic lens. It can and should be turned on contemporary society; when tied to an ethical (that is to say, political) vision, it can be very forceful. The choice to interpret culture in terms of myth is an arbitrary one, however, and is empty without that political vision.
To illustrate this point, let me compare two great twentieth-century thinkers, Michel Foucault and Helene Cixous. The former's thought is fundamentally amoral; the latter's, deeply moral. Foucault's amorality is possible because he considers power relations to be an “essential trait,” and thus chooses to “show” the way in which sexuality as it is experienced is always—and must always be—the sum of a certain set of power relations. “The manifold sexualities," he writes in The History of Sexuality, "all form the correlate of exact procedures of power.” He goes on to construct, from the miscellany of historical events, a narrative of how power relations construct sexuality throughout history. He finds that events fell easily into the framework he selected, so easily he supposed that he must have discovered the truth. (If he has not, then it is not clear what he has to show for himself at all.)
Such a hermeneutic of power lends itself easily to Cixous’ feminist vision. Cixous does not intend to show, as Foucault believes that he does, with unproblematic transparency that power undergirds society. Instead, she undertakes this understanding in order to motivate her political agenda. While like Foucault she does not understand power to be rested in any particular segment of society (“[Men] have led [women] to hate women,” Cixous writes (in The Laugh of the Medusa, I believe), "for both men and women alike share in patriarchal discourse"), and does not even necessarily consider any segment to be particularly subject to it, she does believe it to have a more damaging effect on some groups than others. (Once one accepts power as a synthetic a priori this latter claim follows as an empirical fact.)
*
In retrospect, it occurs to me that it is easy to see Barthes, Foucault, Cixous, and Horkheimer and Adorno all engaged in the same project--in the wake of Wittgenstein, there is only one philosophical project and all thinkers are engaged in it--and much harder to recognize their differences. And this is in many ways the flaw in my undergrad critical theory courses, which were all arranged so that all the texts would in their own way point towards the One Big Idea (meaning/truth/knowledge is continent/fluid) that was the thesis of the course, with the idea that it would take the entire semester to indoctrinate the students in the One Big Idea. Whereas I really accepted and understood the One Big Idea from the get-go, and probably could have stood to focus on the details just a little bit more.
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i was so irate at last week's fandebate when he kept on dissing adorno and all i wanted to say was lookit...just b/c you only read a tiny fraction of his work doesn't mean the rest of us are too. There's plenty of great Adorno even if his stuff on jazz sucks :D
btw, would you be interested in my reading of DE???
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I have to admit that I am so behind on
I'd be very interested in your reading of DE (although I can't help but read that as Death Eater!).
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I'll check them out, thanks!
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(Anonymous) 2012-07-25 08:28 pm (UTC)(link)Thank you.
This does make things make more sense, although in my seminar it was asserted that the DE's main point was not only that the world we participate in can be analyzed through the lens of myth, but that all myths always-already contain the seed of their own destruction. What do you think?
Also, anytime you have a desire to post about Eco, please do. Because I honestly feel he gets short shrift, despite being among the few of his calibre to speak with any clarity. I have a tendency to value the works of theorists not only on their ideas but the quality of their prose, and Eco (and Cixous, and a few others) meet my standard of clarity. This may be because my head is naturally-muddled, but in a more political (ethical) sense, I also see jargon and obtuse language as yet another tool in policing borders, performing privilege, and re-enforcing the status quo in all its depravity/deprivation.
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