Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. (1947) Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford University Press: Stanford, CA. 2002.
It took me a while to get used to the way that H&A wrote this book, in staccato sentences, all abstract declarations without much evidence. The first ten pages were very slow going, especially after Jameson, who was almost the opposite, torturous, tangled sentences that constantly double-back on themselves. The lack of evidence was pretty common to the two of them, though.
The philosophical bedrock of Dialectic is, essentially, that the rationalism of the Enlightenment ‘reduced’ the perceptible world to indistinguishable “specimens” that demonstrate universal laws, rather than as particulars from which we might grasp the abstract tendencies of the world around us. The use of Aristotelian terms, universal/particular, is entirely on purpose, by the way. They don’t tend to bring it up, but Aristotle floats around behind the text much as Plato, Saussure, and Marx do. They’re not named directly all that much, and when they are, it’s usually after they’re concepts have already been used.
Enlightenment is “the disenchantment of the world”(1). The ‘enchanted’ world is the pre-Modern, a ‘mana’ system, that is based on equivalence and balance, as in the scales of justice or wheel of fortune (12). It’s also in religious systems in which “sign and image coincided” (12). I’m reminded of the (probably legendary) discussion in which Tolkien explained Christianity to C.S. Lewis. He reportedly said that the Christian narrative is a myth that happens to also be true; it’s a story that, like most stories, contains some measure of ‘truth’ about the universe and humanity’s place in it, but the details simply happen to have actually happened.
As a non-Christian, Tolkien’s is the only explanation of religion that’s ever made any sense to me (though I’m not as convinced by it as Lewis clearly was) and I suspect it’s very close to the idea that A&H are trying to get at, a view of the universe in which “sign and image coincided,” and “art constantly reenacts the duplication by which the thing appeared as something spiritual, a manifestation of mana. That constitutes its aura” (14). ‘Aura,’ by the way is the “appearance of the whole in the particular” (14) meaning, essentially, that the subject and the object are not separate, in scientific (observer/observed), political (dominant/dominated), or even grammatical terms (subject/object of a sentence).
The opposing idea is exactly what dominates modern thought in literary study, if not the Humanities as a whole, the idea of representation, and of faulty representation at that. They don’t actually get on to invoking it until much later in the book, but Saussurean linguistics is a major culprit in all of this, not only severing the signified from the signifier, but in its more subtle facets, arguing that the signifier only ever refers to an abstract concept and never the actual object. In Classical philosophical terms, the signifier points to the Form or the Universal, never the Particular. In modern psychological terms, Forms and Universals are only ever inside our heads. That ‘enlightened’ way of looking at language severs it from the world it’s supposed to describe. “The so-called leading idea [of Enlightenment] is a filing compartment which creates order, not connections” (99).
On the scientific side, A&H charge that rationalism attempts to measure the world in the most abstract units ever devised, numbers. That process is the “reduction of thought to a mathematical apparatus” (20), which removes anything and everything individual about the things the world is filled with. “The manifold affinities between existing things are supplanted by the single relationship between the subject who confers meaning and the meaningless object, between rational significance and its accidental bearers” (7). We, the ‘subjects who confer meaning,’ render the universe into ‘meaningless terms’ (i.e., numbers). Similarly, “the economic apparatus endows commodities with the values which decide the behavior of people” (21). The scientific principle of observable, replicable phenomena states that if you can’t measure something, then it doesn’t exist (and it’s a useful principle, if you ask me). If we transfer that thinking to economics, however, anything that can’t be evaluated in terms of monetary value effectively doesn’t exist.
Enlightenment, rationalism, positivism, and economics, all subtle shades of basically the same idea, are totalizing systems in that they see the world in terms of only one kind of measurement, and anything that can’t be measured by their single rubric is not acknowledged as part of reality. At the very least, things that can’t be measured are dismissed as unimportant; they simply don’t matter (note the double-meaning of ‘matter,’ here; they’re not material, they have no substance). Alternatively, we might attempt to redefine those unmeasurable (not the same as immeasurable) things into measurable terms so that we can make them ‘real’ again, so that we measure art in terms of how much it costs to produce it or to purchase it, or how many people experience it (ticket sales, readership, attendance, etc.).
But there is yet another alternative: “As long as art does not insist on being treated as knowledge, and thus exclude itself from praxis, it is tolerated by social praxis” (25). Essentially, art can embrace exclusion from the totalizing system and proudly claim that it doesn’t have a demonstrable utilitarian value (a concept that is equated with being measured in money) and that its purpose is, quite specifically, to be useless. This alternative attempts to escape the totalizing view, but “the use that is made of the work of art […] is largely that of confirming the very existence of the useless” (128). Such a stance manages to create a space for art, but that space is pre-defined as that which is without meaning or purpose or value. It’s an entirely impotent position.
What A&H never quite say, but if we’re generous we might say that they imply it by negative example, is that the way to actually get out of the totality is to claim that there are useful things that can’t be measured in the terms set by Enlightenment philosophy, and therefore that perhaps the terms themselves are at fault. Enlightenment assumes “the trial is prejudged” (18), that all things can be expressed in numbers, and if we go along with that assumption, we’re already part of the totality. We can easily argue that evaluation in numbers alone is inappropriate to many tasks.
So far, I actually like the sound of Dialectic. I do believe that science and rationalism are damned useful for a lot of things. Dental medicine and contraception are very near and dear to my heart. I also believe, though, that they’re not designed to do a whole lot of other things, like writing a novel, interpreting a painting, or running a marriage. There are things in the universe that can’t be rendered in hard numbers and can’t be evaluated on the basis of money alone. Sure, the price of an apartment might go up an average of $150 for a really good view of the city, but that doesn’t mean that that view just is worth $150. It merely means that people are willing to pay that much. The ‘charge what the market will bear’ theory of economics demonstrates that monetary evaluation isn’t an objective measure of anything other than ‘what the market will bear.’ There’s more to that view of the city than how much someone will pay for it, and there are elements of it that defy quantification. Placing that particular city-scape into its architectural context, historically, culturally, stylistically, isn’t something you can do with numbers. But Enlightenment rationalism, as A&H describe it, would insist that if you can’t quantify it, it’s essentially meaningless, not worth expending effort to understand.
However, the book makes a fatal leap of reasoning that I just can’t approve of. In their opening chapter, A&H convince me that Enlightenment is a totalizing system based on ‘Reason.’ However, in their chapter on mass culture, they claim that it’s a successful totalizing system, that nothing, indeed, does exist outside of it, ideologically speaking. Essentially, A&H argue that as science reduces the universe to numbers, and economics reduces it to currency, mass culture/entertainment reduces its content to mere generic structures, and its audience to generic subjects, specimens of humanity, as opposed to people in their own right. The process requires a few stages, and I should point out that it would be unfair to insist that these stages are causal or chronological and thus hold them to inconsistencies in their causation or history. What A&H describe is an abstract rendering of the totality of mass culture, not a chronology.
They start with the idea of faulty realism, or realism as a contrived genre, on which point they’re in agreement with Todorov’s concept of verisimilitude. Realism isn’t actually the replication of reality in art. It’s merely another set of generic rules to obey, but a set of rules that developed/were designed to create the false appearance of reality (101), which is basically the same as Barthes’ concept of myth as “depoliticized speech” (which I quote all the time because I think it’s the most succinct explanation of that phenomenon). Film, specifically sound film, and jazz are the major culprits. Their descriptions of the evils of jazz are either too vague or too musically technical for me to understand, but in regards to film they’re more specific.
For A&H, sound in film seems to have introduced a level of ‘empirical objectivity’ (99)—i.e., the technical replication of reality—so powerful that it “creates the illusion that the world outside is a seamless extension of the one which has been revealed in the cinema” (99). This complaint is, by the way, exactly the same as the complaint that violent video games have become ‘too immersive’ for players to be able to tell the difference between the game and the real world, and is extremely similar to the 18th-century complaint that novels were so emotionally powerful that they would overwhelm their readers (who were usually dismissed as soft-skulled women). As such, the complaint would seem to be yet another in a long line of ‘cranky old man’ reactions to artistic innovation, something that A&H claim doesn’t exist post-Enlightenment. At any rate, the wording in that last quotation is quite precise: the world outside the theatre is an extension of the world inside the theatre, not the other way around. Films, in this interpretation, impose their own logic onto the minds of their audience members, who then carry that logic over to the real world.
Film and a few other media use technology to establish themselves as arbiters of reality. That technology can include the capitalist economy itself: “In America it [radio] levies no duty from the public. It thereby takes on the deceptive form of a disinterested, impartial authority, which fits fascism like a glove” (129). Only through the mechanism of the advertising industry can radio be broadcast for ‘free,’ which thus makes it seem neutral and transparent, a mere reflection of reality. Of course, it’s not free, as A&H point out. You pay for the radios themselves, and you pay with your time by listening to advertising. Television wasn’t prevalent enough at the time (1947) for A&H to commit an extensive commentary on it, but the exact same model applies to broadcast TV. Radio broadcasters moved very smoothly into television, and took the whole material and economic structure with them.
By assuming the appearance of reality, by constructing a generic style that is a false replication of reality, the culture industry dispels the notion that it has any generic style at all. It’s not a ‘genre’ if it’s real. Thus, the “style of the culture industry […] is at the same time the negation of style” (102).
According to A&H, we have a population of viewers who think that what’s outside the theatre should follow the same rules as what appears on their screens, including themselves. The creators of mass culture are similarly trapped because the “ability to conform punctiliously to the obligation of the idiom of naturalness [the genre] in all branches of the culture industry becomes the measure of expertise” (102). If you can’t conform to ‘this style which is not one,’ you are by definition unskilled in the ways of the culture industry. “Anyone who does not conform is condemned to an economic impotence which is prolonged in the intellectual powerlessness of the eccentric loner” (106). ‘Those crazy artists’ are actually just people who don’t conform to the style that won’t admit that it is a style.
Viewers then come to identify the people on the screen or on the radio as real, as representations of what it means to be a functional person (notice how ‘functional’ and ‘real’ come to signify the same thing), and thus “agencies of mass production and its culture impress standardized behavior on the individual as the only natural, decent, and rational one” (21). Because the characters up on the big screen are empty, generic vessels, however, they become, like everything else in Enlightenment, mere specimens cut off that which they signify. They are the artistic equivalent of numbers and dollars, internally meaningless units of measurement. They’re abstract examples that cannot exist because, for example, nobody actually has 2.2 children. Having been evacuated of content, mass culture becomes an advertisement for itself. Like fast food, it feels like it fills you up, but it contains no vitamins, no nutrients, nothing that can actually sustain you. “Every film is a preview of the next” and “Every close-up of a film actress is an advert for her name” (132-133). What’s on screen isn’t real, but because it presents itself as such, neither are the people in the audience, so as a result, they continuously chase that false reality and flee from actual reality. [Aside: this would seem to be the exact opposite of Žižeck’s presentation of Lacanian desire: pursuing the real but never being able to accept it. Interesting.]
There are several major problems with this formulation, as complex and fascinating as it is. First, it assumes, as I said earlier, that the totalization worked without much by way of proof. If you’re going to make claims about the world around us, you need some empirical evidence. I realize that the book is about the hegemony of empiricism and rationalism, but I’m not asking for statistics and numbers. In my lived experience, people don’t identify with fictional characters to the degree that the book implies. We are also not nearly as seemingly ignorant of the way the system works as the book implies. There are, for example, a variety of genres in film. Granted, they’re dominated by character-based narrative, but even within that range, there are varying degrees of conformation to ‘the world outside the theatre.’ If our generic expectations can slide up and down the realism scale, then we do have the power to conceive of entertainment as something that isn’t real.
This last point leads me to another fundamental objection: A&H insist upon a social model in which people can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality because their perceptions are totally controlled by the ideology of false objectivity, but if that’s the case, then where is the reality that must exist past the mass culture? They occasionally refer to avant garde art as ‘true’ where the culture industry is a lie, but they never explain what the real world is like, other than to describe the ideological system that supposedly dominates our reality. If reality just is a product of our ideology, then there’s no way ‘out’ of it, and our goal must be to pick the ideology that is the most ‘good’ (by whatever means we define that last term), and not the rejection of ideology as inherently ‘bad.’ A&H have failed to explain exactly why Enlightenment ideology is ‘bad,’ and what alternative there might be.
The book also manages to do exactly what it accuses Enlightenment of doing, reducing people to a sub-human state. In A&H’s estimation, people seem to be unthinking, ignorant, and extremely malleable, an undifferentiated, monolithic ‘mass’ that behaves not unlike a very large school of fish. Explaining the process by which (they claim) people are stripped of their individuality strips people of their individuality, and the only cure that they speak of seems to be returning to a social system in which art is commissioned by the wealthy and created by artists, which would remove ‘the masses’ from the equation entirely, and cut them off from the artistic process entirely. Though A&H admit that the patronage system has its own major flaws, they don’t seem to provide an alternative to the Enlightened mass-market.
As a matter of history, their claims about how the market functions often do not match up to the events that followed their book. I’m not trying to blame them for failing to predict the future, but if the part of the problem with the culture industry is centralization, “technological antithesis between few production centers and widely dispersed reception necessitates organization and planning by those in control” (95), then the dispersed and de-centered nature of the internet and even of the economy in general, should have cancelled out the hegemony, but it doesn’t seem to have done so. Basically, all the things they say are horrifying and disgusting about technology have turned out to be exactly the opposite of what really came to be, so the analysis would seem to be faulty, given the hindsight that today’s reader is privileged to have.
Finally, on a very basic level, A&H make a major oversight when they claim that audience members whole-heartedly identify with film stars. The book fails to recognise that there are a great number of people in the audience who can’t do that. Anyone who’s not white in the West is constantly reminded that the people on screen are not like him- or herself, which seriously weakens the process of identification that the book sketches out. Non-Christians (Jews, Muslims, agnostics/atheists), have similarly few identifiable representations on-screen, as do gay people. Make no mistake, A&H argue a totalizing kind of identification; totalization is the name of the Enlightenment game. The presence of people who can’t identify totally would seem to dismantle their whole theory at a stroke. Their’s is an all-or-nothing analysis. If they’d tempered the book with some nods towards what most people might do, or explained their view as that which is most likely, it could be quite coherent, but they’ve argued in totalizing terms, therefore their argument falls flat. The irony is not lost on me.
This book falls into the same mistakes as The American Monomyth did, and many others, as well. It assumes that there is no escape from dominant ideology, that there is no such thing as subversion, and essentially that there is no such thing as free-thinking members of mass culture. It enacts precisely what it claims to fight against.
Posted by orion at June 26, 2006 6:23 PM