Adorno & Horkheimer on Myth Making

First thought:

In continuing from Lukács, Adorno and Horkheimer take on enlightenment as a power relationship that subdues nature through understanding and knowing. This is not a modern concept; it can be seen in its first instances in myth and language; in magic. But there are differences, as for Lukács, between premodern subject-object relations and their modern counterparts. Magic is an appeal to the mysterious, to the total; it is enacted in a relation of kinship, of expressing. Our new form of enlightenment, scientific rationalism as espoused by Bacon, dominates by disenchanting; power is increased in estrangement over that which it is exerted [VI] . Appearing in the first distinctions between subject and object, it ends with a single relationship between the subject who confers meaning and the meaningless object, between rational significance and its accidental bearer [VII]. In this singular relation, everything collapses away from the subject and into "the rest of the world", becoming meaningless and undifferentiated. Everything is relatable as science and structure; all myths and religions are comparable, equalised, neutered, forming the structure through which we "build" our world. Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the enlightenment, in attempting to disenchant the world, has formed its own techno-cratic enchantment, of debasing self-violation, where nothing human is trusted and concepts of truth and mind become superstitions. It has created societies where the individual is negated and mystery de-mystified through belittlement. The means has been the same means throughout time; the ordering of the universe that reaches back to original myth, is explanation prompted by fear. The fear is the experience of the whole in contrast with the singular; the principle of mana, the primal and unknown substance from which everything springs and holds. It fixes the transcendence of the unknown in relation to the known, permanently linking horror to holiness. Our reaction in explanation is the original ordering, the original control, the original domination. This division has lent itself forward in time to the perverse divisions of reason and non-reason, subject and world, truth and veil. Now we are beyond division into the realm of indivisibility, where everything beyond the realm of subject is interchangeable, everything is the same. Even the self has been stripped of all natural traces, no longer body, soul or ego, but a transcendental logical subject, the reference point of reason. Thus, we have too become interchangeable, we are mere heads to count, either working parts or errors to be corrected. It is reason we have deified at our own expense, reason whose place on the throne was to serve our betterment, fulfilment and happiness, but in its throning we became its kingly subjects and its scientific objects. It became mythic.

Another thought:

I was thinking about Adorno and Horkheimer's conception of language as evidencing the animate against the inanimate, becoming both itself and something else, identical and not identical. Through the deity speech is transformed from tautology into language [11]. More on this later. For now, Bacon cites printing, artillery and the compass having been arrived at more by chance than by systematic enquiry into nature; rather, all three (four if we break printing down into paper as well) were invented in China, and the methodical investigations were less happenstance than old Bacon imagines. Chinese paper gif; paper to pixels, no magic in that.

So, I got really into the Adorno/H concept of mana, which I found out is not a Greek principle at all (cleverly worded by Adorno), but is a Polynesian concept of the great supernatural power that is everything. I'm still not entirely sure how it fits together, because Marcel Mauss (who Adorno does footnote later in the Dialectic in relation to this principle) in his work on magic and the gift, talks of mana as something one possesses i.e. in the improper observation of gift exchange, one can lose one's mana and therefore prestige. I am not sure whether this is a Maussian view of mana, a manifold meaning, or some specific societal formulation of it. I just borrowed Mauss' general theory of magic from the library so hopefully I will be able to clarify soon. I like Adorno's description of mana as "not a spiritual as opposed to a material substance, but the intricacy of the Natural in contrast to the individual" or in another translation "not a spiritual substance in contradistinction to the material world but the complex concatenation of nature in contrast to its individual link." (I think this one is more poetic) and

"The gasp of surprise which accompanies the experience of the unusual becomes its name" or "The cry of terror called forth by the unfamiliar becomes its name". (This is the second translation and now I prefer the first, which I think places proper emphasis on the unknown and less on the cry of terror. I will definitely have to learn German so that I can better understand these authors I like so much)

A bit more: "mana, the moving spirit, is no projection, but the echo of the real supremacy of nature in the weak souls of primitive men" (here the second translation is quite similar). I think that what I like so much about this concept is the enchantment of nature, but not as "God" or knowable, comprehensible thing, but as the stuff the world, that is magic because it is unknowable and ungraspable rather than being ungraspable because it is magic. I think this is a really important distinction and perhaps the mistaken inversion is why we get stuck upon ideas of Gods etc. Can we find a way to incorporate these ideas of mana and acceptance of the unknown into our society, which must categorise and objectify everything? I am not sure, but I think it is not necessarily about believing in an ancient Polynesian principle, but about being more holistic in our understanding (also, I would like a better word than holistic, if you have one) of the world. It is not a dismissal of science to think of the world imbued with mana, for if we take mana to be the "complex concatenation of nature in contrast to its individual link", it is a way of seeing and understanding rather than a "thing" or a substance. It is an attitude that allows us to encompass more than just one view of the world, for when we privilege one way of seeing, we unavoidably diminish another. So imbuing the world with mana is not thingifying an entity named Mana, rather, it is an attitude of respect for the complexity of ideas, people, things and how they all fit together.

Lukács and Instrumentality

First thought:

Lukács, writing in 1923, attempts to understand the all-pervading commodity-structure and its effect on the objective evolution of society. It is the Marxist concept of reification that Lukács brings to the fore, attempting to examine the thing-ifying nature of capitalism without resorting to the very mode of analysis that he is trying to critique. It is important to understand that a quantitative approach would impose the commodity-structure on the abstract notions that we are trying to explore, namely the psyche and time. It must be looked at qualitatively, at the way that this mode changes our perception of ourselves, our relationship to our own psyches and to those of others.

In service of reason, humankind has praised systematisation and classification, and in this, has sought to predict and control. It becomes apparent that the scientific method becomes not only the means to gain knowledge, but increasingly becomes the only criteria for value. Mechanistic qualities become the norm and humanistic qualities become "mere sources of error" [CR, 89]. The mind, the seat of Reason, sets out to make the world calculable, repeatable, known. Labour becomes abstracted in the division and restriction of time; just as time is chained to an instrument, the clock, man is tied to his labour, the 'thing' he now owns. Thus, in the understanding of himself, man can separate and fragment, calculate and reason. He is no longer holistic, but atomised, a possessor of "things", a seller and buyer whose parts can come and go. As the system increasingly becomes machine-like, something that as individuals we are unable to do, man finds himself no longer the true possessor of himself, rather, he must fit into the already normalised system; as Lukács says, he becomes contemplative rather than active. Less and less is man able to see past the veil of reification to the true nature of things, and more and more does this veil come to cover the whole world, subjectively, in the sense that it becomes the only way in which we see ourselves and others, our personal, human relationships, and objectively, in that over time, this mode of existence becomes the very structure of the world, no longer veiling, but building. How are we to see past this when it becomes the framework of our existence? It seems that the first modes of critique, that of identifying and separating out a concept in order to analyse and understand it, serves only to mimic the commodity-structure, reifying the reification process. It is this that I find Lukács unable to confront or adequately deal with. It is not that the commodity relation must be understood in its entirety, for that is the wrong way of thinking about it. Nor is it to be dismissed and ignored. We must attempt to balance the qualitative and quantitative nature of existence without attempting to know it completely. It is mystery that we must admire; art, spontaneity, intuition, irrationality, subjective feeling, error, praxis, music, the tactile and the sensual.

Another thought:

I recently read an article on artnet about Dada. I had always thought of Dadaism as the wonderful Tzara and the Ball/Hemmings cabaret fanfare, an admirable moment in history, based on an unrepeatable, unsustainable philosophy, much like nihilism. Something that came into existence to challenge the whole, to simultaneously say no and yes to everything, to hover and rage, to be static and surging, to call on everything and call on nothing. Complete negation.

In Berlin I found a book by Francois Jullien, professor at Université Paris Diderot, on chinese philosophy, called In Praise of Blandness. It speaks of the difference between the Western and Eastern conception of the bland. In Chinese, surrounded by Daoist and Confucianist ideas, the "dan" is the infinite ability of all things, it is the centre, the undifferentiated. It is flavourless because it is infinite and unfixed; unable be characterised or systematised. We would perhaps classify this as "nothing" or complete negation, but the opposite is true; it is complete becoming.

I have realised that Dada was an instance of this; not nihilism but complete becoming. The idea of this little movement was to be suggestible to everything, to be completely spontaneous in the face of mechanisation, to not be "nothing", but to live in undifferentiated freedom to become. As a matter of point, Tzara said Dada was finished as soon as it "is", in the sense that once classified, once "known" and understood, the it no longer exists except as an historical fact.

But what of Arendt?

"Evil is never "radical",… it is only extreme, and… it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension… It is "thought-defying"… because thought tried to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its "banality"." (1964)

Is the bland the same as the banal? Can these two ideas ever co-exist, or must they be relegated to differing modes of thought, one of "becoming" and the other of negation, the "without".

I have just, on the recommendation of a Nihon Otaku, started reading "Heidegger's Hidden Sources; East Asian Influences on his Work". It shows Heidegger's debt to Daoist and Zen Buddhist philosophies; especially in his conception of Nothing, which comes as radically different to the Western understandings before it. Being, nothing, emptiness. Oh the joy. Actually, I am only up to the first chapter, but I am convinced. I wonder if Jullien has read this?

I leave you with Dada:

I have given a pretty faithful version of progress, law, morality and all other fine qualities that various highly intelligent men have discussed in so manv books, only to conclude that after all everyone dances to his own personal boomboom, and that the writer is entitled to his boomboom: the satisfaction of pathological curiosity; a private bell for inexplicable needs; a bath; pecuniary difficulties; a stomach with repercussions in life; the authority of the mystic wand formulated as the bouquet of a phantom orchestra made up of silent fiddle bows greased with philtres made of chicken manure. With the blue eye-glasses of an angel they have excavated the inner life for a dime's worth of unanimous gratitude. If all of them are right and if all pills are Pink Pills, let us try for once not to be right. Some people think they can explain rationally, by thought, what they think. But that is extremely relative. Psychoanalysis is a dangerous disease, it puts to sleep the anti-objective impulses of men and systematizes the bourgeoisie. There is no ultimate Truth. The dialectic is an amusing mechanism which guides us / in a banal kind of way / to the opinions we had in the first place. Does anyone think that, by a minute refinement of logic, he has demonstrated the truth and established the correctness of these opinions? Logic imprisoned by the senses is an organic disease. To this element philosophers always like to add: the power of observation. But actually this magnificent quality of the mind is the proof of its impotence. We observe, we regard from one or more points of view, we choose them among the millions that exist. Experience is also a product of chance and individual faculties. Science disgusts me as soon as it becomes a speculative system, loses its character of utility-that is so useless but is at least individual. I detest greasy objectivity, and harmony, the science that finds everything in order. Carry on, my children, humanity . . . Science says we are the servants of nature: everything is in order, make love and bash your brains in. Carry on, my children, humanity, kind bourgeois and journalist virgins . . . I am against systems, the most acceptable system is on principle to have none. To complete oneself, to perfect oneself in one's own littleness, to fill the vessel with one's individuality, to have the courage to fight for and against thought, the mystery of bread, the sudden burst of an infernal propeller into economic lilies.... Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada; a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructivc action: *Dada; knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners: Dada; abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: Dada; of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets: Dada; every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: Dada; abolition of memory: Dada; abolition of archaeology: Dada; abolition of prophets: Dada; abolition of the future: Dada; absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity:* Dada; elegant and unprejudiced leap from a harmony to the other sphere; trajectory of a word tossed like a screeching phonograph record; to respect all individuals in their folly of the moment: whether it be serious, fearful, timid, ardent, vigorous, determined, enthusiastic; to divest one's church of every useless cumbersome accessory; to spit out disagreeable or amorous ideas like a luminous waterfall, or coddle them -with the extreme satisfaction that it doesn't matter in the least-with the same intensity in the thicket of one's soul-pure of insects for blood well-born, and gilded with bodies of archangels. Freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE

Hegel on Philosophy and History

First thought:

In Hegel's account of reason, it is thinking that holds the power to explain the world. What we see in nature, in terms of singularities perceived by the senses, our thinking, or our Reason, turns into universals. Pure thinking is when thinking turns on itself, is at home with itself, when the thinker understands himself as a free-thinking thing. This we perceive as universal, Absolute, but we also retain ourselves in a position of free thinker, thinking the universal of which we are a part. This, for Hegel, is what we know as Geist, or Spirit (with no accurate translation, though it is also related to ideas of soul and ghost). This universal is self-determining, not determined.

For Hegel, this process began in Ancient Greece and in a movement of continual progress, the Geist has developed, deepened and grown. So the spirit conceives of itself as universal, of itself as thought by thinkers, and this is the foundation of political freedom. One perceives oneself and recognises one's subjective thinking-freedom as part of the universal, thus pulling apart from nature and becoming at home with itself instead. This is the birth of philosophy, for as thinking universalises particulars, philosophy is the thinking of thinking, it universalises the universaliser, whilst remaining on the level of the subjective. Meaning is bound up in human cognition; the world is understandable insofar as it is we who undertake an understanding of it.

Hegel is concerned here with philosophical history, in attempting to access the Geist, to understand the concepts that animate certain cultural periods. World History is a dialectic, insofar as it determines itself, successively overcoming and synthesising old determinations, gradually becoming richer and more concrete. (CR) Each step in this process has its own determinate principle, encompassing every aspect of a nation's consciousness. It is integral to the philosophical conception of World History to understand why certain principles became inadequate, why they failed and how the Geist transformed itself. Reason is critical and never satisfied; the intellectual sphere is self-transforming and in societies throughout World History, there inevitably comes a point where the objective sphere, within which that culture is based, is no longer adequate. It is then, at this crucial point, when the subjective, intellectual sphere will push to the point of destruction the society it has outgrown. The product is a synthesis, where the old resides within the new, the Geist ever deeper and concrete. Thus we progress.

It is modernity, Hegel believes, that encompasses a truly new relationship of the subjective world to the objective. Taking Kant's notion of rational critique out of its idealised sphere, where it remains unintegrated into the reality of everyday life, Hegel conceives of its synthesis within a society that whose spiritual Being is at home with the objective conditions within which it exists. Modernity has the capacity to create such a society, where culture, social and political institutions, law, governance, and religion are such that the rational being, freeing himself from dogmatism, questioning and criticising, will Be At Home (Beisichsein) within them; the capacity for self-transformation will be a property of the modern society as well as its individual subjects.

Another thought:

From what I have understood of Hegel, his praise of modernity is premature. Without even delving into the notion of a constitutional monarchy as the ideal form of government (perhaps only with an equally ideal Hegelian citizen would this actually seem feasible), I cannot grant him modernity's synthesis of subjective and objective spheres. Insofar as Ideas are most clearly understood right before their demise, in a kind of hubristic crystallisation, his conception of modernity is safe. A society whose Home has as its Geistian foundation the intellectual ideas of self-transformation, critique and progress, must inevitably cease to become a Home at all. Speed, the crucial quickening of The Industrialised (society, culture, mind, soul), will destroy the ability for the cultural to remain a home, and will in turn destroy the mind's conception of a such a philosophical, memory-based space. Home will disappear, and we will feel lost. I return once again to nostalgia, that abhorred word whose mention will produce knowing smirks and grimaces, the concept that we wrongly believe to refer only to a mawkish sentimentalising of the past, a feeling of the "golden ages". The word, from the Greek nostos - 'return home' algos - 'pain', means acute homesickness, and in it we will find (as we usually do with nostalgia) the past, but in this, a Hegelian past. The sea that we have crossed is Hegel's own; "when we think freely, voyaging on the open sea, with nothing under us and nothing over us, in solitude, alone by ourselves, then we are purely at home with ourselves". We have voyaged, we have felt free and new, and perhaps now we simply feel alone. When György Lukács, in his 1920 work 'Theory of the Novel', spoke of "transcendental homelessness", he was speaking directly to a Hegelian demise.

Lear too addresses this important ontological problem of cultural collapse - when an old way of life becomes impossible, when the guiding cultural principles are inadequate, how does one go on? Looking retroactively at the Crow culture, Lear recounts the way in which a culture, through collective anxiety, dream ritual and interpretation, attempts to form an active relationship with its future, to maintain some control. When, looking back, there is nothing one can do or think that makes sense anymore, how can one proceed. "The end of history" for the Crow may well hint at our own impending collapse. How will we create and maintain a relationship to the future that is imaginable to our present Geist? It seems clear that the modern way of life is rapidly becoming unsustainable, population increase untenable and socio-economic divisions ever widening.

The problem we face is made more serious by the fact that the means we have to make sense of the world is the rational system, the very problem we are looking to solve. We are unable criticise outside of the sphere that we inhabit, the critical method being its framework. We do not resort to dreams, save Freudian analysis (which itself has become an outmoded form of discovery), nor do we pay proper attention to the irrational; all things sense based, art, music, literature, nature, have become functional, they are means to an end rather than ends in themselves. Meditation is "used" by corporations as well as people, to improve functioning, to deal with stress, to be more efficient. We will discuss this kind of instrumentality with Lukács next week.

Kantian Cosmopolitan Ideal

It is, for Kant, reason that separates mankind from nature, and yet, it is in nature and in accordance with natural law that reason and free will are manifested as human action. Taking a long perspective of human history, one is able to discover patterns that would initially seem impossible to predict, contingent as they are upon decisions of individual free will. Though, far from chaotic and confused, this aggregate of human actions is shown to be the slow but steady progress of our species, the eventual goal of which is the complete fulfillment of its natural capacities. Kant, adhering to a teleological theory of nature, underlines man’s purpose of furthering to their end the near boundless capacities producible by the faculty of reason. In this, it is inevitable that man be in society, for his ability to reach beyond his natural instincts requires a dependence upon others that the self-sufficient savage has not. This reaching thus necessitates a desire to be in society, the only place this rational faculty can be fostered and his purpose fulfilled; it is the only place he can feel like a man. Simultaneously, his free will inclines him to direct what he can around him in accordance with his own principles, “to live as an individual” and rationally expect others to do the same. This tension, a continual resistance by one toward others and others toward one, is the antagonism of which Kant speaks. It is this, if we are to attain our proper goal set by nature, which must be preserved in a type of civil society that is both maximally free and properly limited insomuch as the same rights extend to all. It is the inevitable great federation (Fœdus Amphictyonum) toward which our history aims, the culmination of individual and large-scale antagonisms that serve as progress through trial, transformation and evolution. It is this form of tension, that having led man from barbarism to civilised society, will lead it to its future goal but all the while hinder its progress. Insofar as mankind is intended to produce everything out of itself, Kant suggests that it is also intended to self-accredit, and in this, possess rational self-esteem. To find oneself “worthy of life and well-being” is the coupling of vanity and reason, where success, amongst one’s peers and in one’s own eyes, is the driving force for rational progress through hardship. It is not the happiness of living peaceably and in comfort, but the pleasure derived from a competitive self-perfecting that develops mankind further along its path. Vanity prompts us to desire apartness from society insomuch as we wish our individual success, but to also require that society, for we have no such success or failure, no status, without the relative others. Without this desire for status, man’s innate capacities would lie dormant, and in Kant’s eyes, would barely render his existence valuable. Vanity comes into conflict with Kant’s teleological view of man’s purpose, in that as self-seeking, exempting himself from the law when he can, a just masterless master (or masters) is impossible; "nothing straight can be constructed from such warped wood.” He barely solves this problem, deeming the perfect solution impossible and settling for approximation. Eventually the vanity that fosters reason will produce late in its stages, the things necessary for the law governed social order; namely, the correct conception of the proper constitution, the right experience and the good will necessary to accept it. Thus, this unsociableness, like the social structures within which it is integrated, will reach equilibrium within the proper conditions, its various evils the necessary steps through which will be produced a purely productive antagonism within a perfectly just civil society. This seems contingent upon ideals that have a basis in Western tradition, which will inevitably come into conflict with other forms, especially those that do not place an emphasis on the individual, and may be challenged as tradition masked as reason.

Kant attributes intention to nature, though it is unclear as to what he means in this context; it encompasses, at the very least, both the world of phenomena and the laws that govern it. “Nature gave man reason and freedom of will based upon reason”. In this sense, nature must, if not reach into the noumenal realm, at least connect with it, in the sense of producing that, reason, which will act from it. He affords nature intent, and with intent, a goal. The system and principles of the natural world bespeak no superfluity; it is purposeful, and it would be unwise, in Kant’s mind, to suppose that man is the only exception. The teleological end is the full development of the germs implanted in a species, which subsist as innate capacities; just as the seed contains within it the grown oak, mankind contains within itself all of its fulfilled and unfulfilled potentials. Unlike an oak, mankind’s goal cannot be achieved in a single lifetime, but only succeeding many generations, each synthesizing and improving on the last. As it has reason as means and reason-products as ends, and reason requires both society and freedom, a just civil constitution must be established that balances the unsocial and social aspects of man, thereby maintaining the dynamism required for progress. The whole of history can be seen as the undertaking of this goal, with individual, social and state antagonisms serving as initial attempts, continually improved upon, toward a moral whole. War and revolution, horrible as they may be, are nature’s way of dissolving old structures and creating new ones, which too, “either in themselves or alongside one another, will … be unable to survive” until finally creating a system that, internally and externally, maintains itself automatically. In a sense, each structure up until the last contains within itself the seed of its own destruction. It is hard to accept that wars and inhumanity of all kinds could be nature’s way of bringing about our talents, and it could be argued whether the goal is worth the price, not to mention the obvious problem of attempts to fulfill that goal in engineering a “super race”. There comes a point when the furthering of our capacities means doing so to the detriment of others, where limited resources for a consumerist-technological society do not allow progress without intentional destruction, subjugation, and wealth or population control. There are further problems with perspectival progress within a teleological system, and though Kant dismisses the possibility that “nature is purposive in its parts but purposeless as a whole”, a teleonomic[11] theory is just as, if not more, likely[12]. Directive principles do not have to mean a Director and lack of superfluity in nature does not give credence to an intentioned system. This, though, would raise problems with our real world conception of purpose and how well we deal with ideas of war, human nature, rights, and morality. Kant is not unaware of this inherent contradiction. Not only does he suggest that we must assume a plan of nature to give us hope, but postulates a wise creator; appeals made more to faith than reason. There of course is a point to such assumptions; without faith of some kind, the world and all our endeavours could well seem purposeless, and our reason may not hold enough power to keep us from nihilism. Individual action is always toward some goal, but if our reason allows us to contemplate broader forms of action and existence that do not contain such purpose, there is a danger of discarding goals in all forms or deciding we can create our own. This is another problem inherent in deducing ends through the rational faculty; by placing emphasis on reason, and truth as discoverable by reason, Kant is placing the idea of objective truth within the mind, uniquely discoverable by the rational subject. Previously, attempts to understand the world and truth assumed that they could never be fully known, that the system, nature or god, were ultimately mysterious. It becomes dangerous to see truth as discoverable by reason, as it gives subjective ideas the potential power and authority of the absolute. Although there are certain flaws in Kant’s conception of mankind and nature, he holds a powerful argument for progress. The question is not whether he is right, but in what sense it becomes untenable to put knowledge (as the fulfillment of our capacities) over humanity, especially given that for Kant, humanity is the highest goal.

[11] Coined to stand in contrast to teleology, teleonomy is the quality of apparent purposefulness that derives not from an ideal end, but from the ability to adapt and evolve.

[12] It is also not unlikely that mankind is heading toward self-destruction; we may not, as Kant suggests, be eternal.