Here's from Pages 5 and 6 of the Introduction to the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Man's likeness to God consists in sovereignty over existence, in the lordly gaze, in the command. Here we see that the enlightenment, as Horkheimer and Adorno see it, makes the human subject the replacement of God. Falling enlightenment program, getting rid of the transcendent, getting rid of the transcendental dimension. But in man's replacing God, man becomes the agent that gives commands. He is the subject that decides what will happen. The only thing that counts is understanding our knowledge, is the power to make things happen through quantitative methods. Enlightenment, they write, is a dictator. Page 6, human beings purchase the increase in their power with estrangement from that over which it is exerted. You can see this, the legacy of Max here, can't you? That we purchased the increase in power with estrangement from that over which it is exerted. We have more power, but we are alienated from the thing that we're trying to understand in the first place. Enlightenment stands in the same relation to things as the dictator to human beings. They have a particular dictator in mind in the 1940s. He knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them. That's the core of their objection. Knowledge becomes the ability to manipulate things. That will eventually sow the seeds of our own destruction, not even eventually, it's happening. That's what they see. They see modern technology being used for mass killings, modern technology being used for efficient murder, modern technology being used for control of people against their interests. That's a great victory for enlightenment because it shows, I really do understand, because I can manipulate. That's really the gist of it. If you can only show you understand something by your power of manipulation, understanding is linked to tyranny, and that's how they explain the persistence of domination. Let's go back to their words. On Page 9, this is a point they make about equality and uniformity. Here's what they say, "Each human being has been endowed with a self of his or her own, different from all others so that it could all the more surely be made the same." Come back to this. ''But because the self never quite fitted the mold, enlightenment throughout the liberalistic period has always sympathized with social coercion. Enlightenment has always sympathized with social coercion. The unity of the manipulated collective consists in the negation of each individual and the scorn poured on the type of society which can make people into individuals.'' That gets hard to follow, I realized. The language is a little dense. But I want you to see that their point is that the persistent pursuit of equality actually creates the grounds for more coercion. As students, we can remember some of it, not too far back, standardized testing. Standardized testing is supposed to treat everybody the same. Equality is a good thing, everybody will be treated the same. But of course, standardization also provides the tools for control, making everybody to say makes them easier to control. Social coercion is the best way to manipulate the thing you're trying to understand. If you're trying to understand society, manipulating society, coercing society into the mold you want is what is going to allow you to show that you have real knowledge. Adorno and Horkheimer are concerned that the pursuit of equality will actually erase difference because we want to treat everyone the same, we have to find ways either through medication, through political control, through infringements on freedom of expression to make everybody comfortable, everybody happy, everybody controlled. This is the totalitarian state, not yet named as such, that they see growing around them, especially in fascism. But not only in fascism, in the enlightenment that even the liberal democracies see at the core of their political regimes. One of the things that Horkheimer and Adorno argue in this introduction to Dialectic of Enlightenment, is that there is no alternative to enlightenment that people in modernity can imagine in respectable terms. That is, all forms of knowledge are pulled into the Enlightenment mold, are pressured to conform to a scientific model of understanding, the technological model of understanding. There is no alternative to it. The scientific model of understanding will debunk religion, it'll debunk political pieties, it'll debunk magic, of course. In other words, it wants to subsume all things within its paradigm. For Horkheimer and Adorno, that's what makes it a myth, that it wants to provide an explanation for every form of cognition. There's nothing outside the enlightenment. Getting towards the middle of the essay, page 11, human beings believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown. When you can have explanations of everything, human beings believe we are free from fear. This has determined the path of demythologization of enlightenment. Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized. One of the few short punchy says. Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized. That is, in order to defeat fear, they make anything that's not fitting into the enlightenment paradigm an object of fear. Positivism, what they call positivism, sees every other intellection, every other thinking process as being somehow corrupted by religion and magic, which are objects of disdain Horkheimer and Adorno think of fear. They see, and this is clear on page 19-20 of the essay, they see the triumph of the quantitative as being part of this mythologized enlightenment process. Insofar as you have the triumph of the quantitative, what they call positivism, this scientistic paradigm of enlightenment, they see that knowledge always will reproduce the status quo. This is around page 20. They write, "The actual is validated, knowledge confines itself to repeating it, thought makes itself mere tautology. The more completely the machinery of thought subjugates existence, the more blindly it is satisfied with reproducing it. Enlightenment thereby regresses to the mythology it has never been able to escape." What they mean here is that our scientistic ways of approaching the world only are validated by mirroring the world as it is. Rather than trying to imagine the world as it might be, rather than taking a critical perspective on the status quo, the positivists quantitatively oriented enlightenment mode of thinking, Horkheimer and Adorno argue, reproduces the reality in front of us. That's the only thing that counts as possible and as real. Knowledge, rather than being used to change the status quo, in the enlightenment mode, knowledge just reproduces what's right there in front of the investigator. This subsumes the thoughtful person in the status quo. It subsumes the person who is reaching for a difference for alternatives in the current reality. It creates the conditions for total control through enlightenment or scientific modes of action. Everything is used to increase the powers of manipulation and domination. Those are what are called rational procedures from Horkheimer and Adorno's perspective. [FOREIGN]. They're writing again in the midst of World War II that publishes just at the end of World War II, they are desperately trying to understand why we participate in our own domination, and the answer in part is, we think we're being rational when we participate in our own domination. That's what it means to be rational, is to reproduce the status quo. We had a candidate for presidency in the United States very recently while we're teaching this class, who made fun of the President Obama for saying that he wanted to keep the seas from rising, I don't know if you remember this phrase, those of you who follow Merck in electoral politics, that somehow it was crazy to try to keep the seas from rising, that we just want to do, we just want to work with what's out there in the world, he was saying, he was being more rational, more reasonable. It seemed that was his appeal but that's because you're just not rational or reasonable, discourse reproduce what's happening and if what's happening is global warming, if what's happening is the sea levels are rising, you can't do anything about that. That would be the rational response, is to just not try to do anything about it, not try to change, but try to mirror reality. That mode of mirroring reality, of reinforcing the status quo, reinforces domination and oppression, Horkheimer and Adorno argue, is there an alternative? Again, we are really just a small piece of a large book for this class, but Horkheimer and Adorno and many of the Frankfurt School people, they really focus on diagnosing the problem and not in giving you a solution. But still towards the end of our essay in the pages 25 and following, they do suggest some ways out, some escapes perhaps of this mode of thinking.
