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based on his philosophy of negative dialectics, and discusses the critiques of the strength and weakness of Adorno’s theory. The next section is focused on Adorno’s interrogation of the “culture industry” and its relevancy to other realms of industry and technology in modern society. The last section goes back to Conrad’s works to analyze the representative images of science and technology that contribute to the making of an “administered world” where losses and sufferings prevail.
I. Adorno’s Thesis of the Dialectic of Enlightenment
In Conrad’s works, the underside of modernity is embodied in the dark and brutal images of science and technology, capitalist commercial activities, colonial enterprise, and state administration, all of which end up being manifestations of the regression of modern enlightenment culture toward the irrational status of barbarity and atrocity.
Theodor Adorno’s critical theory offers a pertinent method to address the regressive tendency of modernity through the lens of negative dialectics as expounded in Dialectic of Enlightenment co-authored with Max Horkheimer. Adorno and Horkheimer belonged to the academic school of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, whose work dealt with the evil tendency of bourgeois society to lapse into an “authoritarian state” and pointed out the contradictory nature of democratic society – its promise of “human fullness” is built on an “inhuman, repressive social formation” that betrays its self-proclaimed progress to a better future
(Schweppenhäuser 3; 6). The institute’s aim was to develop the studies of ideology critique, especially critique of “Enlightenment’s self-enslavement” (16-7). The groundbreaking piece of the Frankfurt School – Dialectic of Enlightenment – is focused on the intractable problem of modern society whose enlightenment culture paradoxically regresses into the irrationality and barbarity – “a new kind of
barbarism” – of pre-history as manifested in the totalitarian state of both fascist nation
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and democratic countries (Adorno and Horkheimer xi).
The Dialectic of Enlightenment is aimed at exploring the “history of rationality;”
its central argument is focused on the tendency of “reason” to become “irrational” by virtue of its negation of any “non-rational moment” from its constitution (Jarivs, Adorno: a Critical Introduction 13). Consequently, a kind of “unreflective rationality” is produced as a “tool” that is termed “instrumental reason” by Adorno and Horkheimer (14). Contradiction between the philosophy of
Enlightenment and the real situation of the enlightenment culture arises because of the latter’s foundation on “instrumental reason” (Held 148). Accordingly, Adorno and Horkheimer aim to find a way for that culture to escape from the domination of instrumental rationality to reach a final emancipatory and liberatory sense of
enlightenment (148-9). They lament the “instrumentalization of science” operated by “calculating reason” in modern-day society that expels any philosophical thought based on “theoretical faculty” as opposed to scientific facts buttressed by “rules of computation and utility”; “number became the canon of the Enlightenment. The same equations dominate bourgeois justice and commodity exchange” (Adorno and Horkheimer xii, xiii, 6, 7, 32). This instrumental rationality is qualified as a kind of subjective reason separate from its “dialectical antithesis” of objective reason, the former in turn “regress[ing] into … an instrument for ends” without capability for autonomy (Schweppenhäuser 45-6). Concerning the rampant growth of instrumental rationality in modern society, Adorno and Horkheimer announce two general theses about the dialectical relation of the modern and the ancient: “myth is already
enlightenment; and enlightenment reverts to mythology” (xvi). Simon Jarvis explains such a dialectical relation in two senses. On the one hand, the “positivistic and rationalistic” nature of enlightenment culture is not “enlightened” enough for it irrationally attempts to get rid of the elements of “myth” and “tradition” from itself;
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while myth in its prototypical models of “ordering, classifying and controlling the world” is already a form of rationality (Jarvis, Adorno: a Critical Introduction 22-3).
For example, the enlightenment culture’s triumph of subjective rationality is paid by its obedient subjection of reason to the given, which is just the essence of mythology in its faith in fate, or the status quo deprived of hope of change as its way to organize the world: “The more the machinery of thought subjects existence to itself, the more blind its resignation in reproducing existence. Hence Enlightenment returns to mythology. […]. For in its figure mythology had the essence of status quo: cycle, fate, and domination of the world reflected as the truth and deprived of hope”
(Adorno and Horkheimer 26-7). On the other hand, the superstitious praxis of domination already reveals its rational means, while the modern rationality is entangled with two forms of domination, including “social domination” and
“domination of nature” (Jarvis, Adorno: a Critical Introduction 24). The bourgeois conception of the predominance of culture over nature enthrones the “knowing subject,” which dismisses the “variety of qualities in an object” and treats them as
“identical” in an effort to “[quantify] nature, thus [make] it controllable”
(Schweppenhäuser 46, 83). The domination of nature through modern rationality is further extended to (a.) “mastery over human nature,” (b.) the “repression of
impulse,” and (c.) “mastery over other humans” (Jarvis, Adorno: a Critical
Introduction 27). As to the ancient form of domination, the mythological attempt to dominate nature and the objective of self-determination is replaced by modern
“technology and industry,” which displays its will to dominate through the destructive force of industrial production as realized in modern warfare, or the “industrially organized mass murder of human beings,” which is “Enlightenment’s antithesis” in that Enlightenment reverts to mythology (Schweppenhäuser 29-30). Gerhard Schweppenhäuser indicates that the violent “development and intensification of the
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subject” is the driving force of the Enlightenment’s dialectic, in which the subject’s domination of nature backfires by its own subordination to the “rigified institution of domination (40). In Enlightenment culture technology is the essence of scientific knowledge, by which men register their desire to dominate nature and other men:
“What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it, and other men;” in other words, “exploitation of other’s work” by destructive
productive process (Adorno and Horkheimer 4). Since the mindset of modern men is grounded on the scientific knowledge of technology, i.e., “instrumental rationality,”
the restriction of their thought to organization and administration has confined their spirit to the apparatuses of domination and self-domination. Accordingly, the complicated social and economic apparatuses in the name of progress ironically and poignantly brought about the impoverished experience of the dominated: “The over-maturity of society lives by the immaturity of the dominated. 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 cannot offer” (Adorno and Horkheimer 36). The increase of men’s power of domination is paid by their “alienation” from nature; progress of power brings its contrary into being so that “irresistible progress is irresistible regression” (9, 36). The attempt of modern world to eradicate superstition through the domination of nature only signifies the progress of power. As a result,
Enlightenment is reduced to “distinct representation of nature in its alienation” (39).
Another important criterion of Enlightenment culture lies in a condemnation of anyone who “resigns himself to life without any rational reference to
self-preservation” as a regression into prehistory (Adorno and Horkheimer 29).
Jarvis elaborates on the idea of enlightenment’s “self-preservation” as a form of
“mimesis” that is characterized by an “attempt to become like nature in order to ward
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off what is feared” culminating in a status of “death” as an “inextinguishable reminder of the nature in culture” (Adorno: a Critical Introduction 31). Since such a
self-preservative mindset mimics death in its paradoxical attempt to become
“inorganic” and “object-like” to ward off death, self-preservation turns into
“self-destructiveness” (31). In another aspect, Adorno and Horkheimer contend that
“the history of civilization is the history of the introversion of sacrifice” (55). Given the fact that enlightenment is “enmity of the self to sacrifice [which in turn] implied a sacrifice of the self” (Adorno and Horkheimer 54), Jarvis reminds us that such
sacrifice in civilization is already anticipated in the mythological practice of
“sacrificial substitution” that “treats its object as a representative, not as an individual” (Adorno: a Critical Introduction 29) – which clearly indicates the
objectification of the individual as commodity in an exchange system. Accordingly, sacrifice not only anticipates “commodity exchange” in the capitalist marketplace, but also welcomes a form of “classificatory thinking” – a thinking that concerns about not what something is but what is comes under as a “representative” or an “example”
(Jarvis, Adorno: a Critical Introduction 29). In other words, objects, including human beings, are not treated as things-in-themselves (use-value), but are turned into a thing that is commensurable with other thing (exchange-value). This is related to Luckács’s concept of “reification”10 which refers to the commodification or
objectification of human consciousness by means of the universal social principle based on commodity form. The process of self-preservation entails the
“self-alienation” of the individual by “[modeling] their body and soul according to the technical apparatus” based on exchange principle; subjectivity is reduced to the in-organic status of “automatic control mechanism,” which can be defined as the
10 Luckács developed Marx’s idea of “reification” in relation to class consciousness in his book Hisotry and Class Consciousness (1923).
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process of reification (Adorno and Horkheimer 29-30). As Adorno and Horkheimer put it,
Animism spiritualized the object, whereas industrialism objectifies the spirits of men. Automatically, the economic apparatus, even before total planning, equips commodities with the values which decide human behavior. Since with the end of free exchange, commodities lost all their economic qualities except for fetishism, the latter has extended its arthritic influence over all aspects of social life. Through the countless agencies of mass production and its culture the conventionalized modes of behavior are impressed on the individual as the only natural,
respectable, and rational ones. He defines himself only as a thing, as a static element. (28)
In fact, in late capitalist society, political domination is inextricable from capitalist production that has produced the administered world. Jarvis appropriates Fredrick Pollack’s theory of the cooperation of “state power” and “concentrated capital” in late capitalism to demonstrate the alliance of “political administration” and “economic activity” that brought about the disasters of Enlightenment culture (Adorno: a Critical Introduction 57).11 We can see numerous concrete examples in Conrad’s political novels, especially in Nostromo, where state administration works hand in hand with capitalist interests that make an “administered world” unbearable to modern people.
It seems Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of instrumental rationality is deeply entangled with the operation of the capitalist market system where economic activity based on exchange value plays an important role in Enlightenment culture. As a result, self-preservation in the service of a “free market economy” is analogous to the
11 See Friedrich Pollock, “The Current Situation of Capitalism and the Prospects for a New Planned Economic Order,” Stadien des Kapitalismus, ed. Helmut Dubiel (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1975), 22-38.
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“survival affirmed by reason” (or the “reified drive of the individual bourgeois”) with the development of an economic system that leads to self-destruction (Adorno and Horkheimer 90). “On the one hand the growth of economic productivity furnishes the conditions for a world of greater justice; on the other hand it allows the technical apparatus and the social groups which administer it a disproportionate superiority to the rest of the population” (xv). The insidious nature of economic productivity in enlightenment culture has devalued the individual with the help of the technical apparatus. It becomes a process of reification of the individuals as the latter turns into exchangeable human labor in capitalist marketplace.
The social theory Adorno elaborated in Dialectic of Enlightenment and his philosophical system of negative dialectics have been subjected to criticism from a number of theoretical voices. Axel Honneth points out the lack of “social
intersubjectivity” in Adorno’s social theory that is totally and only focused on social domination as well as domination over nature (Jarvis, Adorno: a Critical Introduction 35). 12 One of the prime examples of this strand of criticism comes from Jürgen Habermas’ inquiry into the positivity of “communicative rationality” that is ignored in Adorno and Horkheimer’s one-sided evaluation of rationalism in general. Habermas condemns Dialectic of Enlightenment as the “blackest book” written by Adorno and Horkheimer, influenced by the “‘black’ writers of the bourgeoisie” such as Nietzsche (106). The main thrust of Nietzsche’s critique of modern culture lies in a
demythologizing project to debunk the sanctity of science and morality in European civilization as the “ideological expressions of a perverted will to power,” which is similar to Adorno’s denunciation of the institutional structure of “instrumental reason”
(128, 129). It is this same “cramped optics” that induces Adorno to ignore the
12 See Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power: Reflective States in a Critical Social Theory, Tran.
Kenneth Baynes (Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 1991), 51-2.
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positive potential of “communicative rationality” and downplay the prospect of the project of enlightenment (129). Accordingly, Habermas laments the dire situation Dialectic of Enlightenment opens up before our eyes that forecloses “any prospect for an escape from the myth of purposive rationality that has turned into objective
violence” (114). Habermas complains that Dialectic of Enlightenment is biased toward the “rational content of cultural modernity that was captured in bourgeois ideals,” such as the universal validity claims embodied in law and morality of the democratic constitutional government (113). Here Habermas is referring to the communicative power of rationality that helps consolidate a developed modern welfare state. However, it seems all these achievements of “Occidental rationalism”
are denied by Adorno and Horkheimer; rather they reduce cultural modernity to a
“binding of reason and domination, of power and validity” (Habermas 121). In Adorno’s defense, Simon Jarvis points out that the problem of the second-generation critical theorists (like Habermas) is their determination to “free [themselves] from metaphysical commitments” through a “linguistic turn” to highlight the
“intersubjective” aspect of modernity (“Adorno, Marx, Materialism” 99).
Nevertheless, they were unaware that in their linguistic reform metaphysical problem is only “suppressed” not fully resolved (99). In this regard of the tension between the metaphysical and the empirical leads us to the other debate surrounding Adorno’s approach to critical theory.
Adorno is also criticized in his tendency to substitute aesthetic experience for the empirical experience truly surveyed by social theory (Jarvis, Adorno: a Critical Introduction 35). In response to criticism of Adorno’s penchant for an aesthetic theory that lacks an “appreciation of communicative function,” Jay clarifies Adorno’s understanding of aesthetic experience as an impure state of being, because it can be damaged by “changes beyond aesthetic confines, such as modern warfare and
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capitalist exploitation” (“Is Experience Still in Crisis?” 139). Adorno repeatedly contended that art’s “truth content” can be realized only by “an accompanying philosophical cum social theoretical analysis” (139), which allows us a glimpse into his attitude toward the relation of the metaphysical and the sociological. Although Adorno’s critical theory is widely criticized for its philosophically charged tone that lack concrete social and political concern, his approach is actually based on a
“materialism” that aims to eliminate the “deluded beliefs in immaterial entities” or
“‘ideological’ conceptions of society” (Jarvis, “Adorno, Marx, Materialism” 79).
Adorno is himself dedicated to the formulation of an “undogmatic materialism,”
which is a kind of “interpretation” that does not subordinate philosophical texts to external “sociological or historical theses” but attempts to bring out the “historical experiences sedimented inside [philosophical texts]” (81, 85). This emphasis on the linkage of the abstract concepts and the concrete experiences reveals Adorno’s
unusual perspective on the interpenetration between the theory and practice. Under Horkheimer’s influence, Adorno treats materialism not as “a body of metaphysical doctrine” but a “practice of thinking” committed to the “utopian goal of the end of suffering” (Jarivs, “Adorno, Marx, Marxism” 84). Therefore, Adorno envisions a kind of materialism that will bring about the utopian state of “undeluded happiness”
realized at the end of all suffering (80). This spells out the socio-political aspect of materialism, especially its interpersonal concern to end human suffering and form a happy life for all. In a special issue of New German Critique dedicated to Adorno, the editor Christian Gerhardt also came to his defense when the former is viewed as the “most philosophical and least political of the Frankfurt School theorist” by pointing out the intertwinement of the two categories in his system of thought (3).
One of the voices defensive of Adorno in this special issue is J. M. Bernstein, who gives the example of Adorno’s reflection on Auschwitz that provides a “reflective
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critique of atemporal reason” – or universalistic rationality based on the
exchange-value of capitalist production – to help us develop new angle of thought and action that might bring change to the damaged status quo (31). Adorno aimed to bring out a “specification of the form of reasoning” that pays special attention to the suffering of others as a form of the necessary “particularity” that has been hitherto eclipsed by the “universalistic reason” (31). In Adorno’s ongoing effort to prevent the possible repetition of Auschwitz and his “unwillingness to make Auschwitz into a metaphysical trope” (52), he is engaging in a political campaign to call for our social responsibility to our fellow human beings that contributes to the transformation of not only our thought but also our action – the mission of a thinking activist who has combined theory and practice in his commitment.
Adorno’s philosophy never includes a theory of political action, for he gave up his belief in the revolutionary power of the proletariat after the disasters of Hitler regime and the outbreak of WWII (Buck-Morss 24-5). For Adorno, the foundation of truth is “rational” rather than “pragmatic” so that theory cannot be enslaved to the goal of political and revolutionary actions (25). If Adorno had placed any hope in the role of proletariat, it would be the avant-gardist writers and artists in the guise of
“productive workers” (32). The revolutionary role of the artists lies in the facts that their works are based on “modern aesthetic techniques” to dialectically transform the status quo through their fulfillment of “human liberation” in aesthetical terms (33).
Such avant-gardist art reveals “social contradictions” rather than proposes “aesthetic resolution” for the society dominated by the bourgeois consciousness (33).
Although Adorno never explicitly points out the relation between theory and social change, he affirms the power of “critical negativity” to change the social
consciousness and at the same time to attain the knowledge of truth (36).
While Adorno’s approach in Dialectic of Enlightenment is widely criticized for
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its lack of hope or a possibility to escape the despairing present situation, those critical voices only ignore or misconstrue the essential strength in Adorno’s philosophy of negative dialectics. As opposed to “constructive criticism” that is aimed to improve things, Adorno’s critical theory is focused on “negativity”
(Schweppenhäuser 12-3). Nevertheless, the ultimate objective of negation is to produce something positive, which points out the interrelation of criticism’s negative and positive sides as well as the fusion of the theoretical self-reflection and political engagement in Adorno’s dialectical thought (13, 15). In fact, Adorno’s utopian negativity indicates that utopia could be reached only “negatively,” the aim of which is not to provide a “blueprint for what the good life would be like, but only examines what our ‘damaged’ life is like” (Jarvis, Adorno: a Critical Introduction 8, 9).
Indeed, the harrowing experience of Auschwitz makes Adorno hesitant to envision a rosy picture of the utopian future, rather he contends the necessity of absolute
Indeed, the harrowing experience of Auschwitz makes Adorno hesitant to envision a rosy picture of the utopian future, rather he contends the necessity of absolute